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.

One of the great things about the nonprofit technology community is that the community, on the whole, has a great respect for women, in whatever roles we play - whether it be geeky not. The exceptions to this in my experience have been very, very few and far between.

However, take one little step outside of our warm and fuzzy community into the larger technology community, and things change. Unfortunately, the open source community seems to find ways to ridicule, degrade and and belittle women quite often.

Linux Journal ran the following advertisement by a company called “QSOL”:

And, it got 2100+ diggs, with the title “Best. Ad. Ever.” It ran in 2000, with a lot of uproar, and they promised never to run it again. Right.
In addition,  Linux Journal has a column, called “Tech Tips from Gnull and Voyd” with quotes like:

Howdy.  My husband is Chester Gnull and I’m Laverta Voyd, and I’m the lady to light a way for all you sweethearts out there who do fancy stuff with Linux.  Me and my husband’s gonna be bringing you tech tips just about every month now.  … I don’t know nothing about Linux.  Chester, he’s the smart one, but he’s not much of a talker.  That’s why I’m here.  …

One wonders how many bad stereotypes they can fit in one column?

Anyway, if you read Linux Journal, please tell them how you feel. I did.

I’ve been experimenting with the non-content centered social networking sites LinkedIn and Facebook for a while now. (The content centered ones, like flickr, del.icio.us and our own Social Source Commons, are a different animal.) I’ve been playing with LinkedIn for probably a year, Facebook only for a couple of months. It has been fun, in many ways, but I’ve not figured out the utility for me in terms of my work, although others have had a better time of it. But, something has always been nagging me about them, especially Facebook. In some comments in a post of mine about Facebook, someone mentioned the article “Facebook is the new AOL” and I also mentioned an article I’d read asking how open is Facebook, really?

Facebook (and LinkedIn) are what people are calling “walled gardens”. Even though it is true that anyone can join either network, the data in them is limited only to those who join, and join networks and have friends.

I’ve always been an advocate of open data and open standards, and Facebook is a great example of a one-way street. Wired says:

Therein lies the rub. When entering data into Facebook, you’re sending it on a one-way trip. Want to show somebody a video or a picture you posted to your profile? Unless they also have an account, they can’t see it. Your pictures, videos and everything else is stranded in a walled garden, cut off from the rest of the web.

I’ve been slowly but surely realizing that the time and energy I’m putting into Facebook is likely benefiting Facebook more than it is benefiting me. Yeah, it’s fun that there is a great mix of people that I can keep track of (and they can keep track of me) - that’s the part of the equation that’s hard to find elsewhere.

So I’ve decided to, for now, keep my accounts, but dramatically curb my time with Facebook and LinkedIn, and spend more time exploring the ways I can use truly open technologies to do some of the same things. There are some great tips in this Wired article. And I’ll also be experimenting with the XHTML Friends Network, which looks like an interesting start on an open way to connect people.

It’s been a week of mostly not work, which is a nice rest. I finally finished the first edited version of the scifi novel I wrote last summer. That feels good. Next steps are get some feedback, and move forward with it, somehow. I had a brief conversation by email with Cory Doctorow, a science fiction author who is also a copyleft activist, who releases everything he writes with a CC license. He suggested, basically, find the publisher first, then talk about the license second. That sounded like good advice, since it might take me quite a while to get to step 1. (If, perchance, you might want to read it, drop me an email.)

I’m on week 3 of my Ubuntu laptop migration - things are smoothing out - I’ve got audio working, I can listen to mp3 and audio streams. Flash (and, therefore, YouTube) is working, as is Java. I did a webinar for NTEN on it - ReadyTalk worked just fine. I still haven’t figured out how to get higher resolution on my laptop screen, but that’s mostly due to lack of time trying to get it to work. I also have a document nightmare - I have documents on the desktop, documents on my laptop, documents on external hard drives, aiii. I need to figure out a good network configuration.

There’s been some interesting activity in the realm of women in open source. There is a podcast with a group of women developers that was recorded during RailsConf. It’s definitely worth a listen. There is a part two coming, I understand.

Also, I’ll be moving this blog soon - probably next week. I decided to move both of my blogs off of typepad, and to other platforms. My main blog is moving to WordPress, this blog is moving over to the Metacentric.org Joomla CMS.

I’ll keep you posted on URLs and feeds.

Jon Stahl quotes a comment by Ethan Zuckerman about “shiny” - the over attention to cool and groovy web 2.0 functionality. The punch line:

… there’s a good chance that underneath the shiny is something that isn’t very interesting. (Not always, but often.) And that some of what’s deeply, truly, long-term transformative isn’t shiny at all.

Yes!

Technorati Tags: nptech, web2.0

I’ve been thinking a lot about technology support lately. Really a lot. Part of it is being prompted by my own technology support experiences with my satellite “broadband” provider (which have been largely frustrating). A lot of it has been because I have lately been exposed to situations where I have felt organizations haven’t gotten the support they need, which, in our world, I think is all too common. As I move out of doing implementation, and into more evaluation, planning and facilitation of technology change within organizations, I wanted to spend some time articulating what I have tried my best to practice when I’ve been in a place of providing technology support.

All technology providers have to deal at some level with support. Whether they implement a system, or build it, they will inevitably have the job of supporting that technology. Providers have many different ways of handling that challenge. Unfortunately, the most recent trend, which I have experienced all too much (and I’m sure you all have too), is to simply follow a script with the person who needs support. It drives me simply nuts that every single time I call my satellite provider about a problem with the service, and I’m saying “I’m seeing 80% packet loss, and doing a traceroute suggests that it’s about 2 hops after your modem” and they respond with “OK, first, we’re going to clear out your browser cache. Go to preferences …” It has been a challenge to resist uttering strings of obscenities.

But also, the question is - is providing technology support simply just an end in itself, or is it also a means to another end - that is, can it be a means to empower clients in appropriate technology use to further their mission?

I realized, in thinking about all of this, that the model of technology support that makes the most sense to me is to think of it similarly as a teacher-student relationship. I know, I’m a born educator, and I’m sure someone out there is saying “if you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail…” But I do think there is some validity to this approach. Certainly, if you are a technology provider that values empowerment of your clients, this is probably a good model to consider.

So what is it about a teacher-student relationship that we can learn from to provide really good technical support? From my perspective, there are four elements to a technology support process with this as a model:

1. Assessment - where is the client - both in terms of technology knowledge, as well as in terms of what they need at the moment?
2. Empowerment - as you help them with a problem, teach them about the problem, and ways to troubleshoot (or possibly solve) the problem themselves in the future.
3. Relationship - an ongoing relationship with the client
4. Solution - providing the solution to their problem

First, Assessment. Where is this client, now? First, there is the question of what they know. If you have a relationship with them (see #3) you’ll already be familiar with their technical expertise - so you’ll know where to start. But there is more than that to assessment. What is going on for them? Is this a problem that is critical to their work, or a “pebble in the shoe” kind of problem - annoying, but not urgent? Are they trying to get a grant out, and they are scared they won’t meet the deadline because of a technical issue? Are they angry? All of these are important to know and understand, so it’s possible to meet them where they are. That’s one of the hallmarks of a good educator - meeting a student where they are, tailoring the education to meet the needs of the student. It’s also, I think, a hallmark of a good provider of technology support.

Second, Empowerment. One of the most common problems that someone who has built websites has, is the client calls up, and says “the website is down”. And you hurriedly go to your browser, and, voila, the website isn’t down. So now you take them through all of the steps to figure out why it was they can’t see their own website. You can choose to take them through this problem so that they figure out at the moment what’s up, and who to call, or you can take them through it so that next time it happens, they won’t need to call you, because they’ve figured out the problem really belongs to “insert_some_other_technology_provider_here.” Or, they’ll call you because the website really is down. Teaching them about the technology behind the problem they are having, and helping them to understand what’s involved in it, not only empowers them to deal with problems more on their own, but it also empowers them to solve other technology problems, and be more engaged in technology planning in the future.

Third, Relationship. All of this works within whatever relationship you have with a client. As mentioned above, if you’ve worked consistently with a client, you know what their level of expertise is - this makes assessment easier. Also, you remember how much work you got done when a substitute teacher came to class? Not a lot of learning, but certainly a lot of spitballs. Consistency in relationship is as important to students as it is to people who get support from a technology provider. Usually, of course, with the huge technology providers, that sort of thing isn’t possible. But with smaller providers it certainly is. Sometimes, even with larger providers, they manage to get around this by having detailed logs of conversations with you. I’ve found that quite helpful in the past - it has surprised me when someone has said something like “I see you called a couple of months ago with a problem regarding x. How has that worked for you since then?” It was nice to feel like someone actually bothered to write it down, and for the person talking with me bothered to read it. In the past, for me, my ongoing support relationships with clients have been the way that I have learned the most about their organizations. It has allowed me to be proactive in working with them on technology, and incredibly informative in helping future planning. The relationship is a two-way street: just as they let us know about challenges they face with their technology problems - it’s important for us to tell them about the challenges that we run into in working to support them. There is a level of trust that’s important to this relationship. Honestly, it is the relationship I cherish most highly (even more highly than whatever they pay me).

Fourth, Solution. This is where the provider-client relationship differs most from the teacher-student relationship. Of course, in the end, the client needs their technology problem solved, as quickly and efficiently as possible. But I’d argue that good assessment of where the client is, and where the problem fits in their work and organizational lives, empowerment of them to troubleshoot problems on their own, and an ongoing, stable relationship, will make the eventual solution of the problem a lot easier, more economical and less stressful for both the client and the provider than it might be otherwise.

Technorati Tags: nptech, techsupport

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since I wrote my post, a few weeks ago, saying I was done with technology consulting. In one sense, I spoke too soon, although in another, I was right on. And, to some extent, this post is a bit self-indulgent, so if you’re looking for some concrete technology talk, you might want to wait for the next post on Joomla. :-)

I first started doing technology consulting for nonprofit organizations in 1996, with a project for a local public television station (WGBY in Springfield, MA), to design a technology center for teachers to learn about technology and the internet, so they could apply that in their classrooms. It was a great project, and a success, since that technology center is still in operation today. Understandably, it has come to be somewhat different than I designed it back then, but it still feels good that something that I worked hard on is still serving people. And it was the sheer enjoyment of that project - of talking to many different people about needs and desires, thinking about how to appropriately use technology to those ends, that got me out of academia, and into the nonprofit and educational technology world.

I did a lot of planning, evaluation and training in the beginning - some on my own, some with Summit Collaborative. it was what I enjoyed most, and it was what I thought I was best at. But, somewhere along the line, I started to do more and more implementation, because, honestly, that was what my clients needed most at the time. I put in a few networks in the late ’90s (ugh, really, I pulled cable.) I started to do databases for organizations, and then, in 1999, I flew headlong into web application development, which became my specialty and mainstay until I took a break to go to seminary in 2005. At first, I liked it a lot. I liked being able to create things that I thought my clients wanted (and they thought they wanted.) I stumbled a fair bit along the way. I had a hard time being a successful business owner with employees (I pretty much suck at it, so I hitched my wagon to Database Designs Associates from 2003 until this year.) And I struggled mightily with my own capacity to build really good applications mostly without other developers to help out. It was really hard to try and write new applications building on a framework I’d written a while ago, while simultaneously improving that framework, and keeping up with new things such as Ajax and RSS, mostly by myself. It just wasn’t happening very well.

And as time wore on, I lost touch with people and organizations. I sat for hours (or days) at a time in front of my screen without contact with the folks I was doing the work for. And, if there was contact, it was most often on the level of “can you fix this?” “can you add this feature?” I don’t blame them - they needed the fixes, and the features. But that was a pale shadow of the kind of work and contact I wanted with my clients. And I also struggled with the consulting business model. In the early days, as a business owner, I needed to think a lot about sustaining business (I had employees, and I wanted them to eat.) And later, even though it wasn’t a large part of my job description, it still was something that I had a hard time with - like getting yanked out of my flow to answer RFPs.

For one long time client (I had this client for just about all of the span of my consulting career - they were my second client), I had a much fuller, richer role, even though much of the work I did for them was database and web application development, we’d built a great rapport over time, and it felt wonderful when I got the chance to talk with them about bigger picture issues. But that was not so often, and, as staff in that organization left over time, that relationship changed.

When I came back from seminary, I was very clear that I couldn’t do technology consulting in the way that I had come to do it. I couldn’t bring myself to code or design databases, or write connections to APIs, or do any of those things that had become my bread and butter over the past 6 years. I wanted to work directly with organizations and people. So, it seemed to me that I needed simply to leave technology consulting behind, and move into doing things in a more spiritual vein, perhaps.

But then, I had something of an epiphany. And that epiphany was in my post about “Technology Consulting 2.0.” And the more I thought about it, the more it made sense to me, and the more I liked it. And the more I talked with other people about it, the more it made sense for me to do it. I will hold off for a while yet in my life working with people directly on spiritual issues, and work now with what could certainly be called the spirituality of nonprofit technology - finding balance and looking at the bigger picture. I’m creating a new practice, called MetaCentric Techology Advising. It will include visioning and planning, evaluation and training. All of the stuff that I liked the most about nonprofit technology, and, honestly, what I’m probably best at. And it’s nice to know that all of the last 8 years or so as a “technology vendor” as it were, will be there as good experience and guidance as I work with clients.

I won’t talk much about it in this blog again, but I thought it might be something people would want to hear about.

Technorati Tags: consulting, nptech

This conversation is very interesting, and very useful.

Both Michael and Laura bring up some important points that I want to talk more about - the cost of providing good content, and ways to provide that good content in a way that is sustainable. There is no question that providing good content costs money - I have no illusions about that. And I do, very personally know that raising money in a traditional sense (from foundations, etc.) for producing content is difficult, and takes a lot of time. And I don’t think that we have all of the answers yet to solve this problem - but it’s a problem worth solving, a problem worth struggling with, and not just going down the path of least resistance.

I got on Michael’s case about this primarily because his journal is about technology and social change - and, as he had said, he’s made passionate arguments about the open content in the past. But ultimately, yes, I do think that all content that we provide to the nonprofit sector should be freely available, and under Creative Commons (or similar) licensing. That’s the only way to provide important information to nonprofits that need it - some have a hard time affording even nominal fees for that sort of thing.

There are all sorts of interesting models for providing this content in this way, while still providing sustainability. Providing the online version as free and open, and charging for a print version (obviously, above and beyond just the cost of printing it,) is one idea. The open source community has all sorts of good models to learn from. Ways to leverage open content to get folks to pay for more premium services - in this realm it could be for training, or webinars, or those sorts of things. I think revenue sharing is possible - asking nonprofits who have resources to contribute to allow the content to be freely available to all, for instance. Michael’s open bounty is a great idea, and I’d love to help in any way I could to make that happen. There are collaborative content generation models - spreading the work out among more people. I also had heard of the publishing model that Peter brought up - allowing the authors to provide open access.

Believe me, between working with NOSI to provide good content, as well as thinking about what I am going to do with that science fiction novel I wrote over last summer that I’d like to publish at some point (I realized that once I started this conversation, I forever closed off the option to publish it traditionally) I feel this issue very keenly, and very, very personally.

I do want to address Laura’s concern about expectations. She says:

But I’ll put an unpopular suggestion out there: I think we as a community also need to consider possible negative impacts of advocating that all content ought to be open. It’s already very difficult to pay for the effort of creating great content; if in addition we promote in people’s mind the idea that all content ought to be free, it’s hard to escape promoting the idea that no content is worth paying for. Which puts us in danger of tipping an environment in which it’s very difficult to support good content into one in which it’s downright impossible.

It’s an interesting comment, and I think that it doesn’t take into consideration the way that gift economies work. A system where all content were freely available and under a Creative Commons license is a gift economy - in the same way as open source software, or wikipedia works in a gift economy. And there are great examples of sustainable gift economies out there, and ways that the “real” economy feeds gift economies. I think that it’s always important to make clear in people’s mind the difference between free “as in beer” and free as in “information wants to be free.” There is an educational component to providing free and open content. And I think we have to think about the negative impacts of providing content only to those who can pay for it - increasing an already evident digital divide between nonprofits that have the resources to pay for these kinds of content, and those that do not.

Technorati Tags: nptech, opencontent, publishing

As I write this, I’m hurtling through small towns and big cities on the train home. We’ve passed through Baltimore - which reminds me of a project I did once, way back when, to work with a group of mostly small and medium-sized organizations on technology planning. In those days, the buzzwords were “internet connectivity,” “networks,” “websites,” and “email.” This was in the solidly web 1.0 world where many organizations still weren’t even networked, still used dial-up internet connections, and had websites written in the earliest version of Front Page, or were done by the CFO’s nephew.

I’ve emerged from this week’s frenzy of buzzwords like “blogging,” “open API,” “e-advocacy,” “municipal wireless” and “social networking” not surprised at how much things have changed, really, but how much they have stayed exactly the same. From the stories I’ve heard this week, nonprofits of the size that I’m most familiar with (small to medium-sized) still don’t have in-house technology expertise to make evaluations about what directions to go in. They sometimes deal with vendors and developers that don’t really understand their mission, don’t speak their language, and don’t tell them the truth (whether intentionally, or by a lack of self-examination.) They struggle mightily with software, no matter whether it’s free/open source or proprietary, shrink-wrapped or custom-built, on their desktops or web-hosted, which they generally spend extraordinary amounts of time and/or money on. The buzzwords have changed and the technology has gotten more sophisticated - but the problems many nonprofits are facing are exactly the same. So I hate to throw cold water on the whole enterprise - but if the core issues that most nonprofits are facing haven’t changed, and the situation isn’t getting better, how is it that have we helped?

I also saw the conference with some different, post-seminary eyes. I was looking for the deeper purposes behind the implementation of technology. I was looking for the discriminating approach to adopt technology appropriately. I was looking for the big conversation - why are we doing this anyway? Is it still just in the pursuit of “efficiency”? Is it all just TCO arguments? And I also looked at this with post-implementation eyes. I spent 8 years implementing technology “solutions” for nonprofit organizations. I wrote thousands of lines of code and designed more databases than I can count. I think I truly did some good, and I know I made mistakes along the way. Mistakes I hope to learn from, now that I won’t be doing implementation anymore.

Sometimes, the forward march of technology seems like this train I’m riding on - inexorably traveling down the track of capitalist profit while nonprofits are hanging on to those little hand-powered trucks that we, the people who serve them in this realm are working really hard to pump up and down, so we can try and gamely keep up. And while they watch really large organizations zip by them in bigger, better vehicles, looking exactly like they know where they are going. But no one seems to be asking “why are we on this track in the first place?” “Is being on this track going to really help me save the whales/feed people/organize/save the planet?”

And it’s making me think a lot about what I’m going to start calling “Nonprofit Technology Consulting 2.0″ (and yes, I’m subverting the dominant paradigm.) I don’t know yet whether I’ll actually start practicing it, but I’d like to think about it more. What would it be like if we could help nonprofits with the following:

• Asking whether technology implementations in their organization in the past have really facilitated their mission? In what ways have they not?
• Asking whether technology played a beneficiary, damaging or neutral role in internal organizational dynamics and staff morale?
• Asking, before implementing a new technology - what problem is really attempting to be solved? is it a problem that can be solved in any other ways?
• How does increasing use of networking technology, on-line presence, and internet communications facilitate or hinder work that is done face to face?
• Making choices about technology not just based on cost/TCO or feature set - but to bring in issues of the effects on staff, organizational dynamics, and the role of factors such as organizational determination of data destiny, source and ownership of software, and environmental impact.
• Being mediators between vendors and nonprofits - to look at issues that are technological, and issues that are about personality, behavior and organizational structure and dynamics (on both sides)
• Looking at the bigger picture - how does what an organization does with technology affect the larger community, and the planet?

I’m looking for ways that it might be possible to practice nonprofit technology consulting with head and heart, with a view to the bigger picture of our society and our planet, and the precarious place we are in as human beings at this time, and with a view that reflects my emerging belief that increasing human touch and human contact will do more, in the end, than many of our attempts to increase efficiency by using technology.

When I re-started this blog 6 months ago, I named it Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology for a good reason. I want us to pay attention. I want us to pay attention to what we are doing, and how we are doing it. I’m very clear that there are technology implementations that are completely appropriate, mission-facilitating, and even good for the greater community, and good for the planet. I want to make sure that every single technology implementation is like that. My bet is that we might do a lot fewer of them if that were so.

As I keep thinking more about this, I’ll be blogging about it. I welcome any feedback and conversation, either by email, or on comments and trackbacks on this blog.

I had a great Day of Service with the Advocacy Project, which is a great organization that sends interns out into the field, to work with local partner organizations on issues such as human rights, women’s health, peace, and many other issues. We talked about appropriate use of Web 2.0 tools for their interns, for themselves - for advocacy, fundraising, and information dissemination.

It was fun and engaging. They are an interesting and eclectic group, and our conversation ranged all over the map. But it felt useful, and I learned a lot from them. It made me think about what is important to me about consulting - why I got into doing consulting in the first place. I like talking with people. I like learning from them, I like working to give them concrete information they can use, as well as thought-provoking questions for them to ponder as time goes on.

And it reminded me of what I had been missing for all of this time in working to implement technology. It was the human contact, the human touch, the connection about more than just “can you fix this bug?” or “can you build this?” That’s what I’ve been missing.

Technorati Tags: 07NTC, consulting, web2.0