Full Circle Associates

I could not resist playing with words. I was tagged with the Four Things meme a couple of weeks ago and my draft is still sitting in the, well, draft mode! So Paul tagged me today with an NGO/NPO meme. My inner good girl responds. (Oh, that could be a very bad thing! Uh oh!)

Paul wrote:

NGO Manager recently asked me to write something on information management for NGOs for their newsletter, which forced me to think a bit. As everybody knows, I hate thinking. Specifically, I had to think about the five resources that I would recommend to anybody working in an NGO who wanted to know about information management and technology but didn’t know where to start.

So here’s my meme: what five resources - online or otherwise - would you point people to, if you wanted to give them an entry into your field of expertise?"

Paul's pointers were some of the basic NGO resources so I thought I'd go a bit more specific to those looking to use distributed group processes and technology in their work.

I'd start first with KM for Development, a community of diverse folks who care about knowledge sharing and learning in development. There is a DGroups list, a resource rich website and an emerging, collaborative FAQ process. The community is hosted by Canadian NGO, Bellanet.

Second, I'd look to the Digital Divide Network - it brings together news, tools, discussions and blogs. Or maybe Meatball Wiki (tools for collaboration) or the Community Wiki. Mm. Hard to decide, eh? Can you tell I like alive, collaborative resources?

Third, I'd suggest finding 3-4 great NPO blogs to follow as they inevitably lead you to more resources vetted by that person. So pick blogs that relate to your niche in the NPO world. Some of the one's I'm following these days are Beth's Blog (particularly her work in Cambodia), Marshall Kirkpatrick's from a tech perspective, Joitske Hulseboch's from a communities of practice perspective and the Net2 blogs because they give juicy interviews and case studies -- stories -- that are great to pass on to clients.

The last one is a sort of "down the rabbit" hole resource. One of those things that once you start exploring, keeps opening up to new things. It is for looking at the edges of what is emerging right now. It is for tapping into the "wisdom of the crowd." This would be subscribing to some key tags on technorati and del.ico.us: NPTech, NGO, and Community_indicators --> three very different and emergent set of links. This is the sort of resource that you can explore and explore and... EXPLORE!

Tags: memes, nptech, NGO, community_indicators