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In The Three Pillars of Social Source (12 page PDF), Gideon Rosenblatt of ONE Northwest takes a stab at a taxonomy of nonprofit technology provision with the goal of greater focus and coordination among the players. He identifies the three pillars as application developers, application integrators, and application hosters, and speaks out strongly against conflation of those roles. I have to say I agree, at least in part. We learned this lesson at Social Ecology: When we decided to get out of the consulting business (where we were competing with our natural allies, the integrators), business boomed for us. I think the greatest flaw in this analysis, however, is that it is still too technocentric. There is still a fourth pillar (or perhaps it is the roof itself, to stretch the metaphor) which consists of communication professionals, such as marketing staff, fundraising consultants, advocates, organizers, and all the rest of the professionals whose communication vision and needs are meant to be served by technology.
Posted: 3/24/05; 9:33:56 AM # |