iPhone, Smartphone and Google Apps for NPOs
By Gregory Foster | November 23, 2009
Session Card(s)
Notes By Dave Dart
google.com/dashboard – lists all the information Google has about you. You can use this to update your information that is collected from sources across the internet.
Potential sources to help with the creation of a pool for NPO app development:
- nten.org
- techsoup
- greenlights.org – Matt Kouri
Topics: 2009, Session | No Comments »
“Outreach to Hispanics in the U.S. & Tx”, “Building bilingual websites using WordPress”
By Gregory Foster | November 23, 2009
Session Card(s)
Notes By Dale Thompson
Mary Alice Carnes – needs work. Volunteering. Greenlights uses DISC.
Need Hispanic on boards.
Reaching out to Hispanics. Go to where people are. Gathering spaces – online, whatever.
Find advocates to bring your message into that community.
Realtionship of food to Hispanics. They care that diet coke has no sugar – not that it has no calories.
Messaging has to be right.
Churches?
Who is the trusted source. Ask a bunch of people. Follow people on Twitter. Find out what’s in it for them. Don’t label. If they are receiving services, they can also help.
Reach out to people you already serve. They can give back by giving an hour of service. neighborhood. What are the neighborhood assets. Who is there. Start bottom up – don’t inject something and then leave. Leadership development, ask community for feedback. Have representation from the people we serve. We need the insight. What are the issues going on in this community.
Mando [ @elmundodemando ] developed Hispanic track for Ryze.
Las comadres. Nora Comstock
Topics: 2009, Session | No Comments »
Web Sites Behind the Scenes
By Gregory Foster | November 23, 2009
Convened By:
- Chris Boyd, Midas Networks
Notes By:
- Have notes? Attach as comments or send to notes @t effaustin d.t org
Session Card(s)
Topics: 2009, Session | No Comments »
Activity Streams: Getting your users’ actions out onto the social web
By Gregory Foster | November 22, 2009
Session Card(s)
Notes By Gregory Foster
Last updated 11.22.2009
What?
Activity Streams is an emerging standard for publishing a website user’s activities as an Atom feed. It’s already being used by:
- Facebook: securely publishing activities from your profile wall.
- MySpace: publishing you and your friend’s activities.
- Microsoft: gathering and re-publishing your activities from 74 websites (including Facebook and MySpace). Roughly 14 of those sites are publishing Activity Streams-compliant feeds.
Why?
Perhaps the best operative metaphor is that of standardizing railroad track gauges between social networking platforms, enabling a record of one’s activities to move fluidly between the sites you use, to be shared with your different social networks in a manner controlled by you.
- The Why? from Chris Messina’s Activity Streams presentation for Facebook
- To develop a format for expressing activities.
- To stay in touch across the web.
- To create an open, emergent ecosystem of activities.
- To enable better filtering, search, automation and stats.
- To facilitate optimal, compelling, custom experiences.
- Coalescing, merging, and de-duping of data into information.
Activity Streams
View more documents from Chris Messina.
- The Why? from Microsoft’s partnership announcement on 11.10.2009
Activity Streams make it easy for partner sites to expose feed information or activity from their sites in a consistent format, once, so that their customers can import or connect what they’re doing on that site to other major services like Windows Live, MySpace, Facebook, etc. without their needing to implement service-specific tweaks to their feed. Likewise, service endpoints like Windows Live can expose a standard endpoint rather than implementing and maintaining custom feed ingestion for every partner.
- The Why? from Chris Messina’s presentation at the Open Stack meetup
- “One of the problems that we have right now is that people are essentially defined by the services that they use, as opposed to saying I want Dave’s updates across all these different sites because frankly I don’t care which site he’s on, I want to know what’s up with Dave. This software’s not at the point, because the technology’s not there yet, the protocols aren’t there yet, to enable that type of merging of identity.” (6:54-7:16)
- “I shouldn’t have to care where Dave is doing these things, I care about the content.”
How?
- Triples (plus context)
- Actor /verb/ “object” [context]
- gregoryfoster /tweeted/ “OMGWTFBBQ” [via TweetDeck]
- gregoryfoster /watched/ “Keyboard Cat” [on YouTube]
- gregoryfoster /added to profile/ “Some Willie Nelson Song” [on MySpace]
- Actor /verb/ “object” [context]
- Triples (plus indirect objects and context)
- Actor /verb/ “object” {indirect object} [context]
- gregoryfoster /bought/ “Crush It!” {for Kathy} [on Amazon]
- Actor /verb/ “object” {indirect object} [context]
More examples
- http://diso-project.org/wiki/activity-streams-examples
- Provides a good structure for elucidating uses of and additions to Activity Streams.
Activity Streams
- Initiated by the DiSo Project
- http://activitystrea.ms/
- Google Group
- First message June 16, 2008.
- Wiki
- The authoritative wiki has moved several times, but information is generally complementary.
- See also the DiSo wiki for Activity Streams.
Coverage of 01.08.2009 meeting at Six Apart
- http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_facebook_myspace_activitystreams.php
- http://therealmccrea.com/2009/01/08/live-blogging-from-the-activity-streams-meetup/
- http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2009/01/08/RepresentingRichMediaAndSocialNetworkActivitiesInRSSAtomFeeds.aspx
- http://blog.broadbandmechanics.com/2009/01/09/diso-activity-streams-standard/
Adopted by:
MySpace
- MySpace made available their activity streams API on February 25th, 2009 to a group of small partners. Yahoo! was their first partner going live on March 3rd, 2009.
- MySpace developer wiki: Standards for Activity Streams
- Exposes feeds of all of the activities of one’s friends as well.
- Uses OpenSocial for their Developer Platform (write once, run on any OpenSocial site)
- They also host MySpace Domain applications (native)
- MySpace has taken the tack of creating their own verbs and object types. They have exhibited a willingness to update their usage as the emerging specification is standardized (e.g. the Review object type). However, it does demonstrate a precedent for extension established by an active member of the group.
Windows Live
- Engineering the Windows Live / MySpace integration and Leveraging Activity Streams
- Partnership Announcement 11.10.2009
- Released 04.27.2009 as part of their Open Streams API
- Facebook developer wiki: Using Activity Streams
- You must have an interactive session with the user to acquire extended permission to read (read_stream) or publish (publish_stream) to their stream.
- Once your application has permission, you can query the user’s stream to retrieve their Atom Activity Streams feed.
- This last link has a sample syndicated stream one can query against.
Six Apart
- Movable Type Motion
- Looks to be a way to aggregate Activity Streams and cull mentions of particular keywords across the social web. Quite vague on details though.
- Movable Type Action Streams Plugin
- For MT 4.25
Opera
Key People Involved:
- Chris Messina, DiSo Project [ @chrismessina ]
- Monica Keller, MySpace [ @ciberch ]
- Rob Dolin, Microsoft [ @robdolin ]
- Dare Obasanjo, Microsoft [ @Carnage4Life ]
- Kevin Marks, BT [ @kevinmarks ]
- Martin Atkins, Six Apart [ @apparentlymart ]
- Ari Steinberg, Facebook
- Dave Recordon, Facebook (prev. Six Apart) [ @daveman692 ]
- Joseph Smarr, Plaxo [ @jsmarr ]
- John McCrea, Comcast [ @johnmccrea ]
Specs
Atom Activity Extensions
- Read the Specification
- This document presents an extension that allows activities on social objects to be expressed within the Atom Syndication Format.
- For the purpose of this specification, an activity is a description of an action that was performed (the verb) at some instant in time by some actor (the subject, as described in Section 6.1 (Feed Subject)), usually on some social object (the object). An activity feed is a feed of such activities.
- An activity may also have an indirect object. The indirect object is considered for the purposes of this specification to be a modifier of the activity and does not exist as a first-class object.
- …a given activity entry MAY have more than one activity:verb element, which indicates that there are several verbs describing this activity.
Atom Activity Base Schema
- Read the Specification
- Verbs
- Post
- Share: indicates that the Subject has called out the Object to readers.
- Save: indicates that the Subject has called out the Object as being of interest primarily to him- or herself.
- Mark as Favorite: indicates that the Subject marked the Object as an item of special interest.
- Play: indicates that the subject spent some time enjoying the object.
- Start Following: indicates that the Subject began following the activity of the Object.
- Make Friend: indicates the creation of a friendship that is reciprocated by the object.
- Join: indicates that the actor has become a member of the Object.
- Tag: indicates that the actor has identified the presence of a target inside another object. For example, the actor may have specified that a particular user appears in a photo.
- Object Types
- Article: indicates that the Object is an article, such as a news article, a knowledge base entry, or other similar construct.
- Blog Entry: indicates that the Object is an entry in a blog or some other similar construct.
- Note: represents short notes or status updates.
- File: represents some document or other file with no additional machine-readable semantics.
- Photo: represents a graphical still image.
- Photo Album: represents a collection of images.
- Playlist: represents an ordered list of time-based media items, such as video and audio objects.
- Video: represents video content, which usually consists of a motion picture track and an audio track.
- Audio: represents audio content.
- Bookmark: represents a pointer to some URL—typically a web page.
- Person: represents a user account. This is often a person, but might also be a company or ficticious character that is being represented by a user account.
- Group: represents a social networking group.
- Place: represents a location on Earth.
- Includes lat/lng using geo:point element.
- Comment: represents a textual response to another object.
- Context Elements
- Location: describes the location where the user was at the time the activity was performed.
- Mood: describes the mood of the user when the activity was performed.
- Annotation: an extra text-based note added to an activity by the user.
Here’s the process for adding new verbs for activity streams
Related Projects
YouTube
- FAQ: YouTube Subscriptions
- A YouTube subscription means subscribing to a user’s videos and their public activity (their favorites, their ratings, etc). By subscribing to a user, you’ll receive updates and stay informed when something new occurs.
- Data API Protocol
- OAuth support
- YouTube uses Atom with custom namespaced elements for their Data API
- Activity Feeds
- Includes user and friend activity feeds.
- At this time they are NOT using the Activity Streams schema.
- Reference Guide: Data API Protocol
gnip
- http://www.gnip.com/
- It looks like gnip is doing Activity Streams For Profit. They have developed the infrastructure for polling and tracking as many realtime data producing services as possible, rules for normalization, and delivery to requested endpoints.
JIRA Atlassian Activity Streams
MicroFormats
- http://microformats.org/wiki/activity-streams
- Naturally, a good example of “the MicroFormats process” for proposed additions to the lexicon.
- Focuses on the verb component.
SocialText
cliqset
- API Documentation for Activities
- Requests required to perform basic authentication over SSL.
- Defining their own resources as needed.
- Example: Atom+XML request of last 4 bookmarks to and from a user.
- Details on connecting to their streaming API
Ruby on Rails Plugins for Activity Streams
Related Technologies
- OAuth
- OpenID (and Attribute Exchange)
- XRDS/Simple
- WebFinger
- OpenSocial
- Atom Publishing Protocol
- OpenSearch (YouTube and Last.fm using this namespace when returning search results in XML)
- Salmon
- PubSubHubbub
- Universal Feed Parser
- Bill D’Ahorra “Seven Values of Atom”
- “FriendFeed’s MySQL schema for storing schema-less data”:http://bret.appspot.com/entry/how-friendfeed-uses-mysql
OAuth [ http://oauth.net/ ]
- http://oauth.net/
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OAuth
- OAuth allows a user to grant access to their information on one site (the Service Provider), to another site (called Consumer), without sharing all of their identity.
- OAuth is not an OpenID extension and thus is not restricted to use with OpenID.
- Read the Specification
- Google Group
- Beginner’s Guide to OAuth
- OAuth allows you to share your private resources (photos, videos, contact list, bank accounts) stored on one site with another site without having to hand out your username and password.
- Definitely the right tool for the job of permitting access to one’s Activity Stream.
Topics: 2009, Session | 2 Comments »
Plug Into Austin’s Interactive Scene
By Gregory Foster | November 22, 2009
Convened By:
- Marcus Mateus [ @marcusmateus ]
- Steve Golab [ @stevegolab ]
Notes By:
Session Card(s)
Notes By Anne Gentle
Blog Post: Trip report from Non Profit Bar Camp Austin
Notes By Gregory Foster
Introduction
- Going to discuss “The Austin Equation”
- “Interactive” in the SXSWi meaning of the term.
Austin Equation
View more presentations from Bijoy Goswami.
The fundamental question: what exactly makes Austin special and how does it work?
- Keep Austin Weird
- Silicon Hills
- Michael Barnes with the Statesman identified Austin as an “Open City”, a really open and accessible area to start and join efforts. 04.06.2009
- However, the quantity can also be problematic in that there’s too much to do and join…
- The people of Austin – open to new ideas, nice.
- Provincialism cuts both ways. e.g.: NYC is provincial.
- University of Texas.
- Hunter Ellinger: A town where it is cool to be smart.
- As a nonprofit: you see high activity, more respect for NPOs here whereas in other places they might be considered “charity cases”.
- 6000+ NPOs in Austin.
- The presence of the state capital, especially for advocacy focused organizations.
- Slide about “Common Observations” – the “surface level”, maybe not necessarily the unique attributes about the city.
The Austin Equation
- Experience + Community = Scene (E + C = S)
- ATXequation listed as copyright holder, formally organized.
What is an Experience?
- Austin is good at packaging experiences rather than services (Alamo Drafthouse, Amy’s Ice Cream, RunTex)
- Pine and Gilmore graphic cited.
- Stages: Commodities -> Goods -> Services -> Experiences -> Transformations
- Anne Gentle [ @annegentle ]: As a business owner, one can focus on creating a good experience for your employees.
- Jon Lebkowsky [ @jonl ]: Community is when people have history, shared relationships and experience over time.
What is a Scene?
- “An aggregation of communities around a particular area”
- Slide listing Austin scenes (spiritual, fitness, sustainability, interactive, entrepreneurship, etc.)
Bootstrap Austin Model
Topics: 2009, Session | No Comments »
In the Thick of It! Advice on starting your own non-profit from someone who’s in the muck
By Gregory Foster | November 22, 2009
Session Card(s)
In The Thick Of It!
View more presentations from Aaron Bramley.
Notes By Gregory Foster
Lights. Camera. Help.
- http://lightscamerahelp.org/
- On Facebook
- In the process of filing as a 501(c)3.
- Raising $750 for status.
- $300 charge if you’ll have an operational budget of $10,000 during the next 5 years.
- Careful not to handcuff yourself if your budget is projected to be higher; there can be a charge.
- David Neff [ @daveiam ] had the idea for a health-issues film festival; expanded scope to NPO film festival.
- Wound up with 140 submissions.
- 5000 followers on Twitter.
- Submission criteria was purposefully left very broad to encourage submissions. Considering building out categories in the future.
Process
- Define your organization’s scope from the beginning.
- Be as specific as possible BEFORE bringing on collborators because the scope and mission of the organization will change as collaborators come on board.
- Cultivate changes that increase the health and sustainability of your organization.
Make sure it’s clay
- Look for the unique trait that makes your idea useful
- Board size: small and nimble is important when starting because one conflicting voice can derail the entire process. As org grows larger, it becomes more important to move more slowly and methodically. 9-10 is an optimal median size.
Tools
- Social media for getting the word out. Reach out to individuals and organizations to explain mission. Get the word out but also charge forward.
- Don’t get stuck in the muck: enable growth by keeping your vision broad and ambitious.
- Ensure that your supporters who can’t show up can still support you – put a donate button on the site.
- Southwest Key. Between Airport and 183 north of Bolm, on Jane Lane. A free space for NPOs to use.
- UT. Stipulations: money cannot change hands at UT. Event has to be sponsored by a student organization.
- The New Movement Theater. Worked with them to donate time to use their space; held their after party there.
- Texas C-BAR. Used to get their 501(c)3 status. They hook people up with lawyers who will work pro-bono. Helped find lawyer to help file their 1023 form, which is great experience to have.
- Another attendee [ Robyn Hembree ] had help finding a student group of UT Law students to help perform an audit for the organization; very happy with their help, very professional. Was connected with the curriculum of the school, so beneficial for the students to perform non-profit audits.
- Contact: Frances Leos Martinez, Texas C-BAR [ FLeosMartinez @t trla d.t org ]
- Worked with UT students as PR interns: for data entry, media pitches.
- Dave Junker, professor – service learning project every year. PR348 class. Student groups go out and work for non-profits. Contact PR department. Class credit.
Become a Leader
- After initial efforts are successful, target becoming a leader.
- Look up @AaronMSB’s blog post on correlation between tribal leaders and NPO leadership.
- You’re not networking, your finding a person/group that can perform some task/work/benefit for another organization, and introducing them. You’re building the ecosystem.
- But you cannot forget your roots, and you must continue refining and working to stay on top.
Discussion
- Greenlights for Non-Profits.
- First tried their template by-laws; attorneys said ok. But…
- How To Form a Non-Profit Corporation by NoLo Press. Comes with CD with by-laws.
- …indicated the template by-laws were inadequate.
- Do it yourself, because you’re going to have to know everything that’s in there.
- The UT student audit for Guadalupe Neighborhood Development Corporation (GNDC), revealed the same sorts of problems: e.g.: “you need more of this kind of information here.”
Topics: 2009, Session | No Comments »
Google Analytics
By Gregory Foster | November 22, 2009
Session Card(s)
Notes By Anne Gentle
Blog Post: Trip report from Non Profit Bar Camp Austin
Topics: 2009, Session | No Comments »
Drupal and CiviCRM
By Gregory Foster | November 22, 2009
Session Card(s)
Notes By Elizabeth Quintanilla
David Strauss talking Drupal and CiviCRM (designed to help organizations run their internal operations)
Learning about CiviCRM at #npocamp
Talk about installation of Drupal on Webhosts
Recommend Drupal on Linux
Walking through installation
CiviCRM is a module that is installed on top of Drupal
CiviCRM is an open source competitor to Convio
Talking about numerous features on CiviCRM
- Dealing with Custom Data
- Breaking into lots of examples using CiviCRM
- Showing how to import data
- By the way, duplicate detection rules are part of the import
- Profiles are used so members can manage their own data on CiviCRM
- You can organize contacts by custom data, groups, tags, relationships, and smart groups!
Small Themeing Discussion
Recommendation to install WYSWYG editors
Topics: 2009, Session | No Comments »
Intro to Databases
By Gregory Foster | November 22, 2009
Session Card(s)
Notes By Ehren Foss
Notes from Austin #npocamp – Intro to Databases
Topics: 2009, Session | No Comments »
Personalizing Web and Email Content (Communications)
By Gregory Foster | November 22, 2009
Convened By:
- Matt Glazer [ @MattGlazer ]
Notes By:
Session Card(s)
Notes By Jack Darby
Here are some of the non-profits present in this group:
Ronald McDonald House
Girl Scouts
AIDS Austin
Capital Area Food Bank
Anamcara Foundation
Octopus Club
Email tools discussed:
Need to monitor “open rate” stats of emails
Open rates may vary and there may be an optimal time for sending emails.
Survey tools discussed
Notes By Hanson Ling
- How do we get people to open and read our messages?
- Subject Lines
- Jennifer Kim’s subject line had an 82% better open rate than other Austin City Council candidates because Matt used unique subject lines in e-mail campaign (no example given).
- The subject line was tailored to the client-base
- Typical response rate to surveys is 25%. This info was used for demographics on the client-base
- Matt mentioned something about managing multiple e-mail campaigns; mentioned something about the Texas League of _ Voters, their new CEO and e-mail segmentation
- Use Google Analytics to determine where my e-mail subscribers live and use that data to augment survey data.
- Survey Monkey and Google Forms both allow you to export survey data to XLS
- Subject Lines
- Tools
- Constant Contact allows mass e-mails to subscribers BUT it does not allow you to have many e-mail templates.
- Campaigner (Used by Democracy In Action)
- VerticalResponse
- MyNewsLetterBuilder
- Paddington
- Raiser’s Edge
- Mail Chimp
- inexpensive ($350 / month)
- dynamic (undefined, possible reference to templates?)
- allows for redesign of templates for use on Twitter (re-tweeting & forwarding)
- recipient tracking
- Build a new subscriber list by collecting data from off-line activities and volunteers.
- E-mail’s pitfalls.
- E-mail usage and effectiveness is declining (how is this documented?).
- Avoid bundling, blasting or pushing e-mail information on e-mail, Facebook and Twitter simultaneously.
- Segment e-mail distribution between donors and volunteers. Sending the same messages to both groups is counterproductive / may have your campaign ignored by recipient
- The largest opportunity / best use for e-mail is recontacting lease but must be done without blanket messages
- Use e-mail to contact Blogs?
- Texas Vox Blog is an example where a story on that blog was picked up by other sites, side-posts and comments on Texas Chaos and The Burnt Orange Report.
- The posted link was apparently a “Call to Action”
- “You are a brand…Cultivate It!!!”
- Graphics and video will help recipients remember you…60-65% better recognition with graphics / logo / video than without.
- Use Facebook to post “Insider Information” (no example given)
- Use Twitter to request “Calls to Action” or rapid response from recipients (attend a public hearing at City Hall in two hours)
- Use YouTube to recap an event rather than promote it beforehand (i.e. Capital Area AIDS Services’ Why I Walk campaign).
- Life Cycle
- Twitter to increase curiosity, interest and followers’ questions
- Launch a website
- E-mail Marketing
- Press Outreach
- Recap event on YouTube (or Flickr)
- Use all of the above so recipients / followers can take an active part in the community
- Misc.
- AB Testing (Control / Variable e-mail campaigns)
- Create two virtually identical e-mails with only a minor variation (i.e. one with graphics, one without) {a message without graphics contradicts instructions above}
- Send both messages to sample groups of less than 1000 recipients
- Track open % rates, times
- AB Testing (Control / Variable e-mail campaigns)
Topics: 2009, Session | No Comments »