Advocacy Developers Conference III (Day 1)
Monday, July 31st, 2006A great group of developers, strategists, and general good people from around the world came to Oakland, California, on July 31 to solve all the worlds online development problems.
We made good baby steps.
Follow along at home with the quick and dirty wiki that was created.
This is the third advocacy developers conference, and the second that I was lucky enough to attend. I remember the original controlled chaos (that’s speaking praise to the conference!) that our friend Allen Gunner and Aspiration lead back in 2003. While this year’s convergence wasn’t perched just a hill away from the Golden Gate Bridge, the great people at the East Bay Foundation did a great job making us feel at home.
The first day brought together a wide variety of groups, including our good friends like Chris Lundberg of Democracy in Action and David Taylor of Radical Designs. The goal of the first session was to really understand what works, and what doesn’t, in the non-profit/advocacy marketplace. Groups had a variety of thoughts on the topic, but mine had the following:
What Works
- On demand services, focused online, like our Non-Profit Soapbox service
- Content management systems (see line one for a good one!)
- The LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Python)
- Marketplace of tools - there’s lots more today than there were just two years ago
- An ecology that allows and supports customization of open source projects
What Doesn’t Work
- Non-profit management still doesn’t have enough educational resources to make good technology decisions
- Open source software, and its developers, focus too much time on the tools, and less time on the support, stability, and training
- Silos of data still haven’t come together as smoothly as we’d hoped by now, including the following spheres of data silos: CMS, CRM/database, and action platforms.
After coming back to the circle, we all realized that although we’d begun making good progress for the sector over the past two years, there was still much to get done.
After a good lunch break, we started speed-geeking the different wares of attendees. Lots of great stuff was shared, from Non-Profit Soapbox to CivicSpace, May first - people link to Plone. (Photos to come soon)
Finally, we wrapped up the day with a good, but mind-bending, brainstorm session on interoperability led by Chris Lundberg. My general feeling on the interoperability issue is that unless there are either commercial needs that drive this forward, or if the technology is at such a standardized level (think HTML or XML) that interoperability is simply a necessity, it will always be hard to get groups, companies, and software providers to make their tools more interoperable.
One way to help add market pressures to proprietary providers (they know who they are) was to have a public way to allow groups to give their own experiences as to what works well with what. As I called it, “praise or shame”.
A Web site could be constructed, say we call it www.playswelltogether.org, that would allow organizations to say what software or technology plays well with others. The market would then have a way to see what was working, and naturally gravitate towards solutions that allowed them to really increase their capacity.
After the first day, we all headed down to the famous Electric Embers BBQ, where I nibbled for the first time on veggie ribs (don’t ask, I have no idea what’s in them). Thanks to Adam Bernstein and the rest of the EE gang for hosting us all!
