After the wind down of the conference, and sleeping off my red-eye flight back to Maine, now I’m a little nostalgic. Ah, the people, the knowledge, the horrible geek trivia… But to keep the momentum going, I thought I’d document the commitments I’ve made to move things forward – so at a minimum I’ll feel really guilty if I don’t follow through. We crystallized a number of initiatives that I’m excited about:
- A Marketplace for Software Gaps. Our session on gaps in the nonprofit software arena fleshed out the need for some central, well known location where nonprofits could find others with the same software needs, and hopefully hook up with software vendors, open source groups, funders, or partners for collaborative development. I’m going to try to drive this for a little and see where it takes us.
- Making Usability Usable. We discussed the need for more accessible information about usability, and decided on an overview article with a supporting website of usability techniques, case studies, and resources, tentatively hosted by Grassroots.org. I’ll be helping Susan, Mickey, and others with the article and websites, and trying to connect up my corporate usability contacts for the effort.
(any interest in participating in either of these initiatives? Email me at laura@idealware.org And there’s a bunch of potential Idealware articles that I’ll be pursuing
- An “eAdovocay Cookbook” – recipes for what software and actions to use for common advocacy goals, with David Taylor
- An article on Collaborative Development, summarizing the lessons learned we talked about in this session, with some case studies about what’s working, with Jeremy and help from a number of others in the session
- A summary/ roundup of GIS tools, with help from Lars and many others from the GIS session
- Software for Dispute Resolution – thanks, Teresa! Love it when those article ideas come find me!
And many thanks to all the folks (about 15% of the participants!!) who volunteered their software knowledge in many diverse areas for future Idealware articles. I’ll be following up with all of them to make sure we have a good record of the areas in which they’re willing to help. Whew! Apparently I’ll be busy!