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A few weeks ago, Sadie Honey and Elizabeth Raley — Certified SCRUM Masters, or Mistrixes? — presented an NTEN webinar on the topic of SCRUM and Project Management for Accidental Product Owners or Project Managers . The video of the webinar is available from NTEN via ReadyTalk , and the slide deck is available on SlideShare . View more presentations from sadiehoney .
On the heals of our recently released survey that looked at foundations and their websites , I spoke with one of our clients, John Theodore, a Technology Officer at the Annenberg Foundation , about their choice to go with Drupal for their website redesign. The Annenberg Foundation, founded in 1989, provides funding and support to nonprofit organizations in the United States and globally. They have a number of web properties that serve different aims and programs. The Foundation decided to begin migrating their web properties from a variety of mostly proprietary or home-grown systems to Drupal in 2010. The work is ongoing and CivicActions is working with the Foundation on the project. Why Open Source? John admitted to something of a bias against proprietary systems based on the Foundation’s experiences as well as his own personal history as a developer and vendor. Proprietary systems often don’t communicate well with each other and thus become their own silos. Vendor and support options are also more limited for proprietary systems.
An interesting study came out last week reporting on congressional staffers’ attitudes towards Citizen Advocacy. For the report by The Partnership For A More Perfect Union , the organization surveyed 260 congressional staff on their opinions towards communication with constituents via both electronic and traditional mediums.
Tonight is President Obama’s second State of the Union address before Congress and the American People. There has been no shortage of talk about civility (as signified by Republicans and Democrats intermingling on the House floor), and speculation about what the President will talk about (jobs), and in just a few hours we will see what it amounts to.
Are you an Accidental Project Manager or Product Owner? Have you been given a product or service to deliver and been tossed in the deep end? Do you know what a Project Manager or Product Owner is or is supposed to do?
Each year NTEN raises money to provide scholarships to staff from nonprofit organization that would otherwise not be able to afford to attend the conference. Usually the money is raised by people and companies sponsoring or donating money with the reward of seeing Holly Ross, and other N-NTEN staff do something funny, like singing and dancing to All The Single Ladies .
CivicActions is tremendously excited for the 2011 Nonprofit Technology Conference (11NTC) .
We are proud to once again be sponsors of CiviCON , the annual conference for CiviCRM implementers and developers. Last year’s conference was held in conjunction with DrupalCon in San Francisco, and this year’s will precede DrupalCon in Chicago (which we are also sponsoring ).
Last month while conducting research for an upcoming report on Foundations and their use of Twitter, we started looking at what Content Management Systems (CMS) were running Foundations’ websites. Our curiosity lead us to look at the top 885 Foundations with websites (based on endowment size), utilizing the Wappalyzer browser plug-in to determine how the sites were built and what technologies and services were in use. A note on methodology: the list of Foundations and their website URLs came from the Glass Pockets transparency database . We used Wappalyzer during the month of December 2010 and looked only at the home page of Foundation. We were able to clearly identify the technology powering 478 of the 885 Foundation websites (54%). Highlights Here are some highlights from the tables below: When we look at all the Foundations in our sample, Drupal is the front-runner among open source systems, but not by much. Wordpress trails in second, and just over half as many sites are running Joomla compared to Drupal. Most surprising to us is how few Foundation sites (just five) are running Plone. When we look at the largest 500 Foundations, Drupal has double the Wordpress instances, and Joomla is right on the heels of Wordpress with just 3 fewer sites. In both samples, the proprietary web framework ASP.net powers the highest number of sites, however the lead is significantly smaller in the top 500 Foundation sample. Similarly, Dreamweaver drops from 10.51% of the full sample, remaining ahead of all the open source CMSs, to just 5% in the top 500 sample, a few points behind Drupal at 7.6%.
I created the following simple scrum visualization diagram for my Ignite Presentation, " SCRUM For Wedding Planning " because I could not find any decent openly licensed SCRUM diagrams. This image is licensed under Creative Commons (see below) and you are free to modify it as long as you share your modified versions. You can share…