Dear technologist,

May I have a moment of your time? If so, I would like to know if you have ever asked yourself, “What are the consequences of the advice I’m giving?” Or, let me ask, would you have the nerve to stand over the grave of a once-great social-benefit organization and say, “I did this. I am to blame.” If not, I plead with you, please keep your magic and “next big thing” in the corporate sector, or — better yet — use some of that glib approach and bravado to start your own company. Just stay away from our social-mission sector; it’s fragile enough on its own.

Just after the new year, Kim Elliot sent me a link to an interview with Michael Albert about the much-delayed re-launch of the whole Z communications family of Web sites, including Znet, Zmag, etc. The interview made my heart sink. In summary, Z communications — the 20-year-old media group with contributors like Noam Chomsky, Robert Fisk, John Pilger, Howard Zinn, Edward S. Herman, Eleanor Bader, and Barbara Ehrenreich — learned the hard way that large technology projects are not easy or without significant risk.

Pondering both Rob and Rolf’s comments on my suggestion that time management is more important than project management for most non-profit organizations, I was left thinking about the larger issue that each of our perspectives points too… Once distilled down to its essence, my hypothesis is that many people don’t have an accurate picture of their available time.

Rob believes that what I call “traditional” project management is what he would call bad project management, meaning that:

This will most certainly be the first in a long line of posts documenting my observations of life inside many non-profit organizations I’ve connected with. And a discussion around some of the commonly held views of what they struggle with, and what the best approaches are to helping voluntary organizations be more effective are.

One of the commonly held assumptions that I struggle with most is the notion that non-profits are inherently inefficient or poorly managed. My personal experiences lead me to believe that this rarely the case – or certainly no more the case in non-profits than in any other form of organization. And, quite often, I’ve seen innovation coming from community-based organizations being adopted and applied elsewhere.