Daily pages - February 18, 2022

Learning more about nonprofits yesterday, I came across a podcast that talked about non-traditional volunteers. That podcast was talking about mentally disabled folks being great volunteers, but I looked for other titles involving volunteering and found one that talked about using skilled volunteers.

Turns out there is an app/website called catchafire.org that matches nonprofits with people who want to do more than fill boxes. It appears to also be called pro bono work, which is usually associated with lawyers, but can be applied to any professional.

This is great news from a creative practice standpoint, in that it gives a great resource for people looking for work that needs doing. I found another website that pointed to a few other similar sites, although they seemed generally more specialized:

• https://www.taprootfoundation.org/
• https://raise5.com/
• https://openarchcollab.org/
• https://www.probono.net/
• https://www.reserveinc.org/
• https://engage.pointsoflight.org/

I found this list on https://www.goodnet.org/ which appears to be another good resource. They have some kind of quiz that helps you determine what type of “good doer” you are. Their tagline is “Gateway to Going Good,” so I think it’s worth exploring further.

This at least starts to address the question of how to volunteer for something that uses your best skills. It doesn’t answer the consultant question, but in my research, I discovered that there is a whole kind of industry around offering consulting services to non-profits. They often don’t have the resources to handle everything in-house, and the more cost-effective way to get things done is to hire a consultant.

There are a number of consultant types that I found: (https://nonprofitmegaphone.com/consultants-for-nonprofits/)

• Fundraising
• Grant Writing
• Technology
• Human Resources
• Accounting
• Legal
• Special Events/Events
• Volunteer Management
• Innovation

When it comes to open artifacts, it would seem like I cross over between volunteer management and innovation. Both of these appear to be less traditional topics for consultants. Innovation seems to be something that is more common in the for-profit world, and is being repurposed for nonprofits by some of those firms.

What I realized this morning is that I need to understand how open artifacts fit into this ecosystem. Before I talk about that, though, it seems like thinking about volunteers as world creators with a creative practice is an unusual way to think about them, and it might, in itself, offer a certain value to the nonprofit. In a sense, they can treat all volunteers as skilled volunteers, and try to use their skills to highest degree possible.

Open artifacts have a couple of uses. First, they make it possible for people outside the organization to contribute to projects. Second, they produce an artifact that is shared with others, which is a way that a non-profit can extend their mission. Not only are they providing a service, they can help other people provide the same service, or they can help develop and improve the effectiveness of the tools they use.

What I want to make sure is that I’m not trying to invent a problem that open artifacts solve. They need to have a real value, which I think they do; I’m just not sure how they can help nonprofits, which probably means I don’t understand how they help anyone.

There’s the track of continuous improvement, which is closely related to helping a system grow or evolve toward greater complexity. I want to help the nonprofit evolve toward greater complexity.

We need to be clear that open artifacts make the most sense in a decentralized context. In other words, if we’re trying to replicate ourselves across the world, an open artifacts project can help that happen, and it can create a space into which all the experience and understanding that is learned at each instance of the artifact can be shared with everyone.

That can be at the entire organization level, or it can be at the program level. On the podcast, the guest was saying that they had found ways to pull in high school students in a way that benefitted both the student and the nonprofit. Any of these programs could be outlined in an open artifacts project and implemented by other nonprofits around the world. And the experiences and ideas of other groups could benefit the original creator in a back and forth sharing of experience.

So with nonprofits I’m feeling like the running of the nonprofit is one of the best things to encode into an open artifacts project. In some cases, depending on what the nonprofit is doing, the tools, techniques and technologies that they use could also be made into open artifacts projects. Again, the goal isn’t so much to have volunteers help with the nonprofit’s day to day operations, but to share what is working and learn from others who decide to implement the same programs in their own organizations.

There’s a lot of talk about partners in nonprofits. These are other nonprofits that share some of the same goals or just the desire to make a positive difference. If they can support one another, then they try to do that. It seems like open artifacts are more about partner-to-partner communications and sharing than anything else.

So is it just a communication kind of thing? I don’t think so. It could be a question that you want to try and answer. For example, how do we get more high school students involved in our organization? The answer could be a series of ideas from trying to tie into community service requirements at the school to asking them to set up a donation drive or to sell a partner’s jewelry online as a way to raise money. When you create a project around a question, you might get all kinds of answers from all around.

I keep thinking of the water nonprofit: Charity: Water (https://www.charitywater.org/). I first heard of them because they had a different business model than others and it seemed to be working well. They had separate donors decide where their money should go. Some donated exclusively to keep the lights on, while others donated knowing that all the donation money would go toward water projects.

I think an open artifacts project detailing their business model and how they pull it off would a great thing. It might encourage lots of other nonprofits to change their model to match it.

In addition, though, I’m sure Charity: Water has other project-related stuff, like project plans for installing a well in a remote village. There are probably checklists and forms that they use, and there are physical products they buy or make like the water pump that the villagers use. If they were to make some of these things open artifacts, they might benefit from experts who could help them… I don’t know… build better pumps, create replacement parts on a 3D printer, add features to a pump, like a spout that makes it easier to fill a water can, better graphics for pamphlets that show people how to use the pump, translations for instruction manuals, and so on.

The other charity I keep thinking about is the Boulder Safe House. It’s a county-run program, and it’s something that is needed all over. I suspect that safe houses are pretty rare in some parts of the country and definitely in some parts of the world. If they could make their organization an open artifacts project, then they could help others around the world figure out how to replicate them locally. I keep thinking I should contact them.