Open source software reviews, using Google maps, new SharePoint applications and a promising online calendar.

Posted on Charity Village August 4, 2005.

I've been catching up on technology news after several months
out of the country. Here are a few services and articles that may be of
interest to nonprofits:

Online calendar

Trumba is a new service that
provides online calendaring for groups and individuals. An organization
can quickly create multiple calendars, publish them on the web, and
send out automatic email updates. For example, you could post community
events in a public calendar and post upcoming board meetings in a
separate private calendar. You can also send email messages to
distribution lists reminding participants of upcoming meetings, or use
the distribution list for email newsletters. Events can be downloaded
into Outlook and other calendar formats.

Trumba hopes that group members will all buy Trumba accounts so that
they can share each others' calendars.   However, that's not
necessary. It looks like a great service for organizations that want to
easily post and share events and meetings. There is a 60 day free
trial, and it costs $39.95 US/year after that, with unlimited calendars
and email distribution lists (as far as I can tell). Here's a review from PCWorld .

There are no ads on the public calendars so you can link to the
Trumba calendars from your organization's site, using a template of
your choice. This example shows the public events for a San Franciso environmental group.

Google maps

Google's latest offering is a beautiful world mapping service at http://maps.google.com . It can be used for the usual direction-finding, like mapquest or yahoo maps, but has some additional functions. For example, see this map of
downtown Toronto. Now click on 'Satellite' or 'Hybrid' on the top right
corner. The map changes into a satellite photograph that can be zoomed
down to see individual buildings.

Google provides an open API for its maps, meaning that organizations can freely create their own customized maps. Here are some examples of
how communities and organizations have been using Google Maps.
Organizations could map community services or office locations, and
  use the maps to give directions and estimate travel distances.
Many funders require clients and services to calculate mileage costs,
and Google Maps is great for this.

Skype teleconferencing and long distance calling

Skype , the free Internet phone
service, continues to grow and provide new services. I used SkypeIn to
forward my business calls to Qatar; when I was on the computer, anyone
calling my Toronto office would reach me in the Middle East for a cost
of about $4 CAN per month. The cost includes voice mail. Skype is now
partnering with Boingo to provide wireless hotspots across the world where you can use Skype for phone calls . Some people have replaced their home phones with Skype, though it's a bit complicated and requires internet access.

Skype includes Instant Messaging and free teleconferencing for up to
five people as long as everyone is using a computer. (You can patch in
someone on a regular phone, but the quality isn't great.)

For nonprofit organizations, Skype's major contribution would be the
teleconferencing and free or cheap long distance calling. As an
alternative to Vonage and other VOIP services it shows promise,
especially with their growing product line. SkypeJournal , an independent web log, regularly posts updates and gossip about Skype.

SharePoint applications

SharePoint is Microsoft's 'intranet in a box'. RealWorld Systems
uses it for its own intranet, and while it has some problems (works
better with Microsoft browsers and office programs than with
non-Microsoft programs, surprise surprise), it's well designed,
inexpensive and powerful software. And it takes just a few minutes to
set up a good looking functional intranet.

Microsoft has released several new site templates for
SharePoint, including events management, Board of Directors
application, Request for Proposal management, and lots more.
Unfortunately they don't provide examples of each; you have to download
them and see them for yourself. The applications appear to be free.

You can try out a SharePoint site at Outtech , where a site with unlimited users costs $40/month US. There's a 30 day free trial.

Open Source software ratings

Some open source software is terrific, and others are terrible. And
still others will be great if they are ever mature enough to use (i.e.,
have most of their bugs worked out). Several organizations, including
Carnegie Mellon, O'Reilly, SpikeSource and Intel, are sponsoring an
initiative that will rate the business readiness of open source
software. Called the ” Business Readiness Rating “, it will provide an open standard to allow organizations to assess and share information about software.

If it works this will be a real help to organizations that are
trying to select a reliable and robust piece of open source software.

What open source can teach us about work

Finally, here's an article that discusses some lessons that regular organizations can take from the open source software movement .
For example, amateurs are more productive than professionals; homes are
better places to work than offices; employment is a paternalistic and
infantilizing institution; and so on. It's a fun read. In fact, it's
similar to some of the things that Peter Drucker says about nonprofits
– people who work out of a sense of shared values are more productive
than those who just work for money.

**********
Gillian Kerr, Ph.D., C.Psych.
President, RealWorld Systems

gkerr at realworldsystems.net

Web logs (blogs) are becoming more complex and multi-functional, as
described in the following article: It may not be necessary to get an
expensive content management system to post your web site.

Blog tools tackle content management

…
many blog tools are essentially stripped-down content management
systems and some have begun adding features for more complex
content-control needs.

Blog tools “have basic [content
management] capabilities and those are slowly becoming more
sophisticated in terms of features like granular permission management
and workflow”

IBM research has just posted free software that allows almost any Webcam to become a head-tracking computer pointer. A description is below.

Head-tracking pointers allow people who cannot move a mouse, such as those wtih quadriplegia, to control a computer.

alphaWorks : Head-Tracking Pointer : Overview

The Head-Tracking Pointer provides an inexpensive and easily-used mouse replacement for those unable to use traditional pointing devices. Using only software and any Web-cam, this application allows users to point and click with character-level accuracy by simply aiming their face. …

Charity Navigator – How much is too much? summarizes a new study of CEO compensation among charities in the US. Their analysis of 4,357 charities (“America’s largest”) showed that the average CEO’s compensation, including salary, bonus and expense accounts, is $148,477 US, representing 3.4% of the organization’s total  expenses.

Salaries varied by the size, mission and location of the agency. For example, organizations with total expenses greater than $13.5 million/year pay an average of $250,000 to their CEOs.

(Unfortunately, they didn’t define ‘average’, which is irritating. I prefer using medians for salary comparisons, but I bet they used means.)

Another organization – the American Institute of Philanthropy (www.charitywatch.org) – lists the top 25 compensation packages among 500 major national US charities. Number 25 is the President of the American Institute for Cancer Research, who is paid $497,434.

Harvard Business Review offers this article on effective ways to learn from failure. The entire article is worth reading, but here are some excerpts. The original article points out that consultants who always blame the client for problems and don’t look for critical feedback on their own performance are examples of people who don’t learn from failures. Don’t hire them.

*********
EXCERPTS:

It hardly needs to be said that organizations cannot learn from failures if people do not discuss and analyze them. Yet this remains an important insight. The learning that is potentially available may not be realized unless thoughtful analysis and discussion of failure occurs. …

[C]onducting an analysis of a failure requires a spirit of inquiry and openness, patience, and a tolerance for ambiguity. However, most managers admire and are rewarded for decisiveness, efficiency, and action rather than for deep reflection and painstaking analysis. …

People tend to be more comfortable attending to evidence that enables them to believe what they want to believe, denying responsibility for failures, and attributing the problem to others or to “the system.” We would prefer to move on to something more pleasant. Rigorous analysis of failure requires that people, at least temporarily, put aside these tendencies to explore unpleasant truths and take personal responsibility. Evidence of this problem is provided by a study of a large European telecoms company, which revealed that very little learning occurred from a set of large and small failures over a period of twenty years. Instead of realistic and thorough analysis, managers tended to offer ready rationalizations for the failures. Specifically, managers attributed large failures to uncontrollable events outside the organization (e.g., the economy) and to the intervention of outsiders. Small failures were interpreted as flukes, the natural outcomes of experimentation, or as illustrations of the folly of not adhering strictly to the company's core beliefs.2

[This link was posted on Tomalack’s Realm]

This is a nice article on how to measure progress towards complex goals in a workplace, written by an expert on project management and software development.

Scott Berkun: Work vs. Progress. Simple work, like mowing a lawn or washing a car has transparent pr…

Scott Berkun: Work vs. Progress. Simple work, like mowing a lawn or washing a car has transparent progress: as each small unit of work is completed it's visible to everyone. But with complex work, building software, running a business, writing a novel, it is harder to identify true progress.

(From Tomalak’s Realm)

Slashdot has posted a discussion on how to estimate an IT budget in a small company.  Slashdot discussions are good ways to collect a wide range of opinions on technical issues (for example, here’s one that talks about how to convert Word documents to clean HTML), but the discussions often lack non-I.T. perspectives.

The I.T. postings focus on what the I.T. staff person needs to do, and how he/she should spend computing resources. It’s not helpful for the manager who may not know much about technology but still has to approve a budget. How can organizations check the ‘reasonableness’ of I.T. budgets? How can they assess whether their I.T. staff know what they’re doing? It’s certainly possible to have I.T. staff who are terrific technically but don’t know how to estimate and manage financial resources.

Some small organizations are moving to remote and managed I.T. services to simplify, improve support and save money as reported by the Globe and Mail (the article will probably be inaccessible in a few days, unfortunately). For example, Dynamix Solutions offers remote network support starting at $500/month for about 10 employees. Other vendors in the Toronto area include Quartet and Baudry Cybernomics. It’s unlikely that an organization’s current I.T. staff or consultant will suggest this type of solution, since remote service providers compete with internal staff. However, whether or not you switch to a managed service, getting prices from a provider will often give organizations a benchmark for I.T. costs. Then you can compare your current cost structure and service level with a managed service that may be more cost effective.

Another approach to checking the reasonableness of I.T. budgets is to compare your costs with published benchmarks in your sector. A previous article describes some sources for this type of information; it’s hard to get.

Here’s an excerpt from the article: “There are two important points one could imply [I meant infer] from the Gartner data. The first is that government organizations probably spend more on their technology than nonprofits do. The second is that public sector funders who refuse to support a reasonable amount for computing costs in their grants to nonprofits could be challenged to show what they are spending on their own technology. A reasonable amount as far as we’ve been able to gather in our research is about $3,000 workstation/ year for direct costs [in the nonprofit sector], versus an average of $6,200 in direct costs for the public sector (in Canadian dollars).”