Plone NGO Mailing List The Organizational Digital Divide

[Jonah Bossewitch]

Hi Everyone,

Really great meeting many of you all out in Seattle last week.

I mentioned to a few of you that I had been working on an op-ed piece on
the importance of technology for non-profit organizing. I am thinking
about submitting this to the Chronicle of Philanthropy or something
(which means I shouldn't publish it anywhere until then), but was
curious if anyone had any feedback for me before then. I thought it
might also have a place in Plone's non-profit marketing.

all the best,
/Jonah

-------------------------------------------------
Like the telegraph and the railroad in their time, the Internet has been
heralded as the promoter of equality, freedom, and democracy. And like
the technologies that preceded it, its impact will ultimately derive
from the ways we choose to use it. Organizers need to be purposeful and
deliberate in their choice of communication technologies since these
tools shape the connections between their users.

There is an emerging generation of collaboration tools, born and
incubated in the free software world, which are radically improving the
ways that people work together as a team. They have the potential to
help fulfill some of the Internet’s grand prophecies by significantly
improving the efficiency and productivity of non-profits, NGO’s and
activist groups alike. These kinds of tools can dramatically improve the
management of knowledge, communities, and projects, and enable the
coordination and collaboration across thousands of participants. They
are rapidly being adopted by corporations eager to move beyond the
e-mail inbox as the primary task management and collaboration platform.
Organizations of all shapes and sizes need to be evaluating and
embracing these technologies, or they risk falling behind in
differential efficiency, victims of the organizational digital divide.

The “writeable web” has spawned a new generation of networked, web-based
environments that can significantly increase an organization’s ability
to realize their goals. These environments are not a panacea – at best,
they will catalyze and facilitate an improvement in communication and
processes. While technology alone will not guarantee a change in a
group’s culture, it can play an instrumental role raising the
self-awareness around an organization’s processes, and in turn, help
improve them.

It is remarkable how a simple mailing list combined with an internal
wiki can thoroughly transform the workflow within an organization, but
this is just the start. Project management tools, collaboration
platforms, and content management systems, and are transforming the
potentials of the modern intranet. By better balancing the flows of
communication and power, these environments can boost an organization’s
productivity, and increase the return on a philanthropic investment.
With the proper training and tuning, these technologies can help an
organization achieve important strategic objectives such as
transparency, accountability, and sustainability.

Organizers must find the time to learn how to harness these tools as
vehicles for implementing their vision. These aren’t just toys for
techies anymore – just as the word processor became an essential tool
for every writer to master, organizers must embrace the network as their
new medium.