My dad worked at Consumers Union for nearly 40 years, so I am not surprised that I was deeply affected by Eben Moglen’s plenary at this past NTEN NTC in April. In fact, I’ve been unable to stop thinking about it since. In his address, he talked about how our current cultural and economic situation has come about, in part, because corporate America has made profit the primary goal. The world would be better run on an open source model, where everyone can see how things are made in the kitchen because it has glass walls. In this world, knowledge is freely shared and freely available. People are not required to purchase knowledge, but will pay what they can for what is most valuable to them.

The open-source vs. proprietary software debate rages on among nonprofit techies. NTEN’s fearless leader, Holly Ross, addressed this recently in a nuanced blog post about the importance of re-framing the debate to be about prioritizing data sharing and collaboration rather than focusing on open source vs. proprietary.  The comments her post generated are a great conversation in themselves.

I believe in the moral principles of open source software (summed up nicely in this comment). I minimize the business I do with Apple because I believe that Apple’s main goal is to serve the Apple Corporation.  To use their (beautiful) software you need to join their corporate cult, buy their (gorgeous) hardware, depend on their support. I agree with what Moglen has been quoted as saying, that nobody has more contempt for their customers than Steve Jobs.

But I am always wary of any argument framed in black and white terms. I think binary thinking is an evolutionary adaptation, a way for our brains to simplify things so we can take in information quickly. Marketers use binaries as a way to manipulate people and sell them products (clean/dirty, safe/unsafe, etc.).  Activists use binaries to motivate you to take action immediately (right/wrong). The fact is, though, that binary thinking erases complexity.

The middle place of complexity and ambivalence is where the truth usually lies, and where most of us dwell.  Especially as non-profit techies. It is all well and good to say we will only use open-source software, but what if that gets in the way of serving our mission? Activists will say that we all need to make a change, even if it’s hard, or the culture will never shift. I don’t believe it’s that simple. I believe that change can happen incrementally.  And though I run Community Partners‘ site on Drupal, I no longer run my own crashing, spam-infested mail server on my org’s tiny shoestring budget.  I now run our org’s email through the free (no ads) Google Apps account that Google gave us. We have the world’s best spam filter and the server (almost) never crashes.

My org is paying for our Google Apps account, of course, just with data instead of dollars. Is that a fair trade-off? Am I entirely comfortable with it? No. But right now, Google Apps, Twitter, Facebook, Groupsite and other proprietary platforms allow me to serve more people for less money and in less time. And that’s why my org is here–to ensure that as many people in Massachusetts get the health care coverage, doctors and medicines they need, when they need it.

So here I am, once again, in that middle-place of compromise.  I think many nonprofit techies are here with me. In the long term, I believe in collaboration, data sharing, the principles of open source. I believe in open APIs and open content models. And those beliefs guide my long-term decisions. But in the here and now, my immediate question to the people who need our help must always be, “How can I best serve you?”  If your family needs coverage yesterday and the best tool I know to make that happen is via Facebook instead of Drupal, then for the moment, I will have to use it. As non-profit techies, we have to take every situation as it comes, scan for the best existing solution, and then keep re-assessing and looking for more collaborative opportunities, with our eye on our ideals the whole time. This is not easy, but I think it’s the only real way forward.

Photo by Mikey G

I want to write about online collaboration software and Twitter and Jott and how we’re toying with all of those things in our tiny org. But when I think about social media and it’s principles, I think back to the most fundamental shift we made in our org in terms of the Internet. Probably most of you who are reading this are way past this stage, but I am not sure I can talk about other internal innovations without starting here.

It started several years ago when I arrived here. The website was static, updated by an “accidental techie” who was the only person who knew how to update the website. It was brochure-ware, broadcasting info about our programs. If someone needed to update a web page, she had to rely on the tech to get it done.

Our org is tiny and “flat.” That doesn’t mean we run the org by consensus. There are clear lines of supervision and authority. But we all have areas of expertise, and we defer somewhat to each other in these areas. What this has always meant is that we design projects and make decisions with a lot (sometimes too much) conversation.

Conversation and collaboration, online, are major principles of Web 2.0. What’s exciting about it to me is the decentralization of certain kinds of power. The power to put images and ideas on the web used to be tightly controlled. Messages came from the top down and were put online by highly skilled techies. Now anyone with Internet access and some basic skills can speak up on Facebook or her own blog. Anyone can post pictures to Flickr or video to YouTube. This is a significant power shift.

For me, that power shift began in the workplace. I started my career in non-profit tech as an “accidental techie.” I was intimidated at first by techie jargon. For some reason, I was fascinated enough with the web to learn in spite of my fear. But I’ve never forgotten that fear. It’s all too easy to slip into total jargon Tweeting about Friendfeed and other social media tools. (You can tell you’re talking in jargon whenever someone’s eyes glaze over and/or they look uncomfortable.  I try to look for this when I am yammering on about the Interwebs, but I am not always successful at catching myself.)

So, internally, my fundamental goal became clear: de-mystify the tools. With some limits for quality control purposes, I wanted anyone and everyone on our staff to be able to post information to our website. I wanted others to be able to send out emails to our lists. I wanted them to be comfortable with the Internet as much as possible, without having to be “experts” in it.

Luckily for us, others were thinking this way, too. We started using Democracy in Action to send out mass emails, which had a user interface that someone with basic web skills could easily use. I had been building websites for years, but open-source content management systems (CMS) like Joomla and Drupal were suddenly very accessible. I was able to re-build our website in a CMS so that, again, anyone on our staff with basic web surfing and word processing skills could post content to our site.

Yes, there were (and are) vetting processes to control the content that goes up on our site and out in our emails. But, from a tech perspective, when we made these changes, I was no longer the gatekeeper to emailing to our constituents and posting content on our website. Everyone knows at least a few HTML tags, including a couple of our staff members who are over the age of 60. Our staff could prepare web content in a hands-on way, which contributed greatly to their feeling of ownership of our site and to their learning about the web.

Today, I almost never post content to our site or send out an email. I can go on vacation and our news and blog roll on without me.  I keep the infrastructure healthy–I answer questions about Drupal quirks, fix problems and make improvements–but I have time now to think about tech strategy. To think and plan and dream about how to use new tech tools and social media to do our work better. Our staff understands the Internet and its tools better because they use them every day, and that helps them think about how to integrate them into our work, too.

Even though I was once the techie gatekeeper with the keys to the website, I love this loss of control and am inspired thinking about the new places it will take us.

I wonder a lot about how other orgs work. Who controls the posting power in your org? Who controls the content? How else is your org present on the web? Is it tightly controlled? If so, is that changing at all?