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The past 5 days have been quite a blur for me. I had a chance to represent Joomla! at the LinuxExpo Live London 2008 from October 23-25, 2008, and I’m happy to report that the showing was great! After flying in Thursday morning, I hopped my way right over to Olympia to meet up with Chris Davenport and share the Joomla word with the crowd.

The event was interestingly put together, as it was a mash-up of Linux fans and Mac designers coming together under the same roof. Our Joomla booths had good traffic, and with the creative element in the scene, we had an opportunity to meet many Web designers that were looking for a tool to more effectively help their clients better manage their Web content.

Additionally, I had a chance to meet James Kennard (author of Mastering Joomla 1.5 Extensions and Framework Development), Rob (lead developer of Fabrik), and Andy Wallace (Joomla!Day UK 2009 leader), all of whom were terrific folks to work with during the event.

Before I came to the event, I had three goals that I wanted to accomplish before I left. I’m happy to say that I believe we nailed all three of them.

1. Introduction of Joomla to new users
2. Helping build a new Joomla users group in London
3. Spreading the word of the Joomla!Day UK 2009 event

Thanks to everyone that helped and shared their stories with us at the event. Many thanks to Farhan who toured me and the PICnet Penguin around London before shipping me back off to DC yesterday afternoon as well! I’m hopeful I’ll be able to make it back out to London for the Joomla!Day next year.

Health care costs are rising. Fall season brings changing weather and cooler temperatures. Stress from what is supposed to be a joyous holiday season brings headaches. Where can one go to get away from it all? How about the putting green at PICnet DC.

One of the most therapuetic tools we have at PICnet is a 6 foot long artificial turf putting green with three holes. This putting green, along with our trusty left-handed putter for an extra challenge and a pitching wedge for the long shots from the sand, is the perfect therapy tool for my tough days.

I’m not a great golfer by any stretch of the imagination; however, there’s something about focusing intently on hitting that hole-in-one that seems to let the day’s worries slip away into the fog of obscurity. When I hop off a tough phone call, or finish a marathon of proposal writing, the folks in the “big room” next to me can hear my foot steps as I make my way to the putting green.

A few missed putts later, and the occasional chip, I’m relaxed and my shoulders seem to move back down into their comfortable position.  I’m ready to get back to work after a few minutes of putting.

The green also works as a nice discussion zone. Rather than plopping down a conference table, that separates individuals from each other, a nice 6 foot patch of turf seems to go a long way to promote water cooler-ish discussion.

My recommendation: if you’re having the mid-day blues, picking up a putter and focusing on something simple, like sinking a hole-in-one, might be a better stress relief than turning on the cable TV news.

With three offices and multiple PICnetters working from home offices, it’s not too often that our team gets face-time together. On October 14-15, PICnetters from across the country will do their semi-annual migration to the PICnet DC office for our end of the year meetings. During this time, we’ll be exchanging ideas for new services for our community most of day, but available to help extinguish emergencies.

A little background. When the company was starting to grow, it was clear that there were three cities we were going to focus on: Washington, San Francisco, and New York. This setup was obviously going to spread our team thin across the country. With my belief that the water cooler (virtual or otherwise) are where great ideas start, I knew that we needed at least a few times a year that our team physically met in person.

Each year, we have at least two major events that help facilitate in-person meetings among PICnetters. The annual retreat provides a remote location for idea generation from the year’s vision and goals as set in January. The semi-annual meeting in October is an opportunity for us to review our year’s work, provide course corrections where necessary before the end of the year, and to have a good time over food and drink.

We’re looking forward to meeting up and discussing new ways to serve our sector!

Back in 2003, a small group of non-profit and advocacy developers met in San Francisco for a three day event to share ideas and build energy in the budding non-profit technology world. The result was an amazing success of knowledge sharing and the building of new technology for the sector.

Fast forward to 2008. Our friends at Aspiration will be hosting the Non-Profit Software Developers Summit on November 17-19 at Oakland’s Preservation Park. This is a must-attend event (register now).

I have been lucky enough to attend every Non-Profit Software Developers Summit, and I’m always amazed by the powerful take-aways I retain from each event. Many conferences are about 50 people sitting in a room and watching someone lecture. Aspiration’s Dev Summits require participation from all attendees, allowing for a powerful connections to be made between attendees.

So if you’re looking to share code, discuss the state of our non-profit tech world, and build a better technology future for the non-profit community, you should be at the Dev Summit on November 17.

Here’s a short video of the 2007 Dev Summit, to help you get a feel for the event.

My time sitting on the steering committee for the Non-Profit Open Source Initiative has been a great opportunity to learn more about how a tech advocacy group within the non-profit community can be effective in spreading its message. In an effort to allow the NOSI message to grow further, Aspiration has agreed to make NOSI a project under the Aspiration umbrella.

The merger will allow the two organizations to focus their collective energies on growing free and open source capacity in the nonprofit sector, working with developers, integrators, and end users. A number of open source tools, including the Firefox web browser, the CiviCRM platform, and a range of open source web publishing systems, have reached a state of maturity that makes them excellent options for nonprofits. But much work remains to be done in supporting the creation and sustainability of FOSS options in a number of other mission-critical software categories. Aspiration and NOSI welcome the challenge.

I’m excited to see what will blossom from this unique connection of minds!

We’ve been working on the Hill for quite a few years now, and we’ve seen first-hand the amazing impact the Internet has had on the way congressional offices operate. It seems today that this powerful connectivity has certainly been well utilized by constituents during the current fiscal crisis.

A local newspaper, The Hill, published a story on September 30 that said the House had disabled the email forms on the main house.gov Web site from processing messages sent by constituents to House offices.  Without this intervention:  the anticipated crash of the house.gov Web site.

The CAO issued a “Dear Colleague” letter Tuesday morning informing offices that it had placed a limit on the number of e-mails sent via the “Write Your Representative” function of the House website. It said the limit would be imposed during peak e-mail traffic hours.

“This measure has become temporarily necessary to ensure that Congressional websites are not completely disabled by the millions of e-mails flowing into the system,” the letter reads.

While I want to do my best not to wade into the debate on the “logic puzzles” on offices’ Web sites, I am surprised that there wasn’t a better way for the Chief Administrative Office to manage the flood of information from concerned citizens.

PICnet works with a unique slice of the American economy, including non-profits, non-governmental organizations, government agencies, associations, and advocacy groups. One of the newer categories of groups we’re beginning to engage are socially responsible businesses (or corporate social responsibility-focused businesses…choose your own titling), and in the quest to learn more about this important slice of the new economy, I’m beginning some research on the networking groups within this world.

Here’s a shortlist of what I’ve found so far. I’m interested in learning about other networking opportunities as well, so please share your thoughts.

• Social Venture Network - seems to be the gathering place of mid-sized business owners and entrepreneurs, with about 500 participating individuals in North America.
• Net Impact - my early experiences with Net Impact, way back in 2004, was that it was focused on business school and just-finished-b-school folks, but it looks like the community may have shifted since then.
• Sustainable Business Network of Washington - this is obviously DC focused, but we were recommended to look into this group in more detail, especially since our friends and partners in DC like Free Range Studios and Democracy in Action are members.
• Business Alliance for Local Living Economies - what started off as a project within the Social Venture Network has turned into a 15,000 member organization focused on local sourcing of goods and services.

I know that’s only a few of the many networking opportunities available for socially conscious entrepreneurs, so if you have a few to recommend, please let me know.  Happy networking!

In spirit of the season, it’s time for us to lobby for votes! We at PICnet have put together three sessions for next year’s Non-Profit Technology Conference that we think would add excitement to the conference. Now, we’re looking for your support to help us spread the word about open source and the state of the non-profit technology industry.

The NTEN team created a fully transparent process this year, providing everyone in the community a chance to submit session ideas. There were more than 200 session requests this year, so we’ve built this list to help you quickly find what we’re interested in discussing with the community. Do your civic duty and vote before the October 3 deadline!

• Comparing Open Source CMSs: Joomla, Drupal, and Plone
• The message is the medium: Making sure you have the right tools for your Web site
• What effect does the consolidation of the non-profit tech have on your organization?

There are number of other great sessions up for grabs as well, we’d recommend you cruise through the list when you’ve got an opportunity.  See you at the NTC in San Francisco!

It’s always great to be watching television and suddenly see one of our clients on the screen, up to their typical good doing.  Last week PICnet’s newest client, Nothing But Nets, showed up on my TV late one night while I was watching Stephen Colbert.

The clip below is a terrific example of how an organization with a simple but powerful mission and message, can achieve some wonderful mass messaging through a three minute video clip.  In the interview, Rick Reilly does his best to get the message across to Colbert, even while taking the first interview I’ve ever seen under a bed net.

After a few good laughs, head over to the Nothing But Nets Web site and help save a life in Africa for only $10. If Colbert’s doing it, shouldn’t you?

I’m not an economist by any stretch of the imagination. Well, I did take multiple economics and management classes in college, but those were basic lessons about money supply, market fluctuations, and elasticity. Regardless, it doesn’t take a degree in economics to know that the US economy is not in great health right now.

The real question I’m trying to answer, as the CEO of a growing technology business, is “what are going to be the downstream effects of this current mess on our ability to grow, gain capital to meet demand, and predict our community’s ability to grow as well.”

In a blog post just last week, I pointed out a few thoughts about the natural conclusions from the Lehman Brothers fall. However, with the much more severe failures we’ve seen in just the past 7 days, I’m becoming more bearish on our non-profit tech market’s ability to move through this smoothly.

Essentially, it all comes down to access to capital. If the small businesses that are the true engines of innovation in our sector (define “small business as you see fit”) are unable to obtain even small loans at competitive rates to build up capacity or roll out new features, we’re likely going to see a speed-up of the market’s consolidation as well as slowing innovation.

In short, there’s a good chance that all the nptech innovation fun we saw in 2002-2005 will be remembered fondly as “the good old days”. Of course, I don’t want to see this innovation slowdown. Our community deserves the best tools we can provide. I’m hopeful that with the growing support and use of open source technology within non-profits will continue to drive down costs and enable groups to still have access to powerful tools like Joomla during this downturn.

Yesterday while in New York, I had an opportunity to record an interview with our friends at Big Duck who create the Non-Profit Jungle podcast.

This podcast series, hosted by Big Duck’s Sarah Durham, provides regular interviews with communications practitioners in the non-profit sector, with a wide range of topics covering the use of new media in your non-profit.

If you’re looking for new ways to effectively communicate with your organization’s constituents, take this podcast for a spin in your iTunes subscriptions.

The Non-Profit Open Source Initiative’s (NOSI) Michelle Murrain hosted yours truly for the latest session the “Setting up a Joomla site for your organization” yesterday, providing an introductory tour of Joomla to those listening in from the non-profit community. The one hour sessions covered most of the basics, from installation, to managing content, and gave participants a better understanding of the overall Joomla community.

There’s something about having 20 Firefox tabs open without my computer crashing during a live training that makes me smile.

This is the first in a series of open source CMS sessions offered by NOSI’s Michelle Murrain, with webinars for Plone and Drupal coming soon. This series is a must watch for organizations looking for an informative introduction to the most popular open source CMSes.

This set of sessions is a terrific service of NTEN, which is specifically reaching out to the non-profit and open source worlds with their Free and Open Source Software Webinar Series.

If you didn’t get a chance to watch the webinar, you can purchase the recording of the Webinar from NTEN.

After receiving the firehose of Joomla information this past weekend at the Joomla!Day USA - San Francisco Bay Area, I was excited to learn today in our team meeting that our very own Kevin Devine was selected to be the co-maintainer within the Joomla Bug Squad.

As co-maintainer, Kevin is, “…responsible for comitting patches that have moved to “ready-to-commit” status. Before they commit the code changes they do a final code validation (standards, quality, docbook mark-ups etc.).” In short, he’s one of the last folks to check the code before it goes into the Joomla codebase.

Congratulations to Kevin on this achievement, it’s an honor having Joomla superstars like him on the team!

This year’s Joomla!Day USA San Francisco Bay Area was a terrific follow-up to the inaugural event last year, with familiar faces and great sessions. Delivered in the Joomla!Day USA’s now typical un-conference format (with help from Aspiration’s Allen Gunn), the event covered a variety of areas, including templating, Joomla basics, extension development, and more without even one PowerPoint presentation.

With our gracious hosts at Google, and lead by the growing Bay Area Joomla User Group, the event not only played as a great venue for learning about Joomla, but also for meeting up with friends from the community. We were lucky to have folks like Louis Landry, Anthony Ferrara, and Wilco Jansen fly in from as far away as the Netherlands for the gathering.

With three session tracks to attend, I ended up hosting two beginner sessions and a session CRM-CMS integration. The beginner sessions were a great opportunity for me to get back in the trenches with new Joomla users, and there’s something really exciting to see someone’s face light up when they start to realize the power and ease of using Joomla.

In the CRM-CMS session, we did a review of a few of the top CRM sessions for NPOs and small and mid-sized businesses, especially integrations with CiviCRM, Democracy in Action, and Salesforce.com.

Congratulations to the leaders of the Bay Area Joomla Users Group who organized the event! Even better, for those of you looking for a Joomla!Day event in your local US community, there is word of many more spreading throughout the USA within the next year! Keep your eyes open on the Joomla.org site to learn more.

PICnetters hail from a wide-variety of backgrounds that makes our team diverse, including book-writing, international aid, and even law. One of our project manager superstars, Katie Guernsey, brings the beauty of the arts to the team with her strong background in community arts management. She’ll be joining strategist and architect Pradeep Suthram at this year’s Technology in the Arts Conference in Pittsburgh, October 9-11, sharing the Joomla story and enlightening folks with a hands-on learning session.

Technology in the Arts is a service of Center for Arts Management and Technology, an applied research center at Carnegie Mellon University, which provides a wonderful wealth of information for those in the arts community. As the conference Web site reads…

The Technology in the Arts Conference annually brings together the nation’s arts community to spark dialog around the intersection of technology and the arts, discuss best practices as well as lessons learned, provide hands-on training, and examine new potential uses for technology in the arts.

We highly recommend this conference for those of you in the arts community looking to learn more about how technology can shape and provide the assistance you need to gain greater efficiencies in your organizations. Hurry though, online registration ends October 7, 2008!

On September 4, Susan Finkelpearl of Free Range Studios and Tim Forbes of PICnet teamed together to present “Planning & (re)Launching Your Website To Reach & Engage Your Audiences” at PICnet DC. The discussion was the first of what we hope to be multiple opportunities for organizations in our communities to learn about best practices that can grow and keep their Web sites healthy.

Some of the topics covered in the presentation included:

• Audience Identification & Needs Analysis
• Sitemapping
• Wireframing
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Overview
• Best Practices and Worst Practices for SEO

If you missed the presentation, don’t worry, our friends at Free Range Studios have posted some of the best items online. Of course, writing a blog post about this session isn’t terribly helpful for those of you who wanted to attend but didn’t know about it. So, if you have any ideas for a session you’d like to see, or just want to be kept in the loop for the next one, let us know here on our blog.

For those organizations and individuals that have taken the online social network plunge, you’ve likely heard of two giants in the social networking world: Twitter and Facebook. While I do my best to keep up with the cool kids on the nptech circuit, I’ve learned a few things along the way that can help you spread the word about your organization through these systems.

Twitter

Think of Twitter like a mini-blog. When you write a “tweet”, your posting is stored for the world to see on your Twitter page. Of course, you’ve only got 140 characters to do it in, so you’ll need to keep it short. These tweets are displayed to others that are connected to your Twitter feed, which is extremely powerful for delivering a message quickly and directly to a large community. For instance, during the recent hurricanes that swept the southeast, Twitter feeds were setup among volunteers to help co-ordinate support efforts.

While you can type whatever you’d like within your tweets, I’ve found myself more attracted to using Twitter to read the breaking news and information from within my network rather than to read a friend post “I’m cooking pizza tonight.” Additionally, some of the best morsels from Twitter are actually links shared from others. You can easily do this by ending your tweet with a URL created by TinyURL, or any other link shortener. This provides your own comment along with a link for further reading to your visitor.

Facebook

Amazingly, it seems like everybody is on Facebook now. Unlike Twitter, Facebook is more truly a social networking platform that provides a variety of connection points between you and your network of friends and collegues. Facebook’s status update provides you with the ability to quickly share what you’re doing with your network.

While some people are starting to post both to Twitter and Facebook with the same updates, I’m beginning to see a shift in the usage of the two. Facebook seems to be the place where people are focused more on their personal life. This stems from the origianl Facebook requirement of starting all your status updates with “[your name] is…” This lends itself to postings like “Bob is going to pick up the kids”, or “Christina can’t believe the traffic on 101 today.”

With different mediums come different messages. In the Twitter and Facebook worlds, I’ve found that the more personal the update, the more likely it belongs on Facebook. In any case, keep those tweets and status updates coming…everyone’s a voyeur in 2008.

When you run a consulting business, time is money. The system you utilize to keep track of time spent on work (especially those pesky billable hours) is critical to your company’s fiscal foundation, and needs to be reliable, easy to use, and efficient. At PICnet, we’ve gone through our lessons learned in time-tracking, and we’ve realized that unless you want 10% of your productivity spent tracking-time, finding the right tool for your team is critical to your efficiency.

To start, we rely heavily on our Basecamp, which provides us a very nice communication collaboration platform. Basecamp has included in it a time-tracking tool that allows one to track time ad-hoc as well as by todo item, which is useful to very easily track time to a particular task.

What’s interesting, but not necessarily most surprising, is that the tool and the manner in which the time is tracked is critical to seeing high levels of time tracked per week. In short, if your time-tracking tool is cumbersome or hard to use, no one’s going to track time well.

We’ve gone through three phases of time-tracking tools:

1. Directly into Basecamp. This provides you the direct interface with the Basecamp system, but can be cumbersome when you’re switching between multiple projects. Why Basecamp doesn’t have a solid, cross-project time-tracker is still a head scratcher for me.
2. Via a summary page made with the API. We had our developers whip up a basic PHP script that would load all the projects for a given PICnetter, and then essentially present a big form, with updated times tracked for that project, and boxes to enter new time. The problem here is that loading the data via the Basecamp API can be slow, hence tracking minute tasks could become 45 second time sinks.
3. Via an API-based time-tracker. We simply cut the fat in #2, and made a simpler, PHP-based API time-tracker that had a dropdown of the projects, a basic timer, and the ability to enter in a comment. This loads the timer faster, and is slim, so it can fit in a sidebar for Firefox.

Even though we’re getting the technological advantage, the biggest determinate of good time-tracking is practice. One needs to find their own rhythm that is reliable and becomes part of their flow. For instance, I tend to insert my information before I start working on a new task. Then, when I’m done with that task, I can just hit the Send button, and move on.

It’s not easy to find the flow, but once you do, and you have the right tool, time-tracking can really provide your business valuable data.

We’re in a Ubuntu, Mac, and Windows environment at PICnet, so a Web based tool that everyone can use in a common browser was important. If you have any time-tracking tools that you like, please share them, we’re always looking to learn more!

Waking up to read that Lehman Brothers has filed bankruptcy, and that Merrill Lynch was just purchased by Bank of America, made me think about the innovation cycles that sweep through the technology world we live in. Within an already tightening credit marketplace, it’s hard to believe that innovative firms are going to receive capital they need to continue growing from anywhere other than VCs and angels now.

The question for those of us in the nptech sector is whether this macro-credit crunch will stymie innovation for us in the near-term.

Companies in the non-profit technology world will be especially squeezed, particularly those trying to invest deeply in new efforts. If it wasn’t already hard enough for new startups trying to provide innovative products to the non-profit sector, expect it to become more difficult getting the cash to do so now.

What does all this mean to the non-profit sector? Considering the great period of consolidation the non-profit tech sector has seen in the past few months, likely not much.

Our marketplace seems to have been cleaning itself up a bit during the past three years, letting smaller companies go by the wayside, and larger companies merging together to form more powerful services. Additionally, it seems unclear if those technology providers outside our sector (think Twitter and the like) are going to be deeply affected if most of their funding isn’t coming from traditional investment and banking houses, but rather private equity and VCs.

At some point, though, the credit crunch is going to hit everyone. The real question is who will be able to withstand the crunch and expand at the same time to better serve our community.

PICnetters never cease to amaze me. I was taking a look at the new Joomla.org Web site, and came across the new community magazine. Who’s face looked back at me? Well, none other than Kevin Devine, one of the PICnet developer superstars!

Kevin wrote “Extending the User Object in Joomla! 1.5” as a tutorial to teach developers how to easily add additional data elements for users within Joomla. From the magazine:

Kevin Devine is the author of a system plugin for Joomla! 1.5 called Usermeta. This plugin makes it easier for users/developers to extend the user parameters. We asked that Kevin share some of the details behind this plugin so that others might learn how to take advantage of this capability.

Joomla developers, enjoy! Kevin, keep rocking!