Flickr Photo courtesy of Miles Maier, London ICT Champion
I've had the pleasure of talking with Miles Maier face-to-face last month in Birmingham at the UK Circuit Riders conference hosted by LASA. Currently, he's blogging about his Web Office experiment which is well worth following. I'll get a chance to see Miles again at this year's NTC Conference and some lucky local nonprofit in DC will have Miles as a volunteer for the NTC Day of Service!
1. Tell me a little about your background - I know you work for Lasa - can you tell how long, what you do on a daily basis.
I've been working in the non-profit sector for 5 years now and joined Lasa in June 2006, first on the consultancy side of the business by helping non-profits with their IT projects, and later as the wonderfully entitled London Regional ICT Champion. This role is more about providing London's non-profit sector with a for ICT issues and getting policy-makers and funders to recognise that investing in the ICT of non-profit organisations can actually achieve lots of positives - transforming organisations to work smarter and better, better collaboration and information sharing, and so on.
Before making the jump to working for non-profit, I was on the other side of the fence, working for London's largest charitable funder, which had an annual budget of some $31m. Being able to hand out grants and see how the money made a difference was satisfying but not always challenging, and on the whole I prefer life on the cutting edge of the non-profit sector, that's where the drive for social change is coming from.
2. Let's talk about your blog - What value do you get from it?
The blog is a pretty new thing to me and I get a tremendous amount of value out of the blog through connections I've made with other bloggers talking about the same things that interest me. Probably the most satisfying thing has been to meet the authors behind the blogs - David Wilcox and Steve Bridger - and make a more personal connection there. I'd like to blog a lot more, particularly about the potential of social media.
3. So, tell me about your Office 2.0 experiment?
The two week long 'Great Web Office' experiment was inspired by IT Redux's Office 2.0 and the Dot Organize 'Organizer's Toolcrib', the idea being to find out just how easy or hard it would be to apply online tools to my everyday tasks - email, calendar, contacts, word processing, spreadsheets - that many other people in the non-profit sector also use to carry out everyday business tasks.
My own perception is that online tools have the potential to allow non-profit organisations to more easily exploit ICT (which many aren't doing) and better achieve their organisational goals. However, most of the UK voluntary sector (apart from larger organizations) are not grasping the opportunities of online tools to connect with their stakeholders.
For me, the key is going to be showing how online tools can be applied to everyday tasks, like the social media game developed by David Wilcox, which aims to show organisations how they might apply online tools or new media to their business. The question are web 2.0 tools suitable for business tasks like email, calendar, documents and spreadsheets?
Yes, I realise that many non-profit organisations face basic ICT barriers before they even get to thinking about applying online tools to their business, but it's in the nature of experimentation to show what can be done! You can read about the 'web office 2.0' tools I used here
4. Do you think Open Source is like fair trade coffee?
No. You could argue there might be some overlapping values that FOSS and Fair Trade share, but otherwise they're not at all the same thing and the comparison doesn't work for me.
5. As part of your work, you are assisting nonprofits with the use of technology on a daily basis. I saw that you just signed up for the NTC Day of Service (bless you). Why would you ever want to do this work as a volunteer? Why do you think giving back or volunteering is important?
I'm now a trustee for a volunteer centre in East London and I think the short answer to this question is in Kevin Spacey's 'Pay it Forward' movie from 2000:
#1. It has to be something that really helps people.
#2. Something they can't do by themselves.
#3. I do it for them, they do it for three other people.
These are the rules when you pay it forward
6. 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?
Yes, I'm a big believer in the idea of being able to give and receive without necessarily monetizing it. It seems to work pretty well in the non-profit and open source context where the starting point is an expectation of sharing, collaboration and attribution.
Personally, I expect to see gift economies really take off on the web, in non-profits and open source with the ability to remix knowledge, skills and experience into something different. It's already happening in the non-profit, blogging and open source communities, with Creative Commons and GPL open source software licences being examples of how the process can be operated fairly.
Gift economies can also help those without material wealth to trade for goods and services. By coincidence I've been reading Tony Horwitz's Blue Latitudes, which talks about the cultural clash encountered between Polynesian gift economies and western ideas of property and ownership as presented by the 'explorer' Captain Cook. Go read it!
My wife, Deepa, really got me started on the notion of gift economies within her online artistic community. Here, collaboration, sharing, remixing, pass-it-forwards and random-acts-of kindness with others in the community are all very common as folks have no interest in buying or selling from each other. Much more important is the spirit behind the gesture, that not everything given has to be for something in return.
7. What are the 3-5 best blogs by UK folks writing about nps, social change, or nptech that you read regularly?
That would be: David Wilcox, Steve Bridger, Podnosh and Youthnet.
* Disclosure: One of my contracts is with NTEN is to coordinate the Day of Service. My contract does not include writing about the event or conducting interviews on my blog with event particpants. I did this interview with Miles because he has some great insights to share! Also, we still have volunteer slots available for the NTC Day of Service and if you are attending the NTC and want to participate, please do sign up!
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