I work for a small non-profit that specializes in technical help for other non-profits of about 80 organizations. We are working on a conundrum that plagues non-profits and, I suspect, small businesses as well. It is the phenomena of what we are calling the "accidental techie" syndrome. This is where someone in the office who has other responsibilities ends up having to also take care of the technical problems. Often these organizations have a very limited budget and cannot afford the cost of consultants, so printer problems, Internet access, e-mail, etc. are handled in a rather willy-nilly way. If the troubleshooting is erroneous, it can often lead to even more expensive costs to fix.
Project Alchemy wants to set up something that would help these folks access information with one another that is not as confusing as a forum or Web site that trained techies can access and (most of the time) navigate and understand. We have thought of a phone book where accidental techies can call one another -- but many of these places are long distance from one another and a long phone call can be expensive. Also the expertise of one accidental techie may not help another if for instance the whole office is on Macs and the process of troubleshooting is involved, but no one else knows Macs. The creation of a forum or chat to ask questions and get answers is a start, but how many accidental techies would even have time to access them regularly, post answers to problems or seek answers? Unless they are in a crisis themselves, this is probably the only time they would post questions and get answers, and while the postings on forums may help over a long time, most technical office problems are critical and need answers NOW.
One suggestion was to set up a Citrix-like service where everything is kept in one place and offices could access it using the "dumb terminal" method, and this was a brilliant suggestion -- but, as you know, this could be expensive and time-consuming to set up and maintain. Especially expensive and time-consuming are daunting tasks such as migrating archaic databases to the main server, setting up e-mails, storing data; the responsibility of maintaining critical data is something none of us would have time to do.
Often the problems with these organizations are unique. For instance they are out in the middle of nowhere and the only connection they have is a 56k modem, or they are using some donor database that no one else uses and have done so for years, it is on a rickety old local machine that goes nowhere, and the information on them is critical as well as private. In short, the situations are myriad. The accumulation of technical problems is usually big, since nobody has time to do anything but put out the fires so everyone can get their work done.
I am sure these problems are nothing new for most offices, but the key here is that there is no money to pay for solutions and so we are trying to find a way to help one another in a reliable, inexpensive and helpful way. Is creating something that empowers and assists the accidental techie for non-profits on virtually no money an impossible task? Are any of your experts and readers adept at these sorts of things? What do you suggest?
QUESTION POSED ON: 12 JUL 2004
QUESTION ANSWERED BY: Rod Trent
I don't see this as an impossible task at all but definitely something you need to get a handle on. What you may want to look into is to Web-enable the process, so that those that have to connect at 56k can also access the information easily.
All you really need is a simply Web form (text input system) where techies can post problems and resolutions. These posts would be archived in a searchable list. Over time, you should gain a lot of knowledge in a central location. Doing this is pretty simple. If you want to use IIS and Microsoft FrontPage, someone could develop something like this in less than a day.
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