As the Policy Leadership Initiative continues to evolve, we've been listening closely to the needs of policy practitioners at all stages of their journeys. From acquiring and refining essential policy skills to navigating career transitions, there is a strong desire from practitioners to connect with and learn from peers to acquire and refine essential policy skills, support each other in what are often shared challenges, collectively strategise, and successfully navigate their career journeys.
Today we tried to have a Nonprofit Ops brown bag lunch about creating an Nonprofit Operations Manual but no one showed up. I'm not sure if it is because this isn't an interesting topic or my poor advertising. Oh well--I did have quite a few people e-mail me and tell me they couldn't make it to the discussion and asked me to send them an Operations Manual template.
After the wind down of the conference, and sleeping off my red-eye flight back to Maine, now I’m a little nostalgic. Ah, the people, the knowledge, the horrible geek trivia… But to keep the momentum going, I thought I’d document the commitments I’ve made to move things forward – so at a minimum I’ll feel really guilty if I don’t follow through. We crystallized a number of initiatives that I’m excited about:
I'm here at the Nonprofit Software Development Summit and have been doing mostly logistics, however today I was able to attend a session facilitated by Laura Quinn of Idealware called "Gaps in Nonprofit Software" the notes from the session can be found here.
It was an exciting discussion for me because the first twenty minutes or so we discussed gaps in back-end office software (or what I call nonprofit operations software) specifically:
The community-building activities at the start of the Summit revealed a surprising diversity of opinions within the npdev community. What most surprised me is that there's mixed opinions about whether nonprofits are ideologically obligated to support open-source software. My own thought is that social entrepreneurship will take off in the tech sector, and there will be successful nonprofit businesses that promote and develop open-source software that is just as reliable and usable as any proprietary software: ethical dilemma solved.
