Thankfully, Colin Mayes, MP (Conservative – Okanagan-Shuswap-North Gulag) now no longer supports jailing reporters who write articles that strike him as unfair:

In a column e-mailed this week to several B.C. newspapers in his riding of Okanagan-Shuswap, Colin Mayes said that jailing reporters might help the public get accurate information.

“Maybe it is time that we hauled off in handcuffs reporters that fabricate stories, or twist information and even falsely accuse citizens,” Mayes wrote.

Read on…

We’re putting the finishing touches on Word Power, the Social Signal blogging workshop that Alex and I will be holding at the Hollyhock Centre from May 17 to 21.

I’m excited about this: there are a growing number of technical how-to resources for blogging, but there are still very few opportunities to learn about blogs from a strategic standpoint. How do you position them as part of an integrated communications strategy? How do you write in an authentic voice while still keeping your organization’s goals front and centre? And how can you tap into the power of the larger blogging world to help achieve those goals?

We get to spend four days with our participants answering those questions in the spectacular Hollyhock Centre on Cortes Island. It’s gorgeous, the meals manage the impossible task of being both sumptuous and ridiculously healthy, and Hollyhock’s workshops manage to attract some of the most interesting people I’ve had the good fortune to meet. I hope you can join us.

(And deep thanks to everyone who’s helping to spread the word: Marshall, Evan, Declan, Darren, Pogge, Derek, Idealistic Pragmatist, Wonderdog, Will and Mark. Not to mention the April 2006 issue of Vancouver magazine!)

• More information at Social Signal
• Workshop leaflet (PDF)

Early in your career using open-source tools, you’ll probably run up against the highly uneven quality and quantity of documentation.

With nobody actually getting paid by the programmers to crank out user manuals and training material, the job falls to volunteers and after-market publishers. Some programs – especially those a little longer in the tooth – have evolved a sophisticated library of materials suited for any level of expertise. Others are simple enough that they don’t need much anyway.

The gaps start opening up with highly complex software that hasn’t been around for years and years. Case in point: the Drupal content management system.

In some respects, Drupal is very well-documented. If you’re a hard-core coder, you’re in luck; Drupal’s underlying wiring is exposed for all to see, and the thriving Drupal.org online community posts various tricks and hacks. If you’re an absolute beginner looking for a very, very introductory tutorial, there are a number out there online – along with some very handy step-by-step guides for accomplishing specific tasks.

But if you’re a non-coder who wants to learn the system inside and out so you can create kick-ass Drupal web sites, you’ve probably had to pester Drupal-savvy friends, ask endless questions (and endure a certain amount of flaming) on Drupal discussion boards, and generally grope your way to an understanding of this powerful but occasionally quirky content management system. The efforts of volunteers and developers notwithstanding, we’ve all had to make do without anything you could call a coherent, comprehensive user manual.

Until now. Two new publications are on the scene:

One, Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB, and Wordpress from Apress, offers insiders’ perspectives not just on Drupal but on phpBB, a bulletin board system, and Wordpress, the blogging software that drives this site as well as roughly a kabillion others.

It’s available now and I’ve already read the Drupal section. You’ll see a more thorough review here in a few weeks once I’ve read the rest of the book but, for now, suffice to say that it’s great. It walks you through Drupal’s ins and outs, explains some previously-intractible concepts like taxonomy and provides something of a Rosetta stone for grasping the PHP functions that make killer theming possible. And throughout, author Robert T. Douglass employs an approachable writing style that should engage novices without exasperating more experienced users.

Despite the title, though, this isn’t a guide to creating online communities – at least, not in the sense I use the term. You can lay the foundations of those communities with the information in the book, but actually building living, breathing communities – or even just designing an optimal network of modules, navigation and content those communities can live in – requires a whole new level of discussion. That book has yet to be written; thank goodness this one has.

The second book, Building Websites with Drupal, is still on its way from the people at Packt Publishing. It’s by David Mercer, a programmer, writer and editorial consultant. While the publisher’s site doesn’t yet have a sample chapter, the table of contents is certainly promising.

They’re shipping me a review copy, and you’ll hear more about it once they do – probably sometime next month.

(Incidentally, if content management is your game, check out Packt’s incredible library of CMS titles – including your full recommended daily allowance of open-sourcey goodness.)

I just posted this at the Social Signal blog. It’s the opening presentation I didn’t end up delivering at the 2006 Nonprofit Technology Conference. Here’s an excerpt:

Think about Web 2.0 – the loose collection of new technologies like blogs, news feeds and the like – and one of the key things that jumps to mind is aggregation. These new technologies allow us to take raw information from disparate sources, and mix and match and mash-up until a whole new picture emerges.

Funny thing: there’s another field where that’s important, where people combine information from different sources to create a new synthesized perspective on a person, issue, organization or event.

It’s called OSINT – open-source intelligence. That term has nothing to do with Linux or the GPL. It’s the practice by intelligence agencies of collecting and analyzing information from publicly available sources.

[....]The more information we ask people to share through community web sites – the more we invite them to tell us – the more exposed they are.

Head over there to see the rest of it.

Last week at the NTC conference, I kept hearing the term “circuit rider” bandied around. I finally happened to ask the very kind Deborah Elizabeth Finn to relieve me of the burden of trying to bluff my way through those conversations. She obliged with an enthralling account of the rise and eventual transformation of a movement of tech evangelists bringing the gospel of wired wonderment to non-profit organizations.I won’t try to capture it here because a) I can’t remember all the details, b) I’d get some vital stuff wrong and c) I don’t want to deprive Deborah of any reason to tell this story herself; she does it wonderfully. But I do want to thank her publicly, and encourage people to pester her to tell it to them first-hand.

What I’m up to for the rest of the week: Nonprofit Technology Conference, convened by N-TEN: The Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network.

One of my favourite local reads, Raymond Tomlin at the Vanramblings blog, is getting into the web design world with two new sites.

• One of them is my favourite Vancouver stop for salad rolls: Lan’s Restaurant on West Broadway just east of Granville.
• And the second is a site for Cardinal Transportation employees – school bus drivers and aides who are trying to get a first contract as members of CUPE Local 561.

I don’t know much about state senate races in Maryland. I do know a great quotation when I see one… and Jamie Raskin, a constitutional law professor running in the Democratic primary, has just assured himself a place in the next edition of any half-decent book of quotations.

Testifying at a state senate committee’s hearings into a proposed ban on same-sex marriage, Raskin was asked by a Republican senator whether such a ban would be required by God’s law. His response:

“Senator, when you took your oath of office, you placed your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. You didn’t place your hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible.”

Rhetorical scholars will recognize the age-old figure of speech known as antimetabole, the most famous example being John F. Kennedy’s “ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”

Quotations like these last because they capture an abstract idea elegantly and concisely, so that it can be instantly grasped by a listener – whether it’s the virtue of civic responsibility or the principle of the separation of church and state.

Apart from the grace of Raskin’s construction, his words take on even greater power because of the striking concrete image they evoke. And in the two weeks since he spoke on March 1, Raskin has vaulted to national attention on the strength of those two sentences and the renewed vitality they gave to an idea precious to many Americans. (Raskin’s campaign team knows what it’s doing, too; the quotation is now front and centre on his web page.)
The lessons for speechwriters? Nothing you didn’t know already: less is more, striking images trump abstractions… and time-tested rhetorical techniques still come in handy. But it’s good to have a reminder – especially one as eloquent as this one.