I would like to be so bold as to suggests a tenet of nonprofit technology. An axiom maybe. A rule of thumb?
Invisibility.
I remember this Little House on the Prairie episode when Half Pint got her first slate and chalk. Laura Engals was as enamored with her new technology as I was with my first computer. Her slate is a technology that is directly analogous to the the word processor. The tools that I remember are the Tandy TRS 80, the Commodore, the Intel 8086, Apple IIe, Word Perfect, AbiWord, MacWrite, Word. And, now the term "word processor" feels sort of funny in my mouth. Maybe that is because Word IS the word processor and their is no longer a need for a generic term. And, yes there are competitors, I am writing this on the now open source AbiWord on a Mac. But this is exactly my point. Choosing tool more than defining a preference. The computer is not an invisible platform and the word processor is not the pen.
Invisibility.
Personally, I really like the Uni Ball. I never have one around. I will often buy them when I'm in the stationary isle at the store but I loose it pretty quick. So, I end up using a Bic or a Papermate. PaperMate seems to have market share in my world. I prefer black ink. Most pens have black ink. I like to keep a black composition book with with me to take notes. This level of introspection about these tools has absolutely no bearing on the efficacy of the tools.
I would like to suggest that we have a very low bar for technology adoption. A technology becomes "adopted" at the point that it becomes invisible. Because of the rapid pace of technology development, coupled with a very poor delivery mechanism (shrink wrap) and a highly unpredictable platform, adoption, as I have defined it, has arguably not happened in any significant way on the desktop PC, at all. There are general categories of functionality that we take for granted like the ability to send and receive messages or, more basically, the ability to compose a message. But a closer look at the tools required to execute those tasks reveals very problematic, unresolved issues like certified email or interoperability.
I worked for 9 years as a teacher and a high school administrator and I have now worked for 6 years in the corporate world as a Program Director for the Salesforce Foundation. Relative to this discussion about tools and in particular to the concept of invisibility, for a variety of reasons, many financial, many cultural, the corporate environment has come closer to providing invisible tools to its workforce than has the social sector. In a corporation, a request to "Email that to me" generally catalyzes a reflexive response to compose and send an email in Microsoft Outlook. However, behind that reflex is an IT department that supports at least one, often multiple, Microsoft Exchange servers and all the LDAP, Active Directory and other accouterments that are necessary to make that reflexive act effective. So, relative to the end user, the corporate employee, the act of sending an email is relatively invisible. However, relative to the organization, the corporation, it is not.
What I am most interested in is realizing invisible, relevant and effective tools, for the nonprofit sector. In essence, a virtual IT department. In reality, an outsourced it department.
Accenture recently release a report called "Identifying Enablers of Nonprofit High Performance." It is an excellent report that took as its central questions the following:
1. What are nonprofit organizational priorities?
2. Do nonprofits want or need access to corporate skills?
3. How can corporations best contribute to a thriving, high-impact nonprofit sector in the United States?
Unsurprisingly, and, I believe accurately, they say "Yes" to number two and provide good vectors to follow relative to number three. They discuss the equation of how to find skilled volunteers to donate professional skills. A great topic for another time. For the detail on these issues, I encourage folks to read the report.
On the first question, Accenture essentially said that nonprofits do not place enough emphasis on their own operational efficacy. And they made this the primary focus of the reports outcomes. They defined 5...
Steps to Improve Nonprofit Operations
1. Convince corporate and private-sector donors
to fund operations instead of "signature"or "vanity"
programs that may advance the donor's agenda but
do little to help the organization's day-to-day
financial viability.
2. Implement appropriate metrics that enable
organizations to evaluate the success and impact
of their delivery of services and programs.
3. Make better use of technology.
4. Engage board members to ensure that quality
governance structures are in place that not only
minimize the risk of inappropriate actions, but also
help the organization create an effective and efficient
operation that can be sustained over time.
5. Explore and adopt new collaborative business
models with complementary organizations.
Before I bring this particular tangent back to my central thesis, assuming there is one that can be identified at this point, I would like to quickly mention a couple of other resources that I think inform this discussion about technology adoption/invisibility in the nonprofit sector.
Yochai Benklers new book - The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php/Main_Page
Katherine Fulton and Andrew Blau's Book - Looking Out For The Future: An orientation for 21st Century Philanthropists
http://www.futureofphilanthropy.org/
Tim Wu's - The Broadband Debate: A User's Guide (to a lesser degree but still a good read)
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=557330
Teenagers in LA using My Space to organize a massive school walkout in protest of immigration "reform"
http://www.google.com/search?q=myspace+immigration+protest+LA
Pew/Internet Report - Teen Content Creators and Consumers
http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/166/report_display.asp
If you squint, and shake your head a little, the thread that you can see running through all of these examples is a common definition of nonprofit (or decentralized, or nonmarket, or community) efficacy. The idea that innovation, if unfettered, if left to its own devices, will catalyze a better world through social production. The idea that nonmarket, social production creates value, not in dollars specifically (though not exclusively) but instead, social production creates value to support the human condition. An unnervingly strange but entirely welcome place to create value in our world.
It is this idea of social production, the idea that we can aggregate the passion and skills of individuals AND individual organizations (for profit, government, nonprofit...) to collaboratively create nonmarket products that will create a social support infrastructure, an infrastructure that is the analog to the corporate support infrastructure. IT departments are the obvious example of a corporate support system that the nonprofit sector needs to replicate, but there is no reason why this model should necessarily be tied to software development. A holy grail, yes, but one that is coming in to focus with the on demand, web enabled technologies available today. A model whose only detractors are the for profit agencies that believe this social support infrastructure should be purchased from them. I would refer folks back to the Yochai Benkler book (I haven't made it much past the introduction, but it is a really good introduction) and the Tim Wu article above.
It is important not to confuse social production or nonmarket output with a enmity for profit. These things are not mutually exclusive. Watch salesforce.com and our platform play with AppExchange and the AppExchange OEM program. Salesforce.com donates our fully baked CRM service or, in a unique effort to catalyze social production, we donate our blank-slate application development and delivery platform. Google and Yahoo! aggressively promote free access to their API's. This is done to drive innovation and create new ways of using the product that can be leveraged either through productization (is that a word?), PR/Marketting or greater adoption, adoption approaching invisibility.
The Accenture report, suggests that nonprofits need to focus more on operational efficacy. The report makes this request with a complete understanding of the tremendous value and under-resourced nature of our sector. The report also fully recognizes the context of the work, the gravity of the need to make the world a better place. It is this context that provides my final point. Adoption that achieves invisibility will finally allow us, the social sector, to discuss, as sector, the tactics that will fuel our strategy, our strategy to make the world a better place. I do not consider discussions of the the best groupware suite or the best listserv or certified mail or certainly, whether or not to "adopt" a particular technology because it has market share or the best functionality or interoperability to be discussions of tactics. Our movement should be able to outsource these discussions. Change agents should not need to be technologists. Technology has long promised to provide a functionality unique to us, to our context, the make a better world stuff. In general, peer to peer communications may be able to facilitate the sorts of cross sector introductions between people to create a tipping point, to allow individuals to aggregate our opinions, to commodify our commitments to better world. There is another, probably more interesting, article on the potential for technology to catalyze a democracy in the US.
Back to context. Let's assume we are an organization, an organization that aspires to a world where all nonprofits can skillfully and confidently meet community needs for responsive and humane social services, social equity and opportunity, a healthy natural environment, or the challenge and illumination of art (the NTEN mission statement minus the bit about technology). In a world where the discussion of technology tools to achieve those purposes is analogous to picking the best ball point pen to write a letter to the editor, how would this organization operate? What would be the tenor of the discussions? Why would people belong to this organization?
If our goals are to create a better world, even if we need to discuss the idiosyncrasies of particular technologies, it is critical that we discuss the context of our tactics. It is critical that we understand the levers that effect the creation of a better world, and that we understand this in the context of the work that we do. So, back to peer to peer communications, in order to create connections between individuals that are separated by geography or experience or lifestyle or platitude or religion or economics or something else, we need to discuss the content of the discussion that we are looking to catalyze be that context immigration, racism, economic policy, homelessness, foster care, bilingual education, property taxes, the media...
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