The meeting was attended by more than twenty organizations including Western Maine Community Action, United Way of the Tri-Valley Area, Franklin County Community Health Network, Community Concepts, and several educational organizations and special interest nonprofits.

The meeting began by looking at modern practices in web development and how they related to nonprofits and collaboration. Having a site that can be administered remotely, through the web, is the foundation for effective use of a website. If a nonprofit is stuck with a website that they can not update themselves; create various roles and permissions for members and administrators; and publish content via a workflow process, then they are wasting one of the most important opportunities to share information in the modern era.

A discussion ensued in which representatives from several organizations shared their current website capabilities and the need for a greater understanding with regards to what the possibilities are for improved technological capability and how to effectively make use of it.

In an effort to promote a more fundamental form of generative collaboration I introduced the concepts behind Deximer's collaborative development model called The CommonWealth Forums. In this development model, nonprofits collectively fund development on a project that will ultimately be released under a Free software license. This model reduces costs to nonprofits by reallocating money they would already spend doing isolated web development projects and distributes those costs over several nonprofits participating in the CommonWealth Forum.

I also highlighted the dichotomy between mission focused workers and technologists. Technologists tend to know how to do things but do not know what to do. Mission focused people, those who perform tasks directly related to the nonprofit's mission, generally know what needs to be done but have little understanding as to the how. A problem arises when the mission focused people get caught up in a term I coined as the "Tyranny of the Technologist". This is a situation that arises from the massive chasm of knowledge and confidence that exists between the mission focused people and the technologist when it comes to issues of... technology. It often leads to the technologists making decisions about the what and how of technological development. This can lead to solutions being built that do not properly address the real needs of the mission. I stated the need to de-emphasise the role of the technologist and embolden the role of mission focused people in terms of technical decision making regarding what needs to be done.

This new dynamic between mission workers and technolgy workers requires a more structured approach to development than nonprofits typicaly engage in. Deximer's CommonWealth Forums were designed to address this need directly. The forums are based around facilitated meetings where several nonprofits discus their needs while technologists gather those needs into requirements from which a project plan is developed that meets those needs. The costs for the project are then divided among participating nonprofits reducing costs in ratio to the number of participants. This process is designed to put control in it's proper place. Mission focused people decide what is to be built, technologists decide how to build it. Simple concepts that can go terribly wrong in practice.

The meeting was a first step in bringing nonprofits together to discus what it means to use technology as a vehicle for collaboration. The follow up to this meeting will hopefully produce a core group of nonprofits with similar needs that are willing to collaborate on building the technological systems they need in order to better perform their mission.

I suggested SchoolTool ( www.schooltool.org ) as a posible candidate for solving the need for a collaborative calendaring system, particularly for adult education centers.

Another project I am working with but did not mention at the meeting is CooperativeLife ( www.onlinecommunity.coop" ), an organization dedicated to developing tools for online collaboration and decision making.

Thank you to all who attended!