The Pizzigati Prize for Software in the Public Interest has selected six exciting dewelopers and products that are being considered as finalists for its inaugural prize.  The final prize recommendation will be made by an advisory panel but we would also like to hear from you.  We would like to invite you to share your impressions of the products, their usability, elegance and relevance.  The finalist developers and products are:

• George Hotelling, Citizen Speak
• Donald Lobo, CiviCRM
• Jamie McClelland, Basebuilder
• Ethan McCutchen, WagN
• Zack Rosen, Civic Space
• Kevin Smith, The Martus Project

If you are familiar with these products or would like to take some time and explore them a bit and share your insights with the Prize Advisory Panel, we welcome your feedback.  This is the first year of the Pizzigati Prize and we need your guidance as we select a prize recipient who has created an elegant and usable tool, had a practical impact on the effectiveness and capacity of nonprofit organizations, and also has promoted an ethic of collaboration and sharing.  You can find more about the Prize and the finalist products, and share your thoughts at http://forums.pizzigatiprize.org/index.php#5. 

Zack Rosen, David Geilhufe and ...

The "latest and greatest" in open source devleopment for non-profits session was excellent, but I won't try to summarize. Way too much discussed, most of which I understood, some of which I simply missed. (And notes are of no help. I can't listen and write. I don't have the enthusiasm anymore. I keep imagining Alan Bennett at one of these things. Or better, trying to explain this stuff to him over lunch at a monastery ruin.)

 One great line that stood out from the opening of the session: "Go forth and deploy!" I.e, dive in. Funny thing is that is EXACTLY what we've done with Manila since 2000 at <a xhref="http://www.bayareawritingproject.org">BAWP</a>. Looking back from the perspective of some of the deployment challenges mentioned in this workshop, we haven't done badly at all. Big question is, where do we go next? Open Source solution like Drupal makes sense based on what the presenters said here. OS communities of active developers, downloads and forums. A chance to avoid duplication of efforts (nice example of VolunteerMatch and HandsOn Network - 80% of the same stuff needed for both organizations yet 5 years ago each was alone in its development efforts, granting that such a challenge might have been an impossible challenge for open source at that point). Lots said about the need for the intermediary agencies (what Kern County Superintendent of Schools web team has played for us, an Application Service Provider). The fact is that to engineer something you need money. And it helps to no end if you have a fundamental need and some sort of notion of how the software might work to accomplish what it is you want to accomplish. Loved this comment (paraphrased): "Hey if it works for social change and it's Microsoft, so what? That's what differentiates this Open Source conversation from a commerical vendor conversation. Bravo for MS! Next topic?"

Patrick Ball starts session by asking why do we need PowerPoint instead of Open Source at this conference? No good answer.

Andrew Aitken

from alliance org, open source consulting to Fortune 500

Talks about the value of a commercial ecosystem

He fell in love with a movement, based on Eric Raymond's "the Cathedral and the Bazaar" http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/

Healthy commercial Open Source spurs innovation

More than 20 proprietary vendors have open sourced their code in the last month, SugarCRM andFunabol

i would love to figure out how to use all these new technologies to make our work easier and more effective, bu who pays for implementing all these fabulous tools and technologies? Even with open source software, low capacity and grassroots nonprofit organizations like mine still have to identify a staff person or key volunteer to implement, manage and support the technolgy. How do I identify that person? how do i motivate current staff and volunteers to add one more responsibility, one more task to an already overscheduled, overfull agenda? Where do i find qualified volunteers who are both motivated and committed to such a large task? how do I manage and supervise them?I think that many of these tools are merely tools for technoogy's sake - without any real vison about who will actually use them.The real digital divide is between organizations - those of us who deveote all our energy to our programs just don't have the resources to implement new technologies.

Check out the new Theme of the Week over on Net2Learn: Wikis for nonprofits. This resource center provides a crash course in wiki use for nonprofits, including an explanation of wikis, their history, and some great wiki tools, as well as great tips for using wikis strategically to help your nonprofit. 

And whether you're a wiki newbie or a seasoned wiki-warrior, we hope you'll share the insights and resources that have helped you along the way. Join the wikis for nonprofits resource center and you'll be able to add your ideas to our feature on getting started with wikis; or add your favorite resources to our collection of weblinks. And even if you haven't joined the resource center team, you'll be able to add your comments to almost all the content that's there, to help us keep the conversation going.

What if you could present virtually any data easily on the web? So easily that your average nonprofit employee could just upload a data file and have all the technical details worked out for them?

Generate crime maps to talk about why the police need to spend time in your neighborhood.

Zack Rosen shows us how its done today:

http://www.zacker.org/screencast-drupal-mashup-machine

Pretty easy, but not quite to the level of simplicity to be useful to tens of thousands of organizations. This is the type of ease of use we are seeking to build into CivicSpace On Deamand-- hide all the Drupal power and complexity.