Tag Archives: cyberspace

Online Harassment Field Manual

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PEN America is a 501(c)(3) organization based in the USA. Founded in 1922, PEN America works to ensure that people everywhere have the freedom to create literature, to convey information and ideas, to express their views, and to access the views, ideas, and literature of others. Its members are a nationwide community of more than 7,200 novelists, journalists, nonfiction writers, editors, poets, essayists, playwrights, publishers, translators, agents, and other writing professionals, as well as devoted readers and supporters who join with them to carry out PEN America’s mission.

Writers and journalists, particularly women, are facing unprecedented levels of online hate and harassment. PEN America has created an Online Harassment Field Manual that has strategies and resources that writers and journalists, their allies and their employers can use to defend against cyber hate & online abuse. I have found it very helpful.

Manual chapters include: 

  • Prepare for Online Harassment – Tactics, tips, and guidelines for protecting your online presence and accounts
  • Respond to Online Harassment – Strategies for response, including assessing threats, navigating social media and email, deploying cyber communities, and practicing counterspeech
  • Practicing Self-Care – Advice for practicing self-care and maintaining community during online harassment
  • Legal Considerations – What to expect when turning to law enforcement during online harassment
  • Requesting and Providing Support – How-to guides and helpful information for targeted writers, their allies, and their employers
  • Learn More about Online Harassment – What is online harassment, what forms does it take, and why is it a free expression issue?

I highly recommend this manual. Read it even if you are not being insulted or harassed online. Even if you don’t think you will ever be thus targeted, even if you think being insulted or harassed online wouldn’t bother you, even if you don’t have any public social media activities (you aren’t on Facebook, you don’t blog, etc.), but you do produce content in some way, or you oversee staff or have co-workers that produce online content, you need to read this.

On a related note: there’s also this resource from the Women’s Media Center: Online Abuse 101. It’s a primer on targeted online harassment. “The purpose of harassment differs with every incidence, but usually includes wanting to embarrass, humiliate, scare, threaten, silence, extort or, in some instances, encourages mob attacks or malevolent engagements… Online harassment can be a steep tax on women’s freedom of speech, civic life, and democracy.” 

And if you haven’t in a while, check-in with whoever manages your social media and make sure they are okay. Ask them what sort of negative comments get thrown their way. They need to know that senior management supports them.  

Also see:

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help. 

Pioneering Internet Initiatives Deserve To Be Remembered

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So much of what the press and bloggers herald now as pioneering or disruptive on the Internet isn’t at all. In 1995, I was talking online with friends, old and new, in all the ways I do now, with the exception of live video: we were writing messages in real-time and messages posted somewhere to read later. We were making and sharing audios and videos. We were creating communities. We were using online tools to train, to learn, to change minds, to promote ideas and to research. The names of the tools have changed, and they have all definitely gotten more sophisticated, but rarely do I read an article about something new online and find that, in fact, it really is something new, innovative, or disruptive. Many tech pioneers and early tech history have been forgotten, and web sites that detailed these efforts are gone, sometimes not even available on the Wayback Machine (archive.org). In addition, attempts to preserve some of this important, rich early Internet history on Wikipedia often get wiped out by veteran Wikipedeans who don’t think the entries are worth remembering – especially if the entries involve women primarily. There are certain tech-related initiatives from the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s that I think are worth not only remembering but worth reviewing and mining for lessons we can use right now – and worth celebrating. I also think the people involved in these early initiatives are worth looking up by researchers and the press alike, to find out what they think about where our networked world has been and where it might be going. Below is a list of pages on my web site that are a part of my attempts to preserve some of this important history and to make it more findable on various search engines. Note how most are focused on nonprofit and government initiatives, rather than for-profit companies – just like those that created the Internet:
  • Early History of Nonprofits & the Internet The Internet has always been about people and organizations networking with each other, sharing ideas and comments, and collaborating online. It has always been interactive and dynamic. And there were many nonprofit organizations who “got” it early — earlier than many for-profit companies. So I’ve attempted to set the record straight: I’ve prepared a web page that talks about the early history of nonprofits and the Internet. It focuses on 1995 and previous years. It talks a little about what nonprofits were using the cyberspace for as well at that time and lists the names of key people and organizations who helped get nonprofit organizations using the Internet in substantial numbers in 1995 and before. Edits and additions are welcomed.
  • What Was NetAid? First there was Band Aid, then Live Aid, and Farm Aid, and then came NetAid, an initiative that was also launched with celebrity-laden concerts and a great deal of media coverage. The NetAid initiative was meant to harness the Internet to raise money and awareness for the Jubilee 2000 campaign, to raise awareness for the challenges in developing countries, and to allow people to volunteer online, donating their skills to help people in the developing world. NetAid’s goal was to make global philanthropy more efficient. This page reviews who was involved, how the initiative evolved, and its legacy regarding virtual volunteering.
  • Impact Online: A History Impact Online was a nonprofit organization founded in the mid 1990s. It was one of the first web sites, and maybe the first web site, where nonprofits could post their volunteering opportunities and people that wanted to help could sign up to help. It later became VolunteerMatch. Unfortunately, someone requested that old versions of the Impact Online web site be removed from the Internet Wayback Machine, and so all archives of the original web site are gone. Luckily, I downloaded some of text and graphics from that original, pioneering web site. I’m sharing them here because the original Impact Online initiative deserves to be remembered and honored.
  • Al Gore Campaign Pioneered Virtual Volunteering Back in 2000, when Al Gore ran for president, his campaign championed virtual volunteering by recruiting online volunteers to help online with his election efforts. I’ve tried to present some of what his campaign did – this pioneering effort deserves to be remembered, as do some of the lessons from such.
  • A history of the Smart Valley initiative In 1994, perhaps earlier, an initiative called Smart Valley was launched in California. Smart Valley was a 501(c)(6) nonprofit organization focused on creating an “information infrastructure” in Silicon Valley, California – Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, San José, Santa Clara and the surrounding area, creating projects to enhance the quality of life in Silicon Valley. Smart Valley’s projected included SmartSchools NetDay and PC Day, Smart Voter, to help people learn about upcoming elections, Connect 96: The Global Summit on Building Electronic Communities, the Public Access Network (PAN), a Telecommuting Initiative, and the Smart Valley Webmasters Group. Smart Valley was also affiliated with the nonprofit organization Plugged In, one of the first digital divide efforts, working to bring “the tremendous technological resources available in the Silicon Valley to youth in low-income communities” in East Palo Alto and SV-PAL, the Silicon Valley Public Access Link.
  • San Francisco Women of the Web (SFWOW): A History In the 1990s, various associations sprung up all over the USA to support women using the Internet as a primary part of their work – or who wanted to. These associations created safe, supportive, content-rich, fun spaces, both online and in real spaces, for women to talk about their tech and online-related work, to ask questions, and to learn from each other. One of the best well-known at the time, San Francisco Women of the Web, chose 25 women in 1998, in 1999, in 2000 and in 2001, recognizing them with their Women of the Web award. To help highlight some of the many women who played important roles in the 1990s Internet – which I consider the “early days” – as well as some truly pioneering tech projects that laid the groundwork for the success of so many initiatives today, I have reproduced this list of Top25 Women on the Web on my own site.
  • United Nations Technology Service (UNITeS), a global volunteer initiative, created by Kofi Annan in 2000, that both supported volunteers applying information and communications technologies for development (ICT4D) and promoted volunteerism as a fundamental element of successful ICT4D initiatives. It was administered by the UN Volunteers program, and during the tenure of UNITeS, the UNV program helped place and/or support more than 300 volunteers applying ICT4D in more than 50 developing countries, including 28 Least Developed Countries (LDC), making it one of the largest volunteering in ICT4D initiatives. The activities of UN Volunteers, as well as those by tech volunteers working through NetCorps, CompuMentor, the Association for Progressive Communications, Australian Volunteers International, NetCorps, Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) and Volunteers in Technical Assistance (VITA), were tracked and promoted by UNITeS as part of its overall mission. Part of the UNITeS mandate was to try to track all of the various tech volunteering initiatives and encourage them to share their best practices and challenges with each other. UNITeS was discontinued as an active program in 2005.
  • United Nations Tech4Good / ICT4D Initiatives, a list of the various United Nations initiatives that have been launched since 2000 to promote the use of computers, feature phones, smart phones and various networked devices in development and humanitarian activities, to promote digital literacy and equitable access to the “information society,” and to bridge the digital divide. My goal in creating this page is to help researchers, as well as to remind current UN initiatives that much work regarding ICT4D has been done by various UN employees, consultants and volunteers for more than 15 years (and perhaps longer?).
If you are a Wikipedia volunteer, I encourage you to try to create and maintain entries for the initiatives named on these pages, especially if you are male or perceived as male online – male contributors, or those perceived as such, have a MUCH easier time of it on Wikipedia than females. Also see: Wikipedia needs improvement re: volunteerism-related topics Why Do So Few Women Edit Wikipedia? Insights into virtual volunteering Crowdsourcing / Hive Mind – it’s been happening since at least 1849! History & Evaluation of UNV’s Early Years volunteers scramble to preserve online data before government deletes it
If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into developing material, researching information, preparing articles, updating pages, etc., here is how you can help.

A history of “Smart Valley”

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I recently wrote (and published on my web site) a history of Smart Valley, a 1990s initiative in Silicon Valley, California to create an “information infrastructure” to benefit people, communities, governments & businesses.” Smart Valley was an initiative of Joint Venture: Silicon Valley. It was a 501(c)(6) nonprofit organization focused on creating an “information infrastructure” in Silicon Valley, California – Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, San José, Santa Clara and the surrounding area.

Smart Valley’s many activities included coordinating SmartSchools NetDay II and PC Day in Silicon Valley, creating an Internet Technical Guidebook for Schools, leading a Smart Voter campaign to help people learn about upcoming elections by leveraging online sources (one of the first of such initiatives), creating and supporting the Public Access Network (PAN), hosting Connect 96: The Global Summit on Building Electronic Communities, promoting telecommuting, hosting a monthly series of lectures, Smart Talks, that featured “leaders of the growing information infrastructure”, and hosting the annual Smart Valley Corporate Executive Forum “to touch base with the senior executives of our member companies to review the year’s progress and to explain our plans for the future.”

Among its affiliated projects, many of which originated at Smart Valley and were spun off as independent initiatives:

  • ABAG, Association of Bay Area Governments
  • BAMTA, The Broad Alliance for Multimedia Technology and Applications
  • BADGER, The Bay Area Digital Geographic Resource
  • CommerceNet, “the premier industry association for Internet Commerce”
  • Plugged In, one of the first digital divide efforts, working to bring “the tremendous technological resources available in the Silicon Valley to youth in low-income communities” in East Palo Alto (you can see archived versions of this initiative at archive.org by searching pluggedin.org before 2012)
  • SV-PAL, the Silicon Valley Public Access Link, is a non-profit volunteer organization which brings Internet access to the South Bay community including local schools, organizations, businesses and individuals.

Why do I care about the history of Smart Valley? Because I was the internal communications manager for Joint Venture in 1995-1996. Smart Valley is one of Joint Venture’s pioneering initiatives that has disappeared from the Internet and is rarely referenced these days, which is a shame, because it was a pioneering effort. I wasn’t involved with Smart Valley, but I really admired what it was doing.

I would have written the Smart Valley history at Wikipedia, but I’m worried it will just get deleted by some guy who decides it isn’t worthy of a Wikipedia entry…

Also see:

  • Early History of Nonprofits & the Internet
    The Internet has always been about people and organizations networking with each other, sharing ideas and comments, and collaborating online. It has always been interactive and dynamic. And there were many nonprofit organizations who “got” it early — earlier than many for-profit companies. So I’ve attempted to set the record straight: I’ve prepared a web page that talks about the early history of nonprofits and the Internet. It focuses on 1995 and previous years. It talks a little about what nonprofits were using the cyberspace for as well at that time and lists the names of key people and organizations who helped get nonprofit organizations using the Internet in substantial numbers in 1995 and before. Edits and additions are welcomed
  • Lessons from NetAid and onlinevolunteering.org
    Some key learnings from directing the UN’s Online Volunteering service from February 2001 to February 2005, including support materials for those using the service to host online volunteers.
  • United Nations Tech4Good / ICT4D Initiatives
    a list of the various United Nations initiatives that have been launched since 2000 to promote the use of computers, feature phones, smart phones and various networked devices in development and humanitarian activities, to promote digital literacy and equitable access to the “information society,” and to bridge the digital divide. My goal in creating this page is to help researchers, as well as to remind current UN initiatives that much work regarding ICT4D has been done by various UN employees, consultants and volunteers for more than 15 years (and perhaps longer?).
  • Al Gore Campaign Pioneered Virtual Volunteering
    Back in 2000, when Al Gore ran for president, his campaign championed virtual volunteering by recruiting online volunteers to help online with his election efforts. I’ve tried to present some of what his campaign did – this pioneering effort deserves to be remembered, as do some of the lessons from such.

20 Years Ago: The Virtual Volunteering Project

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vvlogoThe Virtual Volunteering Project officially launched 20 years ago this month. It was the first attempt by anyone, anywhere, to research online volunteer service and document what works, and what doesn’t. I directed the initiative at its launch – and now, two decades later, I’m in a mood to reflect.

The Virtual Volunteering Project was the brainchild of Steve Glikbarg and Cindy Shove, co-founders of Impact Online (what became VolunteerMatch). In fact, Glikbarg probably originally coined the phrase virtual volunteering, back in the mid or even early 1990s. In its first two years, the Virtual Volunteering Project was funded primarily with the support of the James Irvine Foundation. Additional support in this first phase of the Project came from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Morino Institute and the Mitsubishi Electric America Foundation. The Charles A. Dana Center, a research institute at the University of Texas at Austin, hosted the Project for most of its life.

How did I start on the road to becoming a virtual volunteering expert? In 1995, while working at Joint Venture: Silicon Valley, the two volunteer interns I’d taken on to build web sites for all of the initiatives we were managing said they would prefer to build the sites on their own computers back on campus, rather than at our office, because their computers were better and it was more convenient for them. They would bring their work to me on disks when they were finished. What a great idea! It worked out very well – they got to work on their own schedule, from their homes, on better computers, and I got what I needed. So I offered the option of working remotely part of the time, even most of the time, to every volunteer I recruited after that at Joint Venture. The next year, Cindy contacted me about running a new virtual volunteering initiative she and Steve had just gotten funded. “What’s ‘virtual volunteering?'” I asked. “It’s what you’ve been doing with your volunteers and talking about on USENET!” she replied.

The Virtual Volunteering Project officially launched in December 1996. It was quite rough at first; the vast majority of the programs that involved volunteers donating some or all of their time online never used the phrase virtual volunteering. In fact, that’s still true today! I remember thinking in those first several weeks that most online volunteers would be 20 something men living in Silicon Valley; imagine my surprise to find out, rather quickly, that most online volunteers were women living all over the USA – and beyond! I was also stunned at how quickly I found more than 100 virtual volunteering initiatives, most of which didn’t know about each other. With the help of online and onsite volunteers myself, I researched virtual volunteering activities, created and continually updated web pages about it, and marketed what I was learning, via both traditional press releases and frequent posts to various online discussion groups. I also involved online volunteers myself – more than 300 over more than four years. As a result, I was invited to speak at a lot of conferences and was quoted in a lot of traditional press, like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

I left the Virtual Volunteering Project in Janaury 2001, to prepare for my move to Germany to work for the United Nations to run the virtual volunteering component of NetAid, which became the stand-alone Online Volunteering service. I got that UN job because of my online activities, including participation in various online communities. In subsequent UN and international work, even when the focus isn’t virtual volunteering but, say, communications, I’ve found a way to inject at least a little virtual volunteering capacity building and involvement into the work.

Now, it’s 20 years after the launch of the Virtual Volunteering Project, which is archived here. Not much has changed in terms of best practices in virtual volunteering, the practices that make virtual volunteering effective for nonprofits, NGOs, government programs, schools and more, though there’s lots of new jargon now in the mix: micro volunteering, crowdsourcing, digital volunteering, the Cloud, etc.

vvbooklittle The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, by Susan J. Ellis and myself, is our attempt to document all these best practices over the more than three decades virtual volunteering has been happening, in a comprehensive, detailed way, so that the collective knowledge can be used with the latest digital engagement initiatives to help people volunteer, advocate for causes they care about, connect with communities and make a difference. It’s a tool primarily for organizations, but there’s also information for online volunteers themselves. It’s available both in traditional print form and in digital version. Thanks to everyone who has purchased it so far! Bonus points if you can find the sci fi/fan girl references in the book…

Also see:

Early History of Nonprofits & the Internet

Al Gore Campaign Pioneered Virtual Volunteering

Lessons on effective, valuable online communities – from the 1990s

Online volunteers created a music festival in St. Louis

Updated: research regarding virtual volunteering

Virtual volunteering: it’s oh-so-personal

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logoThe 20th anniversary of the launch of the Virtual Volunteering Project is approaching! I count it as December 1, 1996, actually, though I could be off by a few days. It was probably summertime 20 years ago that the project was funded, actually.

All that was on my mind when I read that World Pulse, a global nonprofit organization, put out a call for stories that explore the role of technology in our lives and its potential to bring positive change:

At World Pulse, we see so many signs of the good. Every day, women and men creatively embrace tech tools to solve the pressing problems facing our communities and our world. From mobile apps designed to track incidents of violence against women to crowdfunding platforms that put money in the hands of social entrepreneurs, technology is making so much possible for women everywhere.

What technologies have the most potential to make a difference in your community? Do you have a story about using communication technology to form meaningful relationships or bridge a geographical divide? Maybe you are part of a group using technology to mobilize for change.

I submitted my own story for this challenge, noting:

I’ve been researching virtual volunteering for more than 20 years now, and the biggest shock for most people that aren’t familiar with the practice and hear me talk about it at length is just how close I feel to so many of the volunteers and volunteer-involving agencies all over the world. They are my friends and colleagues, just as real as people I work with onsite, face-to-face. These are all real people with hopes and fears and challenging ideas and humor and talents. So many of these online relationships, established through email and Twitter and online communities, are so very, very personal to me.

I mean that from the bottom of my heart.

By the time I left the Virtual Volunteering Project, I had worked with  more than 300 online volunteers. I could tell you so many things about many of them: their career goals, their music tastes, what they enjoyed doing as online volunteers, what they DIDN’T enjoy, and on and on. No, I didn’t know them all that intimately – not all of them wanted to be known that intimately, and there just isn’t enough time in the day to get to know 300 people that well, online or off. At least one of my online volunteers had mental disabilities, and his doctor was one of his references; I got to talk with that doctor once on the phone, and he told me what a huge impact virtual volunteering had had on this particular volunteer. I hung up the phone and cried – I’d had no idea.

I kept working with online volunteers when I took over the UN’s Online Volunteering service, then also a part of NetAid, in February 2001, and a year later, one of the online volunteers died that I had been working with since joining the UN Volunteers program headquarters. She was very young, killed in an accident. I was shattered. We had often IM’d each other, just chatting over this and that. She’d formed a nonprofit with other online volunteers she met through volunteering online with UNV. I was also heartened that, when I sent an email to the entire UNV organization announcing her death, something any program manager did for a volunteer killed in the field, the head of the organization then, Sharon Capeling-Alakija, immediately directed her staff to write the online volunteer’s parents a letter of condolence, just as UNV does when a UN Volunteer dies.

That’s why I get so weary of explaining over and over to people new to virtual volunteering, or skeptical of the practice without reading anything about it, that this volunteering is not impersonal. As I said in an email to someone that blogged disparagingly about virtual volunteering, saying that, as a result of it, “volunteering has the potential to lose its social and community-building benefits”:

Your blog assumes onsite volunteers work in groups and have lots of interaction. This is often not the case. MANY onsite volunteers work in isolation: they arrive, they receive an orientation and training, and then spend their time alone in a room stuffing envelopes, or sorting in-kind donations, or checking inventory, or cleaning something, etc. You cannot assume that onsite volunteering automatically means lots of personal interactions.

I’ve studied virtual volunteering since the mid 1990s, and what I’ve found is just as much or as little social and community-building benefits as any other volunteering. It all depends on the culture of management: is the manager of online volunteers one who provides lots of personal interactions, or one that gives a task and then interacts only at the request of the volunteer? Whether or not any kind of volunteering has social or community-building benefits depends on the manager and the culture of the organization, not necessarily the task being done onsite or online.

Working with virtual volunteering? It’s personal. At least it is for me.

vvbooklittleThere is lots more information about what it’s like to work with online volunteers in The LAST Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, available both as a traditional printed book and as a digital book. The advice is based on both extensive research of virtual volunteering practices at a variety of organizations all over the world and my own experience working with online volunteers – I’ve now worked with more than 1000, some of whom I’m still friends with online, some of whom have become friends offline as well. And if you are about to write about virtual volunteering, but you don’t want to read the guidebook, then PLEASE, at least, first read these Myths About Virtual Volunteering.

The Internet hasn’t changed. Not really.

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The Internet hasn’t changed much since its invention more than 30 years ago. Not really.

Oh, fine, wave your arms and jump up and down and say, “No! No! It’s now interactive. It’s now social. Now people crowdsource problems.” It’s cute when you do that.

But the Internet has always been interactive. It’s always been social. And it’s always been about crowdsourcing. It’s why I fell in love with it, via USENET newsgroups, back in the 1990s.

What has changed about the Internet over the last 30 years? It has a lot more graphical interafaces, and there are many, many more people are using it. That’s it.

Consider the Cluetrain Manifesto, published in 1999 and which immediately became my guide for thinking about the Internet: the authors asserted back then that the Internet is unlike traditional media used in mass marketing / one-to-many marketing, and transforms business practices radically:

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed.

Even the Atlantic Monthly believes the Internet hasn’t changed much in 15 years. It spotlighted a high-school handout from 1996 explaining the advantages and disadvantages of using the newfangled Internet everybody was talking about – and it sounds exactly like what people say today.

I started using the Internet in 1994, when a colleague printed out Munn Heydorn’s guide to nonprofit organizations on the Internet. Even in 1994, it was a document of many, many pages. She suggested I explore some of the resources recommended, as she was too busy to do such (and was only interested in emailing her college friends). Somehow, soc.org.nonprofit jumped out at me most in that long list of resources, and I joined as soon as I could figure out how to do so. The World Wide Web seemed so boring to me then — it was just online brochures — whereas USENET was interactive, and its newsgroups felt like communities. As email groups via ListServ and Majordomo proliferated, and then along with YahooGroups, nonprofits on the Internet flourished.

Sure, there were nonprofits then – and for-profit businesses, for that matter – who used their new web site as an online brochure, and email as one-way communication with customers and constituents. In fact, there are a lot of companies still doing this. But these have never been the norm when it comes to Internet use.

So let’s stop talking about the Internet as something new and, instead, start looking to what’s worked, and what hasn’t, over the many years. There are some fantastic case studies from the 1990s – even the 1980s – about virtual volunteering, online mentoring, crowd-sourcing and microvolunteering via newsgroups, and so much more – that are still relevant today. Mistakes that were made in those early days of networking 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!

Also see The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted.

Putting it all on the Cloud

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The media and various consultants are breathless again with another new tech term. What’s gotten them all aflutter? THE CLOUD. Everyone’s talking about THE CLOUD. Everyone’s asking, Are you working in THE CLOUD?!

What’s THE CLOUD?

The Internet. Instead of saying the Internet, we’re now saying The Cloud.

Don’t you dare write me and say, no! no! The cloud is different!

When someone is talking about cloud computing, they are talking about information and software tools residing somewhere out on the Internet, on a server that may be across town or across the country or across the world, rather than on your desktop or a hard drive in your office. When you read and respond to email on a web site rather than your desk top, such as YahooMail or GoogleMail? That’s cloud computing. Also known as the Internet.

It’s not just email: more and more database software for nonprofits is cloud-based software, meaning that some or all of the software is online, and some or all of the information the software tracks – information about donors, volunteers, clients, etc. – reside on a server that isn’t at your office. You access and manage the information by going online.

Wikipedia has a good graphic that illustrates what working on the Cloud looks like.

Cloud computing is terrific – until it’s not. It’s great to read and respond to your email no matter what device you are using and no matter where you are – your laptop at work, your friend’s laptop in Barbados, your smart phone on a city bus – until you find yourself in a place where you have only a window of time for Internet access. Some airports give users just 30 minutes of free Internet access – that’s enough to download my mail to my laptop, but not enough to time to read and respond to it online.

Cloud computing is great for volunteer-tracking and volunteer-scheduling software, if volunteers can log in from anywhere and input their own information. It’s not so great when the Internet goes down and you need that information. And even in the USA, the Internet DOES go down…

Lack of consistent access isn’t the only concern: people and organizations have lost all of the information they have put out on the Cloud. GoogleMail and Flickr have deleted people’s ENTIRE accounts. Imagine losing ALL of your emails. Imagine losing ALL of your photos (with all those notes and tags and descriptions and what not).

Yesterday, I spent two hours editing a document on Google Docs – out on the Cloud. Google Docs supposedly saves your document every few seconds. After all of that work, when I closed the document, it disappeared. I logged in every hour for the rest of the day, hoping it would show up. 24 hours later, I logged back in and, yes, now the document is there – with none of my edits. Two hours of work gone forever. Someone recently made fun of me for always saving my Google Docs offline, and so I had stopped. I’ll be going back to doing that immediately…

And consider this: software vendors go out of business. I was contacted by a small nonprofit a few years ago that was frantic because the company they had used for a few years for all of their event registration was going under, and the company was not only not offering a refund on the nonprofit’s yearly subscription (which had JUST been renewed), but also, was going to take the systems offline before the nonprofit could find a way to transfer their information elsewhere. Their situation was heart-wrenching!

So, should your nonprofit or NGO go with the Cloud? Yes and no…

For your organization’s database that tracks donors, volunteers, clients and other vital information, Cloud-based systems are fine – as long as you have an offline backup of all of the information physically in your office, ready to access in case of emergency. Daily backups would be best, but even just a monthly backup would protect against disaster. When you are purchasing/subscribing to such software, ask the vendor how you will do these offline backups. If they say, “Oh, there’s no need for them!”, look for a new software vendor, especially if you are a mid-size or small nonprofit (such organizations have little recourse in cases of data loss, where as a large nonprofit may have the political clout to pressure a software vendor into spending the resources necessary to retrieve lost information – or to financially-compensate them for the data loss).

For your organization’s email, using the cloud is fine so long it also provides a way for individuals to also download their email when needed, write their responses offline, queue the email to be sent, and then send all the email at once when they get online access again. This is how my email works, and it’s proven essential for being able to work while traveling. For instance, I download my mail just before I get on the plane, I spend the ride reading and responding, and I send all that mail I’ve written (and download more) once I land. It was particularly essential while in Australia, where Internet access is surprisingly bad.

For organizations AND individuals: do online and offline backups of all your computer-based information. I use Mozy to backup my laptop information online once a week (in the middle of the night, while I’m sleeping). The first time you do an online backup, it’s going to take a looooooong time. But subsequent backups should be shorter, because only updated or new information will be backed up. I also have a hard drive that I use for my once-a-month onsite backups. And I sometimes burn my information onto a DVD or two, and give that DVD to a family member for safe keeping.

Don’t forget to back up your cell phone or smart phone.

So, in short: the Cloud is GREAT… until it’s not. Just like having all of your information on your laptop is GREAT… until it’s not.