Good deeds do get rewarded! If you know someone who’s been toiling in the open source vineyards, developing software that’s helping nonprofits succeed, check out the Tides Foundation Pizzigati Prize, a $10,000 annual award for outstanding contributions to software in the public interest. The competition, judged by a panel of national leaders in public interest computing, is now entering its third year. The application deadline for this year’s prize: September 1, 2008. You can find out more at www.pizzigatiprize.org.

The last winner was announced at the NTC in New Orleans.  

While Open Source has been widely embraced in the server and CMS markets, it has yet to take off in the CRM field, so I'm glad to see that the Code for Change Team has a new release of CiviCRM Standalone out there. I hope they keep the momentum going.

Things I really like about it (after noodling for about 15 minutes):

• It works with MyOpenID. Shouldn't everything work with an OpenID?
• The admin panel is so easy to understand!
• It's blazin' fast on their test server.

Many features need more work, but this release is REALLY early. I can say that I think it's starting to look like the real deal. I hope that they'll spend some time prettifying it, too. I'm a sucker for a pretty application.