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The Technology Understanding Gap

Technology is insidious. It has a way of dominating a problem the way nothing else can. If you understand technology, it’s hard not to see everything in that light. If you don’t understand technology, it’s hard not to be overwhelmed by what you don’t know.    (MUK)

I’ve known these things for a long time, and I often talk about these things, but I saw the latter phenomenon in a way that really affected me last month at the Packard Foundation gathering on the future of network impact in philanthropy. On the first evening, Clay Shirky gave a preview of his book (available now), Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (which sounds like it’s a real winner; can’t wait to read it).    (MUL)

One of Clay’s contentions was that projects that worked in large-scale networks shared a happy medium between a Promise, a Tool, and a Bargain. In the case of Linux, Linus Torvalds‘s Promise was to build “a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.” (Note how small and concrete the original Promise was, compared to what Linux has become.) The Tool was source code control (specifically diff and patch in the early days). The Bargain was the GPL, which stated that if you contributed your work, others would as well.    (MUM)

A lot of my work centers around facilitating collaboration in large-scale networks, so I found this contention particularly interesting. The following day, I co-led a session on this topic with Angus Parker. Two of the participants were dealing with the specific challenge of connecting members of a national network of leaders in reproductive health, so we used that as a case study. We decided to use Clay’s contention to frame the problem, resulting in this whiteboard:    (MUN) What do you notice about this picture?    (MUP)

During the discussion, one of the participants asked, “What tools can we use?”    (MUR)

She nodded.    (MUU)

“Easy for you, maybe,” she said. “You already know what goes there.”    (MUW)

I had two takeaways. First, I had previous explored doing a basic technology literacy workshop as part of Blue Oxen Associates‘ Tools for Catalyzing Collaboration series, but I was not particularly motivated to do it. I’m now rethinking this. Second, if I ever do this exercise again, I’m not going to include the Tools column initially. We can throw that in later.    (MUZ)


Tags: Angus Parker, Blue Oxen Associates, Clay Shirky, Linus Torvalds, Packard Foundation

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