Going Public: An Organizer’s Guide to Citizen Action

by Michael Gecan

Excerpt:

The dynamic of the relational culture is created by leaders who initiate and deepen and multiply effective public relationships. These leaders know, consciously or unconsciously, that their ability to act depends on the number and quality of relationships that they and their colleagues can muster and sustain. They see themselves as recruiters, talent scouts, and trainers. They look for other leaders, not passive followers or adoring dependents. Their bottom line is not profit and loss, or clients served, but expanding pools of reciprocity and trust among people who can act with purpose and power.

Excerpt:

Start on time and end on time. Recognize yourself and one another. Hold yourself accountable (“South Bronx Churches has thirty-five leaders here today!”), so that you can demand public accountability from others and hold them to it. Take the power you build and test it against the power of others. Bring energy, joy, and irreverence to the public square, not just ideology, self-reighteousness, and rote reenactments. Don’t be deterred with others won’t engage. Flow around the obstacles. Persist in unexpected ways.

article in Linux Journal …http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8184

Microsoft recently released Visual FoxPro Version 9.0. Although outside of the normal “office” applications from Microsoft. VFP remains one of the best performing database programs available. It connects to anything and everything. It can form the basis of a web-based applications, functioning as a back-end database, or providing an attractive front end to databases hosted elsewhere, such as SQL-Server and Oracle, or data provided as a web service.

Microsoft positions VFP as a developer’s tool, and it shows. In terms of leverage you can do things in VFP with a fraction of the effort required in Access, especially once you want to do some reporting, or file conversion, or querying. In short, for data manipulation, VFP is king.

So, where does this leave Access, and “the other desktop database”…FileMaker Pro? Access is “just there”…bundled with copies of Microsoft Office Professional. The current version is Microsoft Access 2003, and it offers incremental improvements from previous versions, including greater reliability. Access is is cheap, when bundled, you barely notice the cost. If you need to build a modest application quickly, Access will do the job.

FileMaker Pro is a convert from the Macintosh world. Databases created in Windows can be shared on the Mac and vice-versa. For sheer logic and ease-of-use, Filemaker wins my vote hands down. Filemaker saved the day when we built a photo database of 8,000 photos for a city code office… allowing rapid access to any photo. This application was stored on a Mac server, and served to Windows desktops.

Bottom line: For a quick and dirty single-user desktop database, I would use FileMaker Pro, if I could afford it, or Access if I had it. Once I had to scale up to a real multi-user database, I would seriously consider working with an experienced database developer. Once you establish trust with that person, you are probably best served by using whatever the developer is familiar with. Indeed with a well-designed custom program, users won’t be aware of the underlying development tool used to create the database program.

For ad-hoc data manipulation, using the SQL query language Visual FoxPro is ideal.

Went to a meeting of our local software developer’s alliance…a new organization which has been sponsored by our local community and economic development people. First meeting I’ve been to, and it looks promising.  We had a funny presentation though, by a representative of the Meta Group. (soon to be aquired by Gartner Group). This is a business which has as a slogan Driving Pervasive Integration Through IT Innovation.

Ok…well, the speaker gave a PowerPoint presentation (several times she stood directly in front of the projector) and spent considerable time explaining how the great technology crash of 2000–2001 was caused by, among other things, hype and unrealistic expectations. (Didn’t mention how Gartner and its ilk, when they aren’t driving pervasive integration basically invented hype and unrealistic expectations). One of her final slides was an illustration of a series of columns, each labeled things like “health care”, “human resources”, “security”, and so on. and her point being that we shouldn’t expect to deal with government customers simply within their “silos”…but that we should attempt to sell solutions across clusters of activity… or something like that; that silos were obsolete. At which my neighbor said, in his best flat New England accent, “well, we still got a few of them silos on the farm in Vermont..”.

Just what it says. An effort of the NonProfit Open Source Initiative. Contains case studies and comments about operating system and application software. I would say the desktop is covered nicely…there are good alternatives to Microsoft products. Still, there are holes in the area of accounting and fundraising software. The site includes a “reality check” discussion about how well this all works.

Other links: The Organizer’s Collaborative in Boston who describe themselves thus: ” We are a nonprofit membership organization composed of activists and technically oriented people working to enhance grassroots organizing, research, and movement building by social change organizations.”

Linc – The Low Income Networking and Communications have done some work with obsolete hardware. I know I have this fantasy that 100Mhz Pentium II machines with 256Kb of RAM or less can be loaded with Linux and behave just like a machine 8 years younger. Pehaps if the version of Linux is also eight years old? Red Hat 6.1 circa 1998 loads on some of these old machines.

This site is a gateway to economic statistics from the government and other sources. Find out the mean family income for your state, the relative number of casualties of the war in Iraq, as opposed to other conflicts back as far as the Korean war. Lots of energy statistics. (and it doesn’t look good…)

http://www.nationalpriorities.org

Years ago I asked a friend why he wasn’t using Linux and he said. “Academic pricing for Microsoft products”. I just ordered software for our new server, and it came to about $280.00 for Windows 2003 standard, including 20 user licenses at $6.00 each, and the media for $29.95. This is an incredible deal.

As they say..”dated Linux, married Microsoft”.

Activewords is a automation program on steriods. I tried it and found that it didn’t suit my needs, but it all depends on how you work. See for yourself at their web site. They graciously asked for my comments about the program, so I wrote back the following:

Regarding Activewords:

I’m, perhaps…a somewhat “older” computer user. In general I find if my computer interupts me with some kind of suggestion or pop-up, or if it fills things in automatically, I have found that to be distracting enough that it seems to offset the possible time savings. I’m a fast typist, and when single words are filled in, for example with passwords or phrases in Microsoft Word, I’ve almost completed the typing before the word comes in. So, then I have to:
1. look at the word
2. determine whether it is or is not what I want
3. confirm the action or the word
4. or keep typing.

Frankly, it is easier just to keep typing.

So, I’ve turned off those functions in Word. When programming in Visual Studio/Visual FoxPro/Java I turn off “tool tips”, and Intellisense, and all that stuff, (which is not to say that I don’t call it up once in a while to review the syntax of something).

I also use keyboard shortcuts a lot, and I’ve memorized most of them for Windows. So, the benefit of Activewords in that respect is less than might be for someone who uses the mouse a a lot. I also have dual 21″ screens…so once things are open, then I have enough screen real-estate to keep things open…and I tend not to have more than two or three applications open at a time anyway.

I do use (and pay for!) some add-ins… X-1 has been in use for several months, and OnFolio has become indespensible. These tend to sit behind the scenes and come up only on demand, and they leverage my ability to find information without adding to my distraction.

I work with a lot of older computer users and novices. I find that they suffer greatly from the complexity of the Windows interface. ActiveWords would be a godsend to those people who know what they are automating…but could be a nightmare for someone who doesn’t know what they are doing yet. Clearly for a slow typist, or a disabled person, Activewords would be a godsend, and I don’t deny that for a large segment of the population Activewords is just the ticket.

I basically detest cell phones, but since I’m spending a fair amount of time away from the office, I finally decided to go for one. Because I’m in the process of, as they say, establishing my usage pattern I signed up for a prepaid plan from Verizon. This works like this:
You buy the phone, the activation and get a number. You also buy minutes, in my case I bought two hours worth of minutes for $15.00. Total cost of phone+minutes was $180.00.
Minutes cost 10 cents. However, an initial connection is billed at 25 cents, so the first minute of any call costs you 35 cents, with subsequent minutes billed at the 10 cent rate.
Before a call begins to ring, a voice comes on telling you how many minutes or hours you have for this call. (Of course, this takes at least 15 seconds of your precious time, every time the person is on….and then then the phone rings at the other end.) So even if you don’t get connected, you still pay the air time.)
The plan has U.S. long distance, with no roaming charges. I’ll be testing this on a couple short trips. There are no free minutes, or free weekends. If you are roaming off the Verizon network then the cost is 98 cents per minute, added to the normal charge. (ouch).
I started this in January, and I bought another two hours of minutes on the web. All purchases are charged via a credit card. It is now March, and I still have almost two hours left. So, far, then I’ve paid $210.00 in upfront costs. However, I’m managing about two hours per month of time, which at $10.00 – $15.00 or so is a lot less than even the cheapest prepaid plan.