Report Back from the OSCMS Summit in Sunnyvale

I’ve been down in California since Tuesday, met with Henri, did some work from Aaron’s and then went down to Yahoo in Sunnyvale for the Open Source CMS Summit (OSCMS 2007) and DrupalCON. The crowd of developers, integrators and the like was heavily skewed towards Drupal, as were many of the sessions. Jacob was planning on presenting with Dave Greenberg on CiviCRM but due to a scheduling conflict, I stepped up and gave Jacob’s side of the presentation. Dave has blogged about it over on CiviCRM.org. As he mentions we had a surprising turnout considering we were up against Dries’s Future of Drupal talk. During the presentation I demonstrated how we have integrated CiviCRM into AlGore.org, DefectiveByDesign.org, MTVoters.org and other sites. I also attended Scott Trudeau’s presentation on Drupal Install profiles and was amazed at how simple it seems to start creating these. This is something i find very exciting as it may allow use to provide easy to create website “recipes” to help a wider range of organizations benefit from our work. I was sorry that Fen wasn’t around on Friday to see Julien’s presentation on “Drupal, the Next Generation Wiki” about all the wiki functionality in Drupal Contributed Modules including Wiki Tools. It was very, very cool. By the end of the week I should have some time to edit my video interview with Kent Bye of the Echo Chamber Project who is doing some really cool work with collaborative video editing. Note: Thank god for FireFox 2.0, my Mac Book Pro just crashed before I had submitted this blog entry, and when I restarted, FF had...

More Cool Visualization

Owen recently posted a cool data visualization site. I was talking to a friend last night who pointed me to State-Machine.org, a data visualization site for political funding. The site allows you to compare different sources of campaign funding (3 axis) and distributes the presidential candidates accordingly. This is very cool! My friend also pointed me to WeFeelFine.org, a sort of Zeitgeist data visualization of what people are posting on their blogs and elsewhere on the...

The MySpace of Presidential Politics is on MySpace

MySpace and Presidential Politics Sunday’s NYT ran an article about MySpace’s new Impact Channel where presidential candidates’ profiles will be aggregated and presented for MySpace’s 60 million (mostly young) American members. The article basically says “candidates are going where the voters are” and expects that MySpace and the Impact Channel could have an, err, impact, on youth turn out and the election. Back in late 2005, or maybe it was early 06 I attended barCamp NYC where i saw John Ressig talk about subverting social networks, or social networking sites. He explained how bots are overrunning sites like MySpace and bands often buy software that goes out and invites people to be their friends. In a system where social currency is counted in the number of “friends” you have, this is a tempting way to up your stats. It will be interesting to see if any of the candidates resort to such tactics to improve their standing. Another interesting thing to analyze will be the degrees of separation between the candidates. I would expect that we’ll see many MySpace users who are “friends” with many candidates, and candidates who are friends with each other. As anyone who has used it knows, just because your friends with someone on myspace doesn’t mean you really friends with them, and as I am sure we’ll learn in 08, it probably won’t mean that you will actually vote for them. Recent months have also seen candidates using Flickr and YouTube and growing their social networks there too. What will be next? DodgeBall (as Zephyr Teachout suggested late last...

Brooklyn Beware! Shaya Is Coming (.org)

I got an email from Ethan today who is in Brooklyn working with Arthur and Zoey and one of our newest clients. On his way from their hotel to the client’s office, they spotted this poster: ShayaIsComing.org is a campaign of the Laborers Eastern Region Organizing Fund, one of our clients! The poster is on a utility pole just a few blocks from my old employer, ACORN, who is also involved in the campaign. What who, or what is Shaya? and why should Brooklynites be ware? Shaya Boymelgreen is one of the largest developers in the area and he is building luxury condos with tax payer subsidies while there is a chronic shortage of affordable housing. He also has a habit of ignoring community concerns and uses non union labor. I think it is great when worlds come together, like a little sign you are in the right place, at the right time doing the right thing. Getting this photo (while I set 3000 miles a way in Seattle) made me feel that way, and brought me right back to the neighborhood where I worked just a few years...

Carbon Offsets and Mission Driven Business

I have been meaning to write about carbon offsets (again) but haven’t gotten around to it yet. This post over on TerraPass.com seemed like a good enough reason. About a year ago I was at a Passover Seder talking to some folks about my new (At the time) Bi-Coastal lifestyle. I lamented to them that i was upset by the growing size of my carbon footprint. I continued that I had found a company that plants trees to offset carbon dioxide pollution and that I had bought some to offset mine. Later, my father pointed out that the eyes of the folks I was talking to “glazed over”. Well glaze over no more! Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth and a series of major national press hits have brought the concept of carbon footprint and carbon offsetting to the fore of American’s minds (or am I living in a LOHAS bubble?) Since that seder last year, I have purchased carbon offsets for more air travel from and I am looking into buying some carbon credits through DriveNeutral, an organization the purchases them from would be polluters on the Chicago Carbon Exchange. But back to the blog post that inspired this one. Ted over at TerraPass writes not only about what the company does, but what kind of company it is: a Mission Driven company. I liked his explanation: A mission-driven business is an organization for which the pursuit of growth and revenue naturally produces mission-related benefits. and Mission-driven businesses are also profit-driven businesses. And being profit-driven brings a whole set of advantages that we took into consideration when we started TerraPass....