Trip Report: 2007 Aspiration Nonprofit Software Development Conference

Trip Report:
Aspiration Nonprofit Software Development Conference
Oakland, February 21-23, 2007
Evan Callahan

This was a great conference.  There were many smart people; around half open-source evangelists.  A lot of skill sharing and general geekiness.  A good conference for me, as there was a decent Salesforce contingent including Steve Wright from the SF Foundation.

Takeaways:
•    Open Source vs. Proprietary Models:  Open source is certainly preferred by this community, and many feel strongly.  However, most have backed off from the religious feeling about this, acknowledging that there isn’t always an open-source option in a given space that will meet the need. There is an awareness that open-source community hasn’t done enough to educate foundations and other software customers on the way that open source fits and how they can succeed with that model or with existing tools.  However, they make a convincing argument about open-source being most compatible with nonprofit goals. International participants point out that there is often a huge political difference because the availability of proprietary solutions is often controlled by conservative interests who are indifferent or even hostile to those pursuing social benefits or change. Brazil and Argentina (and to a lesser extent, Mexico) are seeing a lot of open source software innovation, and participants from those countries believe it allows more people to access technology for good.
•    Salesforce NEWS FLASH: Salesforce.com is now selling licenses over 10 at an 80% discount to 501c3s.  This is available but not yet announced.  Steve says that if you want only licenses 11 and 12, they might not bother (just donate the extras).  Unfortunately, the orgs will have to call Tucker at SF.com – they can’t just buy licenses on the site.
•    Grant Management in Salesforce:  Steve also explained how he does grant mgmt in SF.com.  Grants are Solutions, applications are Cases, applicants are Contacts. This allows applicants to use the partner portal and web to case to apply and communicate.  Some workflow options help to manage the application process. When grants are won, they are converted to Opps, and tracked through stages with lots of workflow – including reporting.  (This all sounds awesome to me, although I’m not sure why you’d even need to switch to Opps; need to research a bit.)
•    Salesforce Philanthropic Model:  Steve Wright talked about the Foundation strategy.  Their vision is stronger than ever, no chance the program will go away under the current management.  Could other companies be persuaded to do the same model?  Google has also done something patterned after SF.com.  But Steve believes that companies that sell product to nonprofits will never be this generous, because it hurts their bottom line and is therefore not allowed for public companies.  Salesforce is unique, because it would never sell its stuff at full price to any nonprofits, so it can justify the program for all its other benefits.  He thinks the software-as-service model lends itself to this, but product sales doesn’t.
•    Must Process Map!:  Steve Andersen is doing a lot of cool process mapping for every Salesforce client. He says it isn’t taking too much time because he reuses the same maps, and is adding a lot of value.  He shows the client the map, says “Does this look like what you do?” and most say, “Hey, how did you know?”
•    NonprofitSoapbox.com:  Ryan Ozimek (PICnet) showed us their Nonprofit Soapbox, which is the Joomla CMS, looking really good. It connects to a lot of other systems including Salesforce.  A great example of use of APIs, a smart guy explained how they managed to get connected to almost everything.
•    A Grants Management effort:  Jason Ricci at Solpath.org – Creating an open-source grant mgmt platform.  Probably Drupal, and could end up being a CiviCRM addon. Has big foundation funding (after giving up on small foundation funding), but the effort has been long in planning and hasn’t made much concrete progress.  There is a nice mockup, interface looks slick; the intention is that it would be hosted but Jason says he doesn’t want to be the one to do it.  Jason said he’d post or send me his grant mgmt process map. Another guy in the grants mgmt session is working on a large effort to get foundations to publish all grants (past and future) in a common format, Jason is involved in that too because it could integrate with his system.
•    Idealware:  Laura Quinn at Idealware.org wants more material. She has editors/writers to whip it into shape, might even have money?
•    CiviCRM: There is a new version, it is looking slick, and very much like…uh, Salesforce.com.
•    Ajax:  Ajax lets you make web pages that are responsive and slick like desktop apps.  You can do this in Javascript alone, but the cross-browser issues make it undesirable. The top Ajax/Javascript libraries are dojo, prototype, and yui.  Dojo is huge and popular (and available in Salesforce.com), prototype/scriptaculous is lightweight and interesting, and Yahoo’s yui is also recommended.
•    Collaborative Development Projects:  No one has done a successful open source collaboration in the nonprofit space (looking for something like Subversion, for which most funding came from outside the primary seed group). CiviCRM, for example, was 90% financed by a single funder.  If you could do such a thing, the key would be transparency of funding, goals, ownership, and responsibilities.  The winning plan is to start with ONE player doing something as proof of concept, but leaving lots of distinct pieces for others to take on.
•    Pipes:  Pipes.yahoo.com is a wild new beta tool that lets you use a slick “Ajax” interface to design filters that grab content all over the web, manipulate it in flexible ways you specify, and then return an RSS feed (or just a bunch of data in JSON format).  Not sure what you use that for, but we were fantasizing about a salesforce custom control that displays lots of current web data and links related to the currently displayed contact or account.
•    HTML in IE:  Somebody showed me an awesome and easy way to do conditional HTML in IE (for incompatibility issues).  Conditional comments.  Allows different code for different versions.  Could use to include a different .js file, presumably.
•    3.5 On the Richter Scale:  Californian’s do not miss a beat during an earthquake. The presenter simply says, “Hmm.  An earthquake.  Seems to be over now….roof is still there.  Those of you not from the Bay Area will have a story to take home.”  See http://quake.usgs.gov/recenteqs/Quakes/nc40193843.html for details.


Other things to look at:
•    www.WiserEarth.org – interesting activism site
•    www.DemocracyInAction.org – DIA has new stuff, a robust API, and many fans at the conference
•    www.BlueUtopia.org – technology consortium
•    www.ConsultantCommons.org – resource from Compumentor
•    www.SocialSourceCommons.org – resource from Aspiration
•    www.grassroots.org – nice people, resources on their site
•    http://Wikigraphe.orangeseeds.net – sample graphical wiki site, free tools, clever
•    http://www.campaigner.com/campaignerpro/salesforce.html – this used to integrate with Salesforce, for free; need to research more
•    Conference wiki at http://devsummit.aspirationtech.org/index.php/Main_Page