ICTlogy

The Fundación Bip-Bip [Beep-beep Foundation] is no doubt one of the most important Spanish NGOs in the field of ICT4D, specially in everything related to bring ICTs to nonprofits to improve their managing capacities, advocacy reach, training programmes, etc. Indeed, they issued back in 2005 a report that analyzed the level of adoption of ICTs in Spanish nonprofits that worked in the area of professional inclusion entitled Estudio de diagnóstico sobre el nivel de utilización de las TIC en las entidades no lucrativas de acción social que trabajan en pro de la inserción laboral en España.

Juan Gigli now let’s me know about their new project called PuntoOrg [dotOrg] self described as the web portal devoted to making possible the access to ICTs for nonprofits, through practical guides, discounts and products and service donations. For those familiar with the Third Sector and new technologies, I’d dare say that this is a somewhat spanish version of TechSoup, though at an earlier stage.

Best of lucks in this new project!

The Open Publishing Edition of NGO-in-a-box is a toolkit of Free and Open Source software, tutorials and guides for producing, publishing and distributing content. The Edition, produced by Tactical Tech in collaboration with iCommons, is aimed at small to medium sized non-profits, independent media organisations, free culture creators and grassroots journalists with a particular emphasis on those in developing and transition countries.

Good compilation of resources to, as said before, publish content and do it on a free/open basis. The compilation has three main sections:

• Tools, with the main free software applications to manage your content, be it text be it images, on your desktop or online, etc.
• Projects – How To…, with concrete, practical examples on how to carry on the most common tasks
• Resources, with outlinks to Tactical Tech guides for content diffusion

Besides this main navigation architecture, there’s still room for an Introduction to Open Publishing, other resources and live CDs. A very good work… and reference.

I’ve been sent news about the release of The Dynamics of Technology for Social Change, a book by Jonathan Peizer. The book is about ICT projects in nonprofit and development environments. The index looks quite good:

Chapter 1: The Soros foundations network: Catalyzing Change
Chapter 2: The Internet Program: Web Surfing a Revolution
Chapter 3: AFS: Using Technology Strategically to Facilitate Change
Chapter 4: Sector Dependencies, Collaboration Dynamics, and ICT Challenges
Chapter 5: Marketing, Promotion, and Trusted-Source Relationships
Chapter 6: Nonprofit Capacity: Issues & Promising Approaches
Chapter 7: Sustainability: Balancing the Profit and Value Motive
Chapter 8: Implementation Strategies: Pilot versus Mega Projects
Chapter 9: Implementation or Evaluation: Prioritizing the Criteria for Success
Chapter 10: FOSS in the Nonprofit Environment
Chapter 11: The Donor-Advised Support Conference Afterword
Appendix A: The Internet Program Projects

The Fundación Bip-Bip has released the report “Estudio de diagnóstico sobre el nivel de utilización de las TIC en las entidades no lucrativas de acción social, que trabajan en pro de la inserción laboral en España” [Diagnosis Report on the degree of ICT use in social action nonprofits that work to promote job placements in Spain].

The report is 158 pages long and is really worth reading it.

Here comes a very illustrative highlight:

Only 14% of the analyzed organizations [370 in total] perform online training activities, and less than 19% uses teleworking as a possible option for its personnel [being most of them eventual online volunteers and not permanent staff]. Considering the hardware that most of the organizations do have, the deep degree of decentralization that most o them have (with headquarters in different cities and area of activity that only about a 10% just keep within the boundaries of their own city), the kind of work performed by most of their experts (that work directly in the terrain, increasing the mobility and geographic dispersion) and the particular characteristics of the composition of their staff (with a high percent of eventual and part time volunteers), we believe that this kind of organizations should lean on much more in the benefits that ICTs can bring to adopt models with a higher flexibility and adapted to the special needs of each organization.

It is, then, no nonsense what the Spanish National Volunteering Plan suggests about e-learning and online volunteering. For once in our lives, everyone agrees. Here’s to it!

• Report about the use of ICTs in NGOs(full text in Spanish) (2.93 Mb)
• Piece of news at Fundación Bip-Bip (in Spanish)
• Piece of news at OneWordl.net (in Catalan)

21st Century NGO is a paper published by Sustainability after a research about the future for NGOs, how they will increasingly do business, and the challenges that their ‘markets’ increasingly present.

Surprisingly — at least for someone heavily ICT-biased as me ;) — Information and Communication Technologies are rarely treated, just when one should expect them to have an important role in the new relationship among markets and organizations.

Though I’ve not digged enough in the paper to know it by heart, I only found just two explicit references to ICTs in the section Networks, a strength shown in the SWOT analysis (page 39):

In turn, New Economy technologies — among them the internet and mobile telephones — have powerfully fuelled activism with some interviewees suggesting that in the same way that the printing press served to drive the growth of the early Protestant Church, so the internet is supporting the capacity of NGOs and civil society to network and grow. 104 As Sabine Leidig of Attac Germany put it, ‘We are the Linux model NGO.’

I guess the Internet has done — and is doing — much more than just giving a loudspeaker to NGOs. In fact, just the same concept of “network” relies on much more things than just one-to-many communication, being capacity building, exponential increase of productivity and instant and ubiquitous many-to-many communication, maybe the most important ones just to mention some of them.

I guess Sabine Leidig means by “the Linux model” the way the free software community works. I think it is quite a good example, but it can only be applied to few NGOs, being Attac one of them… but most will consider Attac not an NGO just because of its decentralization, lack of an stablished structure and budget, etc. which, in the end, was the target of the research.

ICTs are not mentioned, for example in the External Agenda, point 9, when talking about New technology:

Closely linked to trade, health and environment concerns, a number of new technologies (e.g. GM foods, human genome work, nanotechnology) will continue to spark major
controversies.

I do agree that these technologies are very important and are the debate on technology and the society — and thus, NGOs. But in the third sector, the digital divide is also the debate, fare more than in developed countries. I guess ICTs should be included in this point.

Nevertheless, besides my ICT-bias, the report is very worth reading and very rigorous :)

More info:

21st Century NGO (1.27 Mb)

When speaking at presentations, seminars and so, there’re usually two different approaches:

• Look, this is what we’ve done
• Let me explain to you why things happen

Depending on the audience, the speaker swings from the most practical point of view to the theoretical one or the contrary. In most cases, though, and this is my case, we tend to theorize, to go from concrete to global, to find the rule that moves the world, the key that will open any door. And I do it not because I am a great philosopher, but because I don’t want to bore my audience with details and, instead, I want to give them the essence of it all, the conclusions I got in my path of essay and error.

These last days we’ve been working together with my colleague Marc Ribó, expert in quality management, in the gathering of the history of the Campus for Peace. This morning he asked: “well, quite interesting the historic evolution of the Campus for Peace, it must have been exciting, hasn’t it?”

From this question, and from others people at seminars do, seems like everything was planned, that we once sat at the office and designed everything from the start. Well, I guess the answer to this is what spanish writer Carmen Martín Gaite once said:

“A ver si te crees que las cosas que te cuento esta noche con su dejillo de filosofía las sé porque las he leído en un libro, no hijo, ni hablar, antes de ser palabra han sido confusión y daño, y gracias a eso, a haber pasado tú tu infierno y yo el mío podemos entendernos esta noche; vivimos un lujo, el de poderlo contar”

Or:

“Don’t you dare think that the things I’m telling you tonight, with their philosophic air, I know them because I read them in a book, no my son, no way, before being word they’ve been confusion and harm, and thanks to this, thanks to you having gone through your hell and I through mine, we now can understand each other tonight: we live the invaluable chance of being able to explain it”