What nonprofits are doing now with the Internet is not much different from what online nonprofits were doing in the 1980s and early 1990s – offering questions to their networks to see what answers they might get (crowd-sourcing), talking about challenges they are facing and offering each other advice, reaching out to current and potential supporters, promoting activities and events, working with volunteers, etc. You can read more about these early days of nonprofits and the Internet in the 1980s, through 1995.

By 1990, there were already several nonprofit organizations and many dedicated volunteers and aspiring consultants who were helping to promote nonprofit use of the Internet and computer technology. Some of these organizations helping nonprofits with Internet technology survived and some didn’t. Their networks of regional offices grew – and sometimes broke up, with individual members going off in new directions. Some changed their names, and some changed their missions.

One of the organizations that grew late in this movement, NPower, a national network of nonprofit technology consulting and training organizations, is now restructuring, and this article in the Nonprofit Times details this restructuring, as well as touching on the ever-changing landscape of support organizations for nonprofits and Internet technology. And it’s written by Tim Mills-Groninger, someone who has been immersed in the nonprofits and tech scene as long as I have (and that’s a frighteningly long time, relatively speaking), so it’s details are right-on.

I know this isn’t breaking news. But it’s important news, because nonprofit organizations, NGOs, schools, libraries and other mission-based organizations need to know where they’ve been in order to know where they are going. Mistakes that were made in those early days of tech are being made again as the Internet gets rebranded as the Cloud and online social networking, as episodic online volunteering gets rebranded as microvolunteering, and as people are starting nonprofits or social enterprises to do with Facebook or Twitter what many nonprofits were doing with USENET back in the 1980s. Let’s learn from those mistakes instead of repeating them!