PTP Blog

I’m hoping that I can appeal to the collective wisdom of the Internet here for some help with an issue I’ve been wrestling with for a long time. At PTP, we generate a lot of curriculum, and over the last six month have been trying to figure out the best way to “publish” that curriculum.

I really see curriculum development as an organic process where the material grows and changes with time and the circumstances it’s used in. To my way of thinking, we want to publish in a way that enables ease of collecting and sharing feedback and modifications made to the curriculum as it’s used in different sscenarios with different folks.

That leads me to thinking that we’re looking at a wiki - but it needs to be one that’s easy to use, and that has a WYSIWYG editing interface to lower the barriers to it being a useful tool for non-techies.

So, that leaves me asking all the very wise folks out there - what do you suggest? Is there a particular wiki tool that fits my requirements? What about a particular configuration of drupal or plone? I’m open to whatever ideas you’ve got, so please share your thoughts.

Aeroseek: Real-Time Flight Tracking also includes a “download and view in Google Earth” option - cool stuff.

Disclaimer - I am not technical enough to know if this is a big deal, or if it is, how big of a deal it is.

This afternoon, we were talking about finding phone numbers for folks - how it’s often challenging even in the age of Google. For giggles, I searched Google for “Arif Mamdani phone number.” What I found was kind of surprising - a page on the civicspacelabs.org website that appeared to be CivicSpace contact manager - and interestingly, it appeared that Google had actually crawled their contact management pages and had captured my name, along with others. Clicking the link from Google’s results page returned an Access Denied error as it should - un-authorized users shouldn’t be able to view pages on a website that are private. Clicking the Google Cache link however turned up this:

and

which pretty clearly shows a bunch of names, including mine, along with phone numbers.

Now, as I said, I’m not techie enough to really understand what happened here, but it looks to me like it’s a bit of problem.
added March 17, 2006:
So the issue that this raises - at least the issue I want to raise is not about CivicSpace, their website, or their ability to configure the code they are developing correctly. The issues are really around privacy, security, and confidentiality - all of which David raises in his comments on this post.

See, the problem here is that most non-profit organizations (PTP included) don’t have explicit policies for what they do with information, and what they will do in the event that information is compromised. In the case highlighted here, it’s clear that user information was made public in ways that the users were probably not aware of (I certainly wasn’t), and probably did not consent to (I certainly didn’t).

What this spotlights is the fact that David points out - that as greater parts of the non-profit sector turn to CRM applications that are online and/or integrated with our websites, the potential for data to be accidentally exposed increases. It therefore behooves us to start a serious conversation about how we treat our data.

For my part, seeing this has made me commit to getting PTP’s privacy policy off my task list and clearly posted on our website - and it’s made me realize that in addition to have a policy that states what we do your information, we also need to have a policy that clearly states what we will do in the event that we learn that your information has been compromised.

What are you going to do?

Oh my: google buys Writerly

I know, I know, they’re much more evil than their “don’t be evil” but still… calendaring is such a huge problem for just about everyone that I know, both inside and outside of our work lives, that I’ve very interested to see how Google’s calendar addresses these challenges.

nice overview of rss:Blogcritics.org: Why Aren’t You Using RSS?

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to explain RSS to organizers. More recently, I’ve given up trying to explain the technology - which is really not interesting or exciting when you break it down - and have instead been saying: “just try it, you’ll like it!” And really, I think it’s true - most folks I know who have really given an rss reader a try have gotten pretty hooked pretty quickly, and more importantly, have very quickly understood why RSS is interesting- an understanding that no amount of explanation seems to be able to do.

Ah well, I knew that when I posted about a cell phone backup device, it was sure to mean that I would eventually actually need one.

And so it would appear that my cell phone is missing, though not actually confirmed as lost yet. Strangely, I find myself wondering if it’s even something I’d want to replace if it is in fact, lost.

I’m also reminded of a prank pulled by some friends our senior year in high school.
continue reading…

interesting take - Seth seems to be saying
that it boils down to a sort of framing problem.