Published
2010-09-14 11:42
Last week, thanks to the invitation and sponsorship from Fundacja TechSoup, I was able to attend the Local Philanthropy Workshop organised by the Odorheiu Secuiesc Community Foundation in the lovely town of Odorheiu Secuiesc in Transylvania.
The event started with a welcome on Tuesday evening and lasted until a wrap-up session on Saturday morning, and for the most part consisted of two parallel tracks, one for NGOs learning about fundraising and the related tools and resources, and one for NGO-related IT people sharing their knowledge about the available tools and learning from each other how to best interact with NGOs to help them the most.
The first day at the IT track centered around the discussion about the state of communication between the IT and NGO sectors, and how it can be made better – we all agreed that a lot of work can be done so that both sides are more willing to interact. Quite a few interesting points were raised, both about general sensitiveness of both parties (‘I’m a web programmer, I might not be the best person to contact when your printer isn’t working’) and technology pragmatism (‘but why wouldn’t you use this shiny new tool from day zero when it’s so cool to play with?’). Th day ended with the track participants’ short presentations on their favourite technologies (with CiviCRM being quite well received; it seems most of the participants haven’t heard about an NGO-specific CRM before, while being quite accustomed with Drupal).
The second day at the IT track started with a broad discussion on how NGOs should ask for help with technical problems to make the experience a pleasure for both parties (don’t panic, ideally have multiple people to contact, be prepared to work with the person you aske for help) and what needs to be done when a new technology is to be evaluated (what is the goal and needs? what are the current tools and established workflows? do you have time to learn? do you have a plan for sustainability? ideally: do involve IT from the start…). The session then expanded into a ‘best practices’ list, including mutual appreciation and patience, the value of giving examples, identifying project ownership on the NGO side, establishing relationships and the invaluable experiences that freshmen can bring to writing introductory documentation. The next item of the IT session was best IT practices, both fundamental ones (do backups and remain calm, hardware will break…) and ones that aren’t obvious even when they’re crucial (putting a spreadsheet with sensitive data on a pendrive that can be easily stolen or lost is a very bad idea). The session closed with a list of recommended IT tools (from CiviCRM through various specific Drupal distributions to Google Docs and NGO-oriented operating systems). The second part of the second day consisted of a joint NGO/IT session, with a lot of knowledge and solutions to particular problems disussed at informal round tables.
Finally, the third main day of the conference consisted mostly of presentations (including an hour-long demo of CiviCRM) and more NGO/IT problem solving in small groups, unconference-style. One of the interesting outcomes from the workshop is the establishing of three new NetSquared Local communities (in Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca and Odorhei) fostering the NGO/IT communication and cooperation; personal experience – the Polish CiviCRM team has been coordinating a NetTuesday group in Warsaw for a year now – suggests such monthly meetings are great opportunities for both lovering barriers and spreading the word about worthwhile IT solutions for NGOs.
You can read more thoughs from the Local Philanthropy Workshop’s participants at the NetSquared blog and watch videos from the conference at NetSquared’s YouTube channel.
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Let me introduce you Piotr Szotkowski, aka shot, aka chastell, that genuinly pretends he doesn't like the spotlights on him:
http://www.youtube.com/user/NetSquared#p/u/7/xOuZEfGlnss
Do you have the slides somewhere visible ?
X+
P.S. big round of applause, et caetera
I somehow hoped no-one would dig it up (thanks, Xavier!); as can be clearly seen from the video, the five hour sleep average took its toll. I’m not sure whether the slides are of much use, but here you are (source on GitHub).