We use a variety of tools to execute our grant and we'll summarize these for you in three categories: Software Development, Communication and Outreach, Financials and Legal Resources.
Software Development Tools
We host all our code at Github which offers free accounts for open source projects. Github is an excellent source code management system which allows our team to work together remotely and allows other developers to fork our code and add new features to be re-integrated with our main tree. It also allows users to download any release or even unstable (latest) code from our project at any time. Github facilitates the transparency and open source nature of our grant software development efforts.
Lighthouse is a bug/ticket management service which we use to track defects and feature requests and organize our work across milestones. It's a critical resource for our project management work.
Lighthouse is also integrated with TenderApp which we use for NewsCloud's online support and feedback. So, if a use reports a problem, we can easily create a new defect ticket in Lighthouse or attach it to an existing one. TenderApp has become a critical service for interfacing with our grant partners. It also offers free accounts for open source projects and has great t-shirts!
Since we're using Ruby on Rails, we get live defect reports via HopToadApp and performance statistics via NewRelic.
As a Mac user, I am (lowly) part of the cult of Textmate, a great editor for software developers on OS X. I've also recently begun using Balsamiq, an interesting AIR-based mock-up tool e.g. I created this mock up of our future topics page with Balsamiq.
A lot of our partners use Google Analytics for tracking usage statistics on their Facebook applications. We've also begun experimenting with TypeKit for custom font styling within our applications.
We get a ton of bug reports about the incompatibilities caused by the pathetic non-standard versions of Internet Explorer 7 and 8 (nightmare!) so we fire up Parallels Desktop to reproduce these. We're thankful Facebook has begun encouraging IE 7 users to upgrade.
When we're co-working, we use a Sprint Overdrive modem for Internet access. It works well in some locations, not well in others. It is not as reliable a device as my old Verizon USB modem, but it provides router capability for multiple users. I recommend waiting for version 2.0.
Communication & Research Tools
We choose to issue biweekly status updates via email to our foundation contacts, our team and other stakeholders. Here is an example status report from February 27, 2009. These reports are not required by the foundation but help us organize our work, get help with risk areas and open issues, highlight our achievements and keep everyone on the team plugged in.
For email, we're big gmail users. No surprise there.
We use TypePad to publish this blog and our open source blog. It's powerful, affordable and regularly improving. Wordpress is also great.
Recently, we've begun using Google Wave and are quite impressed with it. Wave has improved a lot over time. It offers a way for our team to collaborate together, while not losing important information from our conversations and IM chats. It also helps minimize the need for IM or phone interruptions.
We also use Google Docs to share documents and spreadsheets and Google Groups to communicate with our grant partners.
We use Adium with Google Talk to keep in touch with team members throughout the day.
Hootsuite is our favorite Twitter client which we use for outreach about our grant activities on Twitter. We also like Tweetdeck but find it less reliable, especially on mobile devices.
Financial Management Tools
We manage our finances with Quickbooks. Quickbooks make tracking expenditures and reporting to our fiscal sponsor fast and easy. We use Microsoft Excel for sharing budget spreadsheets back and forth. We use online bill pay with our bank to send checks to contractors.
Quickbooks can take a bit of time to set up but once we configure the Chart of Accounts to match our grant budget items, it's fairly straightforward to track payments and track our spending to plan.
We turned off the sketchy (hard to cancel) eFax service last year (which we used to use to capture PDFs via local fax) and now scan any documents to PDF over WiFi with our Epson Artisan Scanner.
We actually run an extra gmail account for our grant which we CC: every contract, receipt and invoice sent to our fiscal sponsor. This helps us create an online archive of all the materials shared back and forth with them.
Legal Resources
The Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard has been an extremely helpful resource to our team.
Please let us know if you have additions, feedback or comments!
