AssistOrg's Silona Bonewald, founder of the League of Technical Voters (LOTV), organized a 48-hour Code-A-Thon over the weekend to create new functionality for the Drupal platform according to LOTV requirements. Kai Mantsch's video shows more about the event.

A good Article and Podcast by Nancy White about why NonProfits should to consider Blogs for creating Community

 Lock, Code and Load

Thank you Dana Blankenhorn!

Go vote for Geek Politics by Nancy Scola (cause I would be a panelist :-)

http://2007.sxsw.com/interactive/panel_picker/

Also any of Jon Lebkowsky's panels too… though I don't remember the titles off the top of my head!

I posted at WorldChanging about an important new report published by dotOrganize, an organization set up "to assist organizers in utilizing online tools as vehicles for their vision." This report is resonant with AssistOrg's vision and focus. 

Assistorg.org is proud to be a sponsor in the 48hr Code-a-thon being thrown by the League of Technical Voters.

Assistorg's mission is to help NonProfits implement open source solutions. Several of our clients will be at the event helping the programmers design new tools that the entire community can use.

Please check out the wiki at http://lotv-lockin.pbwiki.com password is "transparency"

The League's site is http://www.leagueoftechvoters.org There goal is to get more techies involved in the political process and yea I am very involved in that organization as well.

The event is going to be awesome. We are going to have events every 4 hours to keep the programmers pumped. We have a videographer that is gonig to be doing live video blogging of the event. We have a martini rampage and fire spinners and hulahoop dancers and Djs' spinning for us. I have heard humors of zombies?

http://www.knowbility.org will be bringing accessiblity experts help us write compliant code.

To keep AssistOrg in the good graces of the Uberpowerful IRS, I will need the following form from any contractor that receives $600 or more from AssistOrg for Contracting services.

http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw9.pdf

Please fill this out ASAP, as any payment that would result in your receiving more than $600 in one year will be delayed until I receive this form. You will only need to fill out this form once, unless you move, or the answers in anything in Part II change.

If you cannot complete this form (say, for example you are Canadian), please contact me ASAP so I can get all of my IRS-paper work ducks in a row. The earlier you contact me, the faster you get paid for contracting services.

Contact me at chick at margaritachick d o t com

Michelle

Made a quick-n-dirty worksheet to help estimate Self Employment and income taxes for contract pay. If you need help completing this or anytime it says to contact Michelle, I will be able to answer your questions as part of my work for AssistOrg.

When it states contact a tax professional, I will still be able to help, but it would be beyond the scope of my support functions for AssistOrg

Following the concept of "Web 2.0," we can talk about "Nonprofit 2.0," which was the title of a Sonny Cloward post in October 2005 (referring to a post by Marnie Webb of Compumentor about nonprofits and Web 2.0). Others have used the term, but I'm especially interested in a July 8 post at nonprofittechblog.org focusing on one aspect of Web 2.0, "the long tail,"

a statistical phenomenon that says that the niche players in any Internet-driven market, become, in aggregate, a larger market force than the “brand names” of that market. For us non-profit types, that means all those little mom-and-pop non-profits are actually a bigger force in toto than the Red Crosses, United Ways and Salvation Armies of this world. In a sense, your average donor is now going to be confronted with a Netflix-like selection of charities he or she can donate to. Sure, they might want to donate to the Red Cross but then there’s the indie non-profit just trying to help out literally in the neighborhood of that donor.

Steve Andersen at One Northwest has written "Some observations On Nonprofit Software":

• Missions are serviced only by engaging constituents to action
• Engagement activities aren’t unique to nonprofits, so the tools aren’t either
• The best way to build software for nonprofits is to find tools that successfully addresses most of your needs and then add the nonprofit-specific functionality
• Software targeted at a larger market than nonprofits will improve faster than software specifically for the nonprofit market
• Software that has open Application Programming Interfaces makes the “build-on-top” model work
• There is a market for nonprofit-specific software that serves a defined function and is accessible via robust APIs