Interview: Zen and the art of Nonprofit Technology

Michelle Murrain, Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Blog

Michelle and I are  graduates of Bennington College (so is Deborah Finn).  It is a very small liberal arts college in Vermont, where everyone knows everyone's name.  What's very funny is that we were in school during the same two-year period, but we never met!   That's because Michelle was in the Science Building on one end of campus, while I in the Music Building way on the other side.

Although Michelle has some deeply geeky skills, she writes from the perspective of a neo-luddite.   Her blog is filled with insightful pieces that cut through the hype of new technologies and often ask the hard probing questions that haven't been asked. 

Michelle most recently published a white paper in collaboration with NTEN called "Let's Talk: How Open APIs Can Change How Nonprofits Manage Data"  It is a topic of critical importance in the nonprofit tech space.  The paper is a must read.  She is also the coordinator for NOSI - Nonprofit Open Source Initiative.  You can learn more about her impressive accomplishments by reading the official CV/Bio at her web site.

I had a chance to reconnect again with Michelle when she signed up to volunteer for the NTC Day of Service.  Here's my interview:


1.  Like many of us out there, you work as an independent consultant - so you are paid for your expertise and knowledge.  Why the heck would you ever want to give it a way for free by volunteering?

I've been an educator for pretty much all of my adult life (even at Bennington, I was a tutor, and taught some classes in technology.) And so education comes naturally for me, so translating what I know in ways that other people can understand has always been important to me, and I've done it whether I've been paid to do it or not. I want people to understand things better, I want people to be able to approach technology with less fear and trepidation, with less intimidation.

When I first started out consulting, one of the first pieces of advice I got was that giving things away free is an avenue to getting business. I can't really quantify whether this has been the case for me - but between my natural inclinations, and that advice, I certainly got into the habit of doing it. At this point in my life, I'm not worrying about getting business so much - I'm thinking a lot more about a bigger picture of things, and assuming that it will all work out in the end.

That's the more spiritual approach to things - the calling is in relating to people, and in providing information to organizations that helps them accomplish their mission better.

2.  How do you see gift economies operating in the nonprofit open source community, the nonprofit blogosphere, and nonprofit tech community in general?  Is there a downside to gift economies?

I am a big believer in gift economies. I think that the nonprofit tech community in general operates a lot out of a gift economy model. Of course, open source is one big gift economy, although it certainly intersects with the "real" economy, and there are some interesting things that happen in those moments. I see a general desire to provide information and support for free - it's amazing how many responses people get on email lists to a specific problem that they are trying to solve.  People seem to be in this field because it matters in some way to them - to the world.

I don't see any downsides to gift economies, honestly. I wish the whole world worked that way. :-)

3.  Let's talk about your blog(s) - specifically Zen and Nptech which you launched a few months ago.  What value do you get from it?  What is most exciting to you personally and professionally as it relates to blogging?

What I get from it primarily is a venue to air my ideas about technology and human beings, as they form more and more in my mind. I guess I also get out of it feedback and push back on my ideas - which I'm always looking for. It's a good excuse to read lots of other people's blogs, and feed into the general nptech blogosphere, which is fun. It's really a soapbox, honestly. I don't expect to get any tangible benefit from it.  I just hope it's interesting and useful to people.

It's worth mentioning my main blog - which is called "Metacentricities."  Often, that blog is about personal issues (it was quite taken up with my moving experiences lately,) but I also use it to talk about more specifically spiritual issues. I spent half of 2005 and all of 2006 in seminary, in Berkeley, CA, and a lot of the issues that I was exploring during that time I have talked about on that blog.

4.  What is the gender balance/politics/issues/trends (if any) in the OS nptech community?

Aye, what a question. I don't know that the gender balance/politics/issues/trends of the nptech OS community is so different than the general OS community. There is a woeful dearth of women in both. It's funny, there is this very, very active conversation going on one of the mailling lists of the Linuxchix community about gender and open source communities. It's been an issue for years and years, and is why Linuxchix (a community dedicated to women in open source) exists.

I wrote a post about this on my blog once - it was asking the question of why, when you look at the nptech field, that as you get more and more geeky, there are fewer and fewer women. And still, OS is considered pretty geeky, and there are only a handful of women in OS nptech community. It's great that there is leadership in the nptech OS community that understands these issues - but it's going to take some active effort to address them.

5.  Do you think Open Source is like fair trade coffee?


I've been trying to make that argument for years - I wish I had thought of that idea of relating it to fair trade! It's a tough sell, though, this idea that how nonprofits solve technology issues is as important as solving the issues. I think it's like trying to sell the US government on the idea that war is not the way to peace. From my perspective - the means *are* the ends - and the ways we go about trying to work on changing the world is as important as the goal of changing the world - in fact, those ways end up directing the goals in more ways that we understand.

It's one of the reasons that I started my blog - I want people to think about technology in new ways, and think about the ways in which everything is connected. Does it make good sense, for instance, for unions to buy lots of new computers that were manufactured in non-union shops, even if it makes organizing easier? Does it make sense for environmental groups to upgrade their computers every 3 years and put the old ones in a landfill? Does it make sense for an organization dedicated to education to spend money buying software from a company that is dedicating itself to making it easier for all content to be controlled in a  way that makes it harder and more expensive to access?
These are the kinds of questions I want people to think about.

6.  Tell me about your work with NOSI?  What are some of your hopes/dreams/visions?

I'm the Coordinator of NOSI - the Nonprofit Open Source Initiative. NOSI is working to provide concrete resources for nonprofits to help them use open source software. We are also working to build partnerships and relationships between the nonprofit technology field and open source projects.

My hope is that NOSI will become an organization that can provide thought leadership for the nonprofit sector around open source software, provide training and resources to help nonprofits, and convene events and forge partnerships that help to increase and sustain the use of open source software in the nonprofit sector.

Ultimately, it would be my hope that open source software would become very mainstream in the sector- which it already is becoming for some kinds of situations (like content management, for example.)

7.  What else you doing you'd like to mention?

Well, I'm becoming more and more of a writer. On the technology side, I just finished, with NTEN, a paper on open APIs. I'd like to do a lot more like that  - it was a fun project, one that I hope will be helpful for people. But I do a lot of other writing. Some of it can be found on my main website and in my main blog

I also finished a science fiction novel last year that I hope to publish in one way or another this year.

8.   What are the 3-5 best blogs by women writing about nps, social change,
or nptech that you read regularly?

The Bamboo project blog
Jen Mei Wu's Dangerous Ideas
Marnie Webb's Ext.337

There are a bunch of women linux geek blogs I read, and a bunch of women religious blogs I read too.

Cross posted at Blogher

Comments

[Deborah Elizabeth Finn]

Dear Beth and Michelle,

Great interview!

I still can't figure out how Bennington College produced us.

Three very different paths to nonprofit technology, and here we are. I do regret that Michelle and I didn't meet you until after we all had graduated.

Warm regards from Deborah

Deborah Elizabeth Finn
Boston, Massachusetts, USA
www.cyber-yenta.org

"What is good...but to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your god?" (Micah 6:8)