After nearly a year of waiting to see what Google would do with the purchase of Hans Rosling'sGapMinder project we've been rewarded! Google has integrated the GapMinder time-series data visualization tools directly into Google Spreadsheets as a 'Gadget'.
The gadget allows you turn turn any time-series data into stunning full motion graphs. The graphs are interactive and can also be easily embedded into your online work as a flash object.
Here's Hans Rosling in action, showing off the GapMinder tool with Carbon Emmission data:
With the addition of GapMinder gadgets in Google spreadsheets, you can now create your own visualizations in a snap. Here's a quick one that I did showing web traffic to the main sections of ForumOne.com over the past year - fun!
Take some time to play with the axis parameter and you can begin to see how powerful this tool is. Many of the organizations that we work with have data as a core piece of their issue analysis and policy work. Exploring this new tool should be a high priority for those that are looking for a flexible and simple way to present that data online in engaging formats.
Andrew Cohen, myself, and about 10 other volunteers spent the morning installing a wireless network (Cisco provided the equipment) at The St. Bernard Community Center in New Orleans' lower 9th ward. The volunteer effort was organized by Beth Kanter as part of the Nonprofit Technology Network's Day of Service.
It felt great to give back a little, to meet the dedicated folks that are still working hard every day to bring the city back, and to roll up my sleeves and work with some power tools. Thank to Beth Kanter for organizing the day.
Here's some pics that I snapped on my Treo while we were working, and a quick video of our ride to the center:
If your organization is like most, your communications team is working hard to devise the best way to tap into the massive popularity of the social web to promote your message and move your mission. Before you spend too much time and energy trying to devise a clever FaceBook app that's bound to go viral, here's a few practical tips for easing your organization into the wild new world of Social Media.
Set your content free
Anything you post to the web should be easily sharable. So first, make sure to give your site visitors the opportunity to post your content to Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Newsvine and other social media sharing sites - and seek out niche news sharing sites that cover your sector and include those as well. It's free exposure - and its the first step to spreading your messaging beyond the confines of your own domain.
Teach your staff to tag, post, friend, and share
You may say that your site visitors don't know about those Social Media sites I just listed. Maybe that's true. But it's easy to educate your staff. So let them be the first wave of social evangelists for your content. Here's how: Teach your communications staff and issue experts to create accounts on the social media sites relevant to your sector, you can do that at your next staff meeting in 20 minutes. Now have them click those sharing links you added to your content in step one and you've just turned your staff into social media mavens.
Don't be Selfish
In the world of social media, blatant self promotion is pretty obvious, and so you don't want your staff only sharing your organization's content. They'll gain more credibility, and more friends and followers, if they're sharing news and information of interest and relevance to your sector from any source. Here's how: take advantage of the fact that your staff are passionate about the issues and topics your organization works on. Everyday they see interesting and relevant news and stories all over the web that would be of interest to others like them. In fact, they probably already email them to each other all the time. Train your staff to post to social media sites instead of locking all that great information up in your office email.
So what's in it for your organization? The goal is to give your ideas and messages the ability to be rapidly spread through the networks of millions of real people that are consuming news on recommendations from their friends. By positioning your staff as evangelists, you'll be well on your way to making many new friends. These are friends that are likely to listen, because they trust your staff as smart providers of useful information. And of course, their friends have friends who listen to them too, and so on. So the next time you launch that great campaign, it will have an entirely new channel through which to spread - and it's a channel that's growing as fast, or faster than anything we've seen on the web to date.
Last week I was invited by the AFL-CIO to talk with about 40 of their affiliated union's communication directors. We had a great discussion about online trends and opportunities for making an impact online. The conversation was focused on four principles that we're seeing have a real positive effect these days:
1. Crowd-Sourcing: What can your crowd do for you?
2. The Network Effect: Making your sites and systems better with user supplied information
3. Everyone's a Pro-sumer: Thinking about multimedia, user generated content, and mobility
4. Put down the Bull Horn: Building interactive relationships in the age of "friending"
The goal was to share a few stories that illustrate these trends and innovations at a high level and to provide tangible tactics and approaches that can be mixed into your own web communications’ strategies. The full presentation audio is available below, enjoy...
info for grantees to see other similar work being done across their sector
inform grantmakers to see sector-based investments -> lead to collaboration
demonstrate the collective impact of a foundation's investment
trend monitoring
Why Do This in the First Place?
The foundatiion center has, for years manually collected and 'munged' grants data from participants - labor intensive and slooow - poor visibility into the real data
How?
any foundation publishes their grant data to the web in a standard format
This is a great initiative to increase transparency and open information sharing.
opportunity exists to extend standard to grantee outputs - so that a grantee could tag their outputs to a specific grant - and have grantsfire compile the documents, posts, photos, reports etc - wow
amazing to me that leading grant management database vendors don't automatically support this standard and provide the publishing service to their customers
Back in June we hosted another Web Executive Seminar at the National Press Club. This time we convened four IT leaders to talk about Internet Technology Investment planning for their nonprofit or government organizations.
Our speakers included:
Susi Alger, Information Technology Director at opensecrets.org, (2007 Webby Award Winner)
one of my pet peeves as someone trying to develop software tools for scholars, teachers, and students is the lack of application programming interfaces (APIs) for educational resources.
If your policy or issue-focused organization is like most, you have great data locked away in databases, websites, and reports. You are distributing the information through your traditional communication channels - including the web - but consumers of your information have to come to you to get it, and its only available in formats that you provide. Why not set that data free and let users manipulate and consume it in their own innovative ways?
Empowered by freely available application programming interfaces (APIs), innovative developers can now grab data and tools from multiple sources and combine them to create new and innovative views of the information (check out ChicagoCrime.org for a great example). Commercial organizations are embracing the trend in a big way, and it has spawned a new wave of online applications called mashups.
These commercial organizations have realized that opening their data and tools expands the reach of their services and information well beyond the capacity of thier internal resources - and it lets its information assume new and powerful shapes. However, non-commercial organizations have been slow to embrace the trend, and are noticably under-represented in this current list of over 200 freely available data and service APIs.
There are thousands of motivated innovators out there - set your data free and let them innovate for you.
It begs the question - how should an organization manage the balance between "transparency and openness" and control of their message? Its a question that used to need answering only by online community purveyors. Today, every organization using the web to distribute their message needs to be paying close attention to this debate.
I love open comments, just as I love free beer, free pizza... But I'm not entitled to them. And those who partake, I think, owe a certain degree of civility to their hosts.
In an age where there's less control, I think that such informal measures matter more, not less.
Glen Reynolds
On the value in being open:
The age of controlled conversation is over. The age of open conversation is here. But that is damned hard for the controllers to get used to. And I don't say that with the pejorative edge it seems to indicate. The journalists thought it was their job -- emphasis on job, responsibility, value -- to control by verifying and judging and so on. If the job, instead, is to enable [emphasis mine], then you have to start exercising new muscles. And it is important to keep in mind that a democracy is better served by the airing of more viewpoints and perspectives. And journalism is better served by the exposing of more news.
I tried using Basecamp for a project a while back and I found it infuriating - we gave up on it pretty quickly... The 37Signals guys are dedicated to their “less is more” philosophy but for those who crave more features, ProjectSpaces seems like a good option.
We have worked really hard to keep ProjectSpaces both feature-rich and simple at the same time. It's encouraging to see it starting to get noticed!
Jim Cashel recently asked the question Are Books Dead?. This month's FastCompany Magazine features a great conversation between Jeff Jarvis, a blogger at BuzzMachine.com, and John Griffin, President of The National Geographic Society, on that exact question - and there are some fantastic quotes in their brief exchange that have direct relevance to Policy and Issue-focused organizations that today rely heavily on thick research reports and books to distribute their message.
Here's some good ones:
So what are you in 20 years, when the medium no longer matters? In our post-scarcity world, distribution is not king and neither is content. Conversation is the kingdom, and trust is king. Perhaps your value is not just editors or articles but the community around them. Break free of media's shackles and ask: What are you really?...
So take that as advice from the bottom-up: Find ways to aggregate people and capture the wisdom of that crowd.
I'm attending the Technology Affinity Group annual conference in San Francisco - a gathering of foundation technology leaders. Here's some live blogging notes on a session about GrantsFire - an edge aggregator of grant information.