Grantmaking in a Web 2.0 World

Is the web -- many small pieces loosely joined - making old grantmaking practices in advocacy and democratic engagement obsolete? What does grantmaking in an interactive world look like? The rise of collective knowledge, organizing networks, and the transparency that millions of eyes and voices generate is changing politics (remember Macaca?), economic paradigms, how corporations conduct business, and yet has made precious few inroads into how we, as a third sector, operate -- and that is especially true for funders.

In a world more connected than ever, we are already seeing the next big social transformation - as messy and as iterative and lose as all the movements in history, with strong and persuasive visions but at best highly informal plans. 'Social change' in a connected world is based on an entirely different paradigm than that of the 'strategic plan' and clear 'year-end metrics' that funders demand. In a highly fluid, networked, and iterative world, funding by 'blueprint' becomes meaningless. Read more.

Happy Women's Day!

Happy International Women's Day! As women in tech, Holly and I toasted each other with great coffee -- and all of you other techno babes. We are hailing from Portland where we have a brandnew office (see photos from the trusty Macbook Pro of our view!). We are getting pings from all over the country from our women colleagues in tech - Usha, Beth, Joyce, Michelle -- saluting you all in the NTEN community! Special greetings to our board chair (yep, an extraordinary woman) Lynn Labieniec from Beaconfire.

Around the world, International Women's Day (IWD) marks a celebration of the economic, social, cultural and political achievements for women.

More books on Nonprofit Technology - New Collection of Research by NTEN members

The line-up of books focused on nonprofit tech continues (and all of our NTEN authors will be at the NTC, ready to sign and read!) with a NEW one that I was part of at the very beginning a few years back:

Nonprofit Technology: Emerging Research for Usable Knowledge by Michael Cortess and Kevin Rafter are the editors;both are at the University of San Francisco.

The On-Demand Nonprofit

The announcement of Google to offer Google Premier Apps, a suite of on-demand Google services such as its calendar, email, IM, VOIP, docs and spreadsheets bundled for $50/year. A free version targeted at educational institutions — Google Apps Education Edition — offers the same features as the premier edition except for the storage size. There is also the free Google Apps Standard Edition with less features.

This is not only starting to seriously compete with Microsoft but has the potential to tip the way we all operate. Salesforce.com's success and growing adoption by the nonprofit market is already showing that the on-demand nonprofit working in a hosted environment for critical business functions is here to stay. This true especially for office productivity, communications, and other core functions, such as CRM.