Open Spirituality: PDF

Sharing an openly adaptable framework to assist service users on the road to final 'outcome' destinations

In my previous posts on engagement & trust and customer/client contributions to organisations' reach and wellbeing I sign posted various approaches that organisations and companies are undertaking to 'open' up their organisations. This enables them to open up their business processes so that they can be co-developed and co-shared with their various stakeholders, clients or service users.

Co-development, co-sharing expertise in a spirit of openess does a heck of a lot to engage those very publics and peoples whom you want to recruit to help transform lives. It all sounds quite far away and woolly when you can't see an example.

Outcomes Star Second Edition Released - keeping alive sharing & remixing under CC
Homelesslink has kept alive the spirit of an 'Open' organisation by maintaining the creative commons license on the Outcomes Star. This enables orgainsations and individuals to build on each other's efforts to create a better world so that knowledge doesn't become stagnant and is open to new creative possibilities.

The Outcomes Star in a nutshell
The Outcomes Star in a nutshell is an 'outcomes' framework that enables organisations to chart and measure the progress in terms of change (on a scale of 1-10) along several key dimension. These key dimensions are dictated by the sector for which it was developed. For example there are currently two flavours - homelessness and mental health.

Get your own - Open publication

Remix The Outcomes Star to suit your organisation
The Outcomes Star guides are released under Creative Commons (modify, attribute, no commercial profit) license. So if you can benefit from this, that would be fantastic.

About the Outcomes Star
Originally commissioned out to Triangle Consulting for its development to the London Housing Foundation. The mental health version, to my understanding, was co-developed between Triangle consulting and the Mental Health Providers Forum (MHPF). This mental health model, to my knowledge, still remains with the two mentioend before. The homelssness Outcomes star project has now been handed over - if you can put it that way, to homelesslink. There is an online system to support the Outcomes Star, and this has been developed by Jellymould Creative.

Resource(s)/Reference(s)

Outcomes Star - Main website
http://www.homelessoutcomes.org.uk/The_Outcomes_Star.aspx

Outcomes Star online System
http://www.outcomesstarsystem.org.uk/

homeless link - the new guardians of the Outcomes
http://www.homelesslink.org.uk/

Triangle Consulting - The research organisation hired to put together the star outcomes
http://www.triangleconsulting.co.uk/home/2008/5/8/recovery-star-published.html

Mental Health Providers Forum - Co-developers of the Outcomes Star Mental Health
http://www.mhpf.org.uk/

Creative Commons - open licensing for a co-constructive and creative future
http://creativecommons.org/

This PrimoPDF writer is almost perfect, but not quite...

In one of my previous posts relating to the issuu flipbook platform that converted PDFs to Flipbook format (and was free) I promised that I would write a post on a free and reliable PDF writer.

I've been using PrimoPDF for two months after having some problems with my previous pdf writer when printing webpages to pdf. So I went to the credible and reliable download.com owned by Cnet and Ziff Davis publishing (ZDnet.com), and checked around. After some googling and seeing other opionions I decided to give it a go. I still use it to this day.

The only thing that bothers me about PrimoPDF is that it constantly tries to connect to the internet. I've let it a few times but updates did not inform me of the changes. download.com checked it for malaware, etc. and said that it was squeaky clean.

If you aren't happy with your current pdf writer's ability to print webpages to pdf, then give PrimoPDF a go. Once installed it becomes anothe printer that you select to print to.

As part of this series, I'm examining open source components that facilitate a publishing work flow that culminates in a PDF format. Look out for the next open source reviews that will help your non-profit maximize resource and minimize unecessary expenditure. In the meantime check out the PrimoPDF screen shots, and if you like PrimoPDF download it from download.com.

PrimoPDF Printer Dialogue (from firefox Print option)