I had a great time at NTC - it was wonderful to see old friends and meet new ones. But I was struck by how much the same the problems are that nonprofits continue to face. I think perhaps we need to ask some deeper questions.

From the stories I've heard this week, small and medium-sized nonprofits still don't have in-house technology expertise to make evaluations about what directions to go in. They struggle mightily with software, no matter whether it's free/open source or proprietary, shrink-wrapped or custom-built, on their desktops or web-hosted. The technology has gotten more sophisticated - but the problems many nonprofits are facing are exactly the same.

The results of our technology service provider survey are in! In late 2006 we surveyed tech providers across the country - the first step in the TechImpact research project to help us understand what technology assistance means for nonprofit capacity.

We wanted to understand:

• Who is providing technology assistance to nonprofit organizations? Who do they serve?
• What services do providers offer? What approaches do they use to deliver technology assistance?
• Where are technology providers located? Where are they delivering services?
• When do providers employ evaluation strategies to understand the effect of their work?
• How do providers implement strategies to foster key outcomes for organizations, and how do they successfully achieve those outcomes (e.g., improved efficiency and effectiveness)?
• How do providers measure the success of their projects?

The panelists in our Open API Debate (five for-profit vendors, one nonprofit vendor, one open source vendor, and one nonprofit) talked about everything from the current state of APIs to why nonprofits should care to what the future holds for APIs. You can listen to the entire debate in this podcast and read some of our favorite quotes below.

On the Current State of APIs

"The market is bringing [Open APIs] to the surface... At the same time, though, I think the elephant in the room is how impactful these APIs are to the business

It is with great sadness that learned that Miriam Engelberg, formerly of CompassPoint, passed away on October 17 from cancer.

She was a fellow nonprofit techie woman, a consultant whom I met at a tech consulting conference in Santa Cruz many years ago.

She had an irreverent and vibrant spirit and was wise and accomplished -- with astute insights into technology and nonprofit culture. She is probably best known to many in the NTEN and NPTech community for her cartoons, Planet 501c3 -- her witty commentary on life in the nonprofit (tech) world. You can see her homepage and more recent cartoons and her blog chronceling her battle with cancer at

I was just at the Connecting Up Conference in Adelaide, Australia. It has been fascinating to see the nonprofit ICT perspective here.

Australia has a huge NFP sector for its population of 21 million: the most often-cited figure is 700,000 organizations, but most are staffed purely by volunteers. [The numbers drop dramatically when you limit things to organizations that employ staff (380,000) or that have deductible status (20,000)].

Broadband Internet access is surprisingly low here. Overall, Internet access is at 68%, close to the US, but only about 28% of Internet users have broadband access. The cost of access is high compared to the US, and most