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online collaboration

May 2008

Meeting "my project" and the N2Y3 community IRL

NetSquared already has started. Sitting next to again an impressive cake, the room is buzzing while I write my intro. Rolf Kleef, from Amsterdam, here to enjoy San Francisco for some three weeks, and doing the last little bits with Roshani and Mike of Oneworld US to be ready for two rollercoaster days!

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Moving from "Open source" to "Open roadmap"

Crossposting from my blog at NetSquared

Many NGOs are good at forming strategic alliances to achieve their objectives (they're usually also good at competing each other nearly to death, often at the same time, but I'll keep that for a different post maybe). Yet, at the level of web technology, this usually seems to be limited to the level of exchanging tips and tricks, perhaps some RSS feeds, and referring each other to providers and vendors.

Two major developments are changing that situation now:

  1. Many organisations are investing in Drupal for their web platforms. This creates an eco-system where it's easier to exchange actual technology, and to talk about it on a higher level of abstraction of artefacts and concepts.
  2. There's an exploding interest in the NGO world to align strategies and investments in technology. The "Tool Pool" discussion revived at the Ecampaigning Forum, and the NetSquared conference next week brings this closer as well. Not to mention to emergence of more and more BarCamps like Social Innovation Camp.

Going Open! Thursday at the Transnational Institute

First post here after a long silence... maybe too busy with twitter, Nabuur, WebEnq, Ecampaigning Forum, NetSquared. And now preparing my short intro into "open everything" to set the stage for Thursday's meetup of the E-collaboration group.

Within a smaller group, we had some discussions about "open", and about how choosing technology for your campaign or organisation is also a political, cultural, and ethical choice. Features and price often dominate, and lots of stuff on the internet is for free. But there's no such thing as a free lunch: there are many lessons we learned in development aid that equally apply when your organisation gets such "free" web development aid. Lets not spend decades to learn them again.

So while on the one hand, people are trail-blazing the concept of "open everything", there are, on the other hand, many people working in international cooperation who are just starting to look at why all this "open" matters, and how it can help them achieve their mission.

Getting in the mood for the NetSquared Mashup Challenge with Oneworld Connect

In my third year coming to NetSquared, I find myself in a new role: as one of 21 designated "project leads" who will be trying to connect the featured projects with the developers ready to work on an NGO project.