Agreed. But what are the ways to make this happen? I propose that when non profits begin to think “we” instead of “me” some will demonstrate the power of working as a group, rather than just competing with each other. A group of organizations banding together to create publicity, or to fund tech support for all of the organizations in the group might be a example of this. The expamples of Compumentor or Npower demonstrate how a third party can put together a service and offer it at low/no-cost to a group of organizations … if they can find funding from a donor(s) who support the mission of those organizations.

Do you know of any web sites where these concepts are being mapped, or diagramed? Or where links to effective models are being collected and discussed? I’ve a links library and discussion forum at http://www.tutormentorconnection.org and I’d like to aggregate examples of organizations working together to build capacity, quality and lower costs of operations. If you or your readers know of youth serving capacity building networks that seem to be effective, please submit the link so we can build a library.

There are lessons to be learned already from these inter-organizational relationships that build capacity, and problems with them that need to be considered.
1) communication and distributing work across organizations requires an overhead that can be high.
2) jumping to collaboration before trust is well established jeopardizes projects.
3) failure to recognize the scope of project objectives when different participants have missions of differing scope (be those scope differences geographic, economic, of project longevity, of extent of ownership), all of which change at both collaborative project levels and within each organization.
4) turf. I hate to say it, but many organizations whose bottom lines and whose nonprofit and individual constituents stand to benefit most from wise collaborations still behave in ways that threaten and sabotage collaboration — even when the intent is to the contrary.
5) project timing and resources are often poorly synchronized across organizations, leading to holdups and problematic delays.
6) the question of longterm ownership and sustainability of products developed by collaborative initiatives. Some of these projects go into limbo after the project cycle is complete, when too few (or none) of the individual organizations have sufficient commitment to ongoing investment.

These are not technology questions and are far from insurmountable. There are successes and many more to come I think. It is my (sometimes pining) hope and vision that we can see our work as fundamentally connected and increasingly integrated — this is what I always have thought that the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise is — the virtual enterprise made up of all our work and the compounded benefits of our coordinated and separate efforts. Sound Connections was absorbed by NPower when it was first formed. NPower and Benetech worked together on Martus at one point, CompuMentor collaborates with multiple TSOs, TechFinder is a project of CompuMentor, NTEN, and TSOs like the California CTC Network and LASA in the UK. TechAtlas was a joint venture of NPower and TechRocks, and now is strongly supported and growing through partnership with WebJunction.org which brings many new and valuable skills, resources, and vision to the toolset. Growing opportunities exist for partnerships with MSOs, and through technology intimacy; the integration of software tools through linking, embedding, shared feeds, open standards and open APIs. Foundations too can play an important collaborative role by assessing mission-meeting outcomes that are relevant to the project too, by sharing research and data analysis that they mine from the project, it’s knowledgebase and datastores.

As a technologist and mostly well-adapted creature in this evolving habitat, I find face to face meetings like NTEN NTC, the formerly sponsored regional NTEN conferences, 501 techclubs, unconferences like barcamp and mindcamp to be almost universally valuable in building trusted connections between people across organizations, and crossing cultural boundaries, and assessing strategic opportunities seems best done between individual people who can negotiate a productive and shared space. And finally, I do find there are people and organizations who have simply amazing abilities to work together across organizational and international boundaries, and with whom I find myself able to help create much more than could be done by a single-organization team alone.

There are two tangential (but related) points that I think have bearing on this post:

1. I do think that being immersed in a media world does tend to inure us to the shocking reality of what actually happens. It’s not a coincidence that Abu Ghairab photos were taken by soldiers with digital cameras and cell phone cameras, but that it ultimately did not evince the type of collective gasp in the US that I thought it would. We’re so used to visual images like this, it was just another day online, so to speak. These photos are not any worse than what a 13 year old would see in Doom or Quake in level one.

Now recall the two images from the Vietnam War-one of the point blank execution of the man in the street and the little girl running down the street covered in Napalm. These images had gravity and significance–maybe it was the sign of different times, but I think that we were not so jaded.

2. Relatedly, I think with the advent of social networking and on-line communications–the other danger of failing to erect (metaphorically) enough big tents. While I did see lots of immigrant rights protesters (and many immigrants themselves), where were the Asian immigrants, where were the African American church leaders, where were the gay rights advocates, where were the environmentalists?

I’d argue (cynically somewhat) that the on-line medium allows us to concentrate on the issues and the communities that we have affinity for and ignore the other ones. Thus, if you cared about immigrant rights, you marched, but the message wasn’t made forcefully that this is about civil rights and civil rights is about all of us.

Best

I found this blog through Capaciteria. Nice job! I met you briefly at the Innovation Funders Network and I agree with your point above. Funders, in general, fund pilot programs without looking into the long term future of how is the pilot going to scale. Funders can play a vital role in helping successful pilot projects get adopted by larger organizations that can provide capacity/administrative support. These larger organizations can be nonprofits or they may be government. It’s something that nonprofits and funders need to think about - what’s the scalable and sustainable strategy once the pilot has been proven successful?

Best regards from Deborah