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Monolog: Elizabeth Kellison
"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. In keeping with our library theme, this "Monolog" features Elizabeth Kellison, who works for the Gates Foundation-funded and OCLC-sponsored WebJunction portal that helps libraries support public access to computers and the Internet.
Name: Elizabeth Kellison
Title: Content manager
Organization: WebJunction (http://webjunction.org/)
Least Favorite Buzzword: "Whatever." The word is a way for people to dismiss feelings, thoughts, and ideas that are powerful and about which they are passionate, but might be shy or afraid to express. My feeling is express yourself! Show your passion and make a difference in this world.
Favorite Web Site: Nothing beats NPower (http://www.npower.org/) for helping nonprofits figure out how to better leverage technology to achieve their goals. Plus, the technology planning tools on the site (TechAtlas and TechSurveyor) are free for nonprofits and incredibly useful for any organization.
Favorite Quotation: George Mallory, when asked why he climbed Mount Everest, answered, "Because it's there."
Recommended Reading: I recommend reading anything outside the mainstream media (Time, Newsweek, New York Times, Washington Post, etc.) and news programs (all the networks). Reporting on world events and domestic trends seems to have gotten more one-sided in the last few years, and I would encourage the nonprofit sector to stay tapped into alternative sources of news and information.
Prediction for the Sector: I think the nonprofit sector is going to continue to follow the trend to create relationships and alliances that strengthen the sector, much like the corporate world. Technology-enabled collaborative projects will continue to proliferate and bring down costs for nonprofits, while increasing the innovative ideas that can spring from increased collaboration.
Hedgehog or Fox?* Fox. My seemingly unrelated events and contradictory ideas all point to my strongly held belief of anyone and everyone being able to get a high-quality education from any place in the world. Each human being on this planet is entitled to education, whether it comes through computers or in a classroom. What else will save human beings from self-destruction?
* 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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