Plone NGO Mailing List The Organizational Digital Divide

Nynke Kruiderink NKruiderink at iicd.org
Thu Nov 9 20:23:40 UTC 2006


Hi Jonah, 
 
Great to read your piece! Just one little extra "and" in there, I highlighted below.
 
Here in the Netherlands I have the impression the NGO world woke up to web 2.0 tools this year and there are seminars and meetings and a whole bunch of buzzing going around about the uses of web 2.0 tools in online collaboration, although most attention up till now has gone to communication with the external world... not so much organisational, internally.
 
At our organisation (IICD.org) we are indeed looking into using wikis for team communication, and also social bookmarks in combination with tags for bottom-up repositories of usefull web resources. 
 
Alot of interesting things going on!
 
Nynke
 
 

________________________________

Van: ngo-bounces at lists.plone.org namens Jonah Bossewitch
Verzonden: do 11/9/2006 4:51
Aan: ngo at lists.plone.org
Onderwerp: Plone NGO Mailing List The Organizational Digital Divide



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 [remove this extra 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.

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