I landed in the midst of a regional tornado warning for the 2012 Grants Managers Network Conference, where we were grateful to be invited by our friends at Mitchell Kapor Foundation to share Aspiration’s take on how Foundations think about using the so-called cloud in a session titled What Cloud Computing Can Do For You and Your Grantees.
I’ve been following the online discourse (e.g. NTEN-DISCUSS, Information Systems Forum, Progressive Exchange and Nonprofit SalesForce) around Blackbaud’s announced acquisition of Convio.
It was a blast to be in Berlin at the start of February participating in Transmediale.11 with great friends from Mozilla Drumbeat and FLOSSManuals. I helped to facilitate sessions on Strategies of Political Participation and Open Activism, and slowed down long enough to opine about obfuscating personal data in the cloud.
Aspiration board member Michelle Murrain writes on her personal blog about Convio's recent decision to take on an anti-gay marriage organization as a client. She argues:
"I think it's perhaps time for many nonprofit organizations, and the progressive nonprofit community to think carefully about this issue. Few of us think that the ends always justifies the means. Some of us (me included) think that the means by which we work to achieve our mission, affects the mission, sometimes deeply.
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.
There is no other place like Dev Summit. You have incubated a community that delivers so much goodness it’s remarkable. Thank you so much for stewarding this community and giving people like me a space to contribute and listen within it.
