Our WeblogIf you would like to review our 2008 financials as submitted to the IRS with our latest Corporate Bylaw revisions, please grab a copy of it at: http://www.ieuc.org/pdf-files/ieuc-2008-990-ez.pdf
Founded
22 November 2002
The Institute Online
The IEUC was established to engage in ongoing research and educational initiatives pursuing secure, simple, supple, and sophisticated systems to unlock our full human potential. It was established under New York State's not-for-profit corporation law and has been recognized by the IRS as a tax exempt public charity.
email: info@ieuc.org
Forging The Future 7/30/10 — 11:06 UTC
News and Views from The Institute for End User Computing!
Archive for the ‘The Institute Log’ Category
Our 2008 990-EZ is ready for download.
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009Well Wishes for the New Administration
Wednesday, January 21st, 2009As the new Obama Administration takes the helm in Washington today, we wish them all the best, particularly in their desire to revitalize primary and secondary education.
We hope and trust that they will recognize the critical importance of information technology literacy at a much deeper level than mere button pushing to make things work.
Students need to understand what computing can and can’t do; they need to be able to recognize, anticipate, and minimize risks; to be able to make informed business and public policy decision about the implications of emerging technologies; and they need to be able to roll up their sleeves and delve into End User Programming lest they loose those opportunities to offshore outsourcing.
The IEUC stands ready to work hand in hand with all sectors to help bring about these vital changes.
Happy New Year – 2009!
Thursday, January 1st, 20092009 is shaping up to being a very exciting year for the IEUC.
As we noted last month, Rob Akscyn has now rotated out to our Advisory Board and Kirk St. Amant and Jeff Smith have joined our Board of Directors, restoring our Board to full strength for the challenging year ahead.
2008 was a bad year for the US economy and the nonprofit sector was particularly hard hit. With donors at both the institutional and individual level re-directing their giving to Social Safety Net causes, our donations were sharply off. Since, it is now clear that online fundraising for an organization with our profile generates far more regulatory compliance overhead than actual revenue, we stand ready to totally re-think our fundraising strategy going forward.
We will have more financial details on the year past as final bills and donations roll in over the weeks ahead.
While the financial outlook for 2009 is murky, our prospects have never been brighter on the Operations Side. Our new Directors are already exploring the feasibility of several potential Special Projects and last year’s complete online infrastructure overhaul has us well positioned to dramatically expand the range of content offered on our website. We are also preparing to share most of our back end code, which will let other sites leverage the thousands of hours of R&D that went into our website relaunch.
These are exciting times and scary times. The nonprofit sector remains in crisis and their is a very real risk that a number of charities will fail this year. However, the IEUC will not be one of them. With no paid staff, truly minimal overhead, and a mission that involves channeling IDEAS rather than DOLLARS we are here to stay.
So if your New Year’s Resolution is to volunteer some of your time or to share some of your financial good fortune with a worthy cause, we invite you to join us in Forging The Future.
The future is what we make it, so by supporting our work, you can choose economic recovery, increased freedom & security, and a new era of personal empowerment ushered in through the wonders of information technology!
The IEUC’s 2008 Annual Meeting
Tuesday, December 16th, 2008On Friday, December 12th, we successfully concluded our 2008 Annual Meeting. The key business consisted of revising our Corporate Bylaws and naming Jeff Smith and Kirk St. Amant as Directors Elect. They will take office on January 1st as Rob Akscyn rotates off of our Board of Directors to take a seat on our Advisory Board with our other former Directors.
Self-Hosting OpenID Not Ready for End Users
Friday, December 5th, 2008OpenID is the name for a single login scheme that is supposed to free us of the need to juggle multiple user names and passwords. Instead, with OpenID, the theory goes, that we use a single login and sites we want to visit will redirect us to the OpenID provider of our choice for us to verify our identity with that service which will then return us to the site we were originally trying to log into with a security token that will complete the login process.
Since the system consolidates all of your accounts into one, it is critical that you trust your OpenID provider even more than you would a single site, since someone with database access to the OpenID server could usurp your identity everywhere by resetting your password to a new one and then logging into any of your accounts elsewhere.
The logical way to minimize that risk is to host your own identity provider server, which is supposed to be quite painless and easy to do.
Be warned, it is not.
For the last few weeks we have been trying various OpenID servers and have yet to find one that can pass all of the OpenID Enabled: OpenID Tests.
If you do want to experiment with this technology, we recommend indirectly specifying your OpenID End Point. This means that you should point any services requiring you to use OpenID to a web page that uses link tags in its headers to redirect them to your current OpenID provider of choice. Then you can, in theory, change OpenID providers without changing your OpenID Identity with respect to third party sites. However, different implementations may place restrictions on your account name choice which could foil your attempt to seamlessly swap servers.
If you can find a solution that reliably performs well in the real world, do let us know so we can share your good news. Until then, beware the hype and avoid diving in prematurely since this sort of experimentation can be a real time sink.
So in the meantime, if you must use OpenID, go with a large trusted “name” provider and if there isn’t one that you truly trust, consider establishing multiple OpenID’s for different accounts, even though doing this would of course defeat the point of the entire exercise.