Scoutseven

Summer

Crescent Lake, Olympic National Park, Washington

Stolen Passwords

Last Monday my laptop, phone and digital camera were stolen while I was taking a nice stroll with a colleague in Golden Gate Park.

I do know better, but it was such a beautiful day. And I somehow thought the locked trunk of a car was still a (somewhat) safe zone.

Nope.

It’s been an unfortunate lesson in loss, Zen, and gratitude (yes, I was mostly backed up).

After the initial shock of discovering both our computers stolen from a car that had no signs of tampering whatsoever, my colleague and I spent the evening bemoaning bookmarks and Firefox’s password tracking.

As two tech heads who conduct a lot of our personal and professional business online, our lives were there for the taking, perfectly memorized.

There are two passwords I never write down — my bank info and my primary email password. I am grateful for that.

The rest were kept in a little text file on my hard drive called “info.”

Nice and secure.

Luckily, whoever stole my computer appears to have little interest in purchasing plane tickets, deleting ScoutSeven’s entire email list, or hacking my website. Most likely, they wiped the hard drive pretty immediately and went from there. So I try not to get too creaped out by the goody basket of voyeuristic potential that my computer offers, including personal writing, photos, financial data, etc.

Yeah, I know. I should be using multiple encryptions and some kind of vaulted password manager. Or, I should somehow be able to memorize 50-100 unique and unhackable passwords. My friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation would tell me not to use the same password twice and to never, ever keep them electronically available, but what’s a girl to do? Even after the hard lesson, I’m not entirely sure how to balance security with the fact that my brain is too full of details already.

I am still letting Firefox track my passwords. Tho there are certain sites I never bookmark (financial, etc.).

And I’m considering forcing a secure login to my computer after sleep (as I rarely shut the thing down).

What do you do?

Thoughts and best practices appreciated (Mac friendly please…).

Post NTC Musings

I am back from the NTEN conference, regrouping and musing.

The success of an event is marked, in large part, by it’s wake… Is there engagement, inspiration, resistance, frustration? Is there cause for conversation?

Absolutely.

Whatever my gripes (note previous rant), I’m glad I was there. I think the NTEN gang has worked very hard to form a community of practice, and I applaud these efforts.

From the newsletter appearing under my door each morning (nice analog touch), to the many opps to connect with like-minded individuals, to the midnight scheming and dreaming in the hotel lobby, I appreciated the care and attention put into making a valuable space for us to connect and learn.

I met some great new folks, and had lots of time and space to convene with long-time collaborators — invaluable.

At the same, I was uninspired by almost all the session content. Which only means that anything I thought would be inspiring, and therefore attended, turned out to be a total bore. Jason Z from Democracy in Action sums this up well. If you had a different experience and happened upon a Fabulous New Thing somewhere in the mix, please do tell.

I was also very wierded out by the lurking corporatization of absolutely every aspect of the event. I realize this is standard operating procedure, but ouch. Microsoft, or Intel, or Adobe, or Care2 sponsor our dessert, and so we have to stare at their logos on hundred foot screens during lunch.

Feels surreal, wrong, and somewhat embarrassing. Is this the world we’re fighting for? One in which you can’t have a cocktail party without thanking your corporate sponsors?

Something just ain’t right about that.

What it all comes down to is that NTEN is what it is. I appreciate their hard work tremendously, and they do provide a great deal of value to a particular aspect of the nonprofit sector.

But they don’t really speak to my core concerns. And maybe no big conference every will. I don’t know.

I need a space which focuses on social justice values, strategy, and the innovative tools that can help us build a movement for change. I need a space that allows us to work through the hard questions we face in our work, including how our sector deals with very real issues of social stratification, class, race and gender dynamics, etc.

Most of all, I really need a space in which corporate sponsors graciously agree to be listed in the fine print, and not on the program cover. It’s supposed to be philanthropy, not advertising.

So thanks to NTEN for what you do.

And to those of you out there who share my concerns, I think we have our own space to create sometime soon. So let’s start imagining…

“Revolution is Not an Event, But a Process”

I’m at the NTEN conference in Seattle.

This morning’s keynote was by Guy Kawasaki, who evangelized for Apple in the mid-eighties before becoming a hot shot venture capitalist for Garage.com.

The guy gives over 100 speeches a year, so he is funny and engaging, and he pops some very good one-liners. Perhaps because of this audience — the supposed change-the-world types — he chose to sprinkle his speech with references to the Black Panthers and Chairman Mau (why do people still do that?), along with a bunch of other against-all-odds corporate success stories.

When we talk about nonprofits using technology, which is what this conference is about, I want to see a strong and intentional connection to a real-world theory of change. Because if that’s not what we’re here for, then what the hell?

This is mostly lacking in this space.

Lots of great people and ideas. But not a lot of talk about what it means to affect social change, and how technology supports (or does not) support this.

I went into this morning’s speech ready to be bored and/or offended. To my surprise, it was the venture capitalist among us who was the first to talk about changing the world — what it means to make revolution, evolution, meaning.

Now, the art of selling crap is how to make meaning out of it, and I’m kind of a pushover.

But no one else here is talking about meaning, or innovation, or anything having to do with the change we want to see in the world, and in our lives.

And it doesn’t have to be that way.

The nonprofit sector (now nearly 7% of the US economy) is an increasingly targeted, highly profitable, verticle market. I’m not an anti-capitalist purist, and I have nothing against non-exploitative profit in principle, but let’s call it like it is.

Some people are here to change the world. And some people are here to live their lives, run a good business, find more customers for their products, and never rock the boat.

That’s not my game.

So I’m quoting the venture capitalist.

Innovation makes meaning.

Meaning makes change.

Go for the prize.

Don’t be afraid to polarize (you can’t make everyone happy, ever).

Screw up, and itterate, and keep itterating.

Revolution is not an event, but a process.

That’s what I want to talk about.

What Are Your Communication Values?

I’m here in Atlanta, GA co-facilitating a training with the Progressive Technology Project (love them!). PTP does technology capacity building with community-led organizations nationwide.

For this group of people, who are mostly organizers, the question of online engagement is only relevant in how it relates to their real-world organizing work.

I was very struck by one woman’s use of the term “communicaton values.” Describing how she was raised, she says, “I learned that you have to touch it, feel it, hear it…e-mail is so impersonal.”

So what are the “communication values” we’re using in our work?

And how does email fit into this values system?

If you’re like me, you might find it a little disturbing to fully engage this question. Because, without a doubt, I value other forms of communication more than I value email. But what takes up most of my time…

Hrmph.

2006 is Gonna Rock!

Remember how you felt 365 days ago?

Many progressives have spent a year licking wounds, tabulating losses, reevaluating outdated strategies, and gathering strength. It’s been a year of collective soul searching, which is never easy, but always worth it.

Big problems have to be solved in new ways.

I believe we have the power. Yes indeedy.

Let this be a year of innovation, new alliances, and crazy dreams come to life!