Janet Haven

For those of you that asked, yes, last week's reinstallation of my Thinkpad's innards was entirely successful. Fabulous Joe did a fabulous job, and it's all running 100x better than it was. Of course, the DRM on my iTunes is screwed up (the punitive measures targeted, for some reason, at the recently purchased Beach Boys album), and I think I'm going to have to pay again to get FeedDemon, my RSS reader, back since I've lost the key to it...but otherwise, all is well.

And of course I'll take this opportunity to wax philosophically about how my small situation reflects a larger issue in the non-profit world. More and more, funders without a specific interest in technology issues are willing to fund technology projects with NGOs, and almost always this includes equipment purchases. This is a great trend -- it means that communications technologies are, in international development slang, being "mainstreamed" into programming, which is a fancy way of saying that both funders and NGOs see that technology often plays a central role in all kinds of projects and NGO work. One of the things that organizations often forget to budget for, or that donors aren't willing to fund, is ongoing tech support. However, as anyone who works in an office knows, life without tech support, if you're expected to use a computer to do your work, is well-neigh impossible. When the computer stops working well, due to viruses, windows registry problems, spyware, or system failures, the average person will simply have to stop working on that computer until an expert shows up. Same thing with software, both on server and client side -- if an organization is hosting their own infrastructure in any way, they're definitely going to need someone available to solve their problems now and again, or they're not going to be very effective.

What most organizations we run across do, particularly those in the developing world, is work with "accidental techies" -- that is, self-taught technologists who are somehow related to the organization, either by blood and friendship ("my brother's girlfriend's cousin's schoolfriend") or by issue interest (a volunteer operating within a community organization, for instance, who lives down the block from their office), or have become the designated "person with some technical know-how" within the organization because they know a little bit (or a lot) more than everyone else. One of the issues we struggle with at the Civil Society Communications initiative is how best to increase the skills and resources of the accidental techies of the world -- because most of them are working for love rather than money (or very little money), and often are helping a number of organizations, accidental techies often don't have the time to keep up with the latest in software for NGOs, localized open source resources in their own languages, web 2.0 tools useful for advocacy, as well as the basics around databases, web-publishing, and so on. Projects like NGO in a Box, the Social Source Commons, and APC's range of skills-building material go a long way towards providing resources for this group, but nothing beats hands-on workshops that put new ideas to use in a real environment. The trick, of course, is both seeking out the accidental techies in a country, and convincing an organization's funders that tech support is much more than a peripheral expense in organizational budget planning.