Why it might not: a potential (MA based) vendor we’re talking to says

We’ve not been asked this before and about 201 CMR 17 Compliance and I don’t particularly think it applies to our VoIP, or VoIP in general

Why it might: Section 17.04 qualifies the applicability of the rule to

Every person that owns or licenses personal information about a resident of the Commonwealth and electronically stores or transmits such information shall include…a security system covering its computers, including any wireless system

Like just about any business, we definitely transmit personal information over our phone system, so I think the technical / legal question is whether an electronic phone system of the type in question is covered under the “its computers” phrase.

Stepping back from the legal to the practical, however, it seems fair to expect reasonable information security from our communications systems, including VOIP. At least in its intent, I think that’s what 201 CMR 17 is after. VOIP is still new enough that I suspect many prospective customers (like us!) aren’t quite sure what constitutes a reasonably secure installation, though we sense that there are all kinds of potential attack vectors not present in POTS.

some tidbits:

• 201 CMR may even apply to entities entirely outside of MA, as long as they have any data about Massholes in their systems. So don’t get all smirky in Texas or wherever.
• Who knew? Martha Coakley, as AG, gets credit for helping adjust 201 CMR to work better with business’ realities. That, and her Harpoon preference, really ought to be pushed more strongly by the campaign.
• A useful collection of info can be found at one of the ugliest websites in recent memory.

Fortunately, there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly unreasonable in the requirements, so organizations following good data security procedures shouldn’t have to do much work (if any) to be compliant.

As for me, I still need to do my official audit of our procedures vs. those specified by the regulation.

Every person that owns, licenses, stores or maintains personal information about a resident of the Commonwealth shall develop, implement, maintain and monitor a comprehensive, written information security program applicable to any records containing such personal information.

It’ll be interesting to sit down with this & see how our policies & procedures match up.

Keynote speakers

Nick Jehlen of Action Mill shared his approach to social change projects, and how that approach played out for Turn Your Back on Bush, Winter Soldier, and Enough Fear. His basic premise is to take Ghandi’s idea of being the change that you want to see in the world, and bring it to the commons, so that principled actions have a chance to influence others. In addition to having interesting stuff to say, Nick really put together a handsome presentation, so if you get a chance to catch him speak sometime, go for it.

After lunch, Paul Niwa talked about his Boston Chinatown site, which provides a visualization of the community members’ connectedness. He’s a professor of journalism at Emerson, so his initial goals were mostly based in journalistic concerns, but one of the interesting results of the project is that it may have provided incentive for some people to become more involved in their community, to boost their importance on the visualiztion! It was also interesting how what Paul called his “journalistic arrogance” led him to publish people’s information on the web much more freely than many of us in the nonprofit / activist space would be likely to do.

Sesssions

The first breakout session I went to was horrible. No names, to protect the guilty.

Sura Hart and Katie Winterbottom of Grassroots.org ran a helpful session on SEO. Props to them on running the presentation from Google Apps, on a KDE laptop. As for the content,

• it was helpful to see specifics about keyword research, and the tradeoffs between keyword popularity in searches and the existing presence for that term on the web
• will have to think harder about the working of intrasite hrefs
• hadn’t really thought about using the title attribute on tables, forms, etc.
• Google Grants sounds like an amazing opportunity.

Nate Aune of jazkarta had a ton of useful tool suggestions. He started with the constituent database, as that’s at the core of almost any successful organization. His recommendation is salesforce.com now that they’re giving their service away free to nonprofits. This is significant because it’s a best-of-breed solution, with a thriving ecosystem of parters enabled by its comprehensive API.

From there, Nate went on a whirwind tour of helpful tools. I’ll only note here the ones that I can see looking into in the future:

Online donations

• we already use paypal, but I’m not sure if we’re taking advantage of the fact that they give nonprofits a lower fee than for-profits. Also, all processing can be done via their API - no need to send folks to paypal.com’s ugly pages (which we do now…)
• fundable
• chipin
• for nonprofits, google checkout is totally free through next year. Interesting, I wonder what happens then?

Mass email

• campaign monitor - we’ve just been giving them a try, so it was nice to hear that jazkarta has good luck with them. However:
• VerticalResponse is also supposed to be excellent, and is integrated to salesforce.com

Misc.

• eventbrite sounds very handy for online ticketing
• phone.com’s integration of voice mail and email could be very handy

This year I’ll be wearing my IT Manager hat & looking to pick people’s brains particularly about mass emailing, online donations, and fundraisining tools.

Thursday was the fifth day in a row crude prices have set new records.

 — ( extremely out-of-context quote from yahoo story on oil futures’ first trip over $90 / barrel )

Heating oil prices not looking so good lately, either.

Given that very recent conversation, it’s interesting to observe that trying to get through Environment Northeast’s recently released Climate Change Roadmap for New England and Eastern Canada gets my eyes glazed over in no time at all. I truly believe that this is vitally important stuff, but I’m sure having a hard time wrapping my head around it.

Part of the problem is that the solutions outlined in this roadmap all require action at a higher level than the individual - legislatures, executives, and other institutions. Not belonging to any such group, it’s a little tough to relate. What I can do, besides the various personal efforts that I will refrain from boring either of my readers with, is nag my elected officials. According to this Globe article, the Patrick administration is on board with the roadmap, so I’m planning to start bugging my elected officials to see what they’ve committed to on this issue.

As soon as I make it through the roadmap.

Green-Rainbow endorsed Jill Stein for Secretary of State, because the person in charge of state elections ought to show up for his own debates.

The brand-new Working Families party endorsed Rand Wilson for Auditor. Fascinating interview with Wilson here.

On a related topic, I’m voting yes on question two. Good discussion in the interview above; an example of how it’s worked in New York here.

Also voting yes on question three, for these reasons.