-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hey Jesse,
Thanks for starting this thread. On 11/10/2014 09:35 AM, Jesse Krembs wrote: > Dear all > > For a number of years now I've been ponderer the idea of ICT/IS > consultancy organization focus on the NGO/Activists/Press (N/A/P) > markets. The basic idea being that there should be a boutique > consultancy group that is focused on upping the over all ICT/IS > game of N/A/P world. I would argue that lumping those three personas together is your first headache; in our experience, those three stakeholder groups have fundamentally different need sets, infrastructures, risk tolerances, resource profiles etc. And just "NGO" as a needs profile is its own long tail; for every multinational United Way or Red Cross with substantial IT departments, there are literally hundreds of grassroots NGOs where the person who can type the fastest is "accidental techie" by default and tasked with web and database planning. And in between lies a weird assortment of outsourced, part-time and lone-full-timer IT staffing solutions which are too often janky or worse. > There are some organizations out there doing this to certain > degree, (Securing Change, SecDev Group, ONI, Tactical Tech > Collective). But it feels like many are focused similar but > different targets, or not sufficiently funded. And funding is the > most key thing I believe. I don't see a standard fee for service > model working in this market (There just isn't the money inside a > client organization), so something else will be needed. > > So a couple of questions. 1: Is there already someone doing this? Our organization, Aspiration, is a US nonprofit focused on the "1 level up" question of "what does an ecosystem of such intermediaries look/work like?" And it is at present an interesting patchwork of solution providers across the globe. Should you happen to be in driving/travel distance, there will be a good bunch of folks in Oakland next week discussing related questions at our annual conference: https://aspirationtech.org/events/devsummit14 > 2: Is there a market for this sort of organization? Yes and no. It's a question we have wrestled with for over a decade at Aspiration. Some basic observations gleaned from my own travels: * As you allude above, the super majority of organizations that need the offerings of such providers won't or can't pay for it; simply put, the most common pathology is even if they have the money, they feel institutional guilt at diverting resources from direct programmatic investment. Don't even get me started on the non-long-term-nature of that thinking. And alternately orgs that do have nontrivial tech budgets tend to invest poorly the majority of the time, at least in my experience, in part for reasons noted below. * Thus you are left needing third parties to fund. And that gets into the many vagaries of NGO tech funding, which we have also studied quite a bit. You can likely get the latest shiny mobile app or Social Media <insert buzzword> Project funded, but getting core infrastructure or basic opsec funded is still a work in progress. "General support grant" is the great unicorn of NGO tech funding and we need lots more of those unicorns. I literally thank Edward Snowden every day that I wake up (really, thank you Mr. Snowden) because things have gotten notably better in the 18 months since he pulled back those curtains and institutional funders got a much clearer look at what might be at risk from an investment and impact perspective. A related and unfortunate development of the past decade has been the de facto unification of two NGO technology personas: 1) "eRiders" who historically have focused on strategic advising of NGOs in a values-based framework that doesn't prioritize revenue, and 2) for-hire technology implementors/integrators (e.g. Drupal, Wordpress, CiviCRM, Salesforce, etc shops). The seemingly turnkey nature of the latter's offerings has effectively starved the former's market. The net effect is that too many NGOs get their tech advice from vendors who are making money off them, a la John Candy in the movie Stripes coaching his young mentee on how to play poker and then robbing him blind. (Blackbaud.com is hands down the most evil manifestation of this dynamic; they make the devil himself look like a nice old man.) But there are plenty of web dev shops that don't have the missions of their clients at the top of their priority queue. We maintain a list of "ethical vendors" that we share with those we are advising, FWIW. And we also offer free business advising and free proposal reviews for NGOs globally, and it kills me every time we get a call of the form "Was $100K too much to pay for our new basic Wordpress site? My colleague just told me it might have been..." Face-palm. I don't mean to be universally disrespectful to NGOs, but I do feel at times like I am living Groundhog Day, if I may make 2 cinematic allusions in one post. I am at the same time heartened by orgs like Witness.org that both carry out essential nonprofit mission while also innovating technologically and teaching that knowledge forward to their peers. But there aren't enough of those fine data points. Which is what powers our own mission. SO in summary to your question: there is definitely almost unlimited demand in the market you posit, but the "transactional" dynamics are complex to say the least. > 3: How do you make the funding work? It's a longer answer than I'm game to type after 10pm PT, but I'm happy to discuss off list on some audio channel. The short version of our answer focuses on cost reduction rather than on fund generation: * We teach NGOs "minimum viable" thinking coupled with planning for scale, so they only acquire what they actually need in the near term, but in a configuration that isn't low-ceiling or limiting over time. * We teach technology planning processes that draw from community organizing models and social justice principles so as to focus acutely on user needs and deliver appropriate tech. We strive to simplify all tech planning processes into "end user" language. You would be surprised how much this can reduce costing by holding techies accountable to explain what they are doing in non-technical parlance. * If it's not free/open source, it's mostly not an option in our view. We stress the critical nature of organizations retaining control of their technology destiny. But yes, there are plenty of places where free/open offerings don't exist or don't cut it. - From there we coach on traditional and non-traditional ways to source the needed funds. This approach doesn't solve all the challenges, but such processes do reduce risk, reduce cost, and increase odds of success and sustainability. I describe it as the project management analog of "shrink the attack surface". > Any thoughts on the matter either on list or off would be > appreciated. As above, hope it's useful. Been doing this work since the mid-90's and it still mystifies me too much of the time :^) peace, gunner > > Thank you. -- Jesse Krembs > > > - -- Allen Gunn Executive Director, Aspiration +1.415.216.7252 www.aspirationtech.org Aspiration: "Better Tools for a Better World" Read our Manifesto: http://aspirationtech.org/publications/manifesto Follow us: Facebook: www.facebook.com/aspirationtech Twitter: www.twitter.com/aspirationtech - -- -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.14 (GNU/Linux) iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJUYbPaAAoJENVj9yFHsyq3cFwIAJY5k7wtu6UnypdGJehjVT9v H61JpovYz9gpBRU75hVhX/MptNfSEdoOzdze7t7UgTaggJTnEH+4aerN/29HVUOr kItJvOIp4n1CCeY/4NA39h4nROP1BgjYExasNUWGE8XOoBSBJYlf2dNsF88YN9tv 6tEWrQS3NW4VnwkdF1vl2hkZ+kuxvMcRl/R65g/0bkcbAL4I4UoHRNd/2UcjtqfE 3mGyKw6vVh82iTG5CFwRrfQ7nsvRI2Gxc1cTdsHtkjgcULe0H7plcIQNydtVqfwA bURvwZzfYImaf6KXA/JWkEn7xEvGRp0t0OZthXJ+xaSFsq2oKJaLa8qnQgI1mtM= =sPNR -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. 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