A current project of mine has me working out an engagement strategy for a technology based non-profit. I’m sort of appalled at a few things, one of which is how little is researched or written on Technology non-profits and funding for Free and Open Source (FOS) projects, aside for a heated debate whether or not you should click the big, blue donate button and buy a boy (or girl) a coffee.

The Argument

The majority of the nay-sayer’s arguments revolve around the rantings of one man’s post on how disappointed he was at the use of his $5000 donation to an Open Source project when he found out the money was still sitting around 3 months later. This is where my bitch rant post focuses on today.

Despite the fact that the man was getting the third degree from his own readers about his viewpoints that money can’t help an FOS project (read the comments, people), his argument is continually being cited as a reason NOT to contribute to the fiscal well being of an FOS project.

“I’m absolutely dumbfounded to learn that contributing money isn’t an effective way to advance an open source project.” ~J. Atwood

I’m kind of dumbfounded that you would learn that, too, Mr. Atwood, because it’s not true. And I’m kind of dumbfounded that the kids who use his experience to defend their reason not to give to FOS projects. Most of us see you are just being cheap and stingy.

When I said the project could do whatever they saw fit with the money, I meant it. Buy liquor and cigarettes, throw a huge party, play it on the ponies. I’m not kidding.

Ok, kids. There are a few problems with this situation. It seems Mr. Atwood would rather have had the team piss his donation away in the first few weeks rather than put it away as an emergency fund or for when they were better able to address how to utilize the funds strategically at a later date.

Mr. Atwood probably had little experience in non-profit donations and/or might have had other ideas on his agenda. Donating to FOS projects is not a bad thing. In fact, it’s a very very good thing. Without FOS projects and Technology Non-Profits, we wouldn’t have PHP, jQuery, W3C (think HTML and CSS) and all the other goodies that make the web and mobile what they are today. And see all those big companies supporting them? They weren’t always there, they started off as tiny little projects and organizations too, and grew on the charity of supporters and contributors.

How to Donate

So yes, you should donate, just do it right. Three things to keep in mind:

Check out the legitimacy of the organization or project
The man gave $5,000 to an FOS project, no strings attached…no deductions attached either. $5,000 is a huge chunk of money to just turn over to a stranger without verifying in advance how the project is ran and how responsible the group of people behind it is. Registered non-profits have annual reports and sometimes even file 990′s to prove to donors that their funds are properly being handled. Whether you are donating $5 or $5,000 to an organization or a project, it is best to do some research to make sure it is legitimate.

Do it legally
Now let’s talk about that deduction. “No strings attached” is one thing, if you’re handing over change from your pocket or a few hundred dollars, but we all know that $5,000 isn’t just laying around in the average man’s wallet. There is an area of Fund Raising called “Planned Giving”, which is called that because…it takes planning. And planning is good, because at the end of the year the government is going to come to your door and want to know where that $5k went, and you’ll have to file it as a “gift” (and if you give lots of “gifts” including to relatives and your children’s college funds, you’re going to get hit with a “penalty”…i.e. owe more money) instead of claiming it as a donation (which means “deduction”) and that project that you donated to without the 501c3 status? They are going to have to claim the “donation” as income.

A friend recently told me that it has been over 2 years since the federal government has granted 501c3 status to an Open Source project, but they are granting 501c6s. So a deductible donation might not happen with a 501c6, but:

1. Donations could be filed as a business expense.
2. 501c6s are required to file paperwork documenting their financial allocation, which means that if you aren’t ok with your donation being used to fund a mass kegger, you can make sure they are exercising financial responsibility.

The smart thing here would have been a hybrid donation: $500 goes to the formation of a non-profit and the other $4,500 would be a no-strings donation. And don’t tell me that FOS projects are too small/different/underground to register, there are some really weird 501′s that are legitimately registered organizations, including Naked Clowns, animal rescues for Guinea Pigs and one that protests that children aren’t getting equal rights as adults.

Understand that non-profit doesn’t mean non-systematic
Projects, non-profit organizations and for profit businesses a like all require proper management and goals in order to progress forward not to fail. Before donating to a charity or project, realize that sometimes the money won’t go towards super amazing things: like system upgrades and launch parties. Nor should they, as these things seem to be counter productive to the greater good of the project’s mission. Sometimes they end up sitting in an account being used to pay server bills or buy coffee supplies for when the coder is pulling an all-nighter between shifts at the job that actually pays the bills.

And the thing is, a lot of legitimate non-profits claim income generated through interest on their 990′s (think 1040s for 501c3/6s) at the end of the year. A lot of for profit businesses do as well. So for a project to put the money on reserve the way the project in the example did is actually a legitimate business move. A project, a business or an organization…it doesn’t matter what form it takes, requires a certain amount of planning to run correctly. Expect that the project will run professionally and use your funds in the best possible way for their project, they are more familiar with it and it’s goals than you are.

The original project that the man donated to back in 2008, ScrewTurn Wiki is still alive and kicking.

Dear Representatives,

Please reject the Internet Blacklist Bills (PROTECT IP Act in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House) in their current form.

Even as someone who has had their intellectual property used without consent by so called “rogue” websites, I can not stand behind these acts in their current form.

I’ve studied Digital Culture theory in college and have watched the net transform over the 10 years since. The only people who stand to be effected by this act are the legitimate, tax paying, employment producing companies who are giving jobs to one of the hardest hit demographics of the recession: 20-somethings. The underground web will not stop trading intellectual property, no matter what filters and laws are imposed. One site will be shut down, another will open. Onion browsers and other technologies will be used to by pass IPS blocks. If they want to they will find a way.

The internet should not be feared. It is an amazing tool that has already contributed to progress at speeds we have not seen in rest of human history. Blocking this and allowing a handful of people to interpret what is appropriate and what is not is dangerous. There is so much potential, please don’t take that from us.

The Internet Blacklist Legislation is dangerous and short-sighted, and I urge you to join Senator Wyden and other members of Congress, such as Representatives Lofgren, Eshoo and Issa, in opposing it.

Sincerely,

Shell Greenier

—
Jason,

Head over to http://americancensorship.org/ or Mozilla supported the Electronic Frontier Foundation to send an email to your representatives.

No, I know. It’s been a while. It happens. Can I just take a moment to say how awesome my friends are…and not just the ones who have been in my life for 10+ years. Faithful twitter friends are sending me emails to make sure I haven’t died. I haven’t, I can assure you. The truth is, I was cheating a bit on Twitter. You know how Facebook only lets you share updates on “like” pages to Twitter profiles? Well, up until their September debauchery redesign I had been sharing updates from my profile. I didn’t tell you that I was or how I did it because I didn’t want them to cock block me. I’m lazy. In a nut shell it boils down to this simple hack: switch out the numbers in the URL passed on the page that gives permission to share your like page updates with Twitter from your like page to your profile number. Voila! Lazy mans way of cheating the system. I assure you Twitter, I do love you and I am still alive.

Currently Mr. S.Gonzalez and his lovely wife are playing host to me in Raleigh. I was on my way to Pittsburgh last week when the snow storms hit and made the pass over the mountains impossible. So, being the amazing Gonzalez’: they threatened to take the tires off of my car until I acquiesced. Once they realized that didn’t work they bribed me with jQuery swag. Needless to say it was almost impossible to beat back the deafening sound of my nerdgasm echoing in my ears: “Must. Have. jQuery. Flask.” and my tiny <*SQUE*> of delight as stickers and buttons rained down from the heavens. Man did I feel like a nerd pimp when I borrowed his rolls of stickers and pranced around with them on my wrists like bling.

I promise I’ll be around more. My first trimester is over and instead of laying on the couch dying, I am feeling a bit better and hope to be churning out some more articles for Smashing soon.

“You must first engage users…”

There it was. Sitting there in 14pt black and white pixels: one giant statement of hypocrisy. The most un-engaging statement…in the world.

Engage.

Buzzwords are surprisingly unengaging. They are empty compared to what they should be. They act as stand-ins to a bountiful plethora of rich, meaty ideas that could have been but are instead replaced with a handful of syllables because the author (1.) didn’t care enough to find the more appropriate words that would lead users down an deeply intoxicating adventure of great emotional and spiritual importance or 2.) is a slave to word count.

Using buzzwords is just wasting the audience’s time. Respect the audience, don’t use buzzwords.

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

T. Roosevelt “Citizenship in a Republic,”
Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910 via a bookmarklet on the bed at the eo inn in Orlando

“Believability. That is what we were striving for … belief in the life of the characters. That, after all, is the dictionary definition and meaning of the word ‘animation’: to invoke life.” Chuck Jones, describing animation at Warner Brothers via The Role of Emotion in Believable Agents by Joseph Bates

In case you haven’t been around the Madness that long, I’m relatively obsessed with Artificial Intelligence. Yes, ever since I was a wee lad-dess and worked on my thesis of believability in internet interfaces back in 2003, I’ve been obsessed. And my obsession mainly focuses around the inner workings of Carnegie Mellon and their Oz Project and their Center for Entertainment Computing. Swooooon. I remember my first conference there and the boy with the ping pong balls glued all over him. “Motion tracking” they gleamed with a big toothy grin and a thumbs up. My girl parts melted. I was in love. Technophilia at its finest.

So I find myself, from time to time lost among the archives of the Oz Project, and video game design theory and the psychology of film… and fiction writing. And that is the point of this, because while we are busy chasing our tails about things like responsive design and user testing there are industries out there that are light years ahead of ours. Not because they are older and wiser, but because they embraced the human element. They have embraced the art and the magic and the charms of their medium. While we are still stuck on numbers and platforms, they are weaving mystical amazing experiences and winning the hearts and minds of all.

Why is this? Why are we so different? Is it that we started out with Front Page and that they started out with canons? What are we missing? What are we doing wrong? Are we so caught up in the delivery that we miss the true meaning of the platform? As The Role of Emotion in Believable Agents by Joseph Bates discusses, we’re not constructing believable interfaces, amazing stories, awe inspiring fairy tales. We’re still just building navigations and links and informative hypertext. We’re not embracing the quirks of the medium.

Their reaction appear consistent with what Chuck Jones, famous for his success animating Bugs Bunny and other Warner Brothers characters, says was his key insight into animation. As an eight year old he had a cat named Johnson who liked to eat grapefruit and then wear the eaten rind on his head. Jones says he discovered that it is the oddity, the quirk, that gives personality to a character, and it is personality that gives life. If so, our architectures must support quirks, and this may mean they need to allow regularities, such as are expressed in abstraction barriers, to be broken.

Where are the grapefruit eating helmet cats of our industry?

A recent study from Boston College found that companies who employ the Gestalt Closure Principle in their logo design may be creating negative emotion in consumers who respond to the fragmented element with distrust.

On the other hand, “Incompleteness may be interpreted as unclear communication, which can lead to the perception that the firm is untrustworthy,” Hagtvedt said

read more.

I expect this will be my last post for this blog. Thank you to Psychology Today for providing this small soapbox and to you for reading. I am planning to take my Death with Dignity medication soon, unless I die spontaneously before then.

This article “Fairwell” was written June 10. I checked back today to see if there was any update on his condition. His biography was changed from “Ethan Remmel is…” to “Ethan Remmel was…” A small thank you note was posted on his blog by his partner. The denial kicked in, it lasted a few seconds and was more of a wish than an actual disbelief. This was fake, it had to be. It is so much easier to walk through life/scroll through the internets and go “this is fake” than to accept that people change, that people die. Tiny little conspiracy theories of footprints left behind on the binary sands of time.

It wasn’t fake. Ethan Remmel passed away on June 13 and his blog sits quiet.

Soulful Content
Three days before he died he wrote a blog on the need for natural death (like natural childbirth) and dying with dignity. 72 hours left to live and he chose to spend a few of them leaving the world with his view of a heavily controversial subject.

When most of us think about content strategies, we think about what others would like to hear instead of what they need to hear. We regurgitate ideas, spread informative links and aim for “viral”. What happens when we stop benchmarking our strategies and start focusing on the change we make with our words?

The Hard Stuff
When strategy has less to do with progress and manipulation and more to do with soul do we begin to see a change. It involves an internal struggle, be it interpersonal or interoffice. It’s not easy and sometimes it is excruciating, but the world has changed and despite it’s digital roots it requires a heavy dose of reality. We’ve become too connected, too informed, too transparent for the Nikes of the world to try and compare themselves with the TOMS Shoes of the world. We smell phony so if your words don’t match your business model, we know. If your words don’t match your soul, don’t match your mission then the disconnect will be blaring obvious.

If you knew in advance, what would your last blog be about? What would your last product do? What change would you try to make? What’s stopping you from doing that now?

Whatever you do, do it with the very last fiber of your being, do it well and do it honestly.

Wait for it…

…watch for it…

THERE! @ 10:00. It takes a whole 1/5 of a second, so if you blink you’ll miss it. She mentions Steve Jobs using an emotional contagion tactic in his speeches. Swoon.

But watch the whole thing, honestly, it’s divine. Especially Martin Luther King, JR at 11:50 as infographic. Genius.

Nancy Duarte’s talk at TEDx East from Duarte Design on Vimeo.

It can sneak up on you anywhere. In the laboratory it’s called “behavioral research,” in business it’s called “management,” in sales it’s called “CRM,” and in dating it’s called “issues”.