Thank you Dana Blankenhorn!

http://2007.sxsw.com/interactive/panel_picker/

Also any of Jon Lebkowsky's panels too… though I don't remember the titles off the top of my head!

Assistorg's mission is to help NonProfits implement open source solutions. Several of our clients will be at the event helping the programmers design new tools that the entire community can use.

Please check out the wiki at http://lotv-lockin.pbwiki.com password is "transparency"

The League's site is http://www.leagueoftechvoters.org There goal is to get more techies involved in the political process and yea I am very involved in that organization as well.

The event is going to be awesome. We are going to have events every 4 hours to keep the programmers pumped. We have a videographer that is gonig to be doing live video blogging of the event. We have a martini rampage and fire spinners and hulahoop dancers and Djs' spinning for us. I have heard humors of zombies?

http://www.knowbility.org will be bringing accessiblity experts help us write compliant code.

We need programmers of all ranges to come out. On friday we will have drupal tutorials and php intros for programmers of different flavors. And there is some simple implementations that need to be done as well. And volunteers to keep the programmers entertained and fed are also very welcome!

So drop on by http://www.tekrepublik.com at 5310 Burnet in Austin Texas Oct 13-15 6pm to 6pm and show some love!

Technorati Profile

http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw9.pdf

Please fill this out ASAP, as any payment that would result in your receiving more than $600 in one year will be delayed until I receive this form. You will only need to fill out this form once, unless you move, or the answers in anything in Part II change.

If you cannot complete this form (say, for example you are Canadian), please contact me ASAP so I can get all of my IRS-paper work ducks in a row. The earlier you contact me, the faster you get paid for contracting services.

Contact me at chick at margaritachick d o t com

Michelle

When it states contact a tax professional, I will still be able to help, but it would be beyond the scope of my support functions for AssistOrg

a statistical phenomenon that says that the niche players in any Internet-driven market, become, in aggregate, a larger market force than the “brand names” of that market. For us non-profit types, that means all those little mom-and-pop non-profits are actually a bigger force in toto than the Red Crosses, United Ways and Salvation Armies of this world. In a sense, your average donor is now going to be confronted with a Netflix-like selection of charities he or she can donate to. Sure, they might want to donate to the Red Cross but then there’s the indie non-profit just trying to help out literally in the neighborhood of that donor.

All this “2.0” stuff basically says that paradigms are changing as the web experiences a mainstreaming effect and becomes part of the social fabric. And the long-tail thinking says that when the world is at everybody’s fingertips, they’ll make more nuanced or niche choices from an exponentially broader set of possibilities. When our choices were limited by what we could buy at our local bookstores, the more limited universe of book selections would get most of the sales. With the Internet, we can by any book in print; as a result, the online sales of books that sell few copies far outnumber the sales from bestsellers.

This is relevant to the nonprofit world, because potential donors have far more choices. Every nonprofit, however small, can have a web presence with an engine for processing donations. In fact, facilitated by the increased ability to limit overhead by organizing virtually, more and more small nonprofits are appearing. This is going to be reflected in revenues from small donors - all nonprofits will be effected. All will find it harder to attract donations, but large nonprofits with established large overheads will be especially vulnerable. This will also affect large companies that provide relatively expensive support services to nonprofits (e.g. Convio, Kintera).

The survivors will be smaller, lighter nonprofits (who will establish networks and partnerships to extend their capabilities). They’ll be even more successful if they innovate in the kinds of value they provide to their supporters, and how they provide it.

This is happening now, and it’s an exciting and sometimes difficult time to be operating an NPO. But I think this diversification is ultimately very healthy, and I think there are advantages in evolving away from monolithic organizations to networks of small orgs. Mammals did pretty well compared to dinosaurs, and dinosaurs had to shrink and sprout wings to survive.

• Missions are serviced only by engaging constituents to action
• Engagement activities aren’t unique to nonprofits, so the tools aren’t either
• The best way to build software for nonprofits is to find tools that successfully addresses most of your needs and then add the nonprofit-specific functionality
• Software targeted at a larger market than nonprofits will improve faster than software specifically for the nonprofit market
• Software that has open Application Programming Interfaces makes the “build-on-top” model work
• There is a market for nonprofit-specific software that serves a defined function and is accessible via robust APIs

http://poisonedminds.com/comics/pm20060621.png

Cheers,

Silona

Boy it sure does help that the part of the CPA exam that I'm looking at covers accounting for non-profit organizations. Now I probably won't muck it up completely by accounting for it as I would a normal business.

Turns out a non-profit's equity is called "Net Assets." Makes sense, it's the assets less the liabilities.

It's not as intuitive as QuickBooks or Quicken, but it is much more flexible; I believe to adapt Quickbooks to use in a non-profit organization you have to buy additional software. With this software I just have to set up the books properly. (Hmm, I think this desk is real wood.