ICTlogy

Next January 30th and 31st takes place the Cooperación al Desarrollo 2.0: I Encuentro Internacional de las Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación para la Cooperación al Desarrollo [Cooperation for Development 2.0: I International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Cooperation for Development], in Gijón, Spain.

I have been invited to chair one of the four workgroups of the event, actually the one that is more focused on Cooperation for Development 2.0, the one called Networking Cooperation – towards the networked Cooperation.

I have also been asked to write an article, a position paper to start up the debate. It will be coming in the next days, but in the meanwhile, I’m working on the following concepts/keywords:

• Network: Everything will be networked or won’t be. Institutions will be nodes of a grid or isolated, disconnected, starving islands in their way towards disappearance.
• Gift economy: You’re in a network and what you give is what you get
• Open access (open source, open content): If you’re a nonprofit, it absolutely does not make (even less) sense to rediscover the wheel, not to disclose your capital
• Presence: Be on the Web or be not. Networks and networking, accountability, transparency, advocacy will be web based or, at least, begin on the Web.
• Citizen engagement: The rising importance of media (remember the “C” in ICT) shifts the focus from charity, direct cooperation to advocacy, and the power to mobilize the citizens to lobby internationally.
• Online Volunteering: For the most engaged ones, online volunteering makes possible distributed, high quality and highly granular engagement
• Long Tail: Nonprofits, volunteers, minority groups have the potential to find and be found more than ever.
• Networking + Long Tail + Online Volunteering: The evolution of aid big funders (international and national governmental agencies, big foundations) in the last days has shifted from ‘coffee for all’ to ‘big impact on concentrated clusters’. As in firms, I wonder if there is a trend towards big knowledge hubs where multinational nonprofits receive big funding, having the most operational tasks outsourced to smallest onsite nonprofits and online volunteers that gather around a project and dismantle once it is done.
• North-South vs. South-North: No more people traveling around: knowledge workers collaborate online, funders wire funds and target communities from cooperation work on an endogenous development basis.

Comments really welcome.

Notes on the workshop Usos i Reptes de les TIC a les Organitzacions No Lucratives [Uses and Challenges of ICTs in Nonprofits], organized by the Observatori del Tercer Sector [Observatori for the Third Sector] and the CETEI, and chaired by Jaume Albaigès.

The uses — a diagnosis

Two (really) different organization profiles regarding Information and Communication Technologies:

• lite: have a website, are concerned with the digital divide and fight it e.g. with training on digital literacy, etc.
• premium: not only have installed the basic infrastructures, but have gone beyond and adopted management digital applications, use websites for campaining and fundraising, etc. but, in general terms, they act in the short run and lack an IT strategy

Only 5-6% of the demand for personnel to work or be a volunteer in nonprofits is related to ICTs. Inside this group, half of it is for training purposes (e.g. impart courses on digital literacy; 22% is for websites and design and 23% for systems maintenance and programming.

80% of 100 nonprofits surveyed have a website, +90% have their own domain, +90% have information on their projects and +80% have interaction/feedback spaces; but +90% don’t have any interaction space, +85% no data on their social basis, +60% no economic/financial/funding data.

Experience 1: Formació Espiral [Espiral Training]

A need — actually, a claim — for training. Different types of training, all of them focusing on ICTs and ICTs for Nonprofits:

• Open classrooms: horizontal training, between peers, short training sessions (2-3h)
• Annual workshop
• Summer, Fall, Winter courses: wide range of courses

New training/research interests: Web 2.0, blogs, wikis, educational uses of Second Life, conceptual maps…

Experience 2: Database for the management of the Punts Òmnia [telecentres]

To check the performance, number and type of users, type of use, workload and activity, etc.

Solution: a database fed by the user himself (selfregister), filling in a form (best option for the user) with fields asking for user profile and kind of use of the computer at the telecentre, including a user register, thus creating a user database that can fit several purposes.

Two approaches to ICTs:

• No money for computers; we’re trying to get second hand computers; can anybody help for free?
• We have databases… on spreadsheets; the computer is a substitute for paper, that’s all; we’ve got tools… but don’t know how to use them / benefit from using them

Main barriers

• Resources for investment (not expenditures!)
• Knowledge to take decissions
• Training to use ICTs efficiently and in an efficient way

Experience 3: Animations for Peace contest

Experience 4: Exchange Platform for Knowledge Diffusion

Based on Moodle. Being tested in the Master for International Development, an onsite course — not online — that benefits from a virtual platform to enhance the diffusion of knowledge. Moodle can hold documents, bibliography, assessments and automatic evaluation of these assessments, and all kind devices and spaces for collaboration, information, interaction and feedback, etc.

Very interesting asset of Moodle for nonprofits: a whole team — not just a single person —
can manage the platform, including the courses’ teachers… and remotely, not compulsory to be on site, at the nonprofit headquarters (e.g. online volunteers).

Key aspect: the tool can provide spaces and devices to improve the tool itself.

The challenges — a strategy

How to integrate ICTs in the institutions’ strategic planning: opportunity and responsibility. More impact, more diffusion, more resources (avoid costs, raise funds): better reach to beneficiaries, more impact of advocacy campaigns, better communication, transparency, better internal management.

The necessary change of mindset.

Diagnose:

• internal audit: listen and look
• talk with other organizations: the network and the Network
• benchmark with specialists

Design and execution

• Action plan: as ambitious as possible (we’ll adapt it to the reality later on…)
• Priorities, schedule
• Strong focus on training

Follow-up

• Evaluation, moving onto the spotlight the benefits, costs, difficulties, etc. of the project
• Maintenance and supervision

Experience 5: Database to manage the social base

The design performed by an analyst, so all relevant questions are put on the table beforehand, but use of MS Access — not a custom but complex application —, easing the use of the database by a wide range of non-techie people, especially volunteers.

The new database allows a lot of outputs: people management, mail management, financial management, strategic planning (e.g. budgeting), volunteer and tasks management and planning, etc.

Experience 6: Dedications to projects

Shift from a desktop application (MS Excel) to an online database hosted on the intranet. Next step: not only feeding the application but strategic exploitation of data.

Richness of data brings the possibility to plan and better allocate (human) resources, easier follow-up of data evolution (better reports, less data exportation to other applications: centralization of databanks), improvement of the management of the organization as a whole, more efficiency, ability to prioritize needs according to resources, etc.

Training is the key. And is the organization, not just individuals, the one that has to learn.

Important to notice that this is no expenditure, but investment. This really needs a change of mindset.

The importance of volunteering.

Technical resources:

• Web development paradigm: a good resource that needs be kept in mind. The web is the platform, the permanent beta as a means to install applications that can evolve, grow, be enhanced.
• Free and Open source software applications… free as in free beer.
• Share tools between different organizations… and the knowledge that goes with it.

What’s next?

• Towards the nonprofit 2.0: more participation, bidirectional communication, accountability (increase confidence on the sector), networking with all stakeholders (especially the beneficiaries), etc.
• Impact on the environment: use of material resources, energy

Experience 7: A website in 20 minutes, a website with Joomla

1998: a website takes 30 minutes to upload just one piece of news and mastering technological tools (HTML, FTP, etc.)

2004: need for flexibility, being up-to-date, avoid technological skills requirements, low budgets

Now: 5 minutes (maximum) a new piece of news, no skills required, no budget required to implement, update and maintain, ubiquitous management and updating, etc.

Result: not just quicker websites but more websites: campaigns, projects, etc.

Other experiences: WordPress.com, even easier than Joomla.

Best result: increase in presence on the Web, hence, presence in the World, way the target of an advocacy nonprofit.

Experience 8: Health in the Millennium campaign

Need to widen the diffusion of the campaign, upload materials, news, links, videos, events; have a deliverable to handout documents and reports in a friendly way.

Impact: increase in the amount of visits and file downloads, less paper (less costs).

More info

• TecnolONGia, Jaume Albaigès’s blog about technology for nonprofits
• Usos i reptes de les TIC al tercer sector [Uses and Challenges of ICTs in Nonprofits] (854 Kb)
• Files for the experiences presented (282 Kb)

The Web2forDev – Participatory Web for Development Conference is taking place at FAO Headquarters in Rome, organized by FAO, CTA, IICD, GTZ, UBC, IFAD, CGIAR, euforic, UCAD, APC, ACP and the European Commission. Here come my notes.

Presentation: Anton Mangstl

It’s the first time that the revolution is not about the development of systems, but empowerment.

Presentation: Hansjörg Neun

Holidays for me is getting no internet and no GSM. It is important not to get drowned by technologies, but to master them.

Jacques Diouf, Director-General Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Keynote Speech: Anriette Esterhuysen

The importance of ICTs in leapfrogging.

Skilled development, that can be enhanced/fostered by ICTs, and has traditionally been forgotten from the (cooperation for) development agendas.

The focus of ICT4D can be focused into mainstream.

Proliferation of online content, along with language/translation tools, bringing in new users that do not come from the developed world.

Web 2.0 removes the barriers on the consumers, creators of content.

Partnerships are crucial, collaboration is critical for cooperation for development, but most especially engagement, which is widely enhanced by Web 2.0, a perfect platform for this multilayer commitment, response.

Sharing is a main challenge.

We need to rethink (cooperation for) development deeply. We have to provide access to the tools, and to let/help people use them effectively.

Participation, decision making, human rights… are new dimensions on development that the Web 2.0 can include on the development debate.

Online participation should be ways to promote a more inclusive society.

More info

• Web2forDev – Participatory Web for Development at internet.artizans
• Website of the conference
• Blog of the conference
• Wiki of the conference
• Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us, by Michael Wesh
• Pages tagged with "web2fordev" on del.icio.us
• Flickr Photos tagged with web2fordev

As already advanced, my paper Online Volunteers: Knowledge Managers in Nonprofits has been already published in the first issue of the new Journal of Information Technology in Social Change.

Abstract

Online volunteering is as old as the World Wide Web… or as the Internet itself. It is, notwithstanding, with the growing use of the WWW circa end of 1994 that it starts to become popular. Nevertheless, we believe that neither the concept nor the tasks that can be carried along by online volunteers are clear at all or, in any case, are the result of a wide consensus.

The research we here present analyzed 17 websites devoted to fostering volunteering to find out (a) if there was a broadly accepted definition of the concept of online volunteering and (b) if there was a list of tasks thus designed as the core or ideal competences of online volunteers. According to our findings, in this paper we will, first of all, describe all the different denominations for online volunteers and, closely related to them, try and see what are the profiles and tasks that, tied to these denominations, are usually performed or asked for in those main 17 volunteering websites.

To end, we will take some distance from the object of research and, in a more theoretical level, we will then suggest what the online volunteer profile could be and the main tasks he or she could really carry on related to this profile, the nature of the Information Society and the possibilities of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs).

In this aspect, our thesis will be that, just like distance and/or online education changed formal education, ICTs are opening volunteering to some people usually excluded from nonprofits because of personal and professional obligations. On the other hand, it seems that these newcoming people enrolled through and thanks to ICTs do come with a brand new profile, a profile whose main added value is knowledge. It will be stated, then, that the online volunteer is a perfect knowledge management actor and that knowledge transmission seems to be is his or her main role in solidarity.

Citation and postprint download

Peña-López, I. (2007). “Online Volunteers: Knowledge Managers in Nonprofits”. In The Journal of Information Technology in Social Change, Spring Edition – April 2007, (1), 136-152. Vashon: The Gilbert Center.

It looks like ages since I ended my M.Phil.’s research project e-Learning for Development: a model. During last year (2006) I gave a conference about e-Learning and development based on open access and free software, and I also published a shortest Spanish version of the thesis in UPDATE – Dianova International e-magazine, again focusing on the “open” paradigm.

Even if the full digital version has been online for more than one year and a half, I’ve been having the uncomfortable sensation that — at least from my own point of view — my most important contribution in the paper has not had a lot of diffusion, exposure: provided there is really scarce literature on online volunteering, and most of it is from a practitioner’s approach, I thought my work on the taxonomy and typology of online volunteering provided some fresh air to the subject.

Now, it seems that the time for this issue to have an official coverage has come, and it will be, lucky me, in two ways at the same time.

First of all, my paper Online Volunteers: Knowledge Managers in Nonprofits has been accepted to be published in the first issue of the new Journal of Information Technology in Social Change, that is going to be presented at the 2007 Nonprofit Technology Conference by Michael Gilbert (along with the people at The Gilbert Center and NTEN, who have worked together to make it happen).

Second, a session devoted to the Journal will take place on Friday April 6th, 2007, at the conference, where some research gathered in this first issue will be presented to the attendants. As I cannot travel to Washington, DC, Michael Gilbert himself will be doing my speech for me using the material and notes I provided him with.

What is an online volunteer, what are the tasks that one would expect him to do, how are volunteering web portals treating the concept of online volunteering or how could this kind of contribution evolve in the future are questions that I try to answer in my paper and will be also shortly dealt with in the live presentation.

I really would like to sincerely thank Michael Gilbert, Katrin Verclas and Christine Dragonwyck for their help, patience and, over all, determination and drive to make things happen, even against all odds ;)

Jaume Albaigès moderated on Friday 23rd, 2007, the panel “New Technologies at the Social Third Sector”, in the framework of the 1st Catalan Congress on the Social Third Sector that took place in Barcelona, Spain.

He is now publishing the main conclusions (in Catalan and in Spanish) for the ICT panel, which in many ways are similar to the ones that came out from the e-Stas symposium on technologies for social action, alsn on Friday 23rd, 2007, but this time in Sevilla, Spain. Some of the points that where debated in Barcelona I freely translate from Jaume Albaigès’s site):

• Despite general consensus on the benefits of ICTs in many fields, nonprofits still do neither add them to their strategy nor to their day-to-day work, avoiding better performance, efficiency and goal achieving.
• The digital divide is not only a matter of individuals or social groups, but also affects organizations
• There is an evident and huge need in training investment. An organizational cultural change is also a must.
• The role of ICT professionals — specially the ones engaged in nonprofits — should be bridging this cultural divide among techies and non techies.
• ICTs increase NGOs’ transparency, participation and decision taking
• ICTs can ease or even increase NGOs’ revenues thanks to online donations and marketing
• It’s making less and less sense to talk about ICTs as both an external thing or a sector/section within nonprofits: ICTs should be treated as a transversal issue affecting the whole organization

See also:

• Presentations’ slides for the ICT panel (in Catalan) (1.58 Mb)