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We’re excited to announce the availability of our J!Salesforce 1.0 release, connecting Joomla with Salesforce.com! Even better, for a limited-time, new Soapbox clients (non-profits and socially responsible businesses) can receive J!Salesforce for FREE! With J!Salesforce, organizations and businesses using the powerful Salesforce.com CRM can now seamlessly share data with the Joomla CMS. This has been a long and winding road, but we’re proud of the new suite of extensions, and look forward to delivering them to the world. This release of J!Salesforce 1.0 is currently available to new and current Non-Profit Soapbox organizations and businesses. Sign-up now! Key Features This new suite of tools includes our first step in strong integration of Joomla and Salesforce.com, including:
This is just the beginning! Our vision for version 2.0 includes: Read more »
Well, we’re here to help you make that happen! For a limited time, PICnet is offering Soapbox Launchpad, a special $2,500 website package that will provide qualifying non-profits and socially responsible businesses with our Non-Profit Soapbox services at our most affordable pricing ever. Our Soapbox Launchpad is a terrific opportunity to get you up and running with an easy-to-manage and great looking website — quickly and affordably. This special package will be available only until November 15, 2009, and limited to 100 qualifying organizations, so apply now! What’s Included Our special Soapbox Launchpad package includes the following:
By providing this package beyond our standard discounting schedule, we want organizations to gain even further savings. Help us understand how a new website can help you more effectively build a better world. Any organization or business can apply! This year has been a tough one, and you deserve a break. Apply now for our Soapbox Launchpad package, and enjoy the power of Joomla! with strong support by your friends at PICnet. You read a lot of posts from me about the conferences I attend – and this time, I want to encourage you to attend one with me! Dev Summit 09 will be from November 18-20 in Oakland, California. I think it’s the 15th Aspiration run-event I’ve personally attended, and I keep attending them because of Allen Gunn, aka Gunner, is one of the best facilitators of all time. He and his team at Aspiration Tech are simply the best group of folks to run these technology events, and each one is both extremely enjoyable and engaging (less PowerPoints, more actual discussion). Dev Summit will be terrific because it’s going to bring together software developers from the non-profit technology sector, specifically CMS, CRM, and other Web developers. What’s really important is that this is one of the few times that people who are actually writing code for large projects that effect the non-profit community come together to share knowledge, build bridges, and support social change together. It’s really an amazing sight. I’m excited to see Michelle Murrain, Nate Aune, Ben Rigby, Courtney Miller, Jim Craner, and Ron Severdia, all of who will be leading sessions. I’ll also be sharing lessons learned on topics like leveraging the cloud, and talking about utilizing Joomla! for beginners and advanced users. Here are the sessions I’m speaking at:
See a full listing of the sessions at Dev Summit 09 here. Hope to see you there! If you plan on going, give me a shout!
August 13-19, 2009 – Cape Town, South Africa I’ll begin with my trip to Cape Town, South Africa for their Joomla!Day in August. Among the audience at this conference were Joomla! users and people interested in using it, NGOs, local universities and small businesses. The day before the event there was a training day where I had the opportunity to work with 20 individuals from the community (ex. Food Bank of South Africa) to give them hands on instructions and lessons about using Joomla!. It seems nearly every day, I read about a brewing debate to determine what’s “best” for non-profits: Joomla!, Drupal, Plone, or Wordpress. To be honest, I really think this debate is about as useful as a debate about the “best” color in the rainbow. So you can imagine my surprise when I read a quite useful introductory review of Joomla by Tess Gadwa in TechSoup on Friday. After an introduction on CMSes, Tess dives into a key question that folks ask me nearly every day: Why Joomla? With a question like that, I couldn’t help but pen a blog entry. If you’ve been following us here, you’ve probably seen we’re on a hiring spree. Well, here comes another new opening for our growing team: office manager in our Washington DC headquarters. We’re busy, and we’re in need of someone that can help us keep order as we continue to grow. To help us do that, we’re hiring an office manager to assist our CEO and help manage our intake process with the following responsibilities. Job Responsibilities
Interested? See if you’ve got what it takes after the jump.
An example of someone who fits this description who really wowed me recently is Rodrigo S. Spillere, a young developer I met at the FISL 10 conference in Porto Alegre, Brazil, earlier this summer. There are times when you meet a young person, and you can see their raw talent ready to rock. Rodrigo is one of those guys. He’s graduating from a university, and aside from me, he gave the only other Joomla presentation at FISL 10. He did an amazing job, and he focused on a tool he created for taking UML diagrams and having it build out a full Joomla component. Additionally, he’s been working on some YouTube integration with Joomla that I think is pretty darn slick!
In my last post, I pointed out how crazy summertime can get with all the events to attend in the nonprofit technology field. To continue that chapter, I wanted to share my experiences from the Community Leadership Summit 2009, also held in San Jose, Cali., in mid-July. The goals of this “unconference” as they call themselves on their website, are to Advance, Build and Connect. It was the first conference that brought together open source community managers to discuss the success and challenges of managing open source projects. The audience was mostly community managers, and attendees ran the gamut from OpenID and Sun Microsystems to Gnome and Stanford University. Leaders from most of the biggest open source projects, including Joomla, Mozilla, Linux, Drupal, and others were present. I was there as a Open Source Matters board of directors member and leader in the Joomla community, accompanied by Elin Waring, President of Open Source Matters, whom I would work with again at OSCON a week later. Below is a video someone captured of me speaking about the unconference, lessons learned in organizational management and leadership, and my thoughts on some of the stories and ideas participants were sharing. The summer is abound with conferences and conventions in the nonprofit technology field. There are the big names like NTEN, Netroots Nation, and South by Southwest, and then there are some of the more technical-focused ones that we PICnetters attend. In May, I wrote about the CMS Brasil Conference, which was a great opportunity to spread the word about Joomla. This past week, I attended the Open Source Convention in San Jose, Calif., where anyone and everyone in open source software (more than 3,000 developers, designers, consultants, etc.) get together to share the latest and greatest. The sessions and discussions were designed to inspire, urge us to explore the future of open source, and to think creatively about how to use it effectively and efficiently for our clients in these tough economic times. I had the honor to co-lead the Joomla! Birds of a Feather group on Wednesday, with the President of Open Source Matters, Elin Waring, in addition to hanging out at the Joomla! booth at the expo – which gave me a chance to talk to a lot of people from different backgrounds. It’s always neat to see so many people come together and share ideas, best practices and provide expert advice. It’s also great to run into friends of the non-profit tech sector, including Leslie Hawthorn and Chris DiBona from Google, as well as Mark Surman from the Mozilla Foundation – both friends of PICnet that I just saw a few weeks ago in Brazil of all places. Finally, the Joomla booth wouldn’t have been such a success if it weren’t for Bay Area Joomla User Group, including Ron Severdia, Nathan Mallamace, Deborah Susan, Steve Reichgut, and Karl! For more on OSCON, check out their website for a full program and details on the conference. Or, you can search on Twitter for the hashtag #OSCON to see what attendees were tweeting about it. Thanks to OSCON for the invite – we hope to be back next year! At PICnet, we like working with the best of the non-profit technology community, from CRM providers to graphic designers. So when our friends strike gold, we’re ecstatic. This morning, our PICnet DC neighbors, Free Range Studios, received front-page coverage from the New York Times on their video “Story of Stuff“, an acclaimed production with inspiration and direction from Annie Leonard. From the NY Times’ lead:
Congratulations to the Free Range Studios team on this terrific achievement! Happy hour celebration in DC this week? |
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It’s about time that I gave another update on some of my travels to spread the word about PICnet, Joomla! and technology. Over the next few weeks you’ll see installments from my trips to South Africa, Brazil, Mongolia, New York, and more. The key theme? Engaging with Joomla! communities around the world to share our experiences, lessons learned and latest innovations and vision to create a better product for the user – that may be you!
As I’ve said before, one of the greatest things about attending all these conferences is meeting people from all different backgrounds and hearing how their story of why they are in the technology field. Often, those with the most energy and enthusiasm for what they do is the young talent – those are who new to the arena or at least got started within the last few years.
In addition to the immense knowledge and creativity Rodrigo possesses, I was just really impressed with his overall presentation and attitude. He was completely professional, exuded a great positive energy, and was a blast to have a beer with, too – my kind of guy! Thanks, Rodrigo – you made my trip to Brazil that much more enjoyable – I hope we meet again!
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