Solpath

Get a first life.

jason — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 05:33:21 +0000

I’ve never been a fan of Second Life. They’ve been getting tons of press lately - everybody’s talking, including a lot of people in the nonprofit tech world. Personally, I think it’s equal parts lame, pathetic and scary. I guess I just don’t “get it”. Turns out I’m not the only one who doesn’t get it:
http://www.getafirstlife.com/

I’m Famous…

jason — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 18:56:39 +0000

Check out this article at the Silicon Valley Commons…it’s a nice little synopsis about my/Solpath’s history.
http://siliconvalley.wikia.com/wiki/Jason_Ricci

Grantsfire

jason — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 23:03:45 +0000

We’ve been working with some really great, really smart people the past month on a project called Grantsfire. Granstsfire is an aggregator of syndicated grants information. It enables grantseekers and funders to share and search for information on grant announcements in real time – as foundations publish this information on their web sites. We (Keith and I) are building the prototype - you can check it out here (keep in mind it’s a work in progress, we call it a prototype for a reason):

http://dev.solpath.org:3000/

We’ve built a crawler/parser that will pull grants data from participating foundations’ webpages or RSS feeds, save them to the Grantsfire database, then allow anyone to search that data. Future functionality will hopefully allow for Google Map mashups and other fun stuff (including Solpath integration of course)…stay tuned.

We’re also working on an hGrant microformat specification - you should be able to find out more about hGrant once we populate the wiki.

Some of the great folks involved in making this project a reality include:

Katrin Verclas, Executive Director of NTEN.

Eugene Chan, Director of Technology, Community Technology Foundation of California

Gavin Clabough, VP Information Systems, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation

Eugene Eric Kim, Principal and CoFounder, Blue Oxen Associates

Michael Gilbert, Principal, The Gilbert Center

How do people blog so much?

jason — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 22:37:38 +0000

I see people who post several times a day…and I’m talking long diatribes here, not just links to articles or diaries of how they woke and brushed their teeth then ate breakfast and went to work. Where do people find the time? It’s been over a month since my last post. I guess that’s pretty lame in the blogger world.

We’ve got funding!

jason — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 16:40:51 +0000

It’s been a long road, and we’re nowhere near the end, but I’m happy to announce we have our first official funder on board. I’ve always equated the foundation funding process to a bunch of people standing around a pool waiting for someone else to jump in first. At the TAG conference a colleague equated it to a group of penguins waiting on the edge of an iceberg for the first one to jump in the water - if he doesn’t get eaten, the rest will follow. Either way you look at it, I’m hoping that this first penguin will help convince the other penguins to jump in. (If you happen to be one of those penguins, let’s chat). We’re working on press releases next week, so I should be able to announce the who, what and where soon. (If you’re a penguin I can provide more details in person, so get in touch.

Good Magazine Usability

jason — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 00:22:29 +0000

Recently I was thumbing through a magazine at my son’s doctor’s office, and I noticed a very cool “feature” I’d never seen in any other magazine. Take a look at the image above - right there in the table of contents was a diagram showing what page each headline story from the cover could be found on. How many times have you picked up a magazine because of a headline story, thumbed through pages of ads to find the table of contents, then searched and searched to find the page number of the damn story? Every magazine in the world should adopt this “feature” - it’s ridiculous nobody’s done it before (that I know of anyway).

True costs of bad design

jason — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 19:01:03 +0000

Lucy over at Philanthropy 2173 (or whatever the name is this week has an interesting perspective on the true costs of bad design. Her take is that bad design leads to high tech support costs - I like this perspective in addition to our argument that bad design leads to low user adoption rates. Check out here post here.

I also noticed that David Geilhufe from CivicSpace referenced the post with a “we’re working on it“…that’s good to hear. I hope other open source/nonprofit focused developers will also take notice.

TAG was incredible

jason — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 15:23:42 +0000

We struggled for a while as to whether or not we should spend the money to go to TAG this year, but I can tell you it was worth every penny. We met some great people, learned a lot, and will hopefully have some great announcements in the coming weeks to prove it. More on the details as they evolve…

TAG

jason — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 01:24:44 +0000

I just got to Baltimore for the TAG Conference (Technology Affinity Group). We’re participating as a vendor, even though we have nothing to “vend” per se. So, what are we doing here? Well, the theme of the conference is “Using Technology to Enhance Communications and Collaboration”, and the focus is to help foundations explore creative ways to use existing and new technologies to expand their impact while learning from other colleagues about their successes and challenges. Sounds like a perfect place to meet people interested in this project.

I’m hoping that by setting up a booth as a vendor we’ll encourage people to come chat with us at their convenience - I’ve found in the past that the “schmooze and mingle” methodology at most conferences never really works well, especially when the conference has the word “technology” in the title. So, if you’ll be at the conference this week please come by and chat (or if you know someone who might be interested send them our way).

There are a few things I’d like to accomplish at the conference:

Testing the waters - we’ve had a great deal of enthusiasm behind the project from our relatively small circle of foundation and nonprofit friends, so I’m excited to see how a project like this will be received in a broader forum.
Finding project sponsors - in order for this project to move forward and succeed, we need participating foundations to fund it’s development. In return, each of these sponsors will be treated as a test case. We’ll study their existing grants management processes and design our software to work for them. We’re hoping that using 10 foundations as test cases will allow us to build a tool that’s flexible enough for the vast majority of foundations out there with little or no customization.
Starting a dialogue about open software - it’s time to start talking about open APIs, software interoperability, and free software in the nonprofit and foundation world. Hopefully we can kick start that conversation this week.

So, wish me luck and come see me if you’re in Baltimore…

An interesting discussion about closed discussions…

jason — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 19:03:29 +0000

An interesting discussion seems to be brewing over a “closed” nonprofit tech email list over at 501tech-ny. The vendors are apparently upset over the possibility of existing and persepctive clients “talking behind their backs”. My take on this? If they were confident in the quality and value of their software, then they should be able to sleep at night knowing they’ll get nothing but glowing reviews behind those closed doors.

I also think they can learn a lot from open source projects like CiviCRM - not only is their software completely open, but their development process and wiki are completely open as well. The lines of communication flow in both directions, and the developers leading the project take note and learn from criticisms of their software. They’re not afraid of bitch sessions - they encourage it and learn from it.

Here’s some more inside info from those directly involved…

Allen Benamer

Deborah Elizabeth Finn