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News for June 2006
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 29 June 2006 |
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| LifeWork Counseling |
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Only a few of you know of the work that I did before I founded The Gilbert Center in 1996, the year my father died. I had been running a small nonprofit that I had started called GoodWorks. Among our key programs there were workshops, support groups, and counseling, for people in public interest career transitions. I taught a workshop called "Making a Living, Making a Difference". I organized peer groups of people who wanted to help each other make value-driven changes to their work. And the most rewarding thing I did, was counsel individuals. I have missed this work over the years, and as of today, I am starting it up again. We're offering LifeWork Counseling via three media: in person, on the phone, or over video chat. You can find out more about the program on our website, where I hope we have captured both my approach and some of the key things you might want to know. Certainly let us know if you have any questions.
Posted: 6/29/06; 12:27:39 PM # |
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27 June 2006 |
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| The Enduring Power of The Gilbert Email Manifesto |
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Last Summer, Michael Stein interviewed me for GetActive's newsletter about The Enduring Power of The Gilbert Email Manifesto. With permission, I'm publishing the interview here, because I want to share Michael's great questions (and my answers) with you. I am still pretty pleased with my three recommendations for vendors, and the four reasons I give for the interest that persists in my otherwise outdated manifesto.
Posted: 6/27/06; 6:01:43 PM # |
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26 June 2006 |
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| Community Organizing Toolkit |
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The pre-launch site for the Community Organizing Toolkit is worth a look. The main teaching tool is a flash based games that teaches organizing skills derived from the wisdom of the Center for Third World Organizing. They are releasing all the material under licenses that allow for adaptation and localization.
Posted: 6/26/06; 12:44:39 PM # |
| What Drives Innovation? A Heuristic Framework |
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Despite its corporate focus, What Drives Innovation (16 page PDF) by Callahan, Ishmael, and Namiranian is a valuable read for civil society organizations. It focuses primarily on the questions related to the fate of good ideas, rather than to the environments that produce them. They present a set of six high-level questions that serve as a heuristic framework for looking at what drives implementation of new ideas and what stops it.
Posted: 6/26/06; 12:41:46 PM # |
| Space for learning: Donors as Learning Organizations |
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I was very excited to read Donors as Learning Organizations by Jenny Hyatt and Allan Kaplan. They point out quite directly that, in the world of grantmaking, "reflection and learning are neglected out of organizational complacency, fear of failure, and a paradigm of impact which is over-reliant on what can be counted rather than what counts."
Posted: 6/26/06; 12:34:37 PM # |
| Social Isolation in America |
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Every now and then, some bit of research really touches on a core cause of social problems, rather than just the symptoms. The recent report on Social Isolation in America (23 page PDF) is one such bit of research. The trends are alarming and revealing. Social networks have shrunk. Segregation by level of education has increased. Does anyone know: Are there major organizations working on this, or are we all just focused on the symptoms? Maybe we need to work our way back even further to identify the causes of isolation. Some of the factors that contribute to isolation that come to my mind include: oil and automobile subsidies, land use regulations, and labor and environmental policies.
Posted: 6/26/06; 12:32:21 PM # |
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21 June 2006 |
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| The Modern Nonprofit Web Site: Strategies, Patterns, and Tools: Basic Facts |
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The World Wide Web is amazing, powerful, and sometimes, terribly distracting. I thoroughly enjoy teaching rigorous, communication centric approaches to web sites and web strategies. I get to do that again in our upcoming seminar series on The Modern Nonprofit Web Site: Strategies, Patterns, and Tools, July 25-27th, 2006. I look forward to having some of you in those workshops. Feel free to write with any questions you might have.
Posted: 6/21/06; 1:40:48 PM # |
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19 June 2006 |
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| CitizenSpeak |
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Sometimes a systems perspective can get you in trouble. I know it has with me sometimes, as I have found myself struggling to identify the borders of a project. I increasingly admire those projects that do one thing and do it well. That seems to be the case with CitizenSpeak, a free email advocacy service modeled on MoveOn. If you like that model, this is definitely worth a close look. David Geilhufe pointed out to me that, if you're hosting a Drupal systems, email advocacy features of Citizenspeak are a module that you could install.
Posted: 6/19/06; 2:43:12 PM # |
| Looking for Ideas in All the Wrong Places |
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Subtitled "An Argument for Staying in the Box", Ishmael and Callahan's paper on Looking for Ideas in All the Wrong Places (8 page PDF) is a argument for the role that constraints play in fostering creativity. I remember the experience of a writing workshop I once took, where the exercises had extraordinary, almost impossible constraints. The creativity this promoted was remarkable. I would like to explore this much further in a capacity building context.
Posted: 6/19/06; 2:36:45 PM # |
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18 June 2006 |
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| Santa Fe Institute Working Papers: 2006 |
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It's been a year since I spent time with the gold mine of powerful insights coming from the Sante Fe Institute. Their 2006 Working Papers are worth an afternoon or so of your time, if you want to really broaden your approaches to systems thinking. Some of my favorite ones from this year include: Information Flows in Causal Networks, Hierarchical Self-Organization in the Finitary Process Soup, and Social Segregation and the Dynamics of Group Inequality.
Posted: 6/18/06; 10:42:33 PM # |
| Inclusion Through Innovation |
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The British Government has framed some of their core development and social justice work under the rubric of "social exclusion". I just finished a report on Inclusion Through Innovation: Tackling Social Exclusion Through New Technologies (83 page PDF). Some of the important ICT opportunities include: person-centred government services (rather than agency centred), building community connections, and strategic sharing of information. There is some well targeted thinking in here. I would love to know how the person-centred approach will go over with agencies.
Posted: 6/18/06; 10:36:21 PM # |
| Collaborative Reference Work in the Blogsphere |
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Jeffrey Pomerantz and Fred Stutzman (of the iBiblio Lyceum project) have published a paper on Collaborative Reference Work in the Blogsphere (12 page PDF) to explore the use of blogs in library reference services. I have an ongoing interest in the powerful role of simple publishing tools that integrate into people's workflow, especially in a knowledge management context. Papers that look at very specific applications are of greater value, in many cases, than those than skim across the surface.
Posted: 6/18/06; 10:28:02 PM # |
| Thoughtcrime #65: Call to Stillness |
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Like many of you, I am inundated with urgent appeals in my email. Indeed, some organizations seem to only know how to communicate in that particular tone. For once, I would enjoy seeing a message tell me to take a deep breath and reflect on my own relationship to urgency. Maybe I should send one of those out myself? In the mean time, I will point you to the back window of my friend's car in Thoughtcrime #65: 
Posted: 6/18/06; 10:23:10 PM # |
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15 June 2006 |
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| Nonprofit Online News Journal: June 2006 Edition |
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The June 2006 Edition of the Journal is out and its focus is essentially on interoperability. We have a great piece by Bruce Dixon on The Black Stake in the Internet, the Berkman Center's Roadmap for Open ICT Ecosystems, two articles on email by Isaac Garcia, and Nick Gleason's view on standards and open source software. My Quicksheet is about "building on higher ground" and we have the usual assortment of resources.
Posted: 6/15/06; 10:56:44 PM # |
| The Dialectics of Knowledge Management |
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This year, I've decided to start writing about some of the core values and principles of my work. Although you'll find them expressed in both my methods and my political analysis, I don't often develop them directly. My latest article, entitled The Dialectics of Knowledge Management, takes a close look at a world view that informs my consulting work, especially in the field of organizational learning.
Posted: 6/15/06; 12:33:36 PM # |
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13 June 2006 |
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| Manifesto for Social Innovation |
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I have a fondness for the manifesto form. It stimulates conversation, is actionable, and doesn't hide behind fearful postures of neutrality. The Manifesto for Social Innovation (65 page PDF) is one I wish I had written. I was particularly interested in the model presented for how social innovation happens (and how we fail to encourage the early stages) and how much more we need to know about how to support and accelerate it.
Posted: 6/13/06; 8:38:29 PM # |
| The Wealth of Networks |
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Yochai Benkler's book, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom is available for free online in numerous different forms. This book has plenty to love and plenty to hate, but it's deep, rich, and goes far beyond the superficial rhetoric of most contemporary debates that are a reflection of its issues. This is a book that can serve as the basis for discussions that can help remake civil society in the age of networks.
Posted: 6/13/06; 8:34:22 PM # |
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7 June 2006 |
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| Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism |
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Although his less than nuanced framing of "collectivism" leaves something to be desired, Jaron Lanier of VR fame comes to some valuable conclusions in Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism. He ends up with a solid structural analysis and a systems perspective in which he says, in essence, that it is our job to use the power of groups and the power of individuals in concert. This sort of analysis would be very useful in assessing communication, leadership, and knowledge initiatives in civil society.
Posted: 6/7/06; 6:48:57 PM # |
| Charitable Thoughts |
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I had the pleasure of meeting Dalene Bradford in Kansas City last Fall. She started blogging in the Spring at Charitable Thoughts and I recommend her writing highly. She focuses primarily on resource development issues, but takes a holistic approach to it. Her topics include: Branding, Connecting with Donors, Email Strategies & E-Communication, Grant Writing, and Nonprofit Training.
Posted: 6/7/06; 1:22:29 PM # |
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4 June 2006 |
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| Web 2.0: A Pattern Library |
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I remember demonstrating an AJAX interface to Social Ecology's software several years before the term was coined. That was at the same N-TEN conference where I presented on the need for open APIs in nonprofit software applications. And I think that may have been not long before I wrote an open letter to nonprofit technology funders promoting network centric innovation, among other things. I think I should have called it all Web 2.0, don't you? You think it would have caught on? Anyway, it certainly has now and for all my disappointment with gratuitous widgets, there is something worth paying attention to. Take a look at the Web 2.0 Pattern Library. Nonprofit software developers (including open source ones), are you paying attention? Funders, are you? Do you know how to support such things? It doesn't look quite like the winner-take-all approach anymore.
Posted: 6/4/06; 11:45:03 PM # |
| Social Bookmarking For Scientists - The Best Of Both Worlds |
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I am waiting for social bookmarking systems to step further out from the walled garden model and become truly interoperable and peer based. (I think that might actually happen, whereas the social networking systems, on the other hand, will probably just build higher walls.) While we wait, if you're going to use a social bookmarking service, I highly recommend Connotea. Developed as an open source project by folks hired by the journal Nature, it is available to install on your servers or you can use their free system. I particularly appreciate it for how it plays well with other systems of citation, as described in this article from XTech 2006: Social Bookmarking For Scientists - The Best Of Both Worlds.
Posted: 6/4/06; 11:32:59 PM # |
| Quick, It's the Feds! Hide the AJAX! |
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With the growth of gratuitous Javascript in web page showing no sign of abating, it's useful to remember one of its many drawbacks: It's often impenetrable to the screen readers used by people with vision impairments. I'm just waiting to see how soon we find organizations serving people with disabilities telling their designers to "add some of that web 2.0 stuff to our home page". In the mean time, it's good to read tongue in cheek appraisals such as this: Quick, It's the Feds! Hide the AJAX!.
Posted: 6/4/06; 11:27:26 PM # |
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1 June 2006 |
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