A Short Intro Video for the NPO Network

In my last post, I talked about creating a video overview of the problems charities face, and how we have a proven solution that will make philanthropy work better. I created this 26 minute video to begin the process of looking for funding, since we've taken the effort as far as we can on our own, in our spare time.

When I told my brother, Professor Vern Walker, that I had created a 26 minute video to do this he immediately told me that was way too long - it needed to be no more than two minutes!

My position was, if someone didn't care enough to invest 26 minutes of their time to learn about the situation, they certainly wouldn't care enough to donate to the cause. I still feel that way, but I understand Vern's point: really busy people need a quick way to find out if my topic aligns with their interests. That's all I can hope to achieve in two minutes - to help them decide to invest 26 minutes in the longer video. To actually convey information about the problem and our solution requires much more time than two, five or even ten minutes. I wish Life weren't so complex, but if this was a simple problem, someone would have already solved it.

So, with much consternation, I embarked on creating a two minute video that would drum up interest in the NPO Network and my video overview of "How to Make Philanthropy Work Better". Full disclosure: it runs 2 1/2 minutes...

The Decision to Look for Funding for the NPO Network

After working on the NPO Planner and Grant Generator for about eight months, my vision for what it can become has grown from a standalone application to help my local food bank, Food for Others, to an online community that helps charities and foundations alike. I've picked the name 'NPO Network' as my working title for this effort.

I see the NPO Network as a place where charities can find planning and automation tools, as well as search tools that help them find like-minded foundations.

I see foundations coming to the community to get the information they need for selecting charities and giving grants. The community's automated grant application generator will give them the control they want without the expense of designing and maintaining their own grant application website. I think foundations will appreciate that all the money they give will go towards a charity's mission, and not to pay for foundation search firms and grant writers.

And I see an online community that connects a network of coaches with charities and foundations that need their help. My experience tells me that there are a lot of people just like me who are ready and able to put their experience to work helping others.

This vision is much bigger than the project we began work on many months ago, and we've taken things as far as we can take them in our spare time. To move forward, I will need to find some funding.

My goal is to provide our services to charities for free; I don't know if this is really possible, but it is my intent. To achieve this we need to find partners who share our vision and are willing to invest in our efforts.

My first step is to create a video that gives an overview of both the problem charities face, and our solution to it. This 26 minute video is my first attempt at doing this:

Revisiting How the Nonprofit Planner Fits Into My Theme

As I get deep in an actual web application, like the Nonprofit Planner and Grant Generator, it is easy to lose track of what my overall goal is with this blog and my book "The Shape of Knowledge".

My main message is, and has been, that there are basic knowledge patterns that capture important types of reasoning. The pattern I am elaborating on here is a Composer, which captures content once and then configures and reconfigures it into various documents to meet a particular need.

The value of identifying these patterns is that a talented developer, like my partner Steve, can write a powerful program that consumes predefined knowledge artifacts created by domain experts and then generates a web app automatically based on that knowledge. I call this type of program an application generator, or an 'apperator', for short.

At the same time, the identification of knowledge patterns empowers us, the knowledge authors who create the knowledge artifacts, because we can use these 'apperator' programs to build our own custom solutions without writing code.

In this particular case, I built a template using KnowtShare (our online collaboration tool), and made it available to charities for developing and documenting their business plans. The shape of that template, and therefore all plans created using it, is a hierarchical tree model. I call this shape a 'triangle' because it grows from a single root to the many 'leaves' of the tree. This tree/triangle is the knowledge artifact that stores the raw material for the Grant Composer. Each charity will create and maintain its own business plan.

There is a second artifact required, and it is built and maintained by me, as a community resource. That is a table -- a 'square' -- containing the information requirements for particular foundations.

The 'apperator' Steve has written is a Composer that knows how to consume these two types of artifacts: a hierarchical KnowtShare file filled with written information items and a .csv file that contains a matrix of communication targets (foundations) and their preferred order for those information items. Context questions are used to identify which branches of the tree and which rows of the table to use when creating a solution at run-time.

I, as the knowledge author, decided to use business plan information to populate a grant application for foundations, so the actual app that is created is a Grant Application Generator. But the same pattern could be used to collect an individual's CV and generate a customized resume for a particular company -- that would be a Resume Generator. Or a student's transcript and essay questions to generate a customized college application -- that would be a College Application Generator. This makes sense: these examples are very similar to the Grant Generator.

What about something further afield? There's a whole industry evolving around using legal boilerplate and context questions to generate legal documents. The Composer pattern could be used to achieve the same results, and with far less programming.

My last post was dedicated to describing how the very same business planning information used in grant applications can be used to generate other reports and marketing materials. All of these are examples of the Composer Pattern and can be created by the same aperator with only minor tweaks.

The Composer is just one pattern. I have written about the Recommender pattern and the Scoring pattern as well, and I will be describing others going forward.

The challenge, and the opportunity, come from thinking about problem solving at a higher level of abstraction than we normally do.

Most applications are built to solve a particular problem. The IT team interviews their customers to determine the functional specifications for an application they want built. Then the IT people go off and build it, checking back in periodically with the customers to make sure they're still on track.

Typically there is a deadline looming, and everyone is focused on the problem at hand. No one is interested in investing time (and money) in designing a meta solution that will make the next problem easier to solve. In fact, if programming is paid for on an hourly basis, there is a disincentive to look for the patterns that will make application development more efficient. But as knowledge authors, and as problem solvers in general, there are many benefits to identifying and harnessing new patterns.

Knowledge patterns only become visible when you are exposed to many different but similar problems, and when you look for them. It also helps to have a vocabulary and a mental framework that make it easier to discuss the patterns you sense are emerging. My goal is to contribute to the creation of those foundational tools, and to create real world examples that will stimulate discussion.