CU Blogs

I’ve been in discussions with people across the industry numbers times about common bond vs community charter and the ramifications of selecting either one.  Most people know how Denise stands about community charters and I share the same ideology: credit unions were started on common bond and should continue on that path to be successfully.  Many, many CU’s have converted to community charter recently and have lost the affinity base they used to have. 

Tim’s post over at Currency sparked this thought today and now I can’t get it out of my head.  As the internet becomes more prevalent across the US, or North America to keep those Canadians happy, we have a new opportunity to go back to the common bond roots and create strong relationships with out members.  At BarCampBank this past summer, Jesse talked about starting Black Rock Federal for burners which is a perfect example of starting a distributed CU.  Imagine the affinity and strong ties that would come from burners being able to form a CU together.  Same thing goes for NASCAR.  Imagine if each team was able to start their own CU, with their own rewards programs, charity donations, or a spare tire fund.  Any national group with a strong community would be a perfect opportunity. 

This is just me ranting, but CU’s need to get back to that common bond and we have a real opportunity to leverage technology to get us there.  I just hope the NCUA cooperates with some charter requests that are not exactly what they are used to seeing.

 Rather than regurgitate what many people smarter than I have already said, here are some resources for credit union looking to get into blogging. 

Tony from CU Hype talking about starting a blog

Open Source CU talking about starting a blog 

Here are some responses to credit unions starting blogs… 

Here’s William Azaroff’s article on Verity’s new blog.

Morriss talking about First New York’s entry into blogging

Open Source CU cautioning CU’s

 We have a few stats plugins on cublogs.org now, one of which being the new FireStats.  FireStats has released a beta of their next version which includes support for WordPressMu.  Simply click on plugins and then activate FireStats.  This can work in unison with Google Analytics as well and provides an excellent option for analytics embedded inside of the management console for your blog.

We’re slowly adding some more functionality to the site and the most recent upgrade is a support forum for everyone.  Powered by bbPress, the support forum will get you feedback directly from other users and myself.  Feel free to ask any question in the forum or use the contact form if you feel more comfortable asking me directly.  And by the way, anyone who is registered on cublogs.org automatically has access to the support forum.  No other username to sign up with.  I’m working on getting the cookies to work right so you won’t even have to log in. 

In an article on TechCrunch today, the founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, took some harsh words about the grey line that exists in the open source community: how to make money from it.

After BarCampBankSeattle, a small group of us have continued the discussion surrounding the core processing marketplace and opportunities that exist within that space.  Primarily, if an open source core processor will work.

Some CU’s love the idea of open source; a community based development of software that is technically free to the end users, although it is not with cost.  Other CU’s shy away from open source because they would much rather have a turn-key solution in which the vendor provides all of the servicing for the particular product and is on the contractual hook as well.

While some CU’s accept OSS (Open Source Software) and everything that comes along with it, would those same CU’s accept an open sourced core or any other software related to their core, online banking for example?  As this Coding Horror article talks about, many open source product have scaling issues associated with them and the article uses Twitter and RoR (Ruby on Rails) as the example.

Assuming that CU’s could/would accept a major open source operating component (core, online banking, debit/credit cards, payroll processing, etc), how would the company providing the software keep the lights on and servers running?  In the TechCrunch article, WordPress takes some flak for no longer allowing sponsored themes, or themes with text ad links embedded in them, in their theme directory, yet sells an anti-spam plugin to commercial and other non-personal users.  One could go the MySQL/Red Hat/Sugar route and offer "Enterprise" versions of the software for a price while open sourcing the basic version. 

Could a core provider offer a basic version for free but also offer an "Enterprise" version to clients willing to pay?  Would CU’s even buy a core processor that is open sourced?  How do you address the perceived security concerns associated with open source?  As someone point out to me, the ratio of hacker-to-contributor would be much higher for an open source core than FireFox or OpenOffice for example.  If you create a nasty FireFox plugin that reboots someone’s computer, woo-hoo, but if you could go download the core software that a bank or credit union is running, where would you spend your time?

While not a great title for only the second post, cublogs.org experienced a temporary outage today after an update to one of the plugins running the site.  The problem has since been resolved.  Thanks everyone for the prompt heads up!

Welcome to cublogs.org, the free blog hosting site for the credit union industry!  I setup cublogs.org to provide an alternative to the other free blogging services out there but at the same time give everyone the flexibility that comes with running your own blog, just without the hassles.

Getting started is simple!  Just click on the “Get A Blog” link on the top of any page and get started!  The blog is yours, so you can export your data at anytime to move to another provider or delete the blog at any point as well.  This site is just getting started so I encourage everyone to leave their feedback on any post or on the Contact page.

I’ll be setting up an FAQ section shortly that describes some of the functionality, but the best way to learn is to try! If you need a theme, plugin, or anything else just drop me a line.