Prioritize Documentation, Ongoing Support, and Training
Successful implementation of new tools requires the provision of adequate documentation, user-appropriate training, and ongoing methods for technical support.
Conclusions
- Even the best online organizing tools endure short-lived success if delivered without adequate documentation, reliable technical support, or a means for accommodating ongoing feature enhancements. Building cost-effective and relevant online tools is only the first step in the change process. Code lockdowns, in which a group of developers work to quickly build specific tools relevant to social change organizers, often deliver inspiring results. However, by nature, they concentrate on functionality, leaving documentation and ongoing support to chance. The result is often a great idea with little lasting benefit to organizers.
- In theory, everyone agrees that training is essential to the upkeep and progress of an organization. However, resource and time restrictions often make training a low organizational priority. Social change organizations need to invest in training staff to understand technology, and must recognize this commitment to staff buy-in as part of the “true cost of ownership.” As technology becomes increasingly central to the inner workings of an organization, quality training becomes even more essential.
Recommendations
- Social change-oriented software projects need to be approached with a full adoption path in mind. This means prioritizing documentation, training structures, and ongoing support in addition to feature development.
- Develop user-appropriate training structures, with supporting documentation. Although this may seem like an obvious statement, this principle is all too often ignored. Affordable trainings should be imparted to organizations in digestible formats, with supporting documentation for ongoing research and assistance. Aspiration, which has developed a comprehensive set of e-advocacy trainings, is a great example of this recommendation in action. The Progressive Technology Project also provides effective training and capacity-building support to grassroots, community-led organizations.
This report compiles insights from more than 400 social change groups, technology providers, and nonprofit technology capacity builders, examining the needs of organizers working to utilize new technologies, and offering recommendations for how to meet those needs more effectively.
September 27th, 2006 at 9:07 am PST
I love the concept of the “full adoption path,” but have issues with your recommendations about achieving it. I made this point at Web of Change and would like to elaborate it more fully: training is not the end, but the means to an end. If training is ‘giving someone a fish,’ that can work, especially when learning objectives are clear. However, often what you really want is to teach someone to fish. The ‘fish,’ as it were, is learning.
[Note in passing: I haven’t read the whole report yet, so apologies if I’ve missed some elaboration of this issue-but like most people I will judge you by your summaries .]
It makes no sense to talk about training as the solution to a lack of effectiveness with technology, unless one also picks apart a serious problem: training (in my experience) is either expensive, or poorly targeted, and nobody ever gets enough. I mean, when was the last time you heard someone say ‘We really get too much (technology) training’?
In many cases, I hear people call for training for one of two reasons: as an excuse for not dealing with technological novelty (I can’t use that software, I haven’t been trained on it), or because they don’t think much about other ways of learning.
This doesn’t mean that training (however one conceives that) is valueless, but that it generally serves limited uses, particularly where time and money are serious constraints, or where adaptability is desirable.
We always end up back at the same place: we need more training, but we can’t afford training. This is a pretty good signal to reassess the premises which take us there. The resource picture isn’t likely to change any time soon, so let’s go back to the purposes that training is meant to serve, and seek alternatives.
I believe better alternatives involve self-directed learning, such that
* an individual trying to succeed with technology recognizes a responsibility for finding out how to make it work;
* resources to support learning are deployed parsimoniously, but in highly targeted, “just in time” ways to support that process;
* learning is WORMed (reused) across the organization and perhaps across many organizations.
Organizations struggling to understand and use technology will almost always identify “lack of training” as the problem to be solved, but of course it’s not; it’s the (putative) solution. What then _is_ the problem, and what other solutions might we conceive if we were to define the problem in different ways?