I’m a fairly young buck at the whole technology game, and a bit of a strange one, I think. At times, I’m rather skittish with the new whiz-bang technologies – for instance, I’ve been completely unaffected by Apple fannishness, iPhone and OS alike; instead, I’m a proud Linux-Windows-Apple uber-switcher (though I know using Terminal in Apple doesn’t really count as using BSD). At other times, I’m almost indistinguishable from the giddy technophiles that are redefining their better-than-sliced-bread item enough for me to wonder whether they actually really eat bread at all – for evidence of this, one need look no further than my shameless apologizing for Facebook to my friend on her Livejournal as she relentlessly declared it scary and dead to her for its privacy indisretions.
I’ve served as the volunteer “techie” on a couple of occasions in non-profit or volunteer organizations. I find that because technology is, for the organizations I work, seldom central to, and often at the extreme periphery of, its mandate, technology becomes “a thing to work around/work through” in order to get something done. I would like to think that I put in a bit of effort to find out what tools people are most comfortable learning, how much time they want to put into learning it (usually, a negative number), what the longer-term requirements of the organization are for the work, and to factor in the resources (human, financial, technological) at the organization’s disposal.
In spite of my good intentions, inevitably, in 100% of my experience, I become part of the “things” that need to be bypassed. It makes me pretty sad. So I wonder if this is a personality problem, and I just happen to have the entirely wrong demeanor for the task I wish to do, which is to help bring my exposure to certain tools with people’s desires to get whatever they want to do done. I really ought to be taking more tips from Sacha – though to be fair, she’s often working with people who seek her out, not people who may be hostile to her (though I know this may not always be the case).
I’m realizing a couple of things that can throw me completely off the road to the goal:
- I do not adequately demonstrate the cost-benefit trade-off. This needs to be grounded in Dead Obvious Examples of Cool Shit.
- I do not consult with higher up’s in the organization on what the longer-term vision for a thing is, or obtain buy-in and support for the least painful option that yield the greatest long-term extensibility.
- I do not frickin’ follow through on implementation. Planning a Transit Camp and writing my Honours project is not an excuse, because in the end someone else needed something and I was away noodling at my own project.
I seem to be a little heavy on blame on myself here. At the same time, it’s happened so consistently that it’s hard not to see myself, or quality of my interaction with the organization, as the culprit. I know ideas about technologies are deeply ingrained, especially by people who have been scorned too many times by the newness of things to do anything other than the way they know they’ve been able to do it at their workplaces on their Windows machines at home.
I’ve really got to grow some new arms, to work this problem both from the social, people end, and the technology-of-tubes end.
