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Friday, May 10, 2002
| NTEN May Enable Standards to Pick Up Steam |
The Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network, from which I just stepped down as founding President, recently concluded a conference in orlando. As I said to several people there, I was astonished at teh level of interest in nonprofit open standards. A year ago i could barely get people to talk about them and now a panel on the subject had standing room only. I'm hopeful that this site and others like it may soon have something to talk about.
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Sunday, March 25, 2001
| Using the word "open" as marketing |
Edd Dumbill is the editor of XML.com. In this article, he criticizes the way closed consortia of vendors are passing off specifications developed behind closed doors as open, or claiming that a protocol adopted by a handful of vendors is actually some sort of standard. I think we need to remain vigilant about this in the nonprofit world. We haven't yet seen a real standards battle.
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Tuesday, March 20, 2001
| Financial Standards |
A thread has started on financial standards. Mostly they have been developed independent of the nonprofit sector, of course. But there is now nonprofit participation in XBRL, I understand.
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Friday, December 22, 2000
| XML is the Great Peacemaker |
This story is about the power of standards and interoperability on a network to being people together. The examples are from the corporate world, but it's my hope that the same it true for us in the nonprofit world. Comments?
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Friday, November 3, 2000
| Edd Dumbill's XML Protocol Reference |
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"The use of XML for loosely-coupled application integration has become a high profile topic, crucial as it is for the future conduct of electronic business transactions. This area has seen a proliferation of activity from both consortia and individual vendors."
"This article gives an overview and essential information about the most important technologies and initiatives in the XML protocol area. Most of these technologies are being developed under the auspices of either a multi-vendor consortium or standards body."
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Thursday, November 2, 2000
| A data model for case management |
Something other than donor records for a change! Tim Mills-Groninger offers a data model for cae management, developed at ITRC.
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Monday, October 9, 2000
| Customers versus vendors in the standards game |
This Information Week article describes a problem of motivation facing software vendors: They will all want to make it easy to get data INTO their programs, but hard to get it OUT. It's another reason why the interoperability discussion needs the leadership of nonprofits themselves.
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Thursday, September 28, 2000
| The issues raised at the OPX meeting |
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I was in Chicago for the meeting last week and I have briuefly summarized some of the issues raised. A mailing list has been started by OPX for continued discussion of those issues, but it looks like participation will be limited to those who join the organization.
Consequently, I want to encourage discussion of those issues here. Jump to the summary and reply if you want to participate in an open discussion of who should control nonprofit data standards.
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Thursday, August 31, 2000
Wednesday, August 9, 2000
| Chronicle of Philanthropy Covers LDDX & OPX |
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[Note: A paid subscription is required to read this article.]
The Chronicle of Philanthropy's technology column focuses in on the nonprofit standards issue. The article's spin is more on the idea of "competing protocols" rather than on who decides on them. I'm quoted extensively in the piece and personally, I think the protocols themselves are far less interesting than the long term politics of standards setting in the sector.
I believe that there will ultimately be only one protocol. I don't care what it's called but I do care that the nonproft sector have sufficient control over the data specifications of its lifeblood. I am quite hopeful that this will be the case, either through a nonprofit role in OPX, through a genuine nonprofit driven standards setting body, or both.
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