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Monolog: Tim Mills-Groninger
"Monolog" is a standing feature of The Sophist in which we ask one person to share his or her point of view on issues pertinent to those involved with socially-focused organizations.
Name: Tim Mills-Groninger
Title: Associate Executive Director
Organization: IT Resource Center (http://www.itresourcecenter.org/)
Least Favorite Buzzword: "Easy-to-use." It's a phrase with no common and measurable definition. It's often used as a substitute for training staff to really understand business processes--they'd prefer the "easy-to-use" tool to substitute for human understanding, and that, in my experience at least, often leads to problems.
In a conversation with Hedy Helsell, the director of the Center for Nonprofit Management in Dallas, I complained about "easy-to-use" and other phrases that people use in RFPs (requests for proposals) that pertain more to how they want to feel about the software than to what it's really supposed to do within the organization. With her wonderful insight, Hedy said that it sounded like they were trying to buy underwear, not software. Since then, I refer to RFPs that are non-specific in their requirements as "BVD RFPs," after the underwear company.
It's fine for easy-to-use to be a goal, but it shouldn't be a requirement with no supporting specifications.
Favorite Web Site: There are no sites, other than Google (http://www.google.com/) and AlltheWeb (http://www.alltheweb.com/), that I go back to regularly. I did build a site for the community I live in (http://www.whitingcommunity.com/), but I don't think that counts.
On Usenet (http://www.usenet.com/), I read soc.org.nonprofit, which is the longest continuous discussion of nonprofit issues on the Internet. I started participating in 1994. I also participate in the newsgroup comp.databases.ms-access, which focuses on Microsoft Access development issues. It's very hard-core geek.
Favorite Quotation: I don't really have a favorite quotation right now, but the first thing that popped into my head when I heard this question was Psalms 133: "Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!" Which I usually rewrite to read, "Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for siblings to dwell together in unity!"
I work in the sector to advance the cause of civil society. I want to live in a world of safe and secure children, warm homes, and interesting things to talk about. It's so easy to get caught up in the vast amounts of information we have to collect about abuse and neglect and other topics, both pleasant and distasteful, and decisions we need to effect meaningful change. It's important to me to be able to go back to the simplest measures, for my siblings and me to dwell together in unity.
Recommended Reading: The Social Life of Information (http://www.slofi.com/) by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid is a very interesting set of essays on the dististinction between what ought to happen with information and what really happens when logic meets organizational culture.
Prediction for the Sector: Certainly the idea of "what's measured gets done" will become increasingly important in the sector as more agencies fall under performance-based contracts and various outcome measures. Many organizations will end up shifting some of their core values and business practices to meet the new requirements of the people who pay for services (both funders and consumers). Naturally, I think that technology is going to play a major role in collecting what's measured. Paul Light has some keen observations on this topic in his book Making Nonprofits Work (http://brookings.edu/dybdocroot/press/books/tides_of_nonprofit.htm).
Another trend I see is increasing stratification in the quality and availability of information. While more and more information is becoming available on the Internet (although some people argue that point; see http://marylaine.com/exlibris/xlib150.html), the good stuff is getting harder to find. First, it's hidden, and the indexes have gotten too large to locate things, and more and more information is fee-based. Many people expect to read things for free and so flock to the free resources. The fee-based sites may have better information, but they may not be used because people don't value them or just can't afford them. The digital divide is shifting away from issues of accessibility and more toward issues of quality and discernment.
Hedgehog or Fox?* A fox, I'd think. I remember a job interview I had for a position in a college. The department head and I chatted for about an hour. As we wound things up, he gestured at my resume and said, "Well, you certainly have a bouillabaisse of skills and experience." I didn't get that job, but I did teach there in another department.
* This alludes to Isaiah Berlin's 1953 essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox," in which he uses a line from the Greek poet Archilochus ("The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.") as the basis for dividing writers and thinkers into one of two categories: the hedgehogs "who relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel--a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance" and the foxes "who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause…seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision." Berlin says Dante, Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Proust are hedgehogs; Shakespeare, Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzak, and Joyce are foxes.
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