Using GovTrack’s API, for which there is no key, you can track bills, votes, congressional districts, and even map the districts using Google maps. It’s very cool and can be very useful for organizations who focus on Big A Advocacy and legislation. The website pulls from sources like Thomas, the official Library of Congress legislation database, among others. It was nominated for a Webby Award in 2006, and is run by Joshua Tauberer, a PhD student and software developer.

Companies like PICnet and those working in the non-profit community should be thinking about ways in which this data can be used – and not just for advocacy, but to simply inform their supporters how their congressional representatives are voting. It’s a great way to educate people on how politics can play a role in your issue or cause. So check it out!

*The Progressive Exchange is an online community for non-profit technology organizations and individuals. People submit best practices, questions, job vacancies and more. A must-read for NPO techies!

To start, we rely heavily on our Basecamp, which provides us a very nice communication collaboration platform. Basecamp has included in it a time-tracking tool that allows one to track time ad-hoc as well as by todo item, which is useful to very easily track time to a particular task.

What’s interesting, but not necessarily most surprising, is that the tool and the manner in which the time is tracked is critical to seeing high levels of time tracked per week. In short, if your time-tracking tool is cumbersome or hard to use, no one’s going to track time well.

We’ve gone through three phases of time-tracking tools:

1. Directly into Basecamp. This provides you the direct interface with the Basecamp system, but can be cumbersome when you’re switching between multiple projects. Why Basecamp doesn’t have a solid, cross-project time-tracker is still a head scratcher for me.
2. Via a summary page made with the API. We had our developers whip up a basic PHP script that would load all the projects for a given PICnetter, and then essentially present a big form, with updated times tracked for that project, and boxes to enter new time. The problem here is that loading the data via the Basecamp API can be slow, hence tracking minute tasks could become 45 second time sinks.
3. Via an API-based time-tracker. We simply cut the fat in #2, and made a simpler, PHP-based API time-tracker that had a dropdown of the projects, a basic timer, and the ability to enter in a comment. This loads the timer faster, and is slim, so it can fit in a sidebar for Firefox.

Even though we’re getting the technological advantage, the biggest determinate of good time-tracking is practice. One needs to find their own rhythm that is reliable and becomes part of their flow. For instance, I tend to insert my information before I start working on a new task. Then, when I’m done with that task, I can just hit the Send button, and move on.

It’s not easy to find the flow, but once you do, and you have the right tool, time-tracking can really provide your business valuable data.

We’re in a Ubuntu, Mac, and Windows environment at PICnet, so a Web based tool that everyone can use in a common browser was important. If you have any time-tracking tools that you like, please share them, we’re always looking to learn more!

Being a company steeped in the Web, I began wondering recently if there’s a better way of managing our invoices. Currently, we have to manually use QuickBooks to create invoices and receipts, then PDF them, then email them. This ends up adding up to about 5 hours a month, which I’d rather have spent on new Soapbox innovations.

About 6 months ago I signed us up for Freshbooks, an online invoicing system well accepted by the Web 2.0 world. Freshbooks seems made for people just starting out with invoicing, and those that might not already be using QuickBooks. For instance, QuickBooks is our master accounting records, and where we record active clients. With Freshbooks, it seems like we’d need to duplicate our efforts by posting invoices in both our QuickBooks and Freshbooks.
We’re trying to find a way to:

• Automate emailing of invoices and receipts to clients
• Create invoices in non-PDF format for easy distribution
• Build an online, password-protected client area for billing history

Anyone have experience using Freshbooks, or have an automation tips in using QuickBooks?

At that time, we spoke only about content management systems (CMSes) and constituent relationship management (CRMs), and while feedback on the blog was quiet, offline we got an earful.

A full three months have passed since then, and I think it’s about time to open the lid on how our bridge engineers are laying down the first strong links between these islands. Especially with postings like that of Allan Benamer from the Non-Profit Tech Blog, where he writes about his favorite stack of stacks, it made me think a response to his post might be in order.

My dream application stack of stacks: salesforce.com -> Joomla!/Apache/Linux/mySQL -> RoR frontend to salesforce.com via ActiveSFDC/svn -> Chipin.com

He goes on to write:

Price: Despite the mix of for-profit and open-source vendors, it’s still free. However, this stack requires a lot of programmer know-how and is only recommended if you have in-house programmers. The cost in this solution is the labor cost.

Why the Ruby on Rails front-end? Well, RoR will get you to a clean finished state much faster than you would otherwise if you did a PHP to salesforce.com front-end. This is my dream application stack after all. Notice how I mix both open source and for-profit solutions right into one another. That’s right, this is an ultimately pragmatic stack. Get ‘er done is my motto. I only choose open-source solutions that have strong developer and consultancy support.

(Deep breath)

Everything here sounds great, doable, and gosh darn should have been done already. However, I do quarrel over the idea of using RoR to be a front-end to Salesforce.com. With our OSS delivery of J!Salesforce, I think that it would actually be easier to have a front-end to Salesforce.com through Joomla, especially since the hardest work has been done already.

So, what’s that leave us with? It seems that the Joomla CMS, or more specifically the Joomla framework, becomes the pivot point. It’s the flexible front-end that ties the systems together.

It’s the network of bridges. And that’s what I think Joomla’s untapped power lies.

The power of open source, combined with best of breed proprietary systems with open APIs give organizations the power they need combined with a price point they’re more likely to afford.

Which leads us back to the islands and bridges. The winning solutions at the end of this year won’t be those that try to pack as much under the hood as possible, but rather those that are most flexible and connect most effectively with other systems.

In short, the non-profit sector’s needs demand more choice, and that’s just what open source and open APIs can do.

Now if only there were some bridge builders out there…

Basecamp allows time tracking and it is very nice when checking off a task to record how many hours you spent getting it done. But sometimes we get so engrossed in our work we forget when we started. So, we built a sort of stop-watch application which allows us to punch-in, punch-out, write up a description then send it off to Basecamp.

Another pet peeve of ours is when we run over the number of hours we’ve dedicated to a project, and with several people contributing time to a project that can happen easily if the time isn’t closely monitored. So next up on the integration effort is to develop a warning system which will alert project managers when we’re nearing that limit.

We will be sharing our efforts with the Joomla community soon, as open source of course. If you are interested, please check back and if you have any feature requests let us know and we’ll do our best. We would love to hear the community’s thoughts. Or if you are a developer and you would like to take a crack at developing on your own, here are some tips and tricks:

1. You can get a reference to the API here: Basecamp API
2. Follow some discussion here: Basecamp API Forum
3. There are PHP wrappers for the API out there if you don’t want to attempt writing your own. A Google search will most likely turn up something.
4. As it is now, the API isn’t as well developed as others. Pretty much every feature on Basecamp is built into the API but expect your application to do most of the heavy lifting like filtering and sorting data. Oh and look out for the hyphens in the variable names of returned data. PHP isn’t a fan of those so you will probably need to scrub your data before using it.