George McCully returns in January to the Ethos Roundtable to unveil the Massachusetts Philanthropic Directory!

Please note that George McCully will not be able to join us for today's session


It's 4:00 (eastern time) on January 18th, and I've heard from George McCully's colleague, Carl Mastandrea. Neither of them will be able to make it to our 4:30 Ethos Roundtable session.

I am already at the hotel, and will be here to hold a very informal, "open-mike" Ethos Roundtable session with anyone who decides to attend.

I hope that those who are disappointed or inconvenienced will accept my apology for the short notice.

Best regards from Deborah





Many Ethos Roundtable members will remember George McCully's first appearance as a featured guest, soon after the publication of his groundbreaking book, "Philanthropy Reconsidered." During that session, he discussed his idea of an online philanthropic directory, and now he is returning to show us this soon-to-be-launched tool.

Please join us as he unveils the Massachusetts Philanthropic Directory!

Tuesday, January 18, 2011
4:30 - 6:00 pm
Charles Hotel
1 Bennett Street
Harvard Square, Cambridge
Featured guest: George McCully, founder of the Catalogue of Philanthropy and the Massachusetts Philanthropic Directory

Here's a little bit about George:

Philanthropy is George McCully's second career. Trained in Renaissance history at Columbia University (M.A., 1961, Ph.D. 1967), he taught and published articles on history, the philosophy of history, and higher education, for nearly twenty years—as a graduate student, at Queens and Bronx Community Colleges, Barnard and Columbia; then at Swarthmore, Princeton, Yale, and Wellesley, with two years in academic administration at Brown, as Assistant Dean of the Faculty.

In 1980 he entered philanthropy as Executive Director of the Center for Field Research, awarding $1.5 million annually in grants for field research in the sciences and humanities world-wide. This put him on a number of boards, and by 1983 he was a full-time independent consultant in philanthropy, serving since then as fundraiser, strategic planner, trustee, and advisor to charities, foundations, families, and individual donors.

In 1984 he was founding Board President of the national Center for Plant Conservation—a consortium of 12 (now 31) leading botanic gardens from Boston to Hawaii, created to manage plant endangerment in the United States. He conceived its Priority Regions Programs in Hawaii, California, Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico, and as a spin-off for the New England Wild Flower Society, the New England Plant Conservation Program. For 20 years he has helped to build the Boston Early Music Festival as today the world’s leading institution of Early Music. He is a 20-year trustee of the Ellis L. Phillips Foundation (Boston), and has helped to create four community foundations, serving for ten years as founding trustee of the Community Foundation of MetroWest (Boston).

He is also a founding Board director (2008) of the Davlin Fund, a philanthropic mutual fund, and of its corporate Foundation. In 1997 he led a coalition of 20 foundations, corporations, and individual donors, to create in Massachusetts the first Catalogue for Philanthropy (incorp. 2002), to promote charitable giving and strengthen the culture of philanthropy through donor education. He wrote vols. I-XI (884 pp.) of the Catalogues —articles about philanthropy supported by descriptions of (in twelve years) over 900 charities, which is cumulatively the most thorough and detailed description, defense, and advocacy of philanthropy ever published. Also in 1997 he created for public awareness purposes the "Generosity Index," which became the nation's leading stimulus for media discussions of charitable giving. Together the Catalogue and the Generosity Index played a leading role in doubling Massachusetts charitable giving in only four years (1997-2000), from $2 billion to $4 billion.

In 2008 the Catalogue published his book, Philanthropy Reconsidered—a concise but comprehensive introduction to, and strategic overview of, philanthropy, from ancient Greece, through the American Revolution, to the current national paradigm-shift, which he first identified as such in two articles of Foundation News, in 2000, and of which the Massachusetts Philanthropic Directory is at the cutting edge. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Conversations on Philanthropy, and is a main author of the Wikipedia article on “Philanthropy,” which in the last year attracted over 1.2 million hits.

At the conclusion of our Ethos Roundtable session, we will stroll down the hall to enjoy the good company, charming venue, and free food at the 501 Tech Club, which is generously underwritten by TechFoundation. The 501 Tech Club is the monthly gathering of technology professionals who work with nonprofit organizations.

All Ethos Roundtable attendees are welcome at the Boston 501 Tech Club, and vice versa.

Please remember that there's never any need to make a reservation to attend Ethos Roundtable events. Just come if you can, and feel free to invite others! However, if you're planning to attend the Boston 501 Tech Club event at 6:00 pm, we ask that you send an email to Kathleen Sherwin of TechFoundation (ksherwin AT techfoundation DOT org). Since TechFoundation is providing the free food, it's both courteous and prudent to let her know how much to order.

See you in January!

Josh Shortlidge and InterEthos at the Ethos Roundtable in December!

We'd like to invite you to attend our December session, which will be an extra special one, because the featured guest will be the Ethos Roundtable's co-founder and co-convener, Josh Shortlidge.

Tuesday, December 21st, 2010
4:30 - 6:30 pm
Charles Hotel
1 Bennett Street
Harvard Square
Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
Featured guest: Josh Shortlidge, InterEthos and the Data Collaborative
Topic: InterEthos

Here's a little bit about Josh:

Josh Shortlidge is very happily over-employed at the Data Collaborative, in Arlington, Massachusetts, where he and cohorts are constantly challenged to "go where no database has gone before". The list of clients and the complexity of data infrastructure projects are both world-class, with a wonderful blend between for-profit and non-profit work.

From the time he could walk and talk, Josh was always told by his mother to "go out and change the world". So in addition to working on Data Collaborative menageries, Josh is always looking for ways to improve the world, with the ultimate goal of bringing peace.

He holds an MBA in entrepreneurship from Babson College, and sports a long list of entrepreneurial endeavors, with a healthy balance of successes and failures. See his LinkedIn home page for more details.

Josh became possessed by the word "ethos" over a decade ago, while playing the technical lead in an editorial services startup. He co-created and co-hosts the "Ethos RoundTable" with Deborah Elizabeth Finn.

The InterEthos project is all about enhancing the interoperability of how ethos is measured and shared.

Five other team members have committed time to the project including Ruth Koch-Ashton (Ruby on Rails / Open Source Developer), Molly Hitt (Project Manager of the Ever-Changing), Jay Gardner (Brainiac about Things Not Yet Imagined), Rachael Stark (Chief of Library Sciences... a key part of what InterEthos does), and the incomparable Deborah Elizabeth Finn (Interoperability and Spiritual Maven). Without these five cohorts the project would not have taken shape as it has over the past 12 months, and Josh would still be talking to himself about pipe-dreams, as he did for the preceding decade.

Josh enjoys the unflagging devotion of his wonderful wife and "tent buddy" Terri. She continues to support, guide and encourage his pouring of countless hours into the InterEthos project. His daughter is pursuing an acting career in Hollywood, and his son Rocky is pursing a degree in Mechanical Engineering at WPI, and is Rush Chair for his fraternity.

Here's a little bit about the InterEthos project:

• Mission

To create an interoperable cataloging system for collections of data and content, so that those collections can be more easily accessed by internet users. Our focus is primarily on the human services sector.

• Demo Login:

To take a peek, you can access the system via "username=test" and "password=tester". Or you can create your own login and start using InterEthos right now.

• The InterEthos Elevator Speech

Ethos is the spirit or core beliefs of a group of people.

Ethos is measured and cataloged by many organizations around the world.
Taxonomies are often used in such cataloging efforts.
Taxonomies are structure groups of categories.

For example, an organization may catalog the core beliefs about education for various villages. There are many different aspects that can be cataloged about the ethos of education. Examples include

cataloging important content published by residents of the villages, and

surveying the level of education that residents may have achieved.

A problem arises when multiple organizations catalog ethos using taxonomies that have different category names. For example other taxonomies may name their "college" category as "undergraduate" or "bachelors degree". Also, many taxonomies use foreign language names for their categories. The Swahili for "college" is "chuo".

How can all of the content and data in those separate catalogs be brought together, and made more "interoperable"?

InterEthos offers interoperability services for taxonomies.

The three main services are:

Sharing, where one taxonomy can be shared out to mulitple servers or applications on the Internet,

Correlation, where the categories of different taxonomies can be classified as synonyms for each other, and

Internationalization, where taxonomies can be translated into foreign languages.

The goal of InterEthos is to enhance the way ethos is measured, cataloged and shared across the internet, by creating interoperability between taxonomies.

InterEthos is online at interethos.net, where you can also view introductory videos about the project.

InterEthos is an open source project, with the full "Ruby on Rails" code stack awaiting to your enhancements at github.com/swithin/interethos.

Two videos are also available for those who want more information about InterEthos: a three-minute overview, and a more detailed nine-minute introduction.

At the conclusion of our Ethos Roundtable session, we will stroll down the hall to enjoy the good company, charming venue, and free food at the 501 Tech Club, which is generously underwritten by TechFoundation. The 501 Tech Club is the monthly gathering of technology professionals who work with nonprofit organizations.

All Ethos Roundtable attendees are welcome at the Boston 501 Tech Club, and vice versa.

Please remember that there's never any need to make a reservation to attend Ethos Roundtable events. Just come if you can, and feel free to invite others! However, if you're planning to attend the Boston 501 Tech Club event at 6:00 pm, we ask that you send an email to Kathleen Sherwin of TechFoundation (ksherwin AT techfoundation DOT org). Since TechFoundation is providing the free food, it's both courteous and prudent to let her know how much to order.

See you in December!

Georges Grinstein unveils a powerful data visualization application that will be free to nonprofits!

We'd like to invite you to attend our next session:

Tuesday, November 16th, 2010
4:30 - 6:30 pm
Charles Hotel
1 Bennett Street
Harvard Square
Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
Featured guest: Georges Grinstein, Open Indicators Consortium, and UMass-Lowell
Topic: Launch of the WEAVE ((Web-based Analysis and Visualization Environment) platform

Here's a little bit about Georges:

Georges Grinstein is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, head of its Bioinformatics Program, Co-director of its Institute for Visualization and Perception Research, and of its Center for Biomolecular and Medical Informatics. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Rochester in 1978.

His work is broad and interdisciplinary, ranging from perceptual foundations of visualization to techniques for high-dimensional visualization, with the emphasis on the modeling, visualization, and analysis of complex information systems.

He has over 30 years in academia with extensive private consulting, over 100 research grants, products in use nationally and internationally, several patents, numerous publications in journals and conferences, a new book on interactive data visualization, founded several companies, and has been the organizer or chair of national and international conferences and workshops in Computer Graphics, in Visualization, in Visual Analytics and in Data Mining. He has mentored over 25 doctoral students and hundreds of graduate students. He has been on the editorial boards of several journals in Computer Graphics and Data Mining, a member of ANSI and ISO, a NATO Expert, and a technology consultant for various public agencies.

Here's a little bit about WEAVE:

After two years of development at the University of Massachusetts Lowell supported and guided by eight Founding Members, the Open Indicators Consortium (OIC) will release the code for version 1.0 of the data visualization platform Weave (Web-based Analysis and Visualization Environment) free to public and nonprofit users. A hard launch is planned for early 2011, by which time the Founding Members will be showing new websites showcasing Weave's full capacity as expressed by four states, four US regions and many municipal and sub-municipal geographies.

Weave allows a range of users to explore, analyze, visualize and disseminate data on-line from any location at any time. The platform offers multiple levels of user proficiency from novices to advanced researchers, advanced security features, and the ability to integrate, disseminate and visualize economic, social and environmental data and indicators at "nested" levels of geography-from micro to macro.

We will highlight the key aspects of Weave using partner indicator projects examples and others. We will discuss Weave's groundbreaking technologies making it one of the most flexible interactive visualization system.

Partner indicator projects and planning agencies from Arizona, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Atlanta/Metropolitan Atlanta, Boston/Metropolitan Boston, Metropolitan Chicago and Columbus/Central Ohio invested substantial funds to create the Consortium and guide the software development. Together with the UMass Lowell leadership (Georges Grinstein, an internationally recognized expert in analysis and visualization, and William Mass, a leader in the field of regional and industrial economic development), they govern the Consortium, support and shape design priorities and provide continuous testing and feedback to advance Weave's software development.

At the conclusion of our Ethos Roundtable session, we will stroll down the hall to enjoy the good company, charming venue, and free food at the 501 Tech Club, which is generously underwritten by TechFoundation. The 501 Tech Club is the monthly gathering of technology professionals who work with nonprofit organizations.

All Ethos Roundtable attendees are welcome at the Boston 501 Tech Club, and vice versa.

Please remember that there's never any need to make a reservation to attend Ethos Roundtable events. Just come if you can, and feel free to invite others! However, if you're planning to attend the Boston 501 Tech Club event at 6:00 pm, we ask that you send an email to Kathleen Sherwin of TechFoundation (ksherwin AT techfoundation DOT org). Since TechFoundation is providing the free food, it's both courteous and prudent to let her know how much to order.

See you in November!

Join Peter Miller for a discussion of political theory and community technology!

We'd like to invite you to attend our next session:

Tuesday, October 19, 2010
4:30 - 6:30 pm
Charles Hotel
1 Bennett Street
Harvard Square
Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
Topic: Political theory and community technology
Featured guest: Peter Miller

Here's a little bit about Peter and the upcoming session:

After a 35 year hiatus, longtime community technology activist Peter Miller is completing his doctoral work in political theory and community technology and will present an overview with an eye towards contributing to the give and take that characterizes good Roundtable sessions, answering questions about the wide array of topics he is covering and getting suggestions from the tech-savvy, concerned group of attendees about wiki sites for resources at the intersection of technology and democracy.

Peter's work touches on matters as diverse as the Berkeley School of Political Theory and Manuel Castells' Information Age / Network Society trilogy; key and informative moments and models in the development of community technology centers across the country and internationally; the contours and wider world of community media and technology; neighborhoodsonline.net, neighborsforneighbors.org, and forums.e-democracy.org/groups/locals; the CyberMarxists who publish CyRev, the Journal of New Organizing, and the Journal of Community Informatics.

Peter was the founding network director of the Community Technology Centers Network, founder and initial director of the CTC VISTA Project now operating as the Transmission Project, and founder and editor of the Community Technology Review (1994-2005).

At the conclusion of our Ethos Roundtable session, we will stroll down the hall to enjoy the good company, charming venue, and free food at the 501 Tech Club, which is generously underwritten by TechFoundation. The 501 Tech Club is the monthly gathering of technology professionals who work with nonprofit organizations.

All Ethos Roundtable attendees are welcome at the Boston 501 Tech Club, and vice versa.

Please remember that there's never any need to make a reservation to attend Ethos Roundtable events. Just come if you can, and feel free to invite others! However, if you're planning to attend the Boston 501 Tech Club event at 6:00 pm, we ask that you send an email to Kathleen Sherwin of TechFoundation (ksherwin AT techfoundation DOT org). Since TechFoundation is providing the free food, it's both courteous and prudent to let her know how much to order.

See you in October!

Sneak preview at the Ethos Roundtable: "Nonprofit Management Resources"

Topic: The Nonprofit Management Resources project

Featured guests: Ndela Nkobi, Third Sector New England and Deborah Elizabeth Finn, Strategist and Consultant

Tuesday, September 21st 2010
4:30 - 6:30 pm
Charles Hotel
1 Bennett Street
Harvard Square
Cambridge, MA 02138, USA

After its summer hiatus, the Ethos Roundtable will be kicking off a new season on September 21st! Ndlela Nkobi (of Third Sector New England) and I will be the co-presenters, and will be offering you a special sneak peak at a work in progress.

As many of you know, Third Sector New England and the Boston Foundation have joined forces to create a free online search and aggregation engine that is designed to deliver answers to questions that nonprofit managers in Massachusetts frequently ask. Although the web site, "Nonprofit Management Resources," has not yet been launched publicly, we have been given TBF and TSNE's blessing to provide the Ethos Roundtable with an overview of the strategy and history of the project and a special preview of the working prototype.

The Ethos Roundtable session will be followed immediately by the Boston 501 Tech Club event, which also takes place at the Charles Hotel. The Tech Club is for technology professionals in the region who work for or with nonprofit organizations. All Ethos Roundtable attendees are welcome at Tech Club gatherings, and vice versa.

No reservations are ever needed for Ethos Roundtable sessions, but if you plan to attend the Tech Club event, then you need to notify Kathleen Sherwin of TechFoundation (ksherwinAT techfoundation DOT org). Since TechFoundation is providing the free food, it's both courteous and prudent to let Kathleen know how much to order.

See you on September 21st!

We'll be on hiatus in July and August

The Ethos Roundtable will be meeting on June 15th, and then taking the summer off!

There will not be an Ethos Roundtable session in July or August. The Boston 501 Tech Club will also be on hiatus during those two months.

We're looking forward to seeing you again in the fall. Please save the date of September 21st.

We are currently booking featured guests for the fall. If you have an idea for a session, please email us at ethos.roundtable (at) gmail (dot) com.

Ethos Roundtable sessions in the fall:

• Tuesday, September 21st, 4:30 - 6:00 pm, Charles Hotel, Harvard Square. Topic: "Nonprofit Management Resources." Featured guests: Ndlela Nkobi and Deborah Elizabeth Finn.
  
  
• Tuesday, October 19th, 4:30 - 6:00 pm, Charles Hotel, Harvard Square. Topic: Political theory and community technology. Featured guest: Peter Miller.
  
  
• Tuesday, November 16th, 4:30 - 6:00 pm, Charles Hotel, Harvard Square. Topic: The WEAVE platform. Featured guest: Georges Grinstein.
  
  
• Tuesday, December 21st, 4:30 - 6:00 pm, Charles Hotel, Harvard Scquare. Topic and featured guest: to be announced.
  

Kathryn Engelhardt-Cronk and Apricot.Info at the Ethos Roundtable

Please join us in June at the Ethos Roundtable!

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010
4:30 - 6:00 pm
Charles Hotel
1 Bennett Street
Harvard Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Featured guest: Kathryn Engelhardt-Cronk, Community TechKnowledge

The topic will be Apricot.Info, Community TechKnowledge's new platform for small nonprofits. We'll have more details as soon as our featured guest sends them along.

In the meantime, here's a little bit about Apricot from the folks at CTK:

"Developed by leading nonprofit service provider Community TechKnowledge (CTK), Apricot is an online data management system for small and growing nonprofits that tracks and reports information on clients, services and performance....Now your nonprofit will have the same advantage as large sized organizations to confidently demonstrate accountability and ensure continual funding. With a sophisticated web-based application, your organization will have the resources necessary to maintain your data without the costly expenses."

At the conclusion of our Ethos Roundtable session, we will stroll down the hall to enjoy the good company, charming venue, and free food at the 501 Tech Club, which is generously underwritten by TechFoundation. The 501 Tech Club is the monthly gathering of technology professionals who work with nonprofit organizations.

All Ethos Roundtable attendees are welcome at the Boston 501 Tech Club, and vice versa.

Please remember that there's never any need to make a reservation to attend Ethos Roundtable events. Just come if you can, and feel free to invite others! However, if you're planning to attend the Boston 501 Tech Club event at 6:00 pm, we ask that you send an email to Kathleen Sherwin of TechFoundation (ksherwin AT techfoundation DOT org). Since TechFoundation is providing the free food, it's both courteous and prudent to let them know how much to order.

See you in June!

Laura Quinn and Idealware.Org at the Ethos Roundtable

Please join us in May at the Ethos Roundtable!

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010
4:30 - 6:00 pm
Charles Hotel
1 Bennett Street
Harvard Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Featured guest: Laura Quinn, Idealware.Org

Laura Quinn will talk through some early findings from their not-yet-published research as to what social media tools (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube) are useful to achieve what goals and reach what audiences.

At the conclusion of our Ethos Roundtable session, we will stroll down the hall to enjoy the good company, charming venue, and free food at the 501 Tech Club, which is generously underwritten by TechFoundation. Laura will be signing copies of Idealware's new book, Field Guide to Software for Nonprofits: Fundraising, Communications, and Outreach, and TechFoundation will be raffling off free copies of the book as well.

The 501 Tech Club is the monthly gathering of technology professionals who work with nonprofit organizations. All Ethos Roundtable attendees are welcome at the Boston 501 Tech Club, and vice versa.

Please remember that there's never any need to make a reservation to attend Ethos Roundtable events. Just come if you can, and feel free to invite others! However, if you're planning to attend the Boston 501 Tech Club event at 6:00 pm, we ask that you send an email to Kathleen Sherwin of TechFoundation (ksherwin AT techfoundation DOT org). Since TechFoundation is providing the free food, it's both courteous and prudent to let them know how much to order.

See you in May!

NPO Connect - isn't that what you've wanted all along? (To connect with nonprofit organizations?)

Please join us at the next Ethos Roundtable session, in which the topic will be NPO Connect, the online tool that assists in matching nonprofit professionals with peer mentors. It is currently being piloted by the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network of Boston and the Metrowest Nonprofit Network.

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010
4:30 - 6:00 pm
Charles Hotel
1 Bennett Street
Harvard Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Featured guests: Kenny Weill and Gavin Murphy (developers of NPO Connect), and Marc Baizman (Young Nonprofit Professionals Network of Boston)

Here's how the NPO team describes the project:

The mission of NPO Connect is to build the capacity of the non-profit sector by enabling individuals working in the sector to connect, to learn from one another, and to build their skills as non-profit professionals. At NPO Connect, we envision a non-profit sector where individuals can more easily:

• Share best practices (or just what works) in particular operational areas by mentoring peers seeking to improve in those areas;
  
  
• Gain the tools and knowledge to more efficiently and cost-effectively meet the needs of their constituents;
  
  
• Strengthen the capacity of the sector as a whole by honing their skills and adding more value to their non-profit organizations.

NPO Connect facilitates skill transfer between professionals in the non-profit sector by allowing professionals to connect with one another through a web-based platform. Once connected through this site, the peer mentorship is developed and carried out primarily offline - in face-to-face meetings, phone conversations and/or email communications.

A six-month pilot with the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network-Boston was launched February 2010 (in parallel with a pilot launched November 2009 with the Metrowest Nonprofit Network). Quantitative and qualitative feedback from pilot users will enable the NPO Connect Team to further shape the platform to serve as an effective tool for non-profit professionals. After the pilot period is complete (summer 2010), the goal is to expand NPO Connect over time to provide additional functionality and serve a larger geographic area.

This is really an important initiative for the local nonprofit sector, because there are a thousand things about our organizational culture that you can't learn in an academic program or from books. NPO Connect is also an important working prototype for online tools that match resources and needs for nonprofits, philanthropies, community groups, and other mission-based organizations.

Here's a little background on our featured guests:

• Kenny Weill brings more than a dozen years experience in the non-profit sector to his consulting work. Since launching K. Weill Consulting in 2002, Kenny's grant development work has helped his diverse clients raise on average $1.5 million each year. He delivers additional services to help build his non-profit clients’ capacity, including program development, research, and other writing and editing services such as web and newsletter content. Kenny has held management, research and direct care positions in community-based, academic, health care and government settings. He is a member of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, Nonprofit Consultants Network, MA Public Health Association, and Third Sector New England's Consultant Pool. Kenny received an M.S. in Health Policy and Management from Harvard University School of Public Health and a B.A. from Wesleyan University.
  
  
• Gavin Murphy founded Annkissam in the summer of 2007 with the goal of bringing innovative technology solutions to the nonprofit sector. Mr. Murphy has been a technology consultant to a wide range of clients since graduating from Duke University with a double major in Economics and Computer Science. He volunteers 10% or more of the workweek to being President of the Duke Club of Boston.
  
  
• Marc Baizman, a Board member for the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network-Boston, has been involved with nonprofits and technology for the past ten years. Currently, Marc is consulting for nonprofits in and around Boston, helping with Google Apps and Salesforce implementations. Up until the end of 2009, Marc was Technology Director at Root Cause, a nonprofit in Cambridge, MA that helps social innovators and educates social impact investors. As the first and only technology staff person, he was responsible for all things tech, from debugging network cables to disaster recovery planning. Before joining Root Cause, Marc was working at NPower New York as a Senior Project Manager in Consulting Services, specializing in helping nonprofits customize Salesforce.com and building Drupal-based websites. He has a passion for the nonprofit sector and connecting organizations with technology in a positive way. Marc has an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the Rochester Institute of Technology and a TESOL Certificate from Columbia Teacher's College in New York City.

At the conclusion of our Ethos Roundtable session, we will stroll down the hall to enjoy the good company, charming venue, and free food at the 501 Tech Club, which is generously underwritten by TechFoundation. The 501 Tech Club is the monthly gathering of technology professionals who work with nonprofit organizations.

All Ethos Roundtable attendees are welcome at the Boston 501 Tech Club, and vice versa.

Please remember that there's never any need to make a reservation to attend Ethos Roundtable events. Just come if you can, and feel free to invite others! However, if you're planning to attend the Boston 501 Tech Club event at 6:00 pm, we ask that you send an email to Kathleen Sherwin of TechFoundation (ksherwin AT techfoundation DOT org). Since TechFoundation is providing the free food, it's both courteous and prudent to let them know how much to order.

News you can use from the Open Indicators Consortium

Please join us in March at the Ethos Roundtable!

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010
4:30 - 6:00 pm
Charles Hotel
1 Bennett Street
Harvard Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Featured guests: Georges Grinstein and Mary Beth Smrtic, Open Indicators Consortium

We'll have more details as soon as our featured guests send them along, but in the meantime, here's a little bit about the consortium:

"The Open Indicators Consortium is an international consortium dedicated to improving access to data about communities and regions. The Consortium is developing an open source software system for the analysis and visualization of economic, social and environmental indicators at the neighborhood, municipal, county, regional, national and international levels. The effort is led by University of Massachusetts Lowell faculty members Georges Grinstein (Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Institute for Visualization and Perception Research) and William Mass (Director of the Center for Industrial Competitiveness), and by Charlotte Kahn, Director of the Boston Indicators Project at the Boston Foundation.

"The mission of the Open Indicators Consortium is to transform publicly available data into visually compelling and actionable indicators, to inform public policy, research and decision making. The Consortium brings together technical and academic experts, data providers and users, to create and sustain a highly interactive, high-performance, open source platform for measures, indicators and data. Numerous tools are available and being developed for personalization, customization, collaboration, uploading data sets, session history, and generating modern interactive web-based reports."

And when the Open Indicators Consortium promises you "visually compelling and actionable indicators," they are not making frivolous promises. I've already seen a demo, and can assure that this is amazing and powerful software for individuals and organizations that care about positive social change.

At the conclusion of our Ethos Roundtable session, we will stroll down the hall to enjoy the good company, charming venue, and free food at the 501 Tech Club, which is generously underwritten by TechFoundation. The 501 Tech Club is the monthly gathering of technology professionals who work with nonprofit organizations.

All Ethos Roundtable attendees are welcome at the Boston 501 Tech Club, and vice versa.

Please remember that there's never any need to make a reservation to attend Ethos Roundtable events. Just come if you can, and feel free to invite others! However, if you're planning to attend the Boston 501 Tech Club event at 6:00 pm, we ask that you send an email to Kathleen Sherwin of TechFoundation (ksherwin AT techfoundation DOT org). Since TechFoundation is providing the free food, it's courteous to let them know how much to order.

See you in March!

The Massachusetts Nonprofit Database comes to the Ethos Roundtable!

Please join us in February at the Ethos Roundtable!

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010
4:30 - 6:00 pm
Charles Hotel
1 Bennett Street
Harvard Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Featured guests: Tom Pollak and Doug Denatale, developers of the Massachusetts Nonprofit Database

In my opinion, the Massachusetts Nonprofit Database is an "epic win" for our sector, and I have high hopes that it will become a national model.

Here's a description of the project, from Tom Pollak:

Massachusetts Nonprofit Database, a collaboration of the Urban Institute's National Center for Charitable Statistics and the Boston Foundation, will provide nonprofit organizations, community leaders, and citizens with comprehensive data, information and tools to build stronger nonprofit organizations and communities, promote greater citizen engagement, and link to other data and information resources. It includes a number of modules:

Starting with a core of mostly IRS data from the NCCS databases, the Community Inventory enables users to view, update and add nonprofit organizations, schools, churches or other organizations or resources and to overlay with data on community needs via maps, charts, lists or tables.

TheFinancial Analyzer permits users to compare an organization’s performance to similar organizations (a user-defined peer group or general category) and to graph key ratios.

The Programs and Service-Delivery Area Mapping Tool lets users combine program descriptions from IRS Form 990s with additional data from 2-1-1 and other community databases and define and map the service delivery areas of the organizations to create a comprehensive picture of the programs and services in a community. (Urban Institute outcome measurement tools may be integrated into this system, as well.)

The Shared Goods and Services Tool provides a convenient system for nonprofits to communicate with one another about both their needs and potential excess capacity.

Project Management Tools enable nonprofit organizations or groups of citizens or students to collaborate efficiently in mapping community resources and needs.

Advanced Tools for custom analysis of nonprofit data are also available for registered users.

A Knowledgebase of resources to help citizens create their own projects and learn more about the how to create stronger communities and nonprofits is linked into the system.

We expect to incorporate resources from the Foundation Center, the Mass. Charities Bureau and possibly others through our Data Sharing Infrastructure, which permits real-time sharing of NCCS data and viewing of non-NCCS data with key partners.

We believe that the key to making this project successful is to get its tools used on the ground to meet the practical needs of nonprofit organizations and communities. Potential users include United Ways, high school and college student outreach organizations, nonprofit associations, place-based education and human service initiatives and others. If you are interested in working with us, we would like to hear from you!

Here's a little bit about Tom himself:

Thomas Pollak is program director of the nonprofit National Center for Charitable Statistics at the Urban Institute, a Washington DC-based research organization, which he joined in 1996. He has his law degree from Georgetown University and has been actively involved with a range of other nonprofit organizations as a director, volunteer, consultant and employee.

Here's a profile of Doug:

Douglas DeNatale is the President of Community Logic, Inc., an independent consulting firm that specializes in the development of information systems for the cultural sector and managing qualitative research projects. Dr. DeNatale has consulted for national foundations and institutions including the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Library of Congress, Heritage Preservation, and the Smithsonian Institution; as well as a variety of regional and local organizations. He served as co-director of the ethnographic documentation component of the Ford Foundation’s six-year “Internationalizing New Works in the Performing Arts” initiative; and directed a year-long ethnographic documentation project in Lowell, Massachusetts, for the Library of Congress. He has authored a range of articles, monographs, and white papers, including a handbook on documentation for cultural organizations; a white paper on current data systems in the Humanities for the American Academy of Arts & Sciences; a white paper on cultural support to Cambodia for the Rockefeller Foundation (co-author with Khatharya Um)); and a series of studies examining the economic health of the creative economy in New England (co-author with Gregory H. Wassall) Dr. DeNatale holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He has served as Deputy Director of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Director of Research at the New England Foundation for the Arts, and Director of the Folklife and Oral History Program at the University of South Carolina.

Liz Keating, the third developer in this project, won't be able to join us in February, but I think that every friend of the Ethos Roundtable should be aware of her expertise, so here's her bio:

Elizabeth Keating CPA PhD is a Lecturer in Accounting at the School of Management at Boston University. She is also an Associate Scholar at the Center for Nonprofits and Philanthropy at the Urban Institute. Her research focuses on nonprofit and governmental accountability, financial health retirement funding, employee compensation and benefits, and overhead. In the past year, she has produced two reports for the Boston Foundation: "For the Benefit of Our Workers: The Massachusetts Nonprofit Employee Benefit Study" and "Purpose Restructuring, Repositioning and Reinventing: Crisis in the Massachusetts Nonprofit Sector." She has taught at Harvard University, Northwestern University, and New York University. She received her PhD in management from the Sloan School of Management at MIT and her MBA from the Stern School of Business at New York University.

At the conclusion of our Ethos Roundtable session, we will stroll down the hall to enjoy the good company, charming venue, and free food at the 501 Tech Club, which is generously underwritten by TechFoundation. The 501 Tech Club is the monthly gathering of technology professionals who work with nonprofit organizations.

All Ethos Roundtable attendees are welcome at the Boston 501 Tech Club, and vice versa.

Please remember that there's never any need to make a reservation to attend Ethos Roundtable events. Just come if you can, and feel free to invite others! However, if you're planning to attend the Boston 501 Tech Club event at 6:00 pm, we ask that you send an email to Kathleen Sherwin of TechFoundation (ksherwin AT techfoundation DOT org). Since TechFoundation is providing the free food, it's courteous to let them know how much to order.

See you in February!