Non-Profit

Quick update, OpenOffice now ships with macro security set for 'High' so that "Only signed macros from trusted sources are allowed to run. Unsigned macros are disabled". By going to Tools -> Options -> OpenOffice.org -> Security -> Macro Security You can also set the security level to 'Very High' so that "Only Macros from trusted file locations are allowed to run. All other macros, regardless whether signed or not, are disabled." So if you are concerned with these articles, use OpenOffice.

Listening to CBC's Search Engine Podcast I was reminded again of how much our perceptions of security have changed and how much organizations and activists need to do to be mindful of the people they are working to support. For those folks who missed the news on this item, the office of the Dalai Lama brought in the Munk Centre for International Studies' Citizen Lab to investigate some issues they were having with their computers. Turns out that an Microsoft Word document containing a Trojan horse that allowed the attacker to list and access any documents available to their computer (including on their networks), any keystrokes made on that computer and even allowed the attacker to turn on the victim's webcam and see/hear their conversations. This large-scale cyber spying operation was given the name GhostNet.

Now this has been possible for a long time, in fact the code for the Trojan horse that was used can be downloaded from the Internet and manipulated by hackers for all kinds of purposes. What's new is that the folks from the Citizen Lab were able to backtrack and access the control server that was directing these hacks. They were also able to identify that the attackers seemed to have a political target as this Trojan horse was distributed through crafted email and attachment concerning Tibet. Now given that the control server was hosted in China, that the interface was written in Chinese and that China has a strong interest in monitoring activists concerned about their occupation of Tibet, it is most likely that Chinese intelligence is behind this. This is a concern, but not my main one.

I've been coming up with examples of who is using Drupal. I usually just point people to my growing list of Delicious links. There's also summaries available from BuiltWith, which rates Drupal the most popular of their reviewed CMS's. However, I thought that this was probably a more timely way to organize it. This is pulling information out of Delicious' RSS feeds to allow me to post new links that other people find interesting.

Musicians

There are a number of musicians who web presence is delivered by Drupal. Bob Dylan, Ozzy Ozborne, Moby and Avril Lavigne are prominent examples, but also:

I went to the Ottawa Folk Festival last weekend and had a great time watching some amazing performances and meeting lots of wonderful people. Like many successful festivals it is filled with people who make this a regular event and where one can see people in your community that you don't always run into.

One of the first people that I ran into was Jake Morison who was one of the volunteer photographers for the event.  Jake's a good photographer, but it was amazing to see how much photography gear many people at the festival had.  Over the course of the three days there must have been hundreds of thousands of photos taken by the official photographers, media, artists, but mostly by the thousands of people who attended this festival.  

With all of the digital cameras around it is a real lost opportunity not to be encouraging folks to share them by tagging their photos, videos & blog posts with ottawafolkfestival or ottawafolk.  It's a nice way to build community online, and festivals are all about community & great memories.  Like with the Facebook groups that was set up, it is free to set this up and encourage people to participate.  Unlike Facebook though the Flickr interface allows users much more control over the rights to their pictures (especially allowing people to select a Creative Commons license). 

OpenConcept built the database and website for NatureServe.org that is an ecosystem-based management tools network which promotes awareness, development, and effective use of tools for ecosystem-based management in coastal and marine environments and their watersheds.

Having multilingual site in Drupal is getting easier, especially with some of the major advances in the core code. Had a solution for theme based language switching that I figured was worth putting out there.

We are happy to announce that we are working with Volunteer Canada to help them make better use of their website. We upgraded and standardized their existing install and provided better support for their bilingual site.

We are helping this national organization to consolidate a number of other important tools in one website. We will be using this one website to help launch member forums, a corporate volunteering centre and National Volunteer Week. Using Drupal's advanced theming capabilities we will be able to create different themes for each section of the site.

In this blog post I'm trying to promote a great opportunity and some great tools, largely be ripping off the text of Michelle Murrain, the Coordinator, Nonprofit Open Source Initiative (NOSI). There are lots of great non-profits in Canada that haven't been able to attend any NTEN events, but heck, webinars are open to the world, so hopefully more people will take advantage of them.

OpenConcept is happy to announce the launch of the Council of Canadian's Right to Water Campaign. We worked with Agentic Online and Council staff to set up a campaign site to help raise the profile of this important issue.

I wanted to send out a quick announcement about a new campaign site we set up looking at the Colour of Poverty here in Ontario. This is an important issue as communities of colour face a much higher risk of being poor.