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| Path: Main Street > Resources/Library > Research Articles > Feature Article |
Free internet access is over; and technology needs of the voluntary sectorBy Gillian Kerr, RealWorld Systems
The information in this article is current as of October 5, 2001.
Technology needs of the voluntary sector
Good Enough Information Systems has been hired by the Voluntary Sector Initiative’s Information Management/Information Technology Joint Table to study the technology needs of the Canadian voluntary sector. The results will help to define the directions for a new national technology program from the Voluntary Sector Initiative.
We would like to invite your comments about technology in an online discussion group. To participate, please join us at www.technologydiscussion.org. The French site will be up in a few days, and will be accessible from discussiontechnologie.org.
The readers of CharityVillage will generally be more comfortable with technology than the usual nonprofit organization, so we are not expecting you to be completely representative of the sector. However, we want to hear from the people in the voluntary sector who are leaders in the use of the web and email (that means you!). In the next few weeks we will post a survey (linked to the discussion group) that gives several choices for technology programs, based on the ideas brought up in our interviews and the online discussions. This is your chance to influence the direction of the program, which is projected to be about $10 million over five years.
Update on free internet access
It looks like the only free internet access company left in Canada is NetZero, and even they are offering only 10 hours per month after October 1, 2001. Cybersurf’s 3Web has stopped providing free access to its existing customers, and the other free providers have closed or begun charging for access over the past few months.
It will be interesting to see how the penetration of internet access is affected by the loss of these providers. Canadians are continuing to log on in increasing numbers: a report from Forrester Research states that at the end of 2000, 85 per cent of Canadian 13- to 22-year-olds were on-line. And internet use is also growing rapidly in developing countries. According to AC Nielsen//NetRatings, internet access in countries like South Africa and Argentina is growing faster than fixed line telephones. (Both studies are cited in the Globe and Mail, August 30 2001, B11-12).
We are in a transitional time, when some organizations are treating email and internet access as essential and others are treating it as a luxury. It’s very similar to the spread of telephones. If any organization wants to be taken seriously, it needs at least one telephone. Voluntary sector agencies do not ask for special government funding programs to buy telephones. We complain about phones, and they are certainly expensive, but we use them. We don’t have a choice. When organizations have problems paying for telephone service, we don’t call it a ‘telephone problem’. We call it a funding problem.
We really would like your opinions on this topic in our discussion group. Internet access and information technology is not yet in the same league as telephone service. It’s also not as reliable or easy to use (to put it mildly). When do you think it will be seen as just as essential as office rent or phones or bookkeeping costs? Or will that ever happen? I’ll report on your thoughts in future articles.
Yahoo’s services for small organizations
Yahoo is continuing to expand its paid services for small business. It still offers the most versatile, usable free community building web services on the ‘net, but it’s looking for income from paid subscribers. That’s good news for nonprofits, because you can take advantage of some solid, inexpensive services without the ads that free services force you to take.
There are also signs that Yahoo may soon offer web-based office productivity tools like word processing and file storage. It’s always a good idea to keep an eye on Yahoo to find out where ‘mainstream’ web services are going. (By the way, Yahoo has never paid me for any endorsements. I just keep recommending Yahoo services because they are so well designed. We’re even using Yahoo Groups for the Voluntary Sector Initiative study, described above, because it was the only discussion group we could find that was fully bilingual in French and English, and fully accessible to people with disabilities.)
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Gillian Kerr, Ph.D., C.Psych.
President, RealWorld Systems
gkerr at realworldsystems.netRead my weblog at http://blog.realworldsystems.net
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