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.

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?

I saw a note from long-time friend Amanda Hickman this week announcing the release of the “Base Edition of NGO-in-a-box”. It reminded me of all the work that’s been underway (for some years now) at Tactical Tech to get the NGO-in-a-Box project up-and-running. NGO-in-a-box is probably one of the most impressively organized projects in the social-technology sector … from the NGO-in-a-Box site:

NGO-in-a-box offers a set of peer reviewed and selected Free and Open Source software (F/OSS), tailored to the needs of NGO’s. It provides them not only with software, but also with implementation scenarios and relevant materials to support this.

After a couple of weeks of fighting off pneumonia — antibiotics, inhaler, and all — I’m finally feeling like I’m getting back on my feet. Though I never feel very productive when I’m sick — I did have time to jot down a few Web sites of recent note:

Total accident that I stumbled on Fog Creek Copilot: Wow! What a great little subscription-based application for remote desktop assistance. Works on Windows or Macintosh computers. It looks simple to set-up, and the price is right.

I think that OpenCongress caught everyone’s attention recently. Yet another great “Politics 2.0” project from the Sunlight Foundation. OpenCongress brings together official government data with news and blog coverage to give you the real story behind each bill.

stikkit just stuck for me during a little Web 2.0 application search. This is a crazy little Web-baed productivity application that David Wheeler — the lead Bricolage developer — is involved in.

Of course Brad — my fun-loving BSD friend — pointed me to the BSD Network CLI. It’s one of the most interesting “themes” for Wordpress that I’ve come across. The world of Web 2.0 never ceases to amaze me. Basically, this is a command-line interface for reading a blog via a Web browser. Type “help” to get a list of available commands.

I can’t remember where I first saw One Percent for the Planet — but it seems to be catching on. One Percent for the Planet is an alliance of companies that recognize the true cost of doing business and donate 1% of their sales to environmental organizations worldwide.

Adam tipped me off to CheatNeutral — a good satirical campaign about carbon offsetting. And Colan Schwartz tipped me to RetailMeNot in SILC.

So, there you go: being sick is totally boring. ;-)

Collaboratively authored by Dmytri Kleiner and Phillip Smith

Last updated December 2004

Like many curious onlookers, you're probably wondering, Are free and open-source applications really able to meet our needs? or, Are open-source systems compatible with the software that our clients, partners and colleagues are using? The honest answer is yes. In the past two years, the pace of open-source desktop development has increased dramatically, the usability of Linux has been improved(http://www.relevantive.de/Linux-Usabilitystudy_e.html), the installed base of users has increased to an estimated 18 million (http://counter.li.org/estimates.php) and many large software companiesfrom IBM to Novell to Sun—have made significant commitments to develop on, integrate with and support open-source operating systems and software. Additionally, several "e-Riders" (organizations and individuals that support not-for-profit groups with technology) have started the process of moving their clients in the direction of free software (http://www.lincproject.org/), and many brands you experience every day, like the Government of Canada, CNN, Google and Yahoo, use open-source software to power their Web sites.