Philanthropy in the Cloud ( more than just IT plumbing in the sky)

Philanthropy author and “future of fundraising” blogger Lucy Berholtz has kindly shared notes from her presentation at NTEN09 conference on the implications and opportunities of cloud computing for philanthropic organizations.

If history is any guide, we may not be far from the day when managing your foundation’s own data center, IT department, and desktop computers seems as quaint as having your own electrical supply. Online grants management, remote access to secure servers, easier team collaboration – seems to me that foundations and nonprofits that care about spending on mission and cutting administrative costs – might benefit from many of these possibilities.

Why might this matter to philanthropy? Perhaps only in that these tools might allow less money to be spent on managing IT departments and more to spent on mission. Or maybe there is more – sharing information – even something as simple as posting this presentation on SlideShare – matters to how we do things, where and when we do them, and with whom we do them. We can expand our imagination and our work commitment past the idea of giving a speech once or writing a paper for one-time use: they can live on, be amended, copied, re-used, packaged for sale, even serialized. Or not.

> Read the full article

Posted by npmatrix on May 11th, 2009 at 06:12pm