Archive for August, 2004
August 27, 2004
Hosted Drupal Service
Gunnar Langemark has pointed out a new company that provides a hosted Drupal service: Bryght From the site:
Bryght is our Drupal hosted service that enables anyone – from individuals to businesses and organizations – to easily build and maintain a dynamic website with an online community.
I’ve used Drupal for a couple small project groups. It is a great collaborative tool if you can keep everything html based (document management tends to be a bit weak). This service should make it feasible for a much wider array of people to easily take advantage of Drupal.
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August 26, 2004
Source Control HOWTO
Eric Sink is writing a series of articles on how to use source control. Definitely check this out if you manage development teams in-house or out.
I have started writing a series of articles explaining how to do source control and the best practices thereof. See below for links to the individual chapters in this series. The Introduction explains my motivations and goals for writing this series.
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August 26, 2004
IA in Belgium
Peter van Dijck provides us with a view into the Belgian IA/UX community. He scores intercultural bonus points for a Fons Trompenaars reference!
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August 25, 2004
Six great ways to ruin a brainstorming session
Nice article on how not to run a brainstorming session: Six great ways to ruin a brainstorming session - InnovationTools. Spotted via James Robertson.
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August 21, 2004
Blowback
The CEO at View from a Corner Office has some disturbing news from a meeting of her association’s international federation organization:
It’s hard to discuss the international dimension of our work as association executives without delving at least to some degree into the effect of the present administration’s foreign relations policy on how those outside the United States perceive us. In this particular federation the animus toward the United States is so pronounced that for the first time in the federation’s history, all U.S. delegates for office toppled in defeat. If it’s possible to be stunned but not surprised, that was our reaction. At the same time the federation issued a ballot asking member nations to support a dues overhaul that would increase the U.S. share by 8,000%. That is not a typo.
It has been a while since I’ve worked the international side of the business but I can’t say that that reaction surprises me. Unilateralism is completely antithetical to the mission and nature of associations. It’s going to take many years to rebuild trust around the world.
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August 20, 2004
Event Blogging, But Not What You Expected
A Minneapolis blogger got in on the ASAE event blogging, although in a way that I bet the conference organizers didn’t anticipate:
Ooooh, my freakin’ ears. What am I talking about? The American Society of Association Executives (ASAE, I linked their site because that name just sounds too made up), that’s what. They are having a ‘little’ conference outside my apartment. By little I mean they have about four city blocks barricaded and they are all eating, drinking, and networking their heads off. Oh, one other thing. Pretend that you could marry the music of 90’s adult contemporary with smooth jazz; ahh soothing right? Well then imagine a female-male lead singing duo on crack belting out ‘today’s hits and yesterday’s favorites’ (They just did a bone-chilling rendition of Outkast’s Hey Ya). Yeah, and according to the conference itinerary I’ve got a couple more hours to go. Where’s my damn earplugs? Ugh.
That is a pretty accurate description of the party that was thrown Saturday night to open up the meeting. And that easy listening band was truly horrendous.
I came across the post by searching Technorati on Tuesday morning. My plan was to demonstrate the site during a presentation I was doing that afternoon and talk about how associations should start using it to monitor how the blogging world is covering their issues and organizations. What a perfect example! If it’s any consolation, anonymous Minneapolis law student, the attendees in the session seemed to agree that the band was pretty bad.
I also talked about what kind of PR damage that entry could have done if it had been picked up by the local media. Hell, Technorati has a CNN advisory gig so it might go national. OK, that was a pretty low risk, but it could happen. The media seem to love blog-related stories these days.
In the session, I suggested that buying the blogger in question a free dinner or giving him some noise-canceling headphones might be a nice gesture to apologize for interupting his evening and could help turn the story into a postive if it did get picked up. That would have been money well spent to avert a more negative story and at the least would be the right thing to do. Of course, that requires keeping up with what is going on in the blogging world via tools such as Technorati.
In any case, thanks for sharing your neighborhood with us and for giving me a great example for the session I spoke in.
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August 16, 2004
This Turn Down Service Brought to You by Acme!
Can we all agree that this is a bit much? Stuff under the door at night or left with the newspaper in the morning is ok, but I’d like to be able to get in bed without having to remove the marketing material from the covers first.
BTW, I’ve got lots of notes from the conference so far that may take me a day or two to get converted into posts here. Hope to get to it soon….
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August 15, 2004
Last little bit on AMS/CMS deployment timing
In our session yesterday I had the opportunity to ask Loretta DeLuca of DelCor Technology Solutions what she thought about deploying an AMS and a CMS simultaneously. (Loretta is one of the more experienced AMS selection consultants out there.) She said she wouldn’t recommend it either but for slightly different reasons than I have been yammering on about here. Her main concern was that trying to develop your ‘front-office’ systems (the CMS) while still developing, deploying and configuring your ‘back-office’ system (the AMS) is inviting lots of backtracking and crises you need not have to deal with if you wait for the AMS deployment to be complete before ramping up on the CMS project. Waiting lets the AMS settle down so that it isn’t a moving integration target for the CMS. Makes sense to me.
OK, I think that dead horse is well and truly beaten. I’ll move on to something else soon. :)
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August 13, 2004
What controversy?
Jeffrey Zeldman revisits web standards evangelism after some time off the rubber chicken circuit. I guess I’m not reading in the right places but I’ve never had a sense that there were huge rifts in the standards social club (other than RSS of course). I never felt turned off towards adopting standards once I learned about the benefits from reading folks such as Zeldman and Meyer. Maybe the controversy rings loudest to those in the middle of it?
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August 13, 2004
On the ground
Made it to Minneapolis with no problems and have settled in at the Double Tree. They give you a warm cookie when you check in. I recommend that all hotels begin doing this. Yummy.
Got our handouts for our pre-con session tomorrow copied at the local Kinkos, since I put the finishing touches on them during the flight. We’re supposed to turn them in weeks before the meeting but that didn’t happen for several very good reasons. Really. Bad speaker! I’ll probably throw a copy of them up on this site next week if my co-presenters are willing.
As I worked on the presentation I read a story about how Hershey Foods tried to implement CRM, ERP and supply chain managements systems simultaneously. This apparently failed in a rather spectacular way: they weren’t able to delivery candy to major customers in time for Halloween in 1999. Ouch. More reason to think twice before implementing a content management system and an association management system (CRM) at the same time.
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