37 Signals is a supersmart little company known for creating easy-to-use web-based project management tools (namely the Basecamp suite), and they have just announced the latest in their product family: Campfire.
According to their website, “Campfire brings simple group chat to the business setting. Instant messaging is great for quick 1-on-1 chats, but it’s [...]

I am currently researching a field of design known as “Participatory Design” that has a fascinating history (dealing with Scandinavian labor unions) and a very promising future. In short, PD is about incorporating the user in the design process from day one. The resulting ideas and workflows are, in my mind, incredibly powerful tools [...]

Here’s a link to a nice comparison of Google Scholar and Scrius. It points out that Google Scholar has become neglected and is no longer updated regularly. This is a super-unfortunate development; Google is the web’s best hope for easy, inexpensive archiving of scholarly research. (In other news, however, Amazon is now offering scholarly articles [...]

Evaluation is an important, albeit rarefied, science of promoting nonprofit organizations. Do you need to measure the effectiveness of a specific program — or your entire organization? Well, there’s an entire discipline devoted to helping you do just that.
Unfortunately, as with most rarefied, important sciences, the “discipline” part tends to mean something more like [...]

When Nonprofit X goes to county Y and begins handing out seeds and fertilizer to farmers as part of an agricultural intervention during a famine, how does Nonprofit X know that they aren’t causing a greater problem or ignoring a better solution? Perhaps it turns out the fertilizer is more valuable when it is sold [...]

Here’s a chart of evaluation software packages form the Evaluator’s exchange. The list is untested by yours truly, but the Evaluation Exchange (From the Harvard Family Research Project) is an excellent resource for folks working with children.
Here’s a bit from the article, the chart is about a 60K PDF.

A wide variety of software [...]