assistorg.org -

League of Technical Voters' Code-A-Thon

Jon Lebkowsky — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 08:08:49 -0500

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.

Questions for Candidates

Jon Lebkowsky — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 16:24:24 -0500

AssistOrg has been working with Sustainable Future on a Drupal-based site called Questions for Candidates. Members of the site can send a set of questions to candidates in various races across the U.S. The questions focus on energy policy and climate change. From the site:

The energy choices our nation makes, and the consequences of those, such as global warming, affect all Americans and our collective future. Elections should be an opportunity for a national discussion about these issues, but as any voter knows, we mostly just get stump speeches and soundbites.

The tools on this website were designed to give voters some help in changing this dynamic. Sending the questionnaire to candidates is the first step. The questionnaire makes the substantive case that important issues are at stake, and that they are relevant to a broad cross-section of Americans.

Candidates don’t just drop everything and write answers to questionnaires, though. Voters need to make clear that they want answers, and that’s the second step: reminding candidates to respond.

read more

Blogging and community

Silona Bonewald — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 23:58:16 -0500

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

Codeathon Writeup!

Silona Bonewald — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 11:38:33 -0500

Lock, Code and Load

Thank you Dana Blankenhorn!

SXSW voting time

Silona Bonewald — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 17:38:43 -0500

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!

"Social Change and the Technology Struggle"

Jon Lebkowsky — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 15:16:58 -0500

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.

Proud Sponsor of 48hr Code-a-thon

Silona Bonewald — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 14:51:20 -0500

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.

Nonprofit 2.0 and the long tail

Jon Lebkowsky — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 10:32:37 -0500

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.

Observations on nonprofit software from One Northwest

Jon Lebkowsky — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 23:20:27 -0500

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