MobileTech for Social Change

This looks to be an exciting barcamp – Mobile Tech for Social Change.  I’m going, partly out of general interest (I’ve been fascinated by mobile technology for a while, particularly what the rest of the world is accomplishing ahead of the U.S.).  I’m also going because I want to support the Openmoko movement.

I’ll put aside my raised eyebrows at  $25 barcamp (it goes to food, apparently) – but the fact that there is no link to the wiki from the registration page is a little clunky.  Get the real deal at the wiki.

Every Human Has Rights

We (AF83) are supporting Internews launch an international support campaign for the journalists who risk their lives every day to bring you news about the current state of human rights around the world.  A people’s choice award (voting starts Nov 1st) will be given along with other media awards.

Given we are supporting this campaign in a Web2.0 world, you can follow the progress of this campaign via our Twitter feed, through MySpace, and even on FaceBook and Care2.  You can add a banner to your site.

Please join us in supporting human rights, and supporting the journalists who are on the ground every day, bringing us the news of the current state of human rights.

(Having cut my tech teeth in the nonprofit world for a decade, it’s good to be back in the realm of supporting social causes….)

Technorati Tags: internews, af83, ehhr

Drupal’N’Go – Case Study

DrupalNGo

Last weekend, my company’s Paris office helped run “Drupal’N’Go”, a BarCamp/WineCamp style Drupal barn-raising.  The idea was to select a worthy nonprofit organization, and build an entire webiste for them.

How did it turn out?  DrupalFrance community member jlndrr posted this feedback (in English, French version here).

Technorati Tags: drupalngo, af83, drupal

Drupal’N’Go

DrupalNGo

Ah, makes me proud. The French Drupal community (of which my current employer AF83 is a core supporter) is taking the WineCamp style models, and going to host a DrupalCamp with the specific goal to barn-raise a Drupal website for one lucky French NGO. It’s called, in a smart blend of pun and brand, Drupal’N’Go.

(There is discussion whether this is specific to NGOs, or French non-profits in general. Regardless of specific designation, I think the idea is to pick an organization that supports a broader social good instead of a local sports org, which could also be a nonprofit).

A few of the breadcrumbs that led here:

• The original WineCamp Calaveras (California) – which had a significant Drupal presence. (My notes here).
• A follow-up on the the Drupal website built – as a dare, really – at the first WineCamp.
• Some notes about WineCampFrance organized by intrepid French nonprofit-tech evangelist Gregoire Japiot (also the idea man behind Mapovino). Fwiw – our WineCampFrance organizing site has since been taken down since the spin off projects moved elsewhere. This WineCamp was also heavily represented by Drupal folks.
• Notes (in French) about the first Drupal Meetup in Paris; and planning notes about this upcoming Drupal’N’Go.

Technorati Tags: drupal, af83, drupalngo, winecamp

Copier leases: A few experiences and thoughts

I just finished a renewal of our school’s copier lease, and it was an illuminating process, given that I didn’t know much about copiers and the leasing of before this.

Our school has two copiers – one big “spaceship” style copier that can handle color, multiple paper sizes, three-hole punch, and “saddle-stitch” – i.e. creating bound booklets.  Our second copier is a regular black-and-white copier.

We had two major beefs with our current copier lease company: 

1. Response time was supposed to be 4-6 hours, but we had increasing delays, up to 8 hours in some cases.  And often what would happen is an agent would arrive, and 15 minutes later declare “Parts are on order, I’ll be back in X days.”
2. We had an per-machine copy quota system.  On the simple b/w copier, our lease included 18k copies a year, on the large multi-use one, 380k.  However, because of location, the b/w copier was used far more than the other copier, and we got hit with massive overage charges – even though we were twice as much under quota for copies on the large machine.

In reviewing copier lease offerings from small to large shops (including Canon, IKON and Konica-Minolta), I discovered several things:

• The differentiation among machines is nominal.  Really, unless you’re waaay copy-geek, every company offers machines that will pretty much do the same thing.  Of course, you have to figure out whether faxing from the copier or add’l security system is worth it for you, but you can find equivalent machines across the board.
• Many leases will be offered for 60 months (5 years).  Our experience – making 400k copies a year on two machines – is that 36 months (3 years) is as far as we could take the machines without having a service person living on-site.
• Leases are divided into equipment cost, and service.  Equipment costs will be spread over the lease period (in our case, 36 months) with an additional percentage thrown in (since essentially what you are doing is borrowing money from the lease-holding company to pay for the machines).  Yes, this adds to the cost, but is ultimately the only way most smaller companies (and restricted income organizations like non-profits and schools) can afford them.
• Several leases I saw had great monthly equipment rates, but had a purchase requirement at the end of the lease – essentially, you would be required to pony up about $2k-$3k for the “fair market value” of the copier, at the exact time when it is most useless to you.  We asked for a “$1 buyout” lease – that means they readjust the monthly pricing so that at the end of the lease, we pay $1 and the machine is ours.  Monthly price goes up, but not by a huge amount.  Of course, we’re left with the same problem – now we have a machine we don’t want.  Typically, you can donate or sell these machines for a few hundred dollars for another organization that is even harder up.  (But it’s like donated computer equipment – I would advise any recipient against purchasing something like that).
• One interesting lease option I saw from IKON was the equivalent to a “rental” – there was no buyout, dollar or fair market value.  The monthly price was a rental price, and at the end of the lease, IKON picked up the machine and took it back.  That’s convenient.
• Then there’s service and maintenance.  Mostly, service and maintenance was comprehensive – maintenance, troubleshooting labor, parts and toner all included.  Typically the only thing not included was paper and staples. 
• Most of the maintenance quotes I saw were based on our proposed copying quota.  (Most companies were willing to institute a “organizational” quota, as opposed to a per-machine quota).  So if our proposed copy quota went up or down, so did the proposed maintenance costs – makes sense.  Typically, there was a “per-copy” charge for copies made beyond that quota; and there were opportunities to readjust the quota (and thus the monthly service fee) once a year, or even once a quarter if you discovered you were making far more or far less than you expected.
• One quote I received, however, had no quota.  They charged per copy out of the gate.  If you sat down and did the math, based on our proposed quota, the average monthly fee came out about the same, but this was never an option we would want.  First, there was no way to predict how much our monthly fee would be (it could change by hundreds of dollars form one month to the next).  Also, towards the end of the year, when we are cash poor, we put on several events as well as send out renewal forms and acceptance letters – all heavy copy work, and not an expense bump we’d want to see at that time of year.

I leave you to sift through your own proposals and eager salespeople.  I am glad to say we chose a local company that’s been in business for over 100 years, that used to be called Typewritorium…..

eDemocracyCamp in DC!

I’ve been so busy focusing on, amongst other things, DrupalCon that I totally missed mentioning eDemocracyCamp, happening this weekend in Washington D.C. Good friend in the BarCamp, WineCamp and i18n / translation world Tim Bonnemann is one of the organizers.

eDemocracyCamp!

“The place for innovators, optimists, and engaged citizens. March 2, 2008 in Washington, DC

We are building off the momentum of the 2008 Politics Online Conference
which always draws a spectacular crowd. If you are coming into town for one of these events you should definitely check out the other one in order to make the most of your time here in DC.

eDemocracyCamp will be the first BarCamp with a focus specifically on e-democracy. eDemocracyCamp will connect citizens, researchers, developers, practitioners and anyone else interested in the topic to learn about the current state of e-democracy and share their visions for its future direction.”

Open source CMS – for arts orgs!

I’m behind the curve on this one – as usual.  The Center for Arts Management and Technology – who run an excellent arts and technology conference – have recently (well, recently to me, at least) launched a free, hosted open-source CMS service for arts organizations, based on your choice of DotNetNuke or Drupal.  (At first glance, it looks like an arts version of CivicSpace OnDemand.  )

My immediate thoughts:

1. Bravo!
2. Good luck!

Hosting templatable CMS websites is a great idea – and can work – as long as the users accept the limitations of the design and the system.  But it does not take long for any organization to want to grow out of a template website design, and to hear about all the amazing cool awesome things that open-source CMS’s like Drupal can do, and we want that too!  (Just ask the folks at CSoD….)

Nonetheless, this is a great step forward for arts orgs, and CAMT. I mean, part of me wants the job of managing that system.  (Yes, the masochistic but altruistic part of me.  :-))

A tip of the hat to prodigious and prolific nonprofit tech blogger Beth Kanter for this.  Her blog may not have been the source, but she deserves a tip of the hat anyway.  😉

Technorati Tags: camt, drupal, arts, nptech

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Drupal Mini-Case Study: Theatre Without Borders (pt 2.5)

[Original discussion here and here.]

I wanted to write a bit more detail about users vs. nodes, and the specific problem I was facing with this.

[IANAP – I am not a programmer, so my description here might get a little creative…]

In Drupal, almost all content is built off of nodes. A node is base element of any post on a Drupal site – the basic default nodes are story and page. A lot of the functionality that can expand and complicate a site is designed to tap into the basic node functionality. Some modules generate a whole new node type (off the top of my head, the podcast and videocast modules do this, I think). Others just add functionality to any existing node types.

For example, taxonomy is enabled by attaching it to nodes – any node type. One of the taxonomy settings is configuring which node types to apply it to, including the default story and page. And when you add a new node type – using CCK, for example, or podcasts, or what have you – you have to go back and turn on taxonomy for these new node types.

This is part of the hallmark of Drupal’s functionality, and where developers are gently pushed when developing their modules. “Event” started out by adding a new node type, but has now morphed into extra functionality you can add to almost any node (and for legacy and ease of use reasons, they’ve included a “basicevent” node type so you don’t have to do the work). If I remember correctly, the Gmap module also did this – you could add geolocation fields to any node type.

That said, two of the most powerful Drupal functions – taxonomy and views (and CCK, so three) – work only with nodes.

Well, what’s the problem? Users – and their related information – aren’t nodes. Again – problem? Think about sites that are very focused on detailed user profiles – pictures / avatars, personal tags, categories / taxonomies, etc. The standard way of capturing this information is using “profile” – which (as far as I can tell, in lay terms) adds fields to the user record. (I’ve just read something about the bio module which may help this issue, but I remember looking at it before, and it didn’t seem to be what I wanted.)

In any case, on the Theatre Without Borders site, the same categories we wanted to use for the users – a list of countries, and a list of languages – were the same categories we wanted to use for the content. But you can’t add an existing taxonomy to users. So that was the first problem – I needed to create two sets of taxonomies – one for all the content (nodes), and one set for the user profiles.

The second problem was Views. While Views has done a great job of incorporating Profile functionality, I ran into a basic problem. What if I wanted to search the entire site for “Morocco”? I could use the search bar – sure. But I couldn’t do a simple tag search – because the user taxonomy and the node taxonomy are in different places. I.e. in Views you can pull up anything with a taxonomy keyword attached – but taxonomies that are built into profiles are a separate field / filter. (This is not a problem with Views.) So we’re back to one view for the taxonomy list associated with any node – and another View for the taxonomy list associated with users.

Again, newer revisions and tutorials of Usernode and related modules have greatly improved the usability (and understandability) of creating user profile information in nodes. But even now, I wouldn’t want to add that many layers of complexity to a site only maintained by volunteers without Drupal experience.

Technorati Tags: theatrewithoutborders, Drupal

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Drupal Mini-Case Study: Theatre Without Borders (pt 2)

[See this post for part 1]

Site “Design” Notes (functional design, not look and feel):

• Theatre Without Borders is a completely volunteer organization – they don’t have an office, and have a vague selection of charter members, and then the rest of the people who volunteer to be a country contact.  While Drupal can be used very well by a cadre of volunteers, they aren’t there yet, so this site needed to be as basic as possible.  No custom coding.  Few contributed modules as possible.  Anything above and beyond adding content – i.e. setting up a view, creating a new taxonomy, even modifying blocks and menus – needed to be in a fairly locked-down framework, so I wasn’t required to make changes every week (or even month) when something new came up.

• One major surprise – for myself – was dropping any and all internationalization (i18n).  I realized that the site would be complicated enough for a very basic user to manage; in addition, the role of TWB has primarily been a gateway to and from the U.S.  Meaning – U.S. artists looking to do work abroad, and overseas artists looking to do work in the U.S.  TWB had no real qualms about making the site overwhelmingly in English because of this dynamic.  While it pained me to see this potential functionality – given the site’s focus and name, dammit – go by the wayside, it was just another layer I couldn’t support given the scope of the project.

Profiles:  The main piece of Drupal knowledge I gained on this project was the fact that – as of Drupal 5 – you cannot manipulate user info the same way you can any other type of content node.  While Views can get you a lot of the way there, it’s not the same. 

Take my basic issue: I wanted to have one Country List that could be used across the board – users could select countries they “represented”, and we could use the same list to tag any article or resource.  However, if you create a taxonomy of countries, you cannot easily make it show up on a user profile (i.e. the same way you select the list of content types to include the taxonomy). Yes, there are workarounds – many of them.  There’s even a whole Drupal Group devoted to one of the solutions – Profiles as Nodes.  During the time I was working on this, all the documentation was being written and patches were being added – literally one day to the next .  In the end, I was putting an additional 6-10 modules on the site, and still needing to custom code some layouts for the taxonomy to show up on the same page as the My Account editing page. 

Forget it – I went back to a dual-list system: I had a complete country list as a regular taxonomy, and then using the Profile module, I created a parallel country list for users.  (Note:  Users as Nodes has come a long way since I made my decision – see my note about this in a previous post)

Technorati Tags: theatrewithoutborders, Drupal

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Drupal Mini-Case Study: Theatre Without Borders (pt 1)

So this is a long time in coming:  Several years ago, I got involved with Theatre Without Borders (because of my background in theatre and international experience).  TWB is not a classic “without borders” organization – it does not do field work in war zones, nor emergency response (like the French Telecom Without Borders, for example).  It’s primary aim is to a) make high-level connections between existing organizations, projects and people in theatre around the world, b) promote and publish as much info about international theatre work as possible, and c) support and encourage person-to-person connections, by having individual theatre artists of every stripe and professional level just sign up to be a “contact” in their region / country.  So for example, if I were interested in doing some sort of theatre work in, say, Uganda, I would go to the TWB site, see if there are any contacts in Uganda, email them and start a conversation.

Well, their original site was – let’s just say this politely – very basic, totally hand-crafted and more than just a little bit crusty.  I immediately saw the potential that something like Drupal could provide (perhaps TWB was just another nail to my Drupal hammer):  easy yet powerful publishing with extensive “membership” possibilities. 

I actively tried to recruit a volunteer to build a basic site in Drupal, partly as a test run to see how easy/ hard it would be to develop a potentially powerful site on a shoestring budget – this was going to be a case study I would publish as part of my work at CompuMentor.

Well, the volunteer recruiting feel through, and I left CompuMentor.  But I was still interested in helping TWB, and it pained me to see their old site, and know that a simple Drupal site would be 1000 times better.  Finally, I agreed to do it myself, essentially for a stipend of less than $1k.  And now that I’m wrapping the project up, I’m keeping to my promise to talk about the process, and the realities of trying to do “simple” low-budget projects in Drupal.

This case study is split into two parts – the process notes, and then the site notes.

Process Notes:
The basics:  I budget 26 hours for the project, and I’ve spent at least twice that amount on it. 

• I hit the “users are not nodes” issue, and trying to come up with workarounds (and trying to wade through the documentation as it was being written) sucked up a lot of time.
• I underestimated the actual amount of content on the site.  I eyeballed about 20 pages based on a clicking through the menus – and then later discovered there were dozens of pages linked directly from nested pages.  As is often the case, the content had grown beyond the original site architecture, and I had to spend more time that I originally planned making choices about the sit architecture.

This last note points to a common mistake in “small, easy” web projects like this – lack of a full assessment.  I figured I had a handle on the site content – when I didn’t.  However, I doubt it would have been possible to really do that, because of the voluntary nature of the organization – the main person responsible did not have the time to organize and review all of the site content, and make decisions about how and where things should go.  If I pushed for that, the assessment part would have taken months (in fact, that’s kinda were we got stalled last time).  So a lot of the choices were left to me, and several times I had to push back and suggest that more content be consolidated rather than opening up a new section for a single page of information.

Technorati Tags: theatrewithoutborders, Drupal

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