We have adopted the Agile approach on some of our software development projects, which I'll write about another time, but in the meantime, here's a blog on Agile Management and in particular a post on Stretching Agile to Fit CMMI level 3 which is going to be of interest to some of my colleagues.

I'm signed up for the (UK) Charity Finance Directors Group IT conference on 22 February 2006. I went to a meeting on IT in November last year and gathered some vaguely useful links:

Charity IT Resource Alliance which has whitepapers, news and the inevitable forums on Charity and IT use. No RSS feed for news, though I did suggest this to them.

Guidestar appears to be a UK offshoot of the US Guidestar charity information site. It's recently gone live and has some information on every charity in England and Wales, drawn from the official records.

Net:Gain help charities do strategic IT planning.

Charities Resource Network has a membership fee last time I checked, and the site is currently down, so try later.

I'm quite impressed with the Idealware website. They aim to do reviews of nonprofit software. It's fairly new, but does seem to have good articles on low cost constituent databases, and online donation tools. I'm waiting to see what they say about The Raiser's Edge from Blackbaud which we use.

They only aim to cover US software, but some stuff may travel the Atlantic well, unless its heavily financial.

Wireless Networking in the Developing World is a free book available online, under the Creative Commons license. It looks pretty good, not that I've ever needed to do such networking, as I mostly work in the UK.

Bit of a fonts for minority languages theme going here. Here's an article on Gentium, "a font that can be widely used in a variety of languages".

Tags: fonts

On the same theme as my Ubuntu post, here's an article about Localization of Linux in India.

I haven't got the technical details yet, but last week we had a major step forward when some of the people who work on complex scripts for the Non-Roman Script Initiative met with Mark Shuttleworth, the man behind Ubuntu. The next release of Ubuntu in April will incorporate some of their work. The reason I'm interested in this is that support for complex scripts enables Bible Translation to take place in minority languages. The reason we're interested in Linux is the low cost for people for whom the economy of their country prevents them getting legal copies of Windows.

The official press release is on our website.