Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

One of the things I’ve noticed recently is that my blog is getting the attention of software vendors. I guess that’s a good thing. Maybe it means I have “arrived”. Probably it just means that when the “Social Media Director” or the “Goddess of Communication” arrived in their office in the morning, they ran their standard set of google blog and technorati searches, and voila, there I was.

It was, a while ago, part of my job to build technology solutions for people. It was also part of my job to give advice where it was appropriate, but I have come to realize, in my current position of being apart from building things, that I had a bit of myopia, as all builders and vendors do. We like what we build/sell (generally, I’m sure there are exceptions.) We think our particular products or service is the best around, or, at least, provides our clients with some unique value. I had good intentions, like virtually all software vendors do. Like many who work in this sector, I cared more about the missions of my clients than I did about my own income, although I also needed to put food on the table.

But, I was myopic anyway. It’s the standard “if I have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” I wanted to figure out how to make my product solve every problem that my clients had - or, if I couldn’t, I wanted to figure out how to build/install/integrate something that could.

Vendors, no matter what their intentions and points of view do have a particular way of speaking. “Elluminate is a leading provider of live Web conferencing and eLearning solutions for the real-time organization.” and “… hundreds of NonProfits have already found that ReadyTalk is a good fit for them both technologically AND financially.” and “We’ve designed Yugma to work seamlessly between Mac, Windows and Linux.” you the picture. In fact, if you are a nonprofit, you’ve spent time wading through that crap (and believe me, I’ve created my own healthy share of vendorspeak.)

A while ago, I blogged about the “scarcity mentality” - the idea that the pie is finite, and it has to be split up. So, of course, everybody is fighting tooth and nail, bit and byte, trackback and comment (and even dollar and cent), to get their piece. There are some trends that make it seem that some vendors are beginning to get the picture that we can all work together - open APIs seem to be on the rise. That makes me happy.

My one request is that vendors who comment on this blog take a moment to step back a bit from their myopia, and look at the ways in which they can contribute to a vibrant, active ecology of choices, rather than fight for their own little piece of the pie.