Princeton WordNet defines language as “a systematic means of communicating by the use of sounds or conventional symbols.” However, this is true only in the most limited sense. A language not only describes meaning, it creates meaning. We cannot truly conceive of ideas outside of language. Language gives us the tools to create new ideas.

The pattern languages mentioned in the paper do something similar. The article uses the word “generative.” That is, pattern languages generate systems by providing a framework on which to design. Designers start at a high level pattern and can follow the web of linked patterns to inform their systems.

So, where does that leave everyone who isn’t an HCI professional?

Only by creating and using a language within a particular domain can we begin to make that domain “real.” Without a framework (language) for thinking, creating, and describing professionals are bumbling around in the dark. Using simple, linguistic, language to describe domain-specific knowledge is certainly important, a first step. Creating specialized words to fill in the gaps can stretch the tool a long way.

However, words aren’t particularly great for more complex, specialized contexts. It’s not like this is a new realization. There are dozens of specialized languages that have arisen from this gap — the most common being any of a dozen diagrammatic languages (UML, IDFX, etc). But its important for us to continue to find new languages to discuss and build on our knowledge.

The Online Micro-Community is the next generation of web-based technology. Building upon the implementations and lessons of the broad-spectrum Online Social Network (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc), this technology focuses the enormous energy and power of geographically and temporally dispersed communication towards a specific goal or interest.

While the true ripples of this technology are yet to be realized, there is no doubt that it has and will continue to make very real changes to our society. It is already changing the way in which we tackle problems – connecting the few individuals who have a vested interest in a niche concern and changing the way society as a whole deals with its problems. Micro-Communities have begun to educate and empower consumers, beginning the “open sourcing” of information and helping to alleviate some of the worst effects of a highly specialized society. Finally, Micro-Communities are providing vast new marketing resources for companies, and are likely to shift clients from passive receivers of services to active participants.

Of course, this positive change is not without its challenges. Many of the issues inherent in modern online communication mediums are made more potent by the social interactions of Online Micro-Communities. Lack of credibility and the possibilities of legal repercussions for contributed content will shape the use of these websites. Moreover, the increasing collaboration allowed by Micro-Communities has the potential to increase conflict between factions of society, a threat that will be difficult to address.

All of these impacts and challenges reflect a fundamental change to our society, one already in motion but likely perpetuated and strengthened by the rise of the Online Micro-Community. Society is becoming more collaborative. TV, radio, and print – all critical technologies in the progress of humanity – have one crucial flaw; they are passive communication mediums. Because of their inherent lack of collaboration, these technologies lack all but a vanishingly small portion of the World Wide Web’s Potentia. Online Micro-Communities are the most recent, and the most promising, manifestation of this potential.

But what about the nonprofit organizations that are actually poor — that honestly can’t afford to spend 1% of their budget on IT. We can’t just dismiss them.

Providing support for the nonprofit world isn’t a one-size-fits-all model.

Just getting funding doesn’t work either — even if you can find a funder for what is now considered operational expenses. The problem is what to do after you’ve put in the server. It’s not news, but it bears repeating: Technology investment doesn’t end at implementation; it requires ongoing support to be effective.

And here is where the choices get hard. Do you, as the IT professional, recommend and implement a solution that gives an organization functionality that they need, that they demand? We know that the system’s ongoing support is unlikely, that it is certainly not best practice, that it might cause more trouble than it’s worth.

What about organizations that can pay for support, but they can’t afford to pay for the up front implementation costs?You know who you are — local machines acting as file-servers, linking sites with $30 wireless access points, 1.5Mb/s DSL connections for 50 users. These systems break constantly, causing aggravation for everyone, often directed at the IT professional that consented to cobbling it together.

Finding the balance is tough. We can’t afford to turn away nonprofits that don’t fit the mold — they all need our help. But where do you draw the line? Where does “not best practice” become “I’m sorry I can’t help you.”

Last night I attended a talk hosted by phillyCHI that inspired me to actually write something down. Jared Spool, a UX research of some note, spoke of intuitive and embraceable design (the graphic to the left is his). He attempted to define what makes a design intuitive and embraceable. All of what he said was entertaining, and much was useful, but one part stuck with me.

An intuitive design, he said, is unobtrusive. The user’s attention never wavers from the task at hand to the interface itself. Now, this isn’t a particularly novel concept. I’ve heard it several dozen times by now, and it is considered Canon in the UX world. It is, however, a concept with enormous ramifications, and a concept that has direct application in the world of Information Systems as a whole.

Information Systems exist to let the user get their work done. They should be unobtrusive, they should be unnoticeable. Their use should be autonomic. Technology should never exist for the sake of technology. If a user needs to take time out of their work to bridge the gap between their current knowledge and the knowledge they need to use the system, the system is not intuitive and needs to be addressed.

This means that system designers need to minimize the knowledge the system requires the user to know. It also needs to find a way to imperceptibly coach the user along the gap between their current knowledge and the needed knowledge. System designers also need to hide everything the user doesn’t need to know — the technical stuff — to avoid confusion.

Again, none of this is new. But it is a lesson that Systems Designers — as opposed to interface designers — have yet to learn.

Actually looking at technology in this way is difficult. The human mind isn’t particularly good at viewing things as a whole, it has a (usually beneficial) tendency to categorize and break problems down. This is exacerbated by the complexity of Information Systems; it is impossible for any one individual to have detailed subject knowledge about every aspect.

The trick is to cheat. Instead of looking at the system as a whole and then break it down, look at the components, put everything together, and plaster over the cracks. At NPower, we use The House. It’s a little ridiculous, but it works. What is part of the house and what we call each section changes project to project depending on the scope, but the idea remains the same. When doing a strategic technology plan or technology audit we address each part of the house separately through interviews and on-site investigation. As part of this process we examine the interaction between each of these pieces. Finally, everyone comes together to discuss and recommendations informed by the whole are made.

This last part is the most important, and the most difficult. The ability to synthesize massive amounts of information and dozens, sometimes hundreds, of seemingly unrelated gaps is difficult to learn. It requires as much business acumen as technical know-how. What emerges isn’t technical recommendations; it is the huge, business altering ideas. At NPower PA we call them Strategic Initiatives, they are ideas that fundamentally change how you think about technology. Strategic Initiatives are the top-down approach to Information Systems.

In today’s world this top-down approach is crucial. We can’t afford to think of an Information System as discrete components. Take a look at the picture in this post. It’s been making the rounds recently, and is a drawing of the first steamboat (it didn’t work very well). It is intended to illustrate that simply adding technology to a current system or process (like emailing out a pdf copy of a newsletter) fails to fully grasp the potential of technology. Doing so is the bottom-up approach.

Strategic and transformative ideas are the paddle boats. They shift the question from fixing problems through technology to creating new opportunities. Things like websites that integrate internal data sources, online communities, social networking, problem-based learning, open api’s, and open source software all illustrate this concept. Start with what technology can do and then decide how it can help your organization.

Not just anyone can do this. The individual looking for these opportunities needs a somewhat technical background, needs to have excellent management skills, and needs the ability to be both detail and big-picture oriented. And they need to be within the organization, at the level of senior management. Only by having someone inside and invested in an organization, and having the decision making capabilities of senior management can understand the organization and be as proactive as necessary. The solution, unsurprisingly, is to hire a Chief Information Officer.

If your organization can’t afford such an individual, there is always the option to hire a consultant, or to educate senior management about technology. Of course, the unique combination of skills that makes a good CIO are impossible to replicate by non-technical individuals or individuals who aren’t personally invested in the organization.

I attended for two reasons. The first is that institutes of higher learning often face the same issues that non-profits do. They can be slow to change, and often have an institutionalized fear of new technologies. They are also mission focused and dedicated to helping their clients (students). The second reason is that I have toyed with entering higher education at some point later in life. Either by getting my Ph.D. and teaching or by entering the administration and staff.

I’ll be writing more about what I learned at the conference, but I wanted to share a few of the things that really stood out to me. I’m copying these straight from my notebook — they are unstructured, inconsistent, and may make no sense to anyone else. However, I still think a few of them are interesting and sometimes raw ideas are the most thought provoking.

• What can IT/Infrastructure learn from web design? 
  • EX
  • user-centric
  • cyclical design
  • flexible / innovative

• What can web learn from IT/Infrastructure?
  • Formalized process
  • Excelent project management processes
  • Well established metrics

• Top down doesn’t work. It may be inefficient but buyin starts from the bottom.

• Don’t just support the mission — empower the individual

• Technology is working to mitigate specialization of labor through information accessibility — everyone can be an expert. Maybe not enough to do the work, but enough to take professionals off their pedestal and help consumers engadge.

• The switch to a service based economy is a metaphor for open source software — the tools and raw material are available to everyone, but you still have to pay for the expertise to put it all together into something useful. OSS developers sell a service not a product.

• Technology is allowing us to achieve the better teaching methods (problem-based learning, etc) psychologists have been telling us about for year. We need to harness it better.

• It’s impossible to really test huge systems that transform the very way we interact (example: blackboard, facebook) in any quantifiable way. Instead we need to find really subject-specific applications and test them with hard metrics. Do this a couple hundred times, generalize common results, and apply the lessons learned to the system as a whole. This could apply to large infrastructure projects too.

• Education is now similar to open source. Everyone has access to the raw materials and information, but we still need the experts to facilitate the process and teach us how to do something with it.

• Relate it to your mission
• Talk about the project in client-centric ways
• Have a clear plan for implementation
• Set aside money for long term maintenance
• Get recommendations from a professional
• State it as a capital investment

This last is the subject of today’s post. Non-profits need to make it clear that any external funding will be supported down the line by operational costs that are provided by stable revenue streams. This isn’t particularly difficult to do with “traditional” technology projects. It costs $X to design a website, $X to buy and install a file server, $X to purchase and customize an off-the-shelf database solution. Long term support and maintenance for the entire infrastructure is generally a tiny percentage of implementation costs and, in my experience, represents less than or about equal to 5% of the organization’s budget.

But “traditional” technology isn’t what nonprofits need. They need on-demand computing. They need services based in the cloud. The need databases that are customized as needed and sold as a service. They need to be as agile and connected as possible. SaaS, cloud computing, and similar consumption based services are the future. The problem is, they make capital investments operational costs. This is great for for-profit enterprises. Spreading large costs over a number of years has obvious benefits when you are paying for it yourself anyway. But the same does not hold true for non-profit organizations.

Donors just don’t won’t to fund operational, long term, costs. From their perspective it makes perfect sense — even a nonprofit organization should be self sufficient. Money should be reserved for increasing the reach and breadth of services offered, not for paying for office supplies and basic support. SaaS often does help organizations achieve their mission and increase services — and it can do it at a lower cost and with greater efficacy — but how can we communicate this change with investors?

And even if we can convince investors, the perceived risks of moving to a hosted solution may prevent nonprofits from doing so. After all, capital investments can be seen as more flexible. A server can limp along for five or six years after its scheduled replacement date, and support can (and, trust me, is) easily dispensed with in tough economic times. On the other hand, hosted systems have definite expiration dates. The amount of money may be the same either way, but up-front costs are often more attractive to the risk-wary non-profit.

I’m not sure what the solution is, but it is clear that education must begin soon if non-profits are going to jump on-board with the reliability, cost, and efficacy benefits SaaS can provide. We need to work with funders to help them understand the risks and benefits of a new kind of computing.

Our clients already know they need a new server. They already know their database isn’t tracking the data they need. They know no one is visiting their website. But they don’t understand it. They don’t know why, and they certainly don’t know how to go about fixing it. And frankly, telling them what they need to do in the form of a document isn’t going to help.

A few years ago I volunteered at a community center in west Philadelphia. There I taught basic computer skills to under-privileged adults as part of job training. If there was one thing I learned, it was that having them memorize a set of steps to save, or print, or italicize, just wasn’t helpful. As soon as something went wrong, they were out of luck. Instead, I had to teach them the process. Explain context menus, tool bars, contextual editing. I had to teach them how a computer worked. Only with this knowledge could they figure things out on their own. Not that I was particularly good at it, teaching this kind of thing proved very very difficult.

Creating a Strategic Technology Plan is no different. You can explain the steps needed to gather requirements and implement a database as much as you want, but it isn’t going to do them any good. You have to help them understand the process, the reasons for doing things in a particular way. They have to understand how metrics drive fund raising drives implementation projects. They need to understand why long term budgeting is important.

The deliverable is a piece of paper that will be shown to the board once and put on a shelf. The valuable part is the lesson. This is what our clients pay us for.

Free is great. As a member of the nonprofit community, I realize that every dollar not spent on software and support services can be redirected to helping clients. I realize that money is always tight. It’s great that there are innumerable free, open source, and donated tools to help organizations work more efficiently. Google docs, salesforce, google adwords, comparison shopping sites, techsoup, AVG, it’s all there. You can probably find an adequate free solution for just about every issue. So, what’s the problem?

 
You have to find it
This might be the biggest issue. Google, Microsoft, and large companies seem to think that every single nonprofit has someone on staff with technical aptitude and lots of free time. Someone that reads the right blogs. Someone that knows how to search for things.

This is, frankly, not even close to accurate. Non-profits, by and large, are not the young hip organizations that everyone in corporate has romanticized. Many nonprofits are staffed by older, less technically included individuals. Even nonprofits with “young and hip” staff usually don’t have the time to wander around the Internet looking for cool tools.

 
You have to learn to use it
Free isn’t really free. Most of these tools are poorly designed, complicated, or both. That means time — lots of time — installing, configuring, and learning. This is assuming that you can figure it out. Again, many nonprofits just dont’ have the technical aptitude to pull it off. Despite what google seems to think, everyone and their mother can’t learn css, javascript, and mysql in an afternoon.

 
You have to maintain it
Most of these tools — especially the really helpful ones — require periodic monitoring and adjustment. Google adwords campaigns aren’t successful if you don’t update them. Databases need to be updated every time your business processes change or you add a new field for reporting. Ongoing costs, even if they are measured in the man-hours of a salaried individual, can be brutal and unpredictable.

I’m not saying these tools aren’t useful. They absolutely are. But throwing free at the problem usually doesn’t solve anything. Most of these tools should be implemented with the help of a professional and care should be taken to budget for long term maintenance.

It is important that the nonprofit world recognizes this change. The role of nonprofits as the single point of information and aid is dwindling. Instead, nonprofits need to shift to information brokers. We need to help our constituents communicate with each other. Our job is increasingly to facilitate communication — between individuals and the government, between individuals and other organizations, and particularly between individuals — and less to be content providers in our own right.

Obviously nonprofits must adapt their use of technology to meet this changing world, but the change must go deeper than that. Nonprofits must fundamentally change the way they think about their organization, their mission, and their clients. We must think about communication, marketing, outreach in an entirely new light. Technology isn’t the tool we need to use, it is the way we need to think. In today’s age, there is no difference between technology and communication, the Internet and outreach. 

Well, that was all a little (maybe more than a little) melodramatic. The world isn’t going to change overnight. Nonprofits still provide and will continue to provide very real and very needed services — homes need to be heated, children need an education, everyone needs to eat. Our prominent place in this nation’s social safety net isn’t going to change. But the approach is changing,  and we need to pay attention.

For further reading on the topic I recommend Here Comes Everyone, by Clay Shirkey.