Well, work happened, and I have to admit that I am not the driven blogger who can maintain a steady flow of posts while working full-time. I’ve been doing a consulting/contracting gig in San Jose that not only keeps me busy, but takes huge chunks out of my day for the commute, so my attention to Techcafeteria has suffered unduly. I’ll be wrapping up the work in San Jose and transitioning to a new, full-time position over the next month or two, returning to the ranks of Non-Profit IT Directors that I didn’t imagine I’d stay out of for long. More on that position later – I’ve been asked to keep it under wraps for a week or so.
So I’ll be closing the consulting services section of Techcafeteria, but I’ll be keeping the website going as time affords. It’s been an interesting year for me, so far. From 1986 until 2007, I held three jobs. I stayed at each one for at least six years, and I secured the next one before leaving the prior. I haven’t been unemployed (aka self-employed) for over two decades. But I have a bit of a self-imposed challenge – I want a job with deep business and technology challenges, at an organization with a worthwhile mission, at a pay scale that, while not extravagant, is enough to support my family living in the Bay Area, where my partner spends most of her time homeschooling our son. Those opportunities aren’t a dime a dozen. I reached a point early in the year where I was downright desperate to leave the job that I was at (a long story that I have no intention of relating here!), and applied at some for-profit companies. I think I sabotaged myself in the interviews, because it eventually became clear to me that having day to day work that combats social or environmental injustice is a personal requirement of mine. My partner supports this — she was proud to tell people that I worked for Goodwill and she’s even more excited about my new gig, which sports a killer tagline. So setting up the consulting practice was — and probably will be again — a means of staying solvent while I was very picky about what I applied for.
One job that I pursued was with an org called the Pachamama Alliance. They are a fascinating group of people. Their story is that the indigenous people of Ecuador put out a call for help to the Western World as they saw the earth and their culture being destroyed by the clearing of the rainforests. The group forming Pachamama answered that call, and their mission is to “change the dream of the western world” into one that is in harmony with nature, as opposed to dominance and disrespect of it. They maintain that environmental injustice and social injustice are tied at the knees – where you find one, you’ll find the other. For those of you who saw Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”, you’ll recall the fact that the main water source for the Sudan dried up a few years ago. That bit of trivia puts the subsequent genocide in Darfur in an interesting perspective. Pachamama has adopted Gore’s tactics with a multimedia presentation that both educates and inspires people to adopt a more sustainable dream. It’s a timely movement, as it’s becoming clear to all of us that our current rate of consumption of natural resources is having dramatic impacts on the environment. Pachamama spreads the word by training volunteers to share the presentation. Well worth checking out.
In other news, I’m hard at work on an article for Idealware that attempts to deflate all of this big talk about APIs and put it in terms that anyone can use to understand why they might want to migrate data and how they might do it. I’m also talking with my friends at NTEN about doing a webinar on the best practices for rolling out CRM at a non-profit. As long-time blog readers have probably picked up, I consider Constituent Relationship Management software to be the type of technology that, deployed correctly, completely alters the way a business is run. It’s not just about maintaining business relationships and tracking donors – it’s about working collaboratively and breaking down the silos of business relationships and data. So installing the software (if software even needs to be installed) is the least of it, and data migration is just a chore. But aligning business strategy to CRM technology is the real challenge.
So, I’ll post next week about my new gig, and look forward to a long life for Techcafeteria as a resource on non-profit technology, with less of the hawking of services.
