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News and Resources from the Community

AdvocacyDev II Concluded Today in Oakland, California

AdvocacyDev II concluded toay in Oakland, California. Developers, activists, and nonprofit/NGO staff from Southeast Asia, the United States, and Canada creating and using open source eAdocacy applications came together to strategize, map, and socialize about this emerging field of tools. The discussions about online organizing and engagement were incredible! Thank you to all who made this convergence fabulous. The wiki documenting proceedings is at http://wiki.advocacydev.org, pictures are here.

Groundspring's Advocacy Applications Released Under GPL

Jeff Reifman reports that the advocacy tools formerly developed by Groundspring -- EmailNow, DonateNow, and AdvocacyNow -- are released by him and Kellan under the free software GPL license.

AdvocacyNow is now available as eAdvocacy as a hosted solution at Jeff's Action Studio. The other two apps are unsupported at this moment, though a growing community is certainly possible. The source code is available here.

I am pretty excited about this development and look forward to exploring at greater length how DonateNow and EmailNow as well as eAdvocacy can be viable solutions for a broader set of nonprofits, especially in conjunction with tools such as CivicCRM, for example. The ecology of open source advocacy applications got suddenly a whole lot more interesting.

Shoutout to CivicSpace

Nice, <a href:"http://software.newsforge.com/software/05/06/03/2021243.shtml?tid=132 short article on Newsforge about CivicSpace and the ecology of organizations and businesses evolving around CS.

CivicSpace developers will be at the AdvocacyDev II convergence> that Aspiration is hosting in Oakland In July 05.

Quote from NewsForge: "CivicSpace's philosophy might be summed up as "open source inside, open source outside," as Rosen and Hoppin say that one of their organization's core ideals is to "enable citizens to collaboratively conduct what are essentially open source marketing campaigns for causes they believe in." For CivicSpace's staff, the extension of this philosophy is "actively helping organizations that might be thought of as our competitors by a more traditional closed organization," and even being willing to "hop on the bandwagon and help" if another organization improves on what CivicSpace does."

CivicCRM 1.0 is out

From David Geilhufe. CivicCRM is an open source constituency relationship management application running on Drupal (for now):

"Progress on CiviCRM is coming along well and now is the time to get involved!...CiviCRM is now ready to be integrated into other applications. If you have or are considering an NPO application that stores CRM data (contacts, relationships, actions), please take a look at CiviCRM as a basis for your project.

CiviCRM is open source and as long as you contribute your modifications to CiviCRM back to the community, you can do anything you want with the software. CiviCRM is already being adapted by consultants for custom applications in fundraising and member management.

Online Donation Processing

Here is a good list of online donation processors: http://www.affinityresources.com/pgs/awz55Online2.shtml

Some of the entries are a bit out of date, as the list is only updated annually. Most entries are correct, though. Note that there is a 2nd page with additional information.

(Thanks, Robert Weiner!)

Addendum: There is also a useful comparison chart of online registration ASPs on the Consultant Commons at http://www.consultantcommons.org/node/37

User Guide to Using the Linux Desktop

IOSN has produced an introductory end user guide to using the Linux desktop.

This guide is meant as an introductory guide on using a modern personal computer (PC) running the Linux operating system. It provides a self-learning guide on how to use a modern Linux desktop system. It assumes that the user has no prior knowledge of Linux or PC usage.

The guide is formatted for use as printed material, with the acompanying slides to be used by trainers.

The training materials are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License.

Pages

"Thank you for bringing together these incredible people, modelling a welcoming stance, and empowering us to develop real relationships!"

Participant, Dev Summit
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