Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

Beth, of course, suggested this, and I’m jumping on her bandwagon. I realized, in being introduced to Edupunk, that I have been doing it for, oh, almost 20 years now.

In 1989, I joined the faculty of Hampshire College (and stayed for 10 years). Hampshire’s motto is “Non Satis Scire” - to know is not enough. From their website:

Some of the features that distinguish Hampshire from more traditional liberal arts colleges include student-designed academic concentrations; an active, collaborative, inquiry-based pedagogy; an interdisciplinary curriculum; and a narrative evaluation system.

Sounds a lot like Edupunk, doesn’t it?

But in the nonprofit realm, my perspective on helping nonprofit organizations with technology issues has a lot to do with client empowerment, learning based on what’s needed at the moment, and active collaboration.

I got a chance to test this out in a more orchestrated way (as opposed to the usual consultant/client interactions) when I facilitated/taught an OpenOffice.org “untraining” earlier this month at Google HQ in NYC (some more details are on the Google Blog.) I learned a lot. The unconference/camp model of learning about technology issues is really great, but falls a little short when dealing with a specific tool, and an audience that is mostly unfamiliar with it. So the model that I am coming up with is a combination of that model, and what I would call an “inquiry based” model - helping people in a more structured way come up with specific questions and problems before the event, and then use the event to collaboratively answer those questions, and solve those problems. The questions and problems are generated exactly from the needs of the participants - what do they need to do?

Anyway, I do hope at some point to have a chance to do this kind of thing again. And I think it would be great to have an nptechpunk mini movement!