Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

Kudos to Michele Martin who brings up a sticky issue: the scarcity mentality. Her perspective is that the scarcity mentality of nonprofits (the idea that there is only one pie, and we only get our small slice) helps keep nonprofits from taking full advantage of social media (i.e. Web 2.0). I’d argue that it also keeps nonprofits from collaborating together to produce amazingly good open source software projects (or, even closed-source, for that matter) that will help solve their issues and keep them from being captive to either predatory vendors, or vendors whose products, whether it be because of bad design, or not enough resources, promote data lock-in.

If ten similar nonprofit organizations came together to build a system that would work for them, they each would get 10 times the software that they could afford individually. But they are so busy living in that mentality of scarcity and competition, that they can’t do that kind of collaboration. So it doesn’t happen. Web 2.0, collaboratively developed software, and, really, collaborations of all sorts are limited by this mentality.

This reminds me of a true story. A long time ago (in web years) I was working with a certain CEO of a certain chapter of a certain very-big-nonprofit (whose role in life is to fund other nonprofits - this kinda gives it away, but it’s necessary for the story.) We were talking about whether or not this certain nonprofit, who had mondo resources, should help facilitate web development for their client organizations. They had realized that if they did that, the client organizations could begin to raise money themselves, instead of depending so heavily on this certain nonprofit. So, guess what? No web development help. I was, of course, surprised (that’s mild, I was frankly horrified - wasn’t it the mission of this certain nonprofit to help the client nonprofits raise money? Wouldn’t helping them raise money themselves fulfill their mission?) But that’s scarcity thinking for you. Even though this very-big-nonprofit was rolling in money, they thought the pie was finite, and that if the money didn’t go through them, they’d get less. So the scarcity mentality isn’t just for small, struggling nonprofits. It’s very widespread.

Technorati Tags: nptech, opensource, web2.0

This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 1:25 pm and is filed under Technology Zen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.