From the monthly archives:

April 2007

Technology Support as Teaching

April 24, 2007

I’ve been thinking a lot about technology support lately. Really a lot. Part of it is being prompted by my own technology support experiences with my satellite “broadband” provider (which have been largely frustrating). A lot of it has been because I have lately been exposed to situations where I have felt organizations haven’t gotten the support they need, which, in our world, I think is all too common. As I move out of doing implementation, and into more evaluation, planning and facilitation of technology change within organizations, I wanted to spend some time articulating what I have tried my best to practice when I’ve been in a place of providing technology support.

All technology providers have to deal at some level with support. Whether they implement a system, or build it, they will inevitably have the job of supporting that technology. Providers have many different ways of handling that challenge. Unfortunately, the most recent trend, which I have experienced all too much (and I’m sure you all have too), is to simply follow a script with the person who needs support. It drives me simply nuts that every single time I call my satellite provider about a problem with the service, and I’m saying “I’m seeing 80% packet loss, and doing a traceroute suggests that it’s about 2 hops after your modem” and they respond with “OK, first, we’re going to clear out your browser cache. Go to preferences …” It has been a challenge to resist uttering strings of obscenities.

But also, the question is – is providing technology support simply just an end in itself, or is it also a means to another end – that is, can it be a means to empower clients in appropriate technology use to further their mission?

I realized, in thinking about all of this, that the model of technology support that makes the most sense to me is to think of it similarly as a teacher-student relationship. I know, I’m a born educator, and I’m sure someone out there is saying “if you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail…” But I do think there is some validity to this approach. Certainly, if you are a technology provider that values empowerment of your clients, this is probably a good model to consider.

So what is it about a teacher-student relationship that we can learn from to provide really good technical support? From my perspective, there are four elements to a technology support process with this as a model:

  1. Assessment – where is the client – both in terms of technology knowledge, as well as in terms of what they need at the moment?
  2. Empowerment – as you help them with a problem, teach them about the problem, and ways to troubleshoot (or possibly solve) the problem themselves in the future.
  3. Relationship – an ongoing relationship with the client
  4. Solution – providing the solution to their problem

First, Assessment. Where is this client, now? First, there is the question of what they know. If you have a relationship with them (see #3) you’ll already be familiar with their technical expertise – so you’ll know where to start. But there is more than that to assessment. What is going on for them? Is this a problem that is critical to their work, or a “pebble in the shoe” kind of problem – annoying, but not urgent? Are they trying to get a grant out, and they are scared they won’t meet the deadline because of a technical issue? Are they angry? All of these are important to know and understand, so it’s possible to meet them where they are. That’s one of the hallmarks of a good educator – meeting a student where they are, tailoring the education to meet the needs of the student. It’s also, I think, a hallmark of a good provider of technology support.

Second, Empowerment. One of the most common problems that someone who has built websites has, is the client calls up, and says “the website is down”. And you hurriedly go to your browser, and, voila, the website isn’t down. So now you take them through all of the steps to figure out why it was they can’t see their own website. You can choose to take them through this problem so that they figure out at the moment what’s up, and who to call, or you can take them through it so that next time it happens, they won’t need to call you, because they’ve figured out the problem really belongs to “insert_some_other_technology_provider_here.” Or, they’ll call you because the website really is down. Teaching them about the technology behind the problem they are having, and helping them to understand what’s involved in it, not only empowers them to deal with problems more on their own, but it also empowers them to solve other technology problems, and be more engaged in technology planning in the future.

Third, Relationship. All of this works within whatever relationship you have with a client. As mentioned above, if you’ve worked consistently with a client, you know what their level of expertise is – this makes assessment easier. Also, you remember how much work you got done when a substitute teacher came to class? Not a lot of learning, but certainly a lot of spitballs. Consistency in relationship is as important to students as it is to people who get support from a technology provider. Usually, of course, with the huge technology providers, that sort of thing isn’t possible. But with smaller providers it certainly is. Sometimes, even with larger providers, they manage to get around this by having detailed logs of conversations with you. I’ve found that quite helpful in the past – it has surprised me when someone has said something like “I see you called a couple of months ago with a problem regarding x. How has that worked for you since then?” It was nice to feel like someone actually bothered to write it down, and for the person talking with me bothered to read it. In the past, for me, my ongoing support relationships with clients have been the way that I have learned the most about their organizations. It has allowed me to be proactive in working with them on technology, and incredibly informative in helping future planning. The relationship is a two-way street: just as they let us know about challenges they face with their technology problems – it’s important for us to tell them about the challenges that we run into in working to support them. There is a level of trust that’s important to this relationship. Honestly, it is the relationship I cherish most highly (even more highly than whatever they pay me).

Fourth, Solution. This is where the provider-client relationship differs most from the teacher-student relationship. Of course, in the end, the client needs their technology problem solved, as quickly and efficiently as possible. But I’d argue that good assessment of where the client is, and where the problem fits in their work and organizational lives, empowerment of them to troubleshoot problems on their own, and an ongoing, stable relationship, will make the eventual solution of the problem a lot easier, more economical and less stressful for both the client and the provider than it might be otherwise.

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Free as in “Free Kittens”

April 23, 2007

Deborah Finn pointed out this good post in a blog I have never read: ALA Tech Source. I haven’t read that blog (yet) because I’m not a librarian, although, I’ve always thought what Deborah said on the ISF list: “I have long thought that nonprofit techies should make a point of learning from and making common cause with tech-savvy librarians.” She’s ahead of me since she actually reads librarian blogs.

Anyway, there is a (soon to be classic) line: “…all of these technologies are ‘free’ as in ‘free kittens,’ not free as in ‘free beer.’”

I do think that is something that we have a hard time getting across to folks. I just had a great conversation with a IT manager at a medium-sized nonprofit that had implemented Asterisk for their call center. The bottom line, from his perspective, was flexibility. They saved some in cost from a proprietary PBX system – but then they had to spend more on support and the like – it was a wash cost wise. But what they gained, and it sounds like he’s not willing to give it up – is flexibility. It takes more, because you own your own system. But then, you own it – you can do much more.

Open source software, like kittens, take care and management. Some software, like Firefox, is like that kitten that is easy – it learns to be litter trained once, and just sits on your lap (or in its little bed) in a ball and sleeps, and plays only when you want it to. Other projects take more care and feeding, and you might have to take it to the vet.

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Open Standards part 2: XDI and Data Integration

April 23, 2007

Back in December, I had planned to talk first about document format standards before I plunged into XDI. But, a couple of things intervened. First, I decided to write a full blown whitepaper on document standards. So it will be a bit before it comes out. I think people (especially in the nonprofit sector) take document formats far too much for granted, and I think they deserve more treatment than just a blog entry.

I also had a chat with Andy Dale, of ooTao, and it provided lots of great fodder for an informational blog entry. So, here it is. I won’t go nearly into as much detail as he went with me – at some point I’ll write something much more substantial. But this is a good start.

What is XDI, anyway? XDI stands for XRI Data Interchange. It’s all about standards for sharing data over the net via XML and XRIs (eXtensible Resource Identifiers – URIs on steroids.)

If you look at the basic problem – how does data source “A” talk with data source “B”? We’ve done a lot of that via APIs – but that’s a set of idiosyncratic solutions to individual problems (solving the Convio <-> GoogleMaps problem is different than solving the Joomla <-> Salesforce problem, for instance – lots easier than it used to be, but still atomized.) How can this be standardized?

It’s important to understand that this problem has many layers. The first is the identifier layer. Who are you, anyway? Then – authentication – how do I know that you are who you say you are? Then there is authorization/trust – what are you allowed to do, what data can you see? And, finally, there comes the data sharing layer. That’s where this is all leading, of course, but what if when you finally get down to that layer, I say “tomayto” and you say “tomaato”?

Each of the technologies implemented at these layers have to be optimized for different things – you wouldn’t want your data sharing layer to have strong crypto, and be optimized for figuring out who you are, would you? That would be inefficient. So these layers are separate, and, in most situations, pluggable. For instance, you could plug OpenID into the authentication layer for internet transactions, and use Kerberos for internal organizational purposes.

So, to the bottom layer of XDI is optimized for figuring out how the data should be shared. For example – think of a lexicon for all the ways that “First Name” exists out there (“given name”, “First”, “nombre”, etc.) – so it would be possible to share that data. Also, one idea that is a part of XDI is that some data is persistent, and some data is simply a link to persistent data – so the data doesn’t hold my address, for instance, but it does hold exactly where (the XRI) to get my current address.

Andy and I talked a bit about his work in the nonprofit sector. He sees the sector as a great place to try these ideas out – because, for the most part, there is a much more open and flexible ethos around data sharing. I think that probably is mostly true, but as I pointed out to him, the sector is often years behind the for-profit sector in terms of technology. There is a pilot project with Kintera to expose a subset of one nonprofit’s data to an XDI interface. There are others lined up to try it, and the hope is it will spread. I certainly hope it does, and I will be keeping track of this effort, for sure.

I think the idea of this kind of standard – moving data sharing beyond what we (barely) have now, which are these very atomized sets of solutions (even though they are solutions we badly need.) If every data-centric application (ooh, that’s redundant) that a nonprofit implemented had a standard interface for data sharing – think about the possibilities there. Right now, it’s still basically impossible to look at big pictures across a wide range of data domains. This kind of standard would make those kinds of analyses a lot easier.

So this is the next jump beyond open APIs: imagine SQL-like queries on any data, anywhere you were trusted, and across those sources. And I thought open APIs were the holy grail!

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This guy is right on

April 18, 2007

A blog reader introduced me to a new blog by a guy named Phil Jones. Among other great things, he has this amazing post about Microsoft, and their future. Basically, he argues that in the era of Web 2.0, the only really compelling platform they have is Excel. Read this post, it’s dead on.

I’ve always loved Excel (and, since I don’t own a copy, I hobble along with Open Office’s pale, pale substitute.) I’ve thought that it was truly one of the best pieces of software ever written. Really. And it’s amazing how much it can do, and how much an organization can do with it. There are plenty of very small organizations (and not so small) that run on Excel. Many shouldn’t, but, some, arguably, certainly can. And if the ideas he suggests for bringing Excel fully into the new age were actually done by Microsoft (fat chance) that would make it even better.

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Netsquared Innovation Fund

April 16, 2007

David says of the Netsquared Innovation Fund process:

Advocacy is appropriate and good. Mobilizing your network to help you win by making your network part of the process is also appropriate and good.

Mobilizing your network to game a voting process suggests a weak understanding of how communities and social networks create real change (as oppose to raising a buck).

I thought about blogging about the projects I voted for, with details on why I voted for the projects I voted for. But then the flood of “vote for this” and “vote for that” started in the blogosphere and by email, and I decided that I didn’t really want to enter into that space.

There are a very large number of very good and totally deserving projects on that list. I was hesitant, frankly, about the whole idea about a semi-public balloting process. I like the idea of having the widest range of people vote on projects, but I found myself tempted by the “oh, she works on that, I should vote for it” voice, which I tried to temper as much as possible, and focus on whether or not a project fit the criteria. I think I mostly failed at objectivity.

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Drupal, Joomla and Plone! Oh my!

April 15, 2007

At NTC, there was a lot of talk about the “big three” open source CMS packages that most people these days in our sector are using: Drupal, Plone, and Joomla. I’ve had a fair bit of experience with Drupal – nosi.net is run on Drupal, and I’d done a Drupal install once, and helped with some now and again. I hadn’t had experience with either Plone or Joomla, but in talking to folks both at NTC and Penguin Day about Joomla, I got intrigued.

I have a new endeavor (see the last post) that needs a new website, and I figured, why not? I hear Joomla is dead easy to install, and I need dead easy right now, so let’s try it. Well, guess what? Installing Joomla is dead easy. I could do it with my eyes closed. I set up a mysql database in my standard generic virtual hosting setup, copied the downloaded and unzipped Joomla folder into my webspace by FTP, and fired up my browser. Four or five clicks later, tada! A website.

Um, sorta. I guess that’s where it gets interesting when you work with a CMS, right? What are all those content types, and where do they appear, and how do you get things to look exactly like you want them? It’s the same, really, with Drupal, only different. CMSs do share that pretty serious learning curve – but I’m getting over it, slowly.

So I like Joomla. Do I like it better than Drupal? I’m not yet sure. It definitely focuses a lot on the eye candy, which is nice, actually – I like that the admin interface is pretty. I know, that’s silly, but it’s true. In some respects, it’s easier to use, although in others, Drupal can be a bit easier. It’s a tossup, so far. They both seem to pretty much have very similar feature sets. We’ll see how I feel as I progress with it, and see how far I can go. I hear that all of the “cool chix” use Drupal, though (Linuxchix is about to launch it’s new Drupal-based website.) There is, I think, a bit of a geeky bias toward Drupal. So, maybe since I’m becoming a bit less of a geek, Joomla’s a good pick? But Joomla is pretty darned geeky. Like what is a mambot, anyway?

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Speaking too soon

April 15, 2007

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since I wrote my post, a few weeks ago, saying I was done with technology consulting. In one sense, I spoke too soon, although in another, I was right on. And, to some extent, this post is a bit self-indulgent, so if you’re looking for some concrete technology talk, you might want to wait for the next post on Joomla. :-)

I first started doing technology consulting for nonprofit organizations in 1996, with a project for a local public television station (WGBY in Springfield, MA), to design a technology center for teachers to learn about technology and the internet, so they could apply that in their classrooms. It was a great project, and a success, since that technology center is still in operation today. Understandably, it has come to be somewhat different than I designed it back then, but it still feels good that something that I worked hard on is still serving people. And it was the sheer enjoyment of that project – of talking to many different people about needs and desires, thinking about how to appropriately use technology to those ends, that got me out of academia, and into the nonprofit and educational technology world.

I did a lot of planning, evaluation and training in the beginning – some on my own, some with Summit Collaborative. it was what I enjoyed most, and it was what I thought I was best at. But, somewhere along the line, I started to do more and more implementation, because, honestly, that was what my clients needed most at the time. I put in a few networks in the late ’90s (ugh, really, I pulled cable.) I started to do databases for organizations, and then, in 1999, I flew headlong into web application development, which became my specialty and mainstay until I took a break to go to seminary in 2005. At first, I liked it a lot. I liked being able to create things that I thought my clients wanted (and they thought they wanted.) I stumbled a fair bit along the way. I had a hard time being a successful business owner with employees (I pretty much suck at it, so I hitched my wagon to Database Designs Associates from 2003 until this year.) And I struggled mightily with my own capacity to build really good applications mostly without other developers to help out. It was really hard to try and write new applications building on a framework I’d written a while ago, while simultaneously improving that framework, and keeping up with new things such as Ajax and RSS, mostly by myself. It just wasn’t happening very well.

And as time wore on, I lost touch with people and organizations. I sat for hours (or days) at a time in front of my screen without contact with the folks I was doing the work for. And, if there was contact, it was most often on the level of “can you fix this?” “can you add this feature?” I don’t blame them – they needed the fixes, and the features. But that was a pale shadow of the kind of work and contact I wanted with my clients. And I also struggled with the consulting business model. In the early days, as a business owner, I needed to think a lot about sustaining business (I had employees, and I wanted them to eat.) And later, even though it wasn’t a large part of my job description, it still was something that I had a hard time with – like getting yanked out of my flow to answer RFPs.

For one long time client (I had this client for just about all of the span of my consulting career – they were my second client), I had a much fuller, richer role, even though much of the work I did for them was database and web application development, we’d built a great rapport over time, and it felt wonderful when I got the chance to talk with them about bigger picture issues. But that was not so often, and, as staff in that organization left over time, that relationship changed.

When I came back from seminary, I was very clear that I couldn’t do technology consulting in the way that I had come to do it. I couldn’t bring myself to code or design databases, or write connections to APIs, or do any of those things that had become my bread and butter over the past 6 years. I wanted to work directly with organizations and people. So, it seemed to me that I needed simply to leave technology consulting behind, and move into doing things in a more spiritual vein, perhaps.

But then, I had something of an epiphany. And that epiphany was in my post about “Technology Consulting 2.0.” And the more I thought about it, the more it made sense to me, and the more I liked it. And the more I talked with other people about it, the more it made sense for me to do it. I will hold off for a while yet in my life working with people directly on spiritual issues, and work now with what could certainly be called the spirituality of nonprofit technology – finding balance and looking at the bigger picture. I’m creating a new practice, called MetaCentric Techology Advising. It will include visioning and planning, evaluation and training. All of the stuff that I liked the most about nonprofit technology, and, honestly, what I’m probably best at. And it’s nice to know that all of the last 8 years or so as a “technology vendor” as it were, will be there as good experience and guidance as I work with clients.

I won’t talk much about it in this blog again, but I thought it might be something people would want to hear about.

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The Wealth of Networks, Chapter 5

April 15, 2007

I’d taken a long break from Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks – I had a lot going on, and, well, it’s a really, really meaty read. But I picked it up again, and was in the middle of it around the same time as the discussions around the Journal of Information Technology in Social Change happened. And as I finished reading the chapter, it came clear to me that the chapter might well be Yochai’s two cents on our conversation (not that I’ve asked him, but some things seem kinda clear from this chapter.)

The chapter is titled: Individual Freedom: Autonomy, Information and Law. Basically, it talks about the kinds of ways that individuals live, and the kinds of things that increase autonomy, and things that decrease it. He starts out laying the framework: the networked information economy puts materials in people’s hands for action, it provides non-proprietary sources of communications, and it decreases the extent that people can be manipulated by those they depend on for communication. He then goes into detail into each of these ways that the network information economy increases autonomy.

There’s a lot in this chapter, and I can’t possibly do it justice – go read it. But what I want to highlight is his section on autonomy, property and commons. First, because it bears most closely on issues of open content in the nonprofit sector. Second, because it’s a set of concepts that are pretty new to me, and I found interesting, and the arguments compelling.

First, both markets/property and commons have something in common – the ability of people to have some amount of certainty that there is available to them a set of resources so they can, as Benkler says “execute plans over time.” I’d just say, live our lives, or in the case of nonprofits, accomplish their missions. But markets and commons create these certainties in different ways, as you can imagine. Markets are dependent on the willingness and ability of people to pay for goods and services, and are constrained in certain ways. Commons are also constrained in certain ways. He says:

Whether having a particular type of resource subject to a commons, rather than a property-based market enhances freedom of action and security, or harms them, is a context-specific question.

Basically, we have to take things on a case-by-case basis. There may be times (I’d say home ownership is a good one,) where a property-based market would enhance security and flexibility, and a commons-based resource might not. And there will be examples (see below) where the opposite is true. It is his opinion, and based on his arguments I agree, that a mixture of proprietary (market-based) and commons provides people with the most flexible set of resources leading to the greatest autonomy:

Given the diversity of resources and contexts, and the impossibility of a purely “anything goes” absence of rules for either system, some mix of the two different institutional frameworks is likely to provide the greatest diversity of freedom to act in a material context.

He goes on to say:

As to information, then, we can say with a high degree of confidence that a more expansive commons improves individual autonomy, while enclosure of the public domain undermines it. This is less determinate with communications systems. Because computers and network connections are rival goods, there is less certainty that a commons will deliver the required resources. Under present conditions, a mixture of commons-based and proprietary communications systems is likely to improve autonomy.

He thinks that if conditions change, including increasing peer-to-peer networks, and wireless mesh networks, a commons-based communications policy would increase autonomy.

Later in the chapter, when he talks about mass communications, he uses a great metaphor of storytellers. I won’t detail it here, because this is already getting pretty long. But it’s worth reading – it has to do with how free we are to tell our own stories, and to hear the stories of as wide a range of people as possible.

I think that his contribution to our discussion about open content in the nonprofit sector, would be that, since it is information (a nonrival good), and since information is both output (I write a whitepaper that people read) and an input (someone takes the information from that whitepaper, and updates it, or uses a piece of information about one of the specific aspects of that paper in another paper with a different focus) a commons-based approach is the approach that will provide the greatest security and flexibility. In other words, an approach that will allow nonprofits to best fulfill their missions, or in Benkler-ese “execute their plans.”

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Open Source Feminism?

April 12, 2007

Beth Kanter, as always, has a great, informative summary of the Penguin Day activities last Saturday in DC. She’s got some great video blogging, including a short one on “open source feminism.” Although women were only 25% of the Penguin Day attendees, that’s actually pretty darned good for open source related events.

We’d love to get more women involved in nonprofit open source – women from the nptech world who might not be thinking a lot about open source, and women from the open source community who might not be thinking a lot about nonprofit organizations. Let’s get together!

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What’s coming up …

April 10, 2007

I’ve been reviewing my blogging plans, and I have realized that I have been quite remiss in continuing the varied overlapping series that I started over the past few months. So, over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be digging back into some interesting territory. I’ll be blogging a new chapter of Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks (which, by the way, is about information and personal autonomy – it dovetails perfectly with the conversation about open content in the nonprofit sector.) I’ll be talking more about open standards, including the open document standards war, and XDI and identity. And I’ll keep talking about my thoughts on technology consulting, and open content. Also, Deborah Finn gave me the blogging assignment to apply just war theory to my approach to technology. It’s an interesting assignment, one I’m gamely choosing to accept. I’m really looking forward to the next batch of blogging coming up, and I hope it turns out to be useful and engaging.

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