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I’ve been involved in this Telesummit now since the beginning. It’s really fun, and important.
The Women Who Tech Telesummit was formed three years ago to celebrate all the innovative women who provide incredible value to technology and social media. So it’s time to come get your tech on! Come join hundreds of women on September 15th at the Women Who Tech Telesummit from 11AM to 6PM Eastern Time. (It’s virtual – all you need is access to a phone line and the web so you can participate from anywhere in the world). Women Who Tech’s thought provoking virtual panels offer the latest resources and tools for launching a successful startup, tools and apps to build your online community, Social Media ROI, and more. Among the sessions:

• Launching Your Own Startup
• Creating a Culture of Collaboration and Innovation
• Female Ferocity
• ROI of Social Networking
• Speak Up: Pitching and Public Speaking Mojo
• Building the Ultimate User Experience
• Women and Open Source and Identity

And more… Panelists include a “who’s who” of women on the forefront of social change and technological progress, among them: Elisa Camahort Page, Co-Founder of BlogHer, Rashmi Sinha, Co-Founder of SlideShare, Beth Kanter, Blogger and CEO of Zoetica, Cheryl Contee of Fission Strategy, Shireen Mitchell of Digital Sistas, Genevieve Bell of Intel, Deanna Zandt, technologist and author, Liza Sabater of Culture Kitchen, Tara Hunt, Author, Lynne Johnson of the Advertising Research Foundation, and Heather Harde, CEO of TechCrunch. They are also hosting after Parties in DC, NYC and SF so come on out!

Most days, data is pretty straightforward to us here at OpenIssue headquarters. Names, addresses, email addresses, the pesky notes field (today’s bane of our existence.) But sometimes, data is political. Or, I guess more accurately, data models.

In most CRM systems, especially older ones, and ones that are less flexible, some fields can be points of contention for some of us. Gender is one, marital status is another.

CiviCRM, to it’s credit, allows for an arbitrary number of genders – you can define them however you like. My bet (although I could be wrong) is that it’s one of the few out there that allow that. Gender is not a standard field in Salesforce.com contact records, so if you want to add your own, you can customize it however you’d like. There was a very interesting and lively discussion about the gender field in Drupal profiles. Of course, one can always customize these things in Drupal.

For a couple of projects we’ve been working on, we’ve been getting very interested in putting together a really expanded and fleshed out data model for gender, sexual orientation, and marital status. Here’s the first draft. We’d love feedback on this (besides “this is silly/too radical/dangerous/from the antichrist/etc.”). And we also know that even for those who agree that sex and gender are different things, people will differ on how to divide these categories and make sense of it.

• Sex: Male, Female, FTM, MTF, Intersex
• Gender: Male, Female, Genderqueer
• Sexuality: Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Queer, Questioning, Straight
• Marital Status: Straight Marriage, MA, DC, IA, VT Domestic, CA-SF 2004, CA 2008, Canada
• Relationship Status: Single, Partnered, Divorced, Dating, Poly  (There probably could be some field dependencies of Marital Status on Relationship Status)

And if you maybe thought that OpenIssue headquarters was in San Francisco, I’m sure this list made you sure. (Yes, we are.)

As you know, I left twitter 3 months ago today. I figured it was a good time to do a reflection of my experiences over this time – what I miss, and what I don’t miss.

What I don’t miss

• Distractions: I find myself more productive, for sure. I never was very disciplined about turning twitter off, so I was constantly distracted. The lack of distraction has been a really good thing.
• Information overload: how did I keep all that stuff in my head? My mind feels a lot quieter.
• Need to share: I’m happy to leave the somewhat narcissistic impulse that Twitter feeds behind.

What I miss

• Instant answers to questions! And answering people’s questions.
• Banter: Twitter is way better for banter than any other medium besides being in person.
• Opportunities for collaboration: it does seem like a lot of that happens now on Twitter and Facebook (which for me is a friends/family only zone) so I’m probably missing out on some of that.

In general, I’m still happy I left, and have no plans to return. I have, on a couple of occasions, used search.twitter.com when a certain event was happening, so I could see up to the minute what was going on. I’m sure I’ll still do that sometimes.

I became sold on version control fairly far back in my programming life. Back when CVS (C0ncurrent Version System) was the standard. I learned it, although there were varied gaps in my use of it, so it never became second nature. As I learned more about newer version control systems, I tried them out. For a while, I was using SVN (Subversion), which is similar enough to CVS, but has some nice improvements. More and more folks are moving to distributed version control systems. I began to understand the great advantages of those systems, and decided to pick one to standardize on. Git stood out from the others in terms of popularity and resources. And, I figured anything Linus Torvalds wrote was good enough for me. That was last year. This year. drupal.org is moving to Git, making my life oh so much easier.

In my daily life, Git has 2 major advantages: version control and comparison of versions even when I’m not connected to the internet (you have your own actual repository, not just a working copy), and its speed. It takes less time to clone a whole repository of code than it does to check out a working copy using CVS or SVN! It’s really worth checking out.

I imagine Git will become the new CVS – the new standard, until something better comes along to supplant it.

I’ve been working with nonprofit organizations on technology issues (strategy, implementation) for about 15 years now. I remember the heady days, when most nonprofits didn’t even have networks, and some of them still didn’t have internet access. In those days, most nonprofit techies were progressive, and we were sure that what we were doing was going to change the world for the better.

Now, 15 years later, I’m pretty sure I’m not changing the world. You’re still more likely to find a progressive nonprofit techie than a conservative one, but there are plenty of conservative ones now. Conservative causes of all sorts have discovered the power of the kinds of technologies I’ve been helping nonprofits with, and are au courant. Plenty of conservative organizations use Drupal, Salesforce, online fundraising, Facebook and Twitter – using those technologies to push for ends that I am far from interested in seeing come to reality. You can bet that the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections will not be a repeat of the 2008 election with such a massive differential in use of technology and social networks.

I remember also, from those heady days, the idea that we could help nonprofits be more effective by encouraging them to be more proactive around replacing their hardware. Come to find out not so much later, that the massive production (and disposal) of computer hardware fuels deadly conflicts, and causes serious environmental damage.

And then there is the fundamental – what is all this technology really for, anyway? I was reminded of this when listening to Marketplace on radio a while ago. It’s worth remembering that one of the two motive forces around all of this technology change is that business (and nonprofits, too) can squeeze more work out of fewer people. That would be fine if we had a great safety net where people who were unemployed could be supported, and perhaps get free education so they could create art, music, or new and interesting things, but that’s not how the system works, is it? The second motive force is simply to empty your wallet so you can get shiny.

I still think I’m doing good. I still think that working with nonprofits to help them grapple with communications and data is good work, helps people, and is right livelihood. But I’m pretty sure I’m not changing the world by doing it.

I’m reminded, of course, by the famous Audre Lorde quote:  “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

There may be other ways I’m helping to change the world, though, but you’ll have to read my other blog for that.

I’ve been spending a fair bit of time in the last couple of years learning to code in a new way. It reminds me of a transition I made in coding from having written stand-alone applications for varied computers, to writing code for the web. When I was in college, grad school and early in my academic career (this dates me – from the early 80s to early 90s), I spent a lot of time writing stand-alone applications, mostly in Pascal and C. The shift from that kind of code, to writing for the web was a lesson in protocols, constraints, and different ways of troubleshooting.

The transition from writing free-form web applications, to writing modules for Drupal, or APEX customizations for Salesforce, is another set of lessons in protocols and constraints. First, it’s not enough to understand the syntax and form of the language (this is especially true for APEX – and beware the required test coverage!) One has to understand how the surrounding application works – what APIs or methods one can use, and how. And unlike long standing languages, there aren’t lots of detailed cookbooks and that sort of thing lying around – a lot of it is learning from other folks, as well as just learning by trial and error.

And, in my small forays into learning frameworks like CakePHP, Ruby On Rails, and others, it seems like these days, coding for the web is many lessons in constraints – which is a good thing, I think. Even though it feels like beating my head against a wall, it’s nice to know that I won’t “dump core” and break Salesforce (although I for sure have broken Drupal on occasion!)

I’ve been getting to know Amazon S3 lately, and there are some great things about it. I think it is one of the long list of unpredicted successes that resulted from the near-ubiquitousness of open source software on the server side. We’ve been using it for “offsite” backup for drupal sites for a while now. We have a script going which runs by cron daily to do the backups.

There are a number of ways to do this. We started using S3fs as a way to mount an S3 bucket in the filesystem, then just copy the files to S3. One of the scripts we’ve use is here. (We also use rsync.) However, S3fs isn’t very actively supported or in development. So we’re thinking of moving to use S3cmd, which works really well, and is still under active development.

Again, a little peak at what I’ve been up to, reading, and thinking about. You can also see what I’ve been reading by looking at my shared items on my google profile.

• Mule ESB – Open Source ESB Community w. Documentation | Mule ESB Community – an interesting and intriguing data integration tool built on the Java stack.
• SoqlXplorer – a Mac OS X tool for browsing Salesforce.com data.
• A List Apart: Articles: Web Fonts at the Crossing – a solid description of new web font technologies making substitution by other means obsolete.
• Google Font Directory – directory of available fonts from Google
• Contesting the Death of Traditional CRM: Social CRM is a Process and not a Technology – worth a read
• Small Business CRM | BatchBook
• Force.com for Google App Engine
• Installing Force for Facebook – developer.force.com
• gokubi.com » Blog Archive » Visual Force Email Templates 2
• Gist – from GitHub – save little code snippets