For our portion of the evening, I chatted Google Apps, Salesforce.com and our “Create Information Once, Distribute it Widely, Access it Anywhere” motto. After a brief overview of the Timeraiser program, I dove into our Cloud Computing strategy and open-architecture goals, something we’ve documented in detail on our blog. I’m so thrilled with the level of interest in Salesforce.com for non-profits, and happy to recieve praise for the open approach we’ve taken in our IT strategy.

Thanks to Andrew Sinclair from Architech Solutions for hosting the event, and for inviting Timeraiser to demo our use of some very cool cloud tools.  My presentation is below, and you can find out a lot more about our use of the cloud in these two videos.

The premise: a strong core is the root of overall healthy functioning.

We like this philosophy at Framework.  We like it so much we practice it all the time in the form of “Organizational Pilates”.  For a bit more detail about Organizational Pilates as our core management practice, take a quick read of Anil’s September 2009 guest post in Volunteer Vancouver’s blog.

For now, I’d like to share an example of how the exercises and ‘training’ we’ve been doing for the past year or so (our organizational pilates regime) are translating into agility, flexibility and overall effectiveness.

I’ll work backwards, starting with the end result and finishing with the exercises that got us here.

The Success

The GenNext volunteers in London are motivated and passionate to make the 1st London Timeraiser a huge success.  They are currently out connecting with local businesses like WCS Financial and Libro Financial Group who will sign on as sponsors so we can buy artwork at fair market value from local artists.

When a volunteer confirms a new corporate sponsor, we are able to alleviate the burdensome administration around partnership agreements, invoices, etc.  After one quick email containing contact information, we can produce all the necessary documents, email them over, and often have everything signed in 20 minutes.

We transformed an administrative process that used to be circuitous, redundant and cumbersome into one that is fast, easy and efficient for everyone.  Moreover, volunteers can focus their skills where they’re most important: connecting with local businesses and building relationships.

On our end, what used to take us, on average 3 days, can now take 20 minutes start to finish with the end result being more organized and more transparent.

The Process: Before & After

We have completely removed printers, faxes, paper and pens from this workflow and instead rely on a wicked integration of Salesforce.com and EchoSign.

I won’t go into it here, because it’s much for fun to have Amanda take you through the process in this concise and colourful video (shown above). Really, it’s a good video, even the folks at the EchoSign blog said so!

How we got here: Organizational Pilates regime

Our success can be attributed to our strong organizational core.  Our daily pilates regime builds:

1. Strength to evaluate and implement technology that works best for us
2. Agility to practice processes that can engage new ideas and evaluate them against our existing programming
3. Focus to always use programming that engages and supports the best staff and volunteers
4. Resiliency to learn from the work that we, and other like-minded initiatives, are doing
5. Motivation to share everything we know, data we have and insight we generate

We’re going to keep on this exercise regime; we’re feeling fit as ever!  And one thing I learned from my back injury is that maintenance is everything: I re-injured my back last year having neglected my transverse abdominus exercises.  Luckily I enjoy our organizational pilates more than actual exercise!

Let us know how you exercise your organization’s core!

For a geek like me, this video is really, really exciting because it highlights exactly the type of integration we at Framework admire – when one tool talks to the other, and data moves smoothly and openly between each.

What does it all mean?

Well, we use Google Applications for all our Office Productivity Needs, and use Box.net to share files, embed an upload widget and manage non-Google Application files with ease. Now that we can send files from within Gmail and create Google Docs from within Box, it means our data is truly accessible from anywhere – reducing duplication of data. It makes information sharing that much easier.

Seeing technology companies collaborate and share across platforms is exactly why we know “the cloud” is the future and why an open-architecture system is so important for the non-profit sector.

Details of the new integration:

“Box users will now be able to create Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets as file types within Box, benefiting from the real-time collaboration capabilities of Google Docs. You’ll also be able to access the Google Apps suite with the OpenBox action drop-down menu: you can select a file or folder to send with Gmail, schedule a meeting and link to a specific file or folder with Google Calendar, or publish content to Google sites. And as a Google Apps and Box.net customer, you can access, work with, and share Box content with others directly inside of Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Sites.”

I can trace my love of the social web to before Facebook, MSN Messenger or ICQ. I’m sure it was Apple’s eWorld that sold me on the idea of using computers to communicate and connect with others. Even in my first experiences with a social computing environment, it was email (of all things) that sparked my interest. Oh, that little red mail truck, a new message, how marvelous. eWorld was a new, virtual world that connected bulletin boards and email before the “web” was really anything. It was a portal environment that looked and felt like a small city - a community-. Yea, I was very hooked.

Flashing forward to today, there are endless opportunities to participate in the social web. But, as Qasim points out, these profiles – YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, can be “Closed-door or otherwise inaccessible conversations”. It’s interesting that the more we think that we are “present” by producing content for all these social networks, the more we have to recognize and look for the connections between the tools – ensuring that messages reach all our audiences, that some profiles or tools don’t get left behind. It can be a real challenge for Social Media, particularly in a professional setting.

A fascinating element of Qasim’s blog post is his identification of email and blogging as the future. Email, in particular, is a tool some say are becoming archaic (though others argue the contrary). Yet here is this new tool, Posterous, that allows you to post to your blog by emailing Posterous.com. Even more so, you can auto and & cross post across your other profiles, keeping information consistent. Qasim writes, “The implications of using email to feed a Posterous blog and, by-extension, one’s other online accounts, are tremendous”. It is easier than ever to create and distribute content to your social networks, and open the conversation cross-platform. Using email.

Interestingly, he points out that with the rise of the mobile smart phones and the inevitable mobile OS wars, “the vast majority of mobile devices [...] all offer email”. Email. The “aging” communication tool. Or is it? Maybe email is a good example of an evolving, agile technology that moves us forward. Certainly Posterous is offering a new way to connect/blog cross-platform.

Qasim clearly outlines why Posterous is helping the web to be more open, and I am on board. A tool that encourages ease of connecting, cross-platform publishing, and an open-architecture model aligns very closely with the movement we are building here at Framework.

In the very least, this is a tool we’ll keep our eye on here. We are always interested in new tools that can improve information-sharing and transparency for the sector. Posterous may be one new way to do it.

“Think globally, act locally.”

When I read about what they are doing, I thought to myself, “we’re on the right track!”  Looking back at Anil’s thoughts on Open Architecture, Amanda’s writing on information sharing and transparency, I can’t help but come to that conclusion.  This isn’t meant as a pat on our own backs but rather to continue the dialogue on how we deliver programming and how we could do it better.

Thinking Globally

Take NetHope [www.nethope.org], for example.  Among other projects, they have an Innovation for Development (I4D) program which seeks to extend existing best practices and scale solutions for broader impact in developing countries.  If we distill this approach down to a local level, the theory is the same: how do we aggregate existing best practices within the non-profit sector to better serve our community?  And how do we then share theselearnings with the thousands of other charitable organizations? For us (Framework), one way is our use of  smart technology (primarily web-based) to share how we operate with the world. That is, adapting existing technology to our needs and then letting everyone else know why and how we did it.

Another element of NetHope’s work is building telecommunications infrastructure where they either don’t exist or have been destroyed as a result of natural disasters.  The idea being that in both cases the infrastructure will enableNGOs to collaborate, share information and better aid people and communities in need.  This idea that we can better deliver services if we can collaborate and communicate is fundamental to our work.  You can read about our collaboration strategy in an earlier post so I won’t get into it here, but essentially where NetHope’s connectivity initiatives help build a technical workforce in remote areas of Africa, for example, our infrastructure allows us to efficiently collaborate with partners and stakeholders across Canada.

Finally, The Rockefeller Foundation, a huge granting body in the United States, has identified the need for open and user-driven innovation models to solve big issues like poverty and global warming through their “Advancing Innovation Processes to Solve Social Problems” stream of funding.  There are a lot of great questions that came to mind from reading their Key Outcomes:

• How do we foster partnerships with our many stakeholders in order to better deliver Timeraiser programming? 
• What new technology will help us enable our users contribute to our processes?
• How can we quickly capitalize on a creative idea from a volunteer in Calgary?
• And finally, when we think we have a great piece of knowledge, how do we share it with other like-minded NGOs?

Acting Locally

There are a lot of interesting ideas and models out there about how to collaborate, use technology and share best practices.  Some have big outcomes like saving humanity and saving our planet.  But how they are applied is certainly relevant and transferable to organizations working on local issues like housing in Vancouver’s East End, the development of green spaces in Toronto, securing healthy food for poor families in Hamilton, or planning a Timeraiser in Calgary! 

I am a big fan of Box.net. Their response to Google’s announcement reminds me why. In a timely blog post, Aaron Levie (Co-Founder and CEO) wrote about Box.net’s excitement over Google’s announcement as an overall win for Cloud Computing, and that the increased Google support  utlimately enhances Box.net’s services. He also acknowledged that additional services from popular providers like Google drives wider adoption of web-based services as a whole.  The willingness to work together in a collaborative, positive nature and to support integration between applications is a quality I admire about technology companies such as Box.net. Sharing data openly and collaboratively is an important quality of the non-profit sector, and it is complimented by service providers who uphold similar values.

Exciting things are in store for the “cloud” in 2010, and we’re glad to be a non-profit organization using the best resources to allow us to focus on mission-related activities.

There is a lot of debate in the technology space about what the best solutions are for nonprofit and charitable organizations. The power of volunteers contributing to the Linux, SugarCRM or Mozilla open-source community are clear examples of great, low cost tools available to broad public, providing high value to its user base. In many ways, the values in the open-source community are 100% aligned with ours.

However, in our office we make technology decisions based on how well technologies can talk to one another. This is our first and foremost consideration. We consider integration across all  office productivity needs and relationship/program management requirements.

The second consideration made when adopting a new tool is how easy is it for our team to make changes as we fine tune our programming. We don’t want to code ourselves into a box.

Other considerations include cost (comparing off-the-shelf products versus web-based services), and how much external consulting resources are needed for specific or custom configurations.

These consideration points are critical because want to support hundreds more local artists. Thousands more Charities. Tens of thousands new citizens who want to be engaged.

To accomplish this, our small team must select technology tools that best enable our people to connect with our content. We are calling it an Open Architecture approach. If our email isn’t connected to our CRM – it’s no good. If our CRM isn’t connected to our FTP file sharing system, no good. If our FTP doesn’t allow easy access to new users, no good. We need these tools to be deeply integrated and accessible.

As I described in a recent post, we use Box.net for our FTP File sharing needs and EchoSign for our e-signature services. These two services plug into Salesforce.com very nicely. Most of Salesforce.com’s third party apps can be installed within hours by our team of non-technical people. Our modest integration got us into the Power of Us Appy Awards at Dreamforce 2009. It was a great honour.

There is much more to come in the discussion of Open Architecture, and exciting new projects ahead.

Our newest addition to the team- Mike Dror

A few weeks ago Anil mentioned that if a picture can tell a thousand words, an interactive map can tell a million. Not bad. I think I’m in the right field of study.

My name is Mike Dror and I’m an Urban Studies student at the University of Toronto. I’ve been interning at Framework for the past few months as part of a seminar titled Urban Experiential Learning, where each student is placed at one of various urban organizations that range from small, non-profit organizations such as Framework, to larger public service institutions such as a Toronto City Councilor’s office.

The major part of my internship involves a long term project whose goal is to build on aspects of the Civic Footprint programming through the use of interactive mapping. A few weeks ago this project received a huge boon as the City of Toronto (finally) launched its open data set catalogue, following Vancouver’s example. The catalogue includes previously-unavailable data that can be used within Geographic Information Systems for analysis and display.

I’ve already felt the impact of the launch, both at Framework and within my own work. For a personal research project on the relationship between transit availability and demographics I’ve been using the newly-posted TTC Routes and Schedules data. For Framework I downloaded the Wards shapefile that contains boundaries for Toronto’s forty-four wards, a data set I could have used a month ago before I tediously drew them out myself, with far less accuracy.

The point is this. The catalogue received almost four thousand visits on its first day and over fifteen hundred downloads in its first week. Over the next few weeks we’ll be looking at how we can use these to target information on organizations and resources through interactive mapping towards those who need and want them. Check back soon for an update.

We use Box.net for our FTP File sharing needs and EchoSign for our e-signature services. These two services plug into Salesforce.com very nicely. The Salesforce.com AppExchange (App Store) is the enterprise version of Apple’s App Store. Most of Salesforce.com’s third party apps can be installed within hours by our team of non-technical people. Our modest integration got us into the Power of Us Appy Awards:

“Appy Award nominees are recognized for transforming their business with the power of cloud computing. Appy Award recipients are nominated based on their innovative usage of Salesforce CRM or the Force.com platform in bringing new levels of customer success to their sales, marketing, partner, service, support or IT organizations.”

We didn’t win. But it was cool to see our logo so big on the same stage that the Black Crowes played on. And it fuels our interest in technology solutions – open source or not – that provide us the most resource effective way to reach our mission.

Salesforce.com will be launching Chatter, a new tool that brings social communication to enterprise software. Our team has looked at it and can’t wait for the release. It is going to change the way we work as a team. Aloha!

As the article describes, products like the Flip Camera have “stunned the industry”, offering “cheap, fast and simple tools” that are extremely popular. The article points to several examples of customers moving towards easy-to-use tools that offer most (if not the majority) of the functionailty we need at a price that cannot be ignored (as is the case of cloud computing, where many software tools are free).

Capps outlines three elements that participants of the “Good Enough Revolution” are focused on; ease of use, continuous availability, and low price. As he explains, “Thanks to the speed and connectivity of the digital age, we’ve stopped fussing over pixel counts, sample rates, and feature lists”. These elements resonate with what we’re building as a non-profit organization, and our goals to be an open-source organization (where our volunteers, staff, stakeholders and fans can participate and collaborate).

As tech tools continue to become the method for which we produce great work (instead of becoming the work itself), do we need flashy options and endless capabilities (and lengthy training courses?) or do we need software that allows us to create, produce and remix awesome work without huge start-up times (and costs). I vote for the latter. As Shel Holtz has said in regards to social media, “It’s not about the tool, it’s about the conversation”.

In evaluating new technical tools for our organization, I am faced with questions like “will our users pick up and start using the tool without much training? Is it accessible and in the cloud? Is it collaborative? I look for tools that can complete the task (ideally quicker and easier than desktop software), that don’t demand a huge learning curve, and at times, ones that have a “cool factor”.

Maybe more importantly, the Good Enough Revolution is successful because it allows organizations to get started in using the tools now, and then adapt and grow in the future.  Picking up the “Good Enough” tools and running without a strategy isn’t the reason why they are so popular.  In fact, using too many tools without a plan is a surefire way to confusion, disorganization and duplicated processes.  Instead, organizations should look to “Good Enough” tools as a way to excute strategies and projects without commitments to expensive software, training and extended planning.  Get going, experiment and adapt.

It’s interesting that Capps writes, “As more and more industries move their business online, they too will find success in Good Enough tools that focus on maximizing accessibility. It’s a reflection of our new value system. We’ve changed.”  At Framework, it is clear that our values lie with accessibility and open-source.  What do you think about the Good Enough Revolution? Are there some features that the “quick and easy” tools can’t provide for you?