Can social networking tools free us from email?

July 3, 2008

The NYTimes has a piece by an IBM employ­ee who has large­ly freed him­self from email by con­scious­ly using what­ev­er social net­work­ing tool would be bet­ter at mov­ing the con­ver­sa­tion for­ward, whether it’s IM, wikis, or even (gasp!) the tele­phone. This line stood out for me:

I have had con­tin­u­ing sup­port from my man­age­ment in this effort, because I’ve been able to prove how much more I can accom­plish by answer­ing a ques­tion, and post­ing it on a blog, for exam­ple, than I can by answer­ing the same ques­tion over and over. I still help peo­ple, but in a more open and col­lab­o­ra­tive fash­ion. Oth­er peo­ple can join in the dis­cus­sions — maybe they will have a bet­ter idea than mine. 

This is exact­ly how I try to describe the blog­ging phi­los­o­phy in the busi­ness world. Don’t think of the blog as anoth­er chore that needs to be added to your already over­whelmed to-do list. Instead, think about it as anoth­er com­mu­ni­ca­tion tool so it becomes a seam­less part of your ongo­ing work. This will no only help work flow, but help give your blog an hon­esty and approach­a­bil­i­ty it would­n’t have if you thought of it as sim­ply anoth­er mar­ket­ing piece.

New School/Old School in Web Design

June 20, 2008

Web 2.0 tools have changed the bound­ary lines between techies and pro­gram staff in many non­prof­its over the past few years. At least, they should have, though I know of var­i­ous orga­ni­za­tions that haven’t made the con­cep­tu­al leap to the new roles.

OLD SCHOOL: Webmaster

Let me explain by talk­ing about my own chang­ing work role. Even a few years ago, I was a paid staff web­mas­ter. You could divide my work into two large cat­e­gories. The first was techie: I man­aged serv­er accounts, set up required data­bas­es, designed sites. I got into the HTML code, the PHP, the Javascript, CSS, etc.

The oth­er was con­tent: when program-oriented staff had new mate­r­i­al they want­ed on the web­site they would email it to me or walk it over. I would put in my work queue, where it might sit for weeks if it was­n’t an orga­ni­za­tion­al pri­or­i­ty. When it came time to add the mate­r­i­al I would boot up Dreamweaver, a rel­a­tive­ly expen­sive pro­gram that was only acces­si­ble from my lap­top and I would put the mate­r­i­al onto the web­site. Need­less to say, with a process like this some parts of the web­site nev­er got very much attention.

At some point I start sneak­ing in a con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem for frequently-changed pages. This seemed very hack­ish and not good at first but over time I real­ized it great­ly speed­ed up my turn-around time for basic text con­tent. But the orga­ni­za­tions I worked for still relied on the old mod­el, where staff give the web­mas­ter con­tent to put up.

NEW SCHOOL: Web Developer

Nowa­days I’m a web devel­op­er, a free­lancer with an ever chang­ing list of clients. I typ­i­cal­ly spend about a month putting togeth­er a site based on a con­tent man­age­ment (like this) or auto­mat­ic feed sys­tem (like I did for Philadel­phi­a’s William Penn Char­ter School). I do a cer­tain amount of train­ing and while I might add a lit­tle con­tent for test­ing pur­pos­es, I step back at the end of the process to let the client put the mate­r­i­al up them­selves. I’m avail­able for ques­tions but I’m sur­prised about how rarely I’m called.

Here’s two exam­ples. Steady­foot­steps is a blog by an Amer­i­can phys­i­cal ther­a­pist in Viet­nam. When we start­ed, she did­n’t even have a dig­i­tal cam­era! I gave her advice on cam­eras, start­ed her on a Flickr account, set up a fair­ly gener­ic Mov­able Type blog with some cus­tom design ele­ments and answered all the ques­tions she had along the way. She went to town. She’s put tons of pic­tures and embed­ded Youtube videos right in posts. Here’s a non-techie who has con­tributed a lot to the web’s content!

Penn Char­ter is a school that was already on Flickr and Youtube but want­ed to dis­play the con­tent on their web­site in an attrac­tive way. I pulled togeth­er all the mag­ic of feeds and javascripts to have a media page that show­cas­es the newest material. 

They’re very dif­fer­ent sites, but in nei­ther instance does the client con­tact me to add con­tent. They rely on easy-to-use Web 2.0 ser­vices: no spe­cial­ized HTML knowl­edge required.

NEW TOOLS, OLD MODEL

I got an email not so long ago from an old boss who man­ages a month­ly mag­a­zine. Her site has been rad­i­cal­ly rebuilt over the years. Dreamweaver is out and con­tent man­age­ment is in. They use Dru­pal, which my friend Thomas T. of the Philadel­phia Cul­tur­al Alliance tells me won the recent pop­u­lar­i­ty con­test among non­prof­it techies. This is great, a def­i­nite step for­ward, but what con­fused me is that my old boss was ask­ing me whether I would be inter­est­ed in return­ing to my old job (the suc­ces­sor who over­saw the Dru­pal upgrade is leaving).

They still have a web­mas­ter? They still want to fun­nel web­site mate­r­i­al through a sin­gle per­son? Every staff­per­son there is adept at com­put­ers. If a phys­i­cal ther­a­pist can fig­ure out Flickr and Mov­able Type and Youtube, why can’t pro­fes­sion­al print design­ers and editors?

My hourly rate ranges from two to five times what she’d be like­ly to pay, so I turned her down. But I did ask why she want­ed a web­mas­ter. Now that they’re on Dru­pal it seems to me that they’d be bet­ter off switch­ing from the web­mas­ter to the web devel­op­er staffing mod­el: hire me as a free­lance con­sul­tant to do trou­bleshoot­ing, staff train­ing and the occas­sion­al spe­cial project but have the reg­u­lar full­time staff do the bulk of the con­tent man­age­ment. I’d think you’d end up with a site that’s more live­ly and updat­ed and that the cost would about the same, despite my high­er hourly rates.

I’ve heard enough sto­ries of places where sec­re­taries have come out of the shad­ows to embrace con­tent man­age­ment and have helped trans­form web­sites. I’m the son of a for­mer sec­re­tary so I know that they’re often the smartest employ­ees at any firm (if you walk into an office look­ing for the expert on advanced Excel fea­tures you’ll sure­ly find them sit­ting right there behind the recep­tion­ist desk).

FINALLY: WHAT’S UP WITH DRUPAL?

I’m try­ing to join the band­wag­on and use Dru­pal for a upcom­ing site that will have about a dozen edi­tors. But there’s no built-in WYSIWYG edi­tor, no lit­tle for­mat­ting icons. Sure, I myself could eas­i­ly hand-code the HTML and make it look nice. But I don’t want to do that. And it’s unre­al­is­tic to think I’m going to teach a dozen over­worked sec­re­taries how to write in HTML. The inter­face needs to work more or less like Microsoft Word (as it does in Mov­able Type, Cushy­CMS, Google Docs, etc.)

Most Dru­pal sites I see seems from the out­side like they’re still old school: staff web­mas­ter through whom most con­tent fun­nels. Is this right? Because if so, this is real­ly just an insti­tu­tion­al­iza­tion of the con­tent hack I did six years ago. Can any­one point me to live­ly, active Dru­pal sites whose con­tent is being direct­ly added by non-techie office staff? If so, how is it set up?

Reach up high, clear off the dust, time to get started

June 8, 2008

It’s been a fas­ci­nat­ing edu­ca­tion learn­ing about insti­tu­tion­al Catholi­cism these past few weeks. I won’t reveal how and what I know, but I think I have a good pic­ture of the cul­ture inside the bish­op’s inner cir­cle and I’m pret­ty sure I under­stand his long-term agen­da. The cur­rent lightening-fast clo­sure of sixty-some church­es is the first step of an ambi­tious plan; man­u­fac­tured priest short­ages and soon-to-be over­crowd­ed church­es will be used to jus­ti­fy even more rad­i­cal changes. In about twen­ty years time, the 125 church­es that exist today will have been sold off. What’s left of a half mil­lion faith­ful will be herd­ed into a dozen or so mega-churches, with the­ol­o­gy bor­rowed from gener­ic lib­er­al­ism, style from feel-good evan­gel­i­cal­ism, and orga­ni­za­tion from con­sul­tant culture.

When dioce­san offi­cials come by to read this blog (and they do now), they will smile at that last sen­tence and nod their heads approv­ing­ly. The con­spir­a­cy is real.

But I don’t want to talk about Catholi­cism again. Let’s talk Quak­ers instead, why not? I should be in some meet­ing for wor­ship right now any­way. Julie left Friends and returned to the faith of her upbring­ing after eleven years with us because she want­ed a reli­gious com­mu­ni­ty that shared a basic faith and that was­n’t afraid to talk about that faith as a cor­po­rate “we.” It seems that Catholi­cism won’t be able to offer that in a few years. Will she run then run off to the East­ern Ortho­dox church? For that mat­ter should I be run­ning off to the Men­non­ites? See though, the prob­lem is that the same issues will face us wher­ev­er we try to go. It’s mod­ernism, baby. No focused and authen­tic faith seems to be safe from the Forces of the Bland. Lord help us.

We can blog the ques­tions of course. Why would some­one who dis­likes Catholic cul­ture and wants to dis­man­tle its infra­struc­ture become a priest and a career bureau­crat? For that mat­ter why do so many peo­ple want to call them­selves Quak­ers when they can’t stand basic Quak­er the­ol­o­gy? If I want­ed lots of com­ments I could go on blah-blah-blah, but ulti­mate­ly the ques­tion is futile and beyond my figuring.

Anoth­er piece to this issue came in some ques­tions Wess Daniels sent around to me and a few oth­ers this past week in prepa­ra­tion for his upcom­ing pre­sen­ta­tion at Wood­brooke. He asked about how a par­tic­u­lar Quak­er insti­tu­tion did or did not rep­re­sent or might or might not be able to con­tain the so-called “Con­ver­gent” Friends move­ment. I don’t want to bust on any­one so I won’t name the orga­ni­za­tion. Let’s just say that like pret­ty much all Quak­er bureau­cra­cies it’s inward-focused, shal­low in its pub­lic state­ments, slow to take ini­tia­tive and more or less irrel­e­vant to any cam­paign to gath­er a great peo­ple. A more suc­cess­ful Quak­er bureau­cra­cy I could name seems to be doing well in fundrais­ing but is doing less and less with more and more staff and seems more inter­est­ed in donor-focused hype than long-term pro­gram implementation.

One ene­my of the faith is bureau­cra­cy. Real lead­er­ship has been replaced by con­sul­tants and fundrais­ers. Finan­cial and staffing crises – real and cre­at­ed – are used to jus­ti­fy a water­ing down of the mes­sage. Pro­grams are dri­ven by donor mon­ey rather than clear need and when real work might require con­tro­ver­sy, it’s tabled for the facade of feel-goodism. Quak­er read­ers who think I’m talk­ing about Quak­ers: no I’m talk­ing about Catholics. Catholic read­ers who think I’m talk­ing about Catholics: no, I’m talk­ing about Quak­ers. My point is that these forces are tear­ing down reli­gios­i­ty all over. Some cheer this devel­op­ment on. I think it’s evil at work, the Tempter using our lead­er’s desires for posi­tion and respect and our the desires of our laity’s (for lack of a bet­ter word) to trust and think the best of its leaders.

So where does that leave us? I’m tired of think­ing that maybe if I try one more Quak­er meet­ing I’ll find the com­mu­ni­ty where I can prac­tice and deep­en my faith as a Chris­t­ian Friend. I’m stumped. That first batch of Friends knew this feel­ing: Fox and the Pen­ing­tons and all the rest talked about iso­la­tion and about reli­gious pro­fes­sion­als who were in it for the career. I know from the blo­gos­phere and from count­less one-on-one con­ver­sa­tions that there are a lot of us – a lot – who either drift away or stay in meet­ings out of a sense of guilt.

So what would a spir­i­tu­al com­mu­ni­ty for these out­sider Friends look like? If we had real vision rather than donor vision, what would our struc­tures look like? If we let the gener­ic church­es go off to out-compete one oth­er to see who can be the bland­est, what would be left for the rest of us to do?

20080608-xcjchpscnwekhsh85kg2hr7nbf.previewI guess this last para­graph is the new revised mis­sion state­ment for the Quak­er part of this blog. Okay kids, get a step stool, go to your meet­ing library, reach up high, clear away the dust and pull out vol­ume one of “A por­trai­ture of Quak­erism: Tak­en from a view of the edu­ca­tion and dis­ci­pline, social man­ners, civ­il and polit­i­cal econ­o­my, reli­gious prin­ci­ples and char­ac­ter, of the Soci­ety of Friends” by Thomas Clark­son. Yes the 1806 ver­sion, stop the grum­bling. Get out the ribbed pack­ing tape and put its cov­er back togeth­er – this isn’t the frig­ging Library of Con­gress and we’re actu­al­ly going to read this thing. Don’t even waste your time check­ing it out in the meet­ing’s log­book: no one’s pulled it down off the shelf in fifty years and no one’s going to miss it now. Real­ly stuck?, okay Google’s got it too. Class will start shortly.

Pen​n​char​ter​.com Media Pages

May 18, 2008

William Penn Charter School Media PagesOne ele­ment of a gen­er­al social media con­sul­tan­cy project I’ve under­tak­en with Philadel­phi­a’s William Penn Char­ter school is a dynam­ic media page. They had col­lect­ed a large num­ber of pho­tos, movies and pod­cast inter­views, but the media page on their site was sta­t­ic and with­out pic­tures. I worked with them to come up with media poli­cies and then built a media site that auto­mat­i­cal­ly dis­plays the lat­est Flickr sets and Youtube videos, all laid out attrac­tive­ly with CSS. The Flickr part was com­pli­cat­ed by the fact that Flickr does­n’t pro­duce feeds of sets and this required access to it’s API and fair­ly exten­sive Yahoo Pipes manip­u­la­tion. The orig­i­nal pod­casts were just uploaded MP3 files and I worked to col­lect them togeth­er via Odeo (host­ing) and Feed­burn­er (feed pub­lish­ing), which then pro­vides RSS and iTunes sup­port. The actu­al con­tent for the page is col­lect­ed togeth­er on the Mar​tinkel​ley​.com serv­er and embed­ded into the Penn Char­ter media pages via javascript. Oth­er work with Penn Char­ter includes Google Ana­lyt­ics and Dreamweaver support. 

Update: Pen­n­Char­ter redesigned their web­site in August 2009 and the Media Page is unavailable.

Client Testimonial:

“Mar­tin has worked for our school to inte­grate Web 2.0 technologies
into our com­mu­ni­ca­tion mate­ri­als. Mar­tin is highly-personable and his
is an expert in cur­rent tech­no­log­i­cal approach­es. This is a hard match
to find in con­sul­tants.” April 30, 2009

Michael Moul­ton, Tech­nol­o­gy Direc­tor, William Penn Char­ter School.
Hired Mar­tin as a IT Con­sul­tant in 2007, and hired Mar­tin more than once.
Top qual­i­ties: Per­son­able, Expert, High Integrity.

Who are we part one (just what pamphlet do I give the tattooed ex-con?)

November 10, 2007

If you cycle through my last few months of com­ments, you’ll see that I’ve been spend­ing a lot of time think­ing about who “we” Friends are and who we serve and the con­se­quent ques­tion of why we orga­nize into local meet­ings, nation­al affil­i­a­tions, blogs, etc.

Essen­tial to this think­ing has been Jeanne B’s Social Class and Quak­ers blog. There are many ways to tease out the way cul­ture and faith work to rein­force and sab­o­tage one anoth­er, but class is a good one. If you trav­el from one the­o­log­i­cal brand of Friends to anoth­er, from one cul­tur­al zone to anoth­er (e.g, urban vs ex-urban vs rur­al) you’ll see marked cul­ture dif­fer­ences. Just take a look at the potluck array if you doubt me. Jeanne talks about the urban lib­er­al Quak­er stig­ma against Cool Whip and a great link she turned me on to talks about some of the ways the alterna-lefty cul­ture can unwit­ting­ly sep­a­rate itself from poten­tial allies in social change over tofu (update: more recent work from this orga­ni­za­tion can be found at clas​sism​.org).

Since falling out of the rar­efied world of pro­fes­sion­al Quak­erism a year ago, I’ve become more local. I live in a small, large­ly agri­cul­tur­al town in rur­al South Jer­sey rough­ly equidis­tant from the region’s sky­scraper metropoli (I don’t give its name for pri­va­cy rea­sons) and res­i­dents range from multi-generational fam­i­lies to Mex­i­can farm­work­ers to peo­ple who got in trou­ble up north in NYC and are look­ing for a qui­eter place to come clean. I don’t see Quak­ers in my day-to-day life any­more but I do inter­act with a more rep­re­sen­ta­tive sam­pling of Amer­i­ca, peo­ple who are all try­ing to get some­where oth­er than where they are. Jesus would have been here. Fox would have preached here. But what do mod­ern lib­er­al Friends have to say about this world? As Bill Samuel wrote on Jean­ne’s blog issues of safety-net pub­lic assis­tance that seem like do-gooder caus­es for most well-off lib­er­al Friends are mat­ters of per­son­al prac­ti­cal­i­ty for more eco­nom­i­cal­ly diverse reli­gious bod­ies (the child care pro­gram that Pres­i­dent Bush vetoed last month is the same one that let me take my fevered two year old to the doc­tor last Friday).

Last First Day I heard a good ortho­dox piece of Quak­er min­istry couched in a learned lan­guage, all talk of jus­ti­fi­ca­tion ver­sus sanc­ti­fi­ca­tion, with a bit of insid­er Quak­er acronyms thrown in for good effect. I love the fel­low who gave the mes­sage and I appre­ci­at­ed his min­istry. But the whole time I won­dered how this would sound to peo­ple I know now, like the friend­ly but hot-tempered Puer­to Rican ex-con less than a year out of a eight-year stint in fed­er­al prison, now work­ing two eight hour shifts at almost-minimum wage jobs and try­ing to stay out of trou­ble. How does the the­o­ry of our the­ol­o­gy fit into a code of con­duct that does­n’t start off assum­ing mid­dle class norms. What do our tofu cov­ered dish­es and vanil­la soy chai’s (I’m so addict­ed) have to do with liv­ing under Christ’s instruc­tion? And just which FGC out­reach pam­phlet should I be hand­ing my new friend?

Enough for now. More soon.

Steady​Foot​steps​.org

June 22, 2007

Steady Footsteps

Blog by an Amer­i­can cou­ple liv­ing in Viet­nam and advo­cat­ing for greater motor­bike safe­ty. The tech­ni­cal aspects are pret­ty straight-forward but the neat part about it was watch­ing the client learn about blog­ging and online photo
shar­ing as we worked on the site: I intro­duced her to Fli­crk, Picasa
and Gmail! She took to it like a fish to water and the site is full of great
pho­tos tak­en by her hus­band David. Read more about their
work doing phys­i­cal ther­a­py in Viet­nam and their posts about life in Da Nang.
. Tech­nol­o­gy: Mov­able Type, Flickr. Vis­it Site.