This just came across my desk from the fine folks at The Tyee:

For those of you based in Vancouver, please pass this on to anyone you think might be interested. Or perhaps you’re in need of cheap and cheerful space yourself?

The Tyee has two workstations available in an overflow area of our newish office in Chinatown (211 East Georgia, right at the corner of Main).

For a mere $250/month + HST, you get:

• Desk, chair, bookshelf and lovely Ikea lamp (!)
• LAN and wireless connections

A friend wrote to me this week asking for a recommendation on “podcast platform software, he continues “I’m referring to software that will enable us to upload video and audio (a la Youtube) for others to view.”

Given that he already has a Web site, my sense is that he is looking for something quite separate and preferably hosted — not a new Drupal/Workpress/Etc. site that needs to be built from scratch, I would guess — that would make it possible to loosely integrate a podcast section to the existing site.

I had a couple of suggestions from experience: for basic audio podcasts, I’ve used BlogTalkRadio and Hipcast. I used Hipcast for a political campaign and it was easy to integrate into the campaign Web site, and — more importantly — it made it easy for the candidate to call in from anywhere to record a podcast. I see that Hipcast also handles video podcasts now, but haven’t had an opportunity to try it out.

I also wondered if something along the lines of a simple, hosted, blogging platform like Posterous might be an easy way to upload audio & video and provide an RSS feed for it. From experience, I know that services like Posterous handle audio and video quite nicely.

Lastly, the fine folks over at rabble.ca pointed me to Libsyn some years ago — I recall reading that it had some nice Web site integration features too.

All that to say: What are your recommendations? What are you using to built a audio & video podcast feed these days? Any and all link and experiences appreciated.

For the last couple years I’ve struggled to find the perfect backup solution. The perfect backup solution I was after had to meet certain criteria:

• It had to be continuous and require almost no thought;
• It had to be both onsite (for fast access) and offsite (in case of theft);
• It had to to be encrypted so that my client’s data was protected.

Recently, it all came into focus… so I thought I’d share my “ultimate data backup triple-play for under $500” in case you’re in a similar situation.

The first thing I did was ditch my Buffalo Linkstation Mini 1TB Network Attached Storage (NAS) device (great conceptually, terrible in practice) and bought a Western Digital My Book Studio 2TB drive with firewire 800 and USB 2.0 interfaces. Unlike the NAS device, the firewire 800 connection means that my local, onsite backups are blazingly fast and the device only cost $210 CAD at Canada Computers.

Next I signed-up for Backblaze — an online (thus offsite) backup service — after reading this (very convincing) article about their hardware and HTTP-based backup software. The Backblaze service costs $50/year for one computer with unlimited data (wich is the key, as I have a lot of data to backup).

Finally, I found a way to make the process of backing up to my 160GB “classic” iPod painless and functional by ditching my hand-crafted rsync scripts and replacing them with the easy-as-pie iPodBackup software. The current cost for a 160GB iPod is roughly $259.00 and you can probably find one a lot cheaper on eBay or Craigslist.

Those pieces in place, here’s how it all works:

• I have a full backup of my computer on the 2TB hard drive that runs continuously via Apple’s Time Machine software (not as terrible a piece of software as I thought it would be, to be honest). The hard drive mentioned above is one of the few at that price that comes with built-in hardware-based encryption — so the drive is locked and encrypted when I dismount it.
• A continuous encrypted backup of my essential client files (~40GB) happens via Backblaze so that I never need to think about it and can access the data in a pinch from the road. Backblaze lets you provide your own private encryption key, so that data is also encrypted both on-route to Backblaze and at their facility.
• Finally, I perform a semi-regular encrypted backup of my essential client files (~40GB) on to my iPod, which I bring along with me on trips so that I have a copy of all my client data in my pocket. The iPodBackup software handles the creation of an encrypted “sparse image” before it moves the backup to the iPod, so I never have to worry that much about losing the iPod or having it stolen, as the data is encrypted.

All this for under $500. That’s a low price to pay for complete piece of mind. :)

And, because I saw a tweet from my friend Rolf about it this morning, I should mention quickly what I do on the server that hosts my e-mail and Web sites. Basically, after much futzing around, I ended up with a simple solution using rsync and expect (to handle authentication prompts) that backs-up all of my Web site data, e-mail, and anything else lying around my account. This is all backed up to the free 100GB Strongspace account that I received as part of my lifetime hosting account with Textdrive (now Joyent). That backup runs every day by itself — never have to think about it! — and makes those files available via sFTP and a nifty Web interface.

Note to those of you that use a Linux desktop operating system: obviously, a lot of the above is Mac-centric. If you have some suggestions on how to achieve roughly the same set-up on open hardware and free software, it would be great if you could pop it into the comments. :-)

Over the years, I've subscribed to hundreds of e-mail lists. Like many of my colleagues in the online campaigning world, I subscribe to get a feel for how different organizations handle their online communication strategy. During the US Presidential election in 2008, I was subscribed to more than ever -- and I enjoyed every missive! -- however, when the election was over I unsubscribed, no longer wanting to hear from McCain, Ron Paul, and so on.

A year and eight months passed ... and then, today, I received the e-mail below.

I'm a big fan of e-mail and I work with many organizations to help grow their lists by reducing list attrition (unsubscribes) -- so my first reaction was "this is pretty smart." However, as I had a chance to read further and realize that I'd simply been re-subscribed to the list without permission, I was less enthusiastic. Now, frankly, I'm not the kind to get my knickers in a knot about this kind of thing (as it is easy enough to re-unsubscribe), but I bet that many others would. What do you think? Genius or Spam?

(Click for larger version.)

Web of Change alums Tim Walker & Michael Silberman have put together a manifesto entitled "Web thinking: The Choice Ahead for Movement-Leading Organizations," which presents what organizations need to be thinking about in 2010 and beyond to success online (and in general).

Our field is maturing rapidly. The next generation of movement leaders is overcoming its fetish with technology and expertise as secrets to online success. Indeed, now faced with existential challenges from a fast shifting landscape, the time has come for us all to rethink our most deeply held tenets in this struggle to remain relevant. Thankfully, a brave few are trying – and they're finding answers. Looking beyond traditional online strategy, they're fundamentally transforming how they and their organizations work – shifting their entire perspective towards what we call "Web Thinking" – to better reflect the reality of our time. And they're winning. They're charting a path forward for us all.

The teams at EchoDitto and Biro Creative have been tracking and studying this shift for more than six years through their work with a wide range of leading social change organizations. After a decade of obsessive technology consumption, the sector is ready for a new chapter. This manifesto reveals new tenets for success. It is a call to arms for our next generation of leaders.

They go on to outline 10 proclamations that organizations should be thinking about in relation to their structure, thinking, and strategy about change. There are some great ideas there.

In some ways, it doesn't go far enough. I'll be adding my 3 cents, why not add yours?

This in late last week (while I was on the mend from some serious food poisoning... thanks Peru!) from Donald Lobo and the CiviCRM team:

Hey folks:

We are trying to raise some sponsorship $$$ to build canvassing and get out of the vote support in CiviCRM. Seems like we've got a good combination of folks who are interested in working with us to develop it. We've got an excellent start from some seed funders, and need a few more funders to meet our goals. If the above is of interest to you or your clients, please consider helping out. You can make your donation here :)

The complete specification is on the the wiki: CiviCRM for Canvassing and GOTV

This requirement has been probably been the #1 reason that many of the electoral campaigns that I've supported in the past couldn't get good mileage out of CiviCRM. There was no easy way to do the usual canvassing and get out of the vote activities right inside of CiviCRM. Sure, it was hackable with custom fields and custom reports, but it never worked as well as it could have. If you've had similar experiences, this is your chance to fix that.

Why not sponsor some of the development, or commit some developer hours to help out?

Exciting to (finally) see a freely available Web service for looking up Member of Parliament in Canada based on a postal code.

Historically, the various licensing costs and restrictions on the data required to support this service made it hard to provide as a "free as in free beer" service to organizations that wanted to make use of the data in advocacy applications and so on.

It seems those barriers have been lowered, as Cory Horner from the How'd They Vote team announces the service and speaks to the licensing questions:

I am pleased to present, at long last, a Postal Code to Member of Parliament web service:

http://howdtheyvote.ca/news.php?i=free-postal-code-lookup-service

Sadly the raw data cannot be shared, but fortunately the terms of the licence dictate that its use in a web service is permitted.

Russell McOrmond, a pioneer in this area, pressed Cory about lookups based on geolocation, i.e., enabling an end-user to click on a map and receive information on their Member of Parliament (made difficult by the nature of riding boundaries). And it appears that Cory has added that functionality to the API also, so that latitude and longitude can be used instead of postal code in the API query.

The geeky among you might want to also know that the service using PostGIS as the spatial database.

Exciting times in Canada, as geeks start to put the Web services in place to enable more democracy-enabling technology.

(Thanks to Civic Access for the info.)

This just in from Donald Lobo and the CiviCRM team:

Hey folks:

Just wanted to let you know that we'll be having our very first CiviCon on April 22 at Mitch Kapor Foundation offices. We hope to see all of you at the conference.
Save the date and book your tickets: CiviCon, April 22, 2010

Information and registration is here. Please register as soon as possible :)

Would be great if folks could propose a few sessions here. We'd love to organize the conference into various tracks (fundraising, advocacy/political, membership/association, education). The success of the conference depends on our combined involvement.

We are also having quite a few trainings around that time in Atlanta, GA around NTEN (April 7, 11, 12). There is an affinity group session and panel discussions around CiviCRM during NTEN.

We are also having trainings the day before DrupalCon April 18.

If you are in the area or attending either of those conferences, we could use your help. Please contact us via email.

A complete list of our events is here

lobo

Exciting to see a product evolve so far in such a short timeframe. If I recall correctly, my own introduction to CiviCRM began on the Kleercut campaign in 2005. It's been a reliable friend several times since then and just keeps on improving. Kudos to all the folks that make this open-source software project possible.

This is one event that I might just have to attend. If you're considering CiviCRM for your organization, you might want to think about it too.

Our "Left Coast" friends over at Groundwire (formerly ONE/Northwest) have just posted a great roundup of events in 2010 that any self-respecting "technologist for good" should check out.

There are a lot of conferences on that list that are new to me, so I'm looking forward to digging into the agendas and asking for feedback from folks that have attended in the past.

There are a few events not on Groundwire's list that caught my eye this year. I provide them with the caveat that I haven't personally attended these, and most haven't announce follow-up events yet. Here's to hoping they do:

• Tide's Momentum conference
• Fairsay's eCampaigning Forum in Oxford
• Journalism That Matters
• Organizing 2.0
• A local "Ignite" events
• And, finally, any one of the great events that are run by Aspiration Technology Foundation ever year

There are more, but I'll leave it there.

Know of others? Post a comment over at Groundwire.

I stumbled on the "lifestream" blog of Cory O'Brien today. Being a fan of "lifestreams" (an aggregation of 'actions' taken on various sites) myself, I was interested to find that Cory's site was running on an lifestream aggregation platform called Sweet Cron, which was new to me. Sweet Cron is an open-source PHP-based application developed by "yongfook."

The developer, however, has since moved his own lifestream/blog to the free service called Posterous. Posterous, like Tumblr makes blogging easy, which is great. However, Posterous, like Tumblr, also has a very opaque business plan. Call me cynical: but I can't get my head around relying on "free" hosted Web services for more than transient projects. (I'm even starting to question my own previous musings about a "Software pyramid for a healthy non-profit".)

From the recent purchase of EtherPad by Google -- leaving even their paid customers in the lurch -- to the quiet shut down of free service TwitApps, it seems that hosted services -- paid or not -- can be volatile ground these days. There's a long list of web services that have joined the "dead pool" over the last few years -- I know that I've been bitten more than once (Stikipad, Ma.gnolia, etc.)

If you've read Free by Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson, you'll know that most of these services aren't free by any means; they are simply going for the largest market possible to make it feasible for 5% of users to pay the freight for the other 95%. If they can't reach the mass market necessary to succeed, troubling times lay ahead for the service's users.

Enough of these free services have shut down that I've started moving toward installed software again for my own personal needs. After enough wasted time looking for half-baked free services, I've found it becomes worthwhile to invest in running the service myself on my own infrastructure. Your mileage may vary of course.

All that said, I'm sincerely curious about what others are doing: Are you relying more-and-more on free services like Posterous and Tumblr? Do you think about the day of reckoning when, inevitability, they introduce a premium plan, sell your data, or show ads on your site? Do you back up your data regularly, or just have faith that all will be okay? Or, alternately, are you starting to dust off your old programming books and getting to work on your own solutions?