Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

Over the past year and a half, I’ve been fulfilling a definitely different role with nonprofit organizations than most times in the past. I’ve been an intermediary, rather than an implementor. In this role, it has been my task to provide advice for organizations around technology choice and vendor selection.

Many times, I narrow down the technology options as a part of the RFP process. I do this based on my knowledge of the options out there, my own opinions about them, and, most importantly, the feature match. For many projects, a wide range of options are possible, and in talking with vendors who specialize in one toolset or another, I’ve been intrigued by the ways in which vendors talk about their chosen tools. For some projects, there is no question that one tool may be better than another. But for a lot of projects, what’s way more important than the tool is the approach of the vendor/developer, and the quality of the work they produce.

And some things surprise me. I am actually still surprised at how many small vendors are still selling their custom CMS. Having written and maintained my own for a few years, I know that the investment is hard to let go of. But in terms of long term sustainability, from my perspective, picking one of the well developed open source CMSs and running with it, can’t be beat. There will be an initial investment of time, but the time savings later, and the added opportunities will almost inevitably outweigh the cost of maintaining and improving (as web technology gets more sophisticated, clients expect more from their websites) your own.

And I guess what’s less surprising is that people are pretty wedded to their toolset, and ready with long lists of arguments as to why theirs is better. I’m sure that when I was doing implementation, I focused some energy on “why my tools are better” (and, actually, I was right and wrong at the time. For instance, I chose perl over php and postgresql over mysql in 1999.) I know that’s just part of the package of being an implementor. Some arguments I can certainly appreciate better than others (the Python vs PHP ones are fun.) But I’m sorry, I’m not going to be convinced that ColdFusion is a platform I should choose. I mean, it doesn’t even have objects! (That’s actually not the most important reason, but the fact that a web development platform that has been around for 13 years still doesn’t have objects is telling.)

And as I think about going back to doing implementation, platform choice is certainly something to ponder. (More on those thoughts in a forthcoming post.)