Programs powered by coders’ collective brainpower & generosity

Target audience: Nonprofits, social change organizations, educators, foundations, businesses, individuals. This is part of Creating Media, our ongoing series designed to help nonprofits and other organizations learn how to use and make media.

By Kim Bale
Socialbrite staff

Afew years ago, most of us relied on closed, proprietary software to create documents, crunch numbers, surf the Web or watch videos. Today the landscape has shifted dramatically, with tens of millions of people taking advantage of free open source software that’s equal to — and often superior to — tools created the old way.

Some of the most useful, reliable and productive Web programs were developed using open source methods — transparency, collaboration, peer review and testing — resulting in screaming-cool products that keep getting better. Many of the open source tools outlined below are distributed under the GPL (GNU General Public License), making them flexible, high-quality products that give their corporate competitors a run for the money at a fraction of the cost. A few were even developed by foundations.

Here are 12 open source tools your organization should consider using and supporting. How many of them do you know about? (Know about others? Recommend them in the comments below.)

Office tools

OpenOffice: Full-featured productivity suite

1A single piece of full-featured software that will fulfill all of your administrative needs, OpenOffice.org is a nonprofit’s dream. The package boasts a word processor, spreadsheets, graphics programs and database access from any connected computer. The main benefit of OpenOffice is its interoperability — open and save Word docs, Excel spreadsheet, PowerPoint documents, etc., even if you don’t own Microsoft Office. Compatible with the Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, Sun Solaris and Apple Mac operating systems, OpenOffice is a one-click install and comes with an international community of users. Anyone can suggest improvements, report possible bugs or help troubleshoot problems via the organization’s wiki page. Download OpenOffice.org.

Constituent management

CiviCRM: Manage your connections

2CiviCRM is a free, open source solution for the civic sector that lets you manage your constituents. Far more than a contacts database, Web-based CiviCRM is designed specifically to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups. See this 4-minute explanatory video on Vimeo.

CiviCRM is a contacts, fundraising and eCRM system that allows you to record and manage information about your various constituents including volunteers, activists, donors, employees, clients, vendors, etc. Track and execute donations, transactions, conversations, events or any type of correspondence with each constituent and store it all in one place. CiviCRM was created by CiviCRM LLC, the nonprofit Social Source Foundation and the open source community. See this page about which content management systems are supported.

Audio-visual tools

Miro: Watch Web video in high-def

3Streaming your videos is free and easy with the Miro Video Player. A project of the nonprofit Participatory Culture Foundation, Miro is free to download and allows users to watch video in full-screen HD from anywhere, regardless of Internet connectivity. Once downloaded, Miro plays host to HD content gathered from sites like YouTube and Blip.tv as well as podcasts and torrent files. Users subscribe to channels and feeds in their video player, allowing downloads to happen automatically as soon as new content is available.

Miro is great for nonprofits because it offers a customizable player allowing any organization to co-brand their video players and blast them to the expanding Miro community — the player was downloaded about 4 million times over the past year and boasts hundreds of thousands of users each month. As an open-source program, Miro is run by a mere 10 staff members, leaving much of the translating, coding, fixes and upgrades to volunteers around the world. Download the Miro Video Player.

A related free tool is Miro Video Converter, an amazing downloadable app that converts almost any video to MP4, WebM (vp8), Ogg Theora, or for Android, iPhone and more.

Audacity: A complete sound editing suite

4Audacity is a free audio editor that makes it easy for anyone to record, convert, import, export, edit and mix audio files of many formats. The simple Cut, Copy, Paste and Delete options make it very user-friendly and the Undo/Redo options quickly correct any errors. Audacity allows users to layer music beneath dialogue for a professional-quality podcast and features effects that can change the pitch or tempo of the recording, remove any background noise and add sound effects, like an echo. The open-source Audacity Wiki Tutorials can be edited by any user and helps answer questions like how to export projects into iTunes and record audio that’s playing on your computer. Download Audacity.

Songbird: Take control of your music

5This open source media player combines the best of iTunes, YouTube and Pandora to give you an immersive audio-visual experience. Songbird lets you buy and download your favorite music, provides video, photos, news and bios related to each song you play, suggests music you might enjoy and allows you to create and manage playlists that can be downloaded to your synced mobile device. Users are encouraged to aid in the development by uploading add-ons and submitting code. Download Songbird. (Image of songbird at left isn’t related to Songbird site — we just loved the little guy!)

VLC Media Player: A cross-platform media player

6This open-source media player has cross-platform capabilities and is very easy to use. One simple, free installation will leave you a player that can read DVDs, Audio CDs, QuickTime files and more. VLC is ideal for playing video or audio files that are unrecognizable to programs like Windows Media Player or QuickTime, and it has the ability to play damaged files by simply skipping over the damaged parts. Download VLC Media Player.

HandBrake: Rip your DVD collection

7The HandBrake DVD converter can take any DVD or DVD-like source and generate files output as MP4, H.264, Theora video, MKV and several audio options. Chapter selection, subtitles and other features are maintained even after the media has been converted, giving you a DVD quality file fit for any website, computer or iPod. Notably, HandBrake lets you rip copy-protected DVDs you own so you can travel much lighter. See the HandBrake wiki to ask questions of its strong support community. Download HandBrake.

Web browsing tools

Firefox: The Web at your fingertips

8Mozilla Firefox is the second most popular web browser in the world and is a model open-source product. It’s easy to download and runs on Mac, Windows and Linux operating systems. Mozilla is constantly rolling out new versions of Firefox, and its current version, Firefox 3.6, has racked up more than 121 million downloads. Users can join the community, report bugs, suggest upgrades and create and contribute to the more than 6,000 add-ons that make the browser customizable for you or your team. Current add-ons make it possible to aggregate your social network updates into one app, raise money for charities simply by browsing the Web (Better The World Fundraising Sidebar), create blog posts, manage Delicious bookmarks and more. Download Mozilla Firefox.

Flock: Manage your social network

9If your organizations is interested in beefing up your social media presence, consider Flock, an open source browser often overshadowed by Firefox but one that offers different strengths. Powered by the same platform and technology developed by Mozilla, Flock allows you to update your social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, from any site on the Web. With Flock, you can instantly share links and post videos to your pages while you enjoy the same security and strong community Mozilla offers. Download Flock.

Website management tools

Drupal: A popular content management platform

10Does your organization need a content management system? Drupal‘s open-source software package is free to use and allows you to manage members, assign permissions and display content on your site. Drupal can be used for anything from a discussion site or community portal to building and maintaining your organization’s site or blog, and its engaged professional community is constantly rolling out updates and add-ons to improve service. Drupal offers many benefits for the nonprofit sector: It’s affordable and scalable, it gives you control over managing and editing your site and it’s easy to integrate podcasts, multimedia files and other social media. Many nonprofits are using Drupal, including 350.org and Mother Jones. Get started with Drupal.

Other popular open source CMSs or Web frameworks include Joomla, Plone and Ruby on Rails.

WordPress: World’s best blogging platform

11What started as a modest blogging program by a 19-year-old college freshman has grown into the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, and rightfully so. We love WordPress.org — it’s software that you can download and configure to easily build, manage and customize your blog or website. You can find your own web hosting platform or choose a WordPress partner to host it.

WordPress’s thousands of free plug-ins, widgets and (mostly free) themes offer a breathtaking array of choices (don’t overdo it!) and help brand your site and set it aside from the competition. The WordPress community is constantly working to improve the software both remotely and by attending WordCamp conferences. Side note: Socialbrite.org runs on WordPress! Get started with WordPress.

Messaging tools

Pidgin: Connect across chat applications

12Connect instantly with staff, volunteers and the rest of your community regardless of which instant messaging application they use with either Pidgin (if your office computers are PCs) or Adium (if you have Macs). Both are downloadable applications that allow you to connect with almost anyone running AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, Google Talk, MSN, IRC, Facebook and other chat networks — all at the same time. Customize your chat app with unique styles and organize your contacts in any number of manageable lists. Download Pidgin or Adium.

Other open source tools

We couldn’t list every open source tool out there, so please add your favorites in the comments below. Some other open source software includes:

• Bean is a free, easy-to-use word processor (or more precisely, a rich text editor) for Mac OS X, designed to make writing convenient, efficient and comfortable. From the site: “MS Word, OpenOffice, etc. try to be all things to all people. But sometimes you just want the right tool for the job. That is Bean’s niche.”

• Thunderbird: Mozilla strikes again with its open source email program. The messaging system allows you to manage email, instant messaging, social networking messages and more in one tool. You can link multiple email accounts to Thunderbird and see all of your incoming messages in one in-box, open tabs just as you would in Firefox allowing you to see multiple emails at once, and completely customize the system to fit your needs and personality. The community has created add-ons to extend its functionality. Download Thunderbird.

• Gimp: Gimp is a photo editing application that rivals Photoshop for retouching images or creating new ones. It runs on Windows, Mac or Linux. Download Gimp.

• Inkscape: Inkscape is a graphics application with similar capabilities to Illustrator that lets you create detailed line art. It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. Download Inkscape.

• For other open-source software exclusive to MAC OS X, visit Open Source Mac.

Related

• Creating an Open-Source Desktop (TechSoup)

• Short video discussion led by Mitchell Baker of Mozilla about open source software.

The post 12 open source tools you should be using appeared first on Socialbrite.

An overview of software for multimedia editing, video hosting & podcasting

Target audience: Nonprofits, social change organizations, educators, NGOs, citizen journalists, media makers. This is part of Creating Media, our ongoing series designed to help nonprofits and other organizations learn how to use and make media.

By Kaitlin LaCasse and Laura S. Quinn
Idealware

Want to get started using audio or videos to engage your current supporters and pull in new ones? There are a number of tools that put multimedia within the reach of most nonprofits. In this excerpt from the Idealware Field Guide to Software for Nonprofits: Fundraising, Communications and Outreach, we explore three related multimedia topics. First, we take a look at multimedia editing software, which can help you whip your audio or video files into shape for public distribution. Then we explore how video sharing websites can help you put your video into the world. Finally, we talk about podcasts, a way to let people easily subscribe to audio or video shows.

Multimedia editing

Multimedia editing software gives you the capability to create videos or audio recordings with a level of a polish that used to require a lot of expensive hardware. Good editing takes time and some skill, but a number of low-cost, straightforward packages put the tools within reach of any nonprofit.

With audio packages, you can edit interviews for length, cut “um”s and pauses, and add music or voiceover introductions. Both GarageBand (for the Mac) and Audacity (for the PC or Mac) are free, solid tools that provide all the functionality you’re likely to need. If you’re eligible for the Adobe donation program through TechSoup, you may be able to get professional-grade Adobe Audition for a $35 admin fee.

Video tools let you cut out pieces you don’t want, splice different sections together, and overlay graphics and text onto your piece. You might join an interview with a constituent together with scenes of your program participants, and put a title screen at the beginning — and even upload it to YouTube with a single click.

For Mac users, iMovie (free with the Mac OS X operating system) is a great editing tool for simple movies. The free editing software available for PCs, on the other hand — like Windows Movie Maker and Pinnacle Systems’ VideoSpin — can be difficult to work with, and often imposes insistent front-and-center ads or confusing limitations on supported formats. For PC users, a good alternative is Adobe Premiere Elements (pictured at right, $15 for nonprofits on TechSoup, or the movie editor is about $79 retail), which provides friendly features very similar to iMovie.

[Editors note: There are also a few online video editing options, including Jaycut.com (free), Motionbox.com (free), Moviemasher.com (free & open source) and Kaltura (fee-based and open source, though these solutions have serious limitations.]

If you’ve outgrown the low-cost options, or want to create more robust animations or special effects, Final Cut Express and Final Cut Pro provide logical stepping stones for Mac users, while Adobe Premiere Pro (a $70 admin fee for eligible nonprofits through TechSoup) is a popular option for both Macs and PCs. These products, all under $1,000 retail, provide all the power you’re likely to need. If you need more, consider hiring a professional video editor.

Video sharing websites

Videos can provide a compelling way to tell your story online. While they can be expensive to produce, both in staff time and actual money, video sharing websites let you upload videos to the web for free. Once they’re online, viewers can comment and share them with friends. In general, you maintain ownership of the videos you post, but you grant the site certain rights — before you post a video, read the site’s Policies and Terms carefully.

There are many free video sharing options, including YouTube , Blip.tv, Revver and Vimeo. DoGooderTV is geared specifically at nonprofits. Brightcove lets you show videos and video pages without any logo or branding for Brightcove itself, but starts at $2,000 per month. YouTube offers nonprofit-specific functionality, like the ability to create a branded YouTube channel, link calls to action directly in videos or accept donations directly through the video page.

Want to “go viral”? If enough people share a video, it can spread around the Web exponentially, eventually reaching an enormous audience — this rare, sought-after phenomenon is known as “going viral.” There’s no recipe for creating viral videos, but you can start by making sure it’s relevant and irresistible enough to compel people to share. And then cross your fingers.

Many of these video sharing websites also allow you to post the videos on your own Web page or blog. They provide HTML (the coding language of websites) code for you to copy and paste to embed the video. In most cases, the sites’ logos are displayed on these videos.

Podcasts: Hosting and directories

Podcasts are syndicated audio or video shows that allow people to subscribe. Once that’s done, whenever a new show is available, files are automatically downloaded onto subscribers’ computers. In fact, that’s the main difference between podcasts and other types of audio or video files — podcasts are subscription-based and downloaded via RSS so subscribers don’t have to seek them out.

Nonprofits can use them in a number of ways to create awareness or educate people about their causes. Podcasts can be useful to record and broadcast meetings, conference calls, speeches and more. Keep in mind, though, that creating polished multimedia content is time-consuming. If you have the audio or visual content or the experience to create podcasts, they can provide an interesting way to distribute information, but think carefully about the time involved before committing yourself to creating new multimedia content on a regular basis.

The first step is to record audio or video using a microphone or camera, and edit it using multimedia editing software like GarageBand or Audacity, mentioned above. Once you’ve polished the content and exported it into a standard file format, decide whether to post the podcast on your own site or on a site designed to store and share them, like Hipcast.com, LibSyn, Podbus, Ourmedia or others. These sites range from free to around $5 per month.

Once your podcast is hosted and published, people can subscribe via most RSS readers. You should also submit your podcast to a site like iTunes or Odeo that allows people to easily find it. On these sites, users search for podcasts or enter their Web addresses, and the site downloads the files directly onto their computers, iPods or other portable devices as soon as they are available.

Related

• Comparing Terms of Service at video sites (Socialbrite)

• BlogTalkRadio: Extend the reach of your nonprofit (Socialbrite)

• More in our Making media series

The post A quick guide to multimedia software appeared first on Socialbrite.

A step-by-step guide to using Audacity to get a polished audio

Target audience: nonprofits, NGOs, educators, citizen journalists, individuals who require media skills

Guest post by Adam Hyde and Adam Willets
Tactical Technology Collective

This is one in a series of training articles that convey new media skills to organizations.

It’s simple to record an audio interview — say, of a guest speaker in your office or at an event. Don’t miss the chance to capture the event so that others who couldn’t be there can share in the experience.

Here’s our guide to recording and editing a two-minute interview with a minimum of equipment. (Don’t be put off by all the steps below — once you’ve done it, it becomes simple the second time around.) There are lots of ways to do this — you can begin with an iPhone as the recording device, for example — but for our purposes, we’ll show you the steps using just one microphone and a laptop.

You will need:

• a microphone
• a computer (with Audacity installed)
• someone to interview

This guide will show you how to record the interview to the laptop using Audacity, an open-source audio recording and editing program that can be installed on Windows, Linux or Mac OS X. Once you’ve recorded the interview, we’ll show you how to edit your audio using Audacity.

Setting up

You’ll need to have a microphone that can plug into your computer. The mike must have a 3.5mm plug at the end of the cable, like the picture below.

If the plug at the end of your microphone cord doesn’t look like this, then you won’t be able to plug it into your computer. Have the right plug? Then plug it into the ‘mic-in’ of your computer.

The microphone input can look different depending on the computer you’re using. Here is an example of a mic-in — the blue input on the far right — in the image below:

After you plug in the mike, place it close to your interview subject. You may want to hold the mike in your hand so that when you ask questions you can turn it toward both you and your interview subject. Getting this process right takes a bit of practice. Avoid bumping or rubbing the mike — it’ll be picked up by mike. Be sure to move it steadily and quietly.

Recording the interview

Now that you have the mike plugged in, you can begin the recording process. You’ll need to have Audacity (a free download for both Windows and Mac) installed. Launch the application and follow these steps:

Before making the recording, it’s important to preview the loudest section of the source audio so that you don’t end up with a distorted recording. First, switch on the input meter on. This can be set in the main interface. Simply click on the bars above the microphone symbol or click on the arrow next to the microphone symbol and select “Monitor input” like so:

Now ask your subject to talk loudly. While they do, look at the input level meter.

At their loudest the red bars should be at about -12. You can adjust the input level by moving the slider next to the microphone symbol.

Ask them to keep talking while you adjust the input level until it peaks at about -12. Once you have done that, click the “Stop” button :

You don’t need to keep that preview recording so select “Undo Record” from the “Edit” menu.

Now you’re ready to record

Now you’re ready to make your proper recording. Click the “Record” button.

Start the interview. Once you’ve finished, click the “Stop” button.

Your recording is now complete. Save it immediately by selecting “Save Project” from the “File” menu.

Your interview is completed and saved. You can play it back by clicking the “Play” button.

Editing and exporting

Basic editing with Audacity

The process of editing requires that you first know your source file: the file you will edit. Play the audio file and listen for where you want to make your first edit.

Once you know the part you want to edit, select the area by clicking on where the cut should start, holding down the mouse button, and dragging the mouse to the end of the area to be cut. If you do this correctly, the area to be deleted will be highlighted in gray. (Don’t worry if you make a mistake, you can undo it: control z on a PC, command z on a Mac.)

In the above example, you can see we’ve highlighted the area from 1 minute (1:00) to one and a half minutes (1:30). To delete that segment, I can now click on the Edit menu and choose ‘cut’:

When you release the mouse button, you’ll see that the selected area has disappeared and your file has become shorter.

Focusing on the area to be cut

When you open an audio file, just press the green play button to listen to the entire file:

Once you have listened to it, you may want to take some notes to help you decide which area you want to delete. It’s also a good idea to replay the area that you’ve decided to cut to make sure you’re selecting the right area. To do this, select the area as described above and then press the play button and Audacity will play back only the selected area. If that isn’t the segment you want to delete, then start again by selecting another area.

If you need to focus closer to the audio to make a “finer” cut, then press on the magnifying glass icon:

This will enlarge the time scale shown and give you a close-up view of the audio. (You can zoom out of the audio again by pressing the magnifying glass with the minus sign on it.)

Pasting

If you want to shift audio from one place to another, Audacity make it easy. First, select the area you want to move. Let’s use the same area I used in the cutting example:

Now choose Cut like you did in the above example.

The audio will now be cut from the track. Now click on the audio that is left at the point where you want this audio to be shifted to.

In the above example, you can see that I’ve inserted the audio at the 4 minute mark. Now choose the Edit menu and select Paste:

The audio has now be inserted. If you look at the Audacity window, you should see the selected audio in its new place :

Exporting with Audacity

Projects created in Audacity are always saved in Audacity’s own unique file format that cannot be opened by most other software. So you’ll want to export, or convert, your file into a common file format that can be played by other audio software or media players.

Audacity can export to the following formats: AIFF, MP3 and Ogg Vorbis.

AIFF files provide uncompressed CD quality audio, so this format should be used if you want to open your Audacity project with other music production software or CD authoring software.

MP3 and Ogg Vorbis are both compressed audio formats so they have lower sound quality but much smaller file sizes, making them ideal for use in media players or online distribution. One important difference between these two formats is that Ogg Vorbis is completely open source while MP3 is not. Many audio players however don’t support the playing of Ogg files, so you need to consider that when distributing your audio. Most people have a ton of MP3 files on their home computers.

To export your file, click “File” then click on the format that you want to export as.

You should now see a window like this:

Use this window to edit the file name and select or create a folder where you’ll save the new file. Next, simply click on “Save” to begin exporting. The time it takes to export the project will depend on the length of the recording and the speed of your computer.

When exporting is complete, you should now be able to see the file in the folder that you chose to save it into looking something like this:

Congratulations, you’ve finished!

You can now enjoy listening to the results of your Audacity project through other audio software or transfer it on to your portable media player or upload it to the Internet (you can host it yourself or use a service like Libsyn.)

Common problems

No sound from the microphone

This is a common issue. There are a couple of things you should check.

• If the microphone has an “on/off” switch make sure it is turned on.
• If the mike is turned on and you have no sound, then you may need to check the microphone’s battery and replace it if necessary.
• Have you selected the microphone‘ audio input in Audacity?
• You may need to turn on or “unmute” the microphone input in your computer’s sound preferences. Where the preferences are located depends on your operating system.

Distortion in the audio

This might be caused by any number of reasons, here are a few possibilities:

• Your levels might be too high. Recheck your recording input level in Audacity.
• The connection between the microphone and the computer might be loose. Check to make sure it’s a tight fit. Move the microphone plug a bit while recording to see if this is the issue. If it is, you may need to replace the plug or, as a short-term solution, use some tape to hold it in place.
• Your microphone might be damaged. Record more audio and speak directly into the mike. If the microphone is damaged, you may hear distortion in your recorded voice.
• It could be that your headphones or speakers are actually damaged and your recording is fine. To check this, use something else to listen to the audio. The easiest thing to do is to find a set of headphones and plug them in.

Creative Commons image at top by cliff1066 on Flickr

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included here: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.txt. This article originally appeared at Tactical Technology Collective.

The post How to record & edit a 2-minute audio interview appeared first on Socialbrite.