October 2009

We are one month in on our Idealware Facebook experiment. I know I shouldn't succumb to the Ashton Kutcher complex, but I can't help checking the number of fans multiple times a day (which isn't great for my office productivity). We are up to 247 fans. After an initial push at the beginning (as you might recall from my last post about the launch, we got 100 fans in just over 24 hours), for the past month fans have been trickling in. Just this week we "featured" the page in our eNews, and hada quick jump from 218 to 247.

I posed the question to the fans yesterday (by writing on the wall), "Why did you decide to become a fan of Idealware?". I got two answers: one from a personal friend saying he is a fan because Idealware hires great employees (thanks, Bob), and another saying that she became a fan to get additional information to pass along to her own audience.

We asked a similar question in a survey a couple of weeks ago, "In general, How do you decide to be a fan of a page on Facebook?" Most of the answers fell into the same two categories as above, either they personally know the person inviting them or the organization, or, they have high expectations as to the quality of information and resources that would be posted. Someone also wrote for their response, "A better question would be, how do I decide to unfan a page?" (Their answer: "poor signal/noise, high volume").

Survey participants were eligible to win free Idealware seminar (either live or an on-demand recording), and so I want to say congratulations, and thank you, to Bianca Taulman from the University of TX at Austin for winning!

One of the challenges I have been having is trying to balance listen, responding to people, and creating content through our three social media channels (this blog, Facebook, and Twitter) with the other aspects of my job that seem (to me) to be more pressing and a higher priority. I know I am not alone in this. It may boil down to a question that was asked at a recent Social Media Breakfast I was presenting at.

The question goes something like this: My organization has limited resources, yet we know our audience is using multiple social media channels. How do we choose which tool to use?

The organization knows they shouldn't go from zero to multiple channels all at once, especially with the resource constraints and lack of experience. While the standard answer is to consider your audience and your goals and go from there, what does that actually mean? If your audience is using multiple channels (as more and more are), and multiple channels would help you reach our goal...the answer isn't actually so easy.

Of course, that standard answer is what I gave, but I can't help feeling like I took the easy way out.

How did you choose which channels to jump into? Did you go from not having a social media presence to having Twitter, Facebook, and a YouTube channel? Or, did you start with one channel and gradually include more? Please leave thoughts in the comments...

Here's the third in a series of posts on getting started with Drupal, the popular open source content management system. The short intro and discussion on modules are best read first. Today we'll look at site structure, and how menus, blocks and taxonomies can make your site navigable for your visitors.

Menus

Drupal has a simple and flexible tool for creating and managing menus. You can check/uncheck standard functions; assign them to regions (left sidebar, right sidebar, header, footer, etc.); and easily create new items.

By default, Drupal offers three menus that you can add to your site:

	Navigation - The main menu is dynamic. It displays items based on the visitor's role and state of authentication. For example, an unauthenticated user might see a "Login" menu item, while an authenticated user would see "logout". An authenticated user who is also a site manager would see the Administer menu. This menu is usually placed in a sidebar, next to the main content
	Primary Links - This is often the menu for the main content areas, e.g. Home, Blog, Calendar, About. Primarily links are usually placed in a site's header.
	Secondary Links can be used for less popular pages, but ones that you want to have available, such as site maps, privacy notices, and contact links.

You can assign a menu item to any particular piece of content, or to a collection of items by content type. Drupal assigns numbers to individual items. The basic content type is called a node, so the default first page of a web site would be at http://your-site.org/node/1. If you create a blog, the first post would be at http://your-site.org/blog/1.



Say you wanted blog/1 to be your front page, but you also wanted something easier to remember to appear in the address bar, you could rename it "home", so that people could browse directly to the site at http://your-site.org/home. They would see, in the center of the home page, that first blog entry. Drupal's general settings allow you to identify your home page; renaming a numeric page simply makes it friendlier for your users.

If, instead, you simply wanted the whole blog to be the home page, then you would skip the numbers, and not bother with a rename, as linking the front page to http://your-site.org/blog would accomplish that.

Drupal's real power comes in when you realize that, with the CCK module, you can make your own content types, and that can be very easy. A press release will have a similar format to a blog item (title, content). So you can create a type called press_release and link a page to it: http://your-site.org/press_release. All new press releases that you post to the site from Create Content/Press Release will appear there.

Blocks

Blocks are boxes that can be placed on one or more pages or associated with one or more content types. They usually appear in the left or right sidebars. Strategically associating blocks with particular content can be a subtler way o offer navigational aids. For example, you might want to have a block with current open positions appear on your "About" page, but not necessarily with your blog. Or you might not want the job listings to appear on pages describing your services, instead featuring a "Donate Now" box. This flexibility allows you to align content in ways that make sense for the different audiences with varying interests that your site will attract.

Taxonomies

All of the above is fine for sites without a lot of content. But, once you have a library of blog entries, press releases and documents to share, you'll want to give your visitors a way to find what they're looking for that doesn't involve inordinate amounts of scrolling. Search is a no-brainer, but even more important is to organize your content with meaningful labels. For this, use the Taxonomy module.




Taxonomies allow you to tag or classify your content using hierarchal terminology. For example, if your NPO serves the homeless, you might have papers on poverty and employment, descriptions of available shelters and programs, job opportunities, and much more. You can break this content down into meaningful categories, then assign sub-terms in each category. Once the taxonomy is in place, you can assign menu items to terms in your taxonomy, thus aggregating all of the relevant content on a single page. You can set up menu blocks for the sub-terms and assign each block to it's category page. The result is a content rich, drill down web site.



That's it for navigation. Next week, we'll talk about Themes and ways you can make your Drupal site distinctive.

Idealware is looking for reviewers for our upcoming small reference book, the Field Guide to Software for Nonprofits: Fundraising, Outreach, and Communications. The Guide will help nonprofits decide what types of software make sense for them based on what they're doing and their technology level.

We have a solid draft of the content, and are hoping to enlist a number of reviewers to make sure our information is sound and on target. Are you willing to pick a few sections of interest to you, read through, and offer comments, prior to October 21st? It shouldn’t take any longer than an hour (unless you want to review additional sections).

Reviewers will be listed as contributors in the Field Guide.

If you are interested, please email me at Kaitlin@idealware.org with a sentence or two about your role and experience in the nonprofit sector (please, no vendors. We’re not able to include anyone who distributes software for a living).

Thanks for your help!

Email is in the news these days, at least here in Boston and Massachusetts. Twitter, Facebook, and political blogs have elbowed their way in as organizing tools, yet incidents in the lowly world of email have had a huge public impact.

If you don’t live in Massachusetts, our local politics may not interest you and who can blame you. Bear with me a minute.

How long do email posts persist?

Here in Boston, missing emails from the computer of the Mayor’s chief adviser have become one of a handful of widely-discussed fall campaign issues. We have a mayor with a strong reputation for attention to all the details in all the neighborhoods, including perhaps emailing about them. And we have challengers focusing on the need for greater transparency and decentralization of decision-making. These have been somewhat abstract differentiators. Nothing like a chief aide’s apparent penchant for erasing all his email every day to focus the public attention.

What’s fascinating to me is how much public information about technology this incident has brought about.

Infrastructure: The public is learning stuff about the technical infrastructure of backing up emails on a server, also important in the second incident, below. Everyone should know now that it’s the norm for their email to exist in more one place. It’s not just on your desktop. Once it’s out there, a message’s traces may persist for a long time.

In this case, while things were not automatically and consistently kept in multiple places, emails that we’re cc’d or forwarded to others leave their own traces. Multiple computers leave traces. Sender’s outbound email leave traces.

While there has been a lot of discussion recently about what happens to personal details on Facebook and other social media, we all got a big fat reminder about the persistence of email.

Forensics: Second, on the technical side, those that could stand it learned more about computer forensics than you would in a season of 24. Maybe 2 seasons. Are things you erase from a hard drive really erased? Not if someone is willing to spending time and money recovering those electronic wisps and traces of the past. Typically, even if you reformat a hard drive, a lot of stuff is still there. When you are done with a computer, in addition to the environmental concerns about all the hardware, better be pretty sure what is going to happen with that hard drive.

Open Government: Third, given that some of the missing emails may factor in a corruption case involving another politician, if they are truly gone, this may violate the state’s public record laws. This may point to the most important public information side of the incident.

Transparency in government operations means more than just having cameras in hearing rooms. It means that the sum total of data collected and used—including emails—may be of interest to policy advocates and others. Tabular data on services provided and business status may have more direct value. And there may not be much to learn from plowing through tedious emails by the thousands from the desks of policy makers. Yet I can imagine that many people now imagining seeing a “power map” of the social web of who corresponds with who and in what frequency at City Hall and other government offices.

Email shows politics in charter school decision

The second email-ish political incident is playing out at the state level. We have had a look at highly embarassing “private” email correspondence between Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and Secretary of Education Paul Reville. We see that a critical decision regarding a new charter school had as much to do with politics as pedagogy. What, politics in charter school decisions? This is like Captain Renault confronting Humphrey Bogart with gambling in “Rick’s Cafe” in Casablanca. Education activists have been trying to make this point for years, and one tiny email exchange blows it wide open for everyone.

Both incidents are lessons in the advocacy potential of Open Government.

The irony about all this is that it also reveals the twin headaches of email in IT or personal computer infrastructure. Email can be one of the hardest things to ensure safe back-up. Whether to tape, disk or off-site cloud storage, you generally need software specifically rated to back up an Outlook mailbox or Exchange server files. And if you have off-site hosted Exchange or use Google Apps webmail, you have even more complicated issues in insuring your organization controls and retains the archives it wants. Blackberries and such add even more complexity to infrastructure and back-up issues.

If the city issue shows that email archives can be harder to maintain than, say, a project document folder, the state issue shows that sometimes a email exchange you thought casual, ad hoc, and private may turn out to have a life of its own. Email copies may exist in many places aside from your own desktop, and they maybe there for a really long time, and they may get forwarded when and where you least expect it.

And both political problems also show that even if you take care in what you write, you can’t control what comes streaming into your Inbox unscreened every day. Things others send you can make trouble even if they’re not malware.

In the continuum of attention to what we write these days, Instant Messages or cell phone SMS texts sit at one end of casualness. A polished, multiply edited and vetted report or proposal lies at the other end. Tweets, blogs, social media participation, along with emails all occupy some middle ground. While quite old in Internet terms, email--whether person-to-person or broadcast out—needs new strategy, care and attention that reflects its continuing persistence.

photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/e_phots/