Acronym

Finally catching up on some pre-holiday reading and enjoyed the Associations Now December cover story on crowdsourcing (though, I'd nitpic that it isn't just about amateurs).

What caught my attention was how Jeff Howe (focus of the story and author of Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business) is slated as the keynote for the ASAE's Tech Conference. I thought to myself, Why Tech?

As a techy myself, the tech of crowdsourcing - in fact, pretty much all tech in the social media/Web 2.0 sphere - is actually not interesting. I know this argument has been made before, but I'll reiterate that the tech is just one part of the puzzle (again, in many ways, the least interesting one), and that the social, psychological, economic, legal, etc, pieces are far more important.

Tossing thought leaders like Jeff Howe in with the techies, while (hopefully) appreciated by the techs, is not actually helpful to the association community at large. As another example, I saw an add for the DigitalNow conference with Clay Shirky (author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations) as the keynote. Lucky them, but Clay really needs to be getting in front of executive directors and association leaders at the Annual!

The further association leaders use the "oh, it's tech stuff, let IT handle it" to dismiss the overall relevance/significance of all this, the deeper they dig their graves. (Hmm, and, as a side note, probably the same could be said about a similar "it's just marketing" excuse, but I digress.)

Makes me think of a parallel case: A foundation's board was reviewing a game proposal for funding (side note: not a random action game for Xbox or whatever, but a "serious" game geared towards advancing the cause of the foundation - something serious like this).

The board, all non-techy and non-game types, were really getting held up on the technology. They feared that getting into games was this big scary and risky tech venture that was turning them off. I was called in to give some advice, and essentially said that the tech part was totally not an issue, that in fact the real challenge was the design and user experience elements of promoting a particular cause via gameplay.

I gave the analogy that if this was a proposal for a movie project to promote their cause, would the board be wrestling over the engineering details of the camera or the chemistry of film processing. No. The tech of movie making is a given, and they'd be debating the story, characters, etc, in relation to the cause and so on.

Long story short, once they realized they were irrationally concerned about the tech because that was the piece they didn't understand (even though others did) they approved funding for the project. And, have since dived in with enthusiasm and gusto on the cause related design elements of the project.

Sound familiar?

We need to stop using tech as our collective excuse to dismiss the change that is occurring all around us.

(Ah, the meta irony! Making the above argument on a blog isn't much better than having Jeff keynote at Tech ;)