Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

I’ve been involved in this Telesummit now since the beginning. It’s really fun, and important.
The Women Who Tech Telesummit was formed three years ago to celebrate all the innovative women who provide incredible value to technology and social media. So it’s time to come get your tech on! Come join hundreds of women on September 15th at the Women Who Tech Telesummit from 11AM to 6PM Eastern Time. (It’s virtual – all you need is access to a phone line and the web so you can participate from anywhere in the world). Women Who Tech’s thought provoking virtual panels offer the latest resources and tools for launching a successful startup, tools and apps to build your online community, Social Media ROI, and more. Among the sessions:

• Launching Your Own Startup
• Creating a Culture of Collaboration and Innovation
• Female Ferocity
• ROI of Social Networking
• Speak Up: Pitching and Public Speaking Mojo
• Building the Ultimate User Experience
• Women and Open Source and Identity

And more… Panelists include a “who’s who” of women on the forefront of social change and technological progress, among them: Elisa Camahort Page, Co-Founder of BlogHer, Rashmi Sinha, Co-Founder of SlideShare, Beth Kanter, Blogger and CEO of Zoetica, Cheryl Contee of Fission Strategy, Shireen Mitchell of Digital Sistas, Genevieve Bell of Intel, Deanna Zandt, technologist and author, Liza Sabater of Culture Kitchen, Tara Hunt, Author, Lynne Johnson of the Advertising Research Foundation, and Heather Harde, CEO of TechCrunch. They are also hosting after Parties in DC, NYC and SF so come on out!

Most days, data is pretty straightforward to us here at OpenIssue headquarters. Names, addresses, email addresses, the pesky notes field (today’s bane of our existence.) But sometimes, data is political. Or, I guess more accurately, data models.

In most CRM systems, especially older ones, and ones that are less flexible, some fields can be points of contention for some of us. Gender is one, marital status is another.

CiviCRM, to it’s credit, allows for an arbitrary number of genders – you can define them however you like. My bet (although I could be wrong) is that it’s one of the few out there that allow that. Gender is not a standard field in Salesforce.com contact records, so if you want to add your own, you can customize it however you’d like. There was a very interesting and lively discussion about the gender field in Drupal profiles. Of course, one can always customize these things in Drupal.

For a couple of projects we’ve been working on, we’ve been getting very interested in putting together a really expanded and fleshed out data model for gender, sexual orientation, and marital status. Here’s the first draft. We’d love feedback on this (besides “this is silly/too radical/dangerous/from the antichrist/etc.”). And we also know that even for those who agree that sex and gender are different things, people will differ on how to divide these categories and make sense of it.

• Sex: Male, Female, FTM, MTF, Intersex
• Gender: Male, Female, Genderqueer
• Sexuality: Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Queer, Questioning, Straight
• Marital Status: Straight Marriage, MA, DC, IA, VT Domestic, CA-SF 2004, CA 2008, Canada
• Relationship Status: Single, Partnered, Divorced, Dating, Poly  (There probably could be some field dependencies of Marital Status on Relationship Status)

And if you maybe thought that OpenIssue headquarters was in San Francisco, I’m sure this list made you sure. (Yes, we are.)

As you know, I left twitter 3 months ago today. I figured it was a good time to do a reflection of my experiences over this time – what I miss, and what I don’t miss.

What I don’t miss

• Distractions: I find myself more productive, for sure. I never was very disciplined about turning twitter off, so I was constantly distracted. The lack of distraction has been a really good thing.
• Information overload: how did I keep all that stuff in my head? My mind feels a lot quieter.
• Need to share: I’m happy to leave the somewhat narcissistic impulse that Twitter feeds behind.

What I miss

• Instant answers to questions! And answering people’s questions.
• Banter: Twitter is way better for banter than any other medium besides being in person.
• Opportunities for collaboration: it does seem like a lot of that happens now on Twitter and Facebook (which for me is a friends/family only zone) so I’m probably missing out on some of that.

In general, I’m still happy I left, and have no plans to return. I have, on a couple of occasions, used search.twitter.com when a certain event was happening, so I could see up to the minute what was going on. I’m sure I’ll still do that sometimes.

I became sold on version control fairly far back in my programming life. Back when CVS (C0ncurrent Version System) was the standard. I learned it, although there were varied gaps in my use of it, so it never became second nature. As I learned more about newer version control systems, I tried them out. For a while, I was using SVN (Subversion), which is similar enough to CVS, but has some nice improvements. More and more folks are moving to distributed version control systems. I began to understand the great advantages of those systems, and decided to pick one to standardize on. Git stood out from the others in terms of popularity and resources. And, I figured anything Linus Torvalds wrote was good enough for me. That was last year. This year. drupal.org is moving to Git, making my life oh so much easier.

In my daily life, Git has 2 major advantages: version control and comparison of versions even when I’m not connected to the internet (you have your own actual repository, not just a working copy), and its speed. It takes less time to clone a whole repository of code than it does to check out a working copy using CVS or SVN! It’s really worth checking out.

I imagine Git will become the new CVS – the new standard, until something better comes along to supplant it.