Basic Research Results
Hopefully this won't bore you to pieces, but my research is coming along nicely. Just some background: I will be focusing my research will be on a group of nonprofit organizations supported by the Nokomis Foundation since 1999 around technology. These ten organizations have been supported financially and through education through monthly meetings since it's inception, the organization is called the Women's Technology Consortium and is lovingly referred to as WTC by myself.
So, these organizations will be my obsession for the next few months while I finish up my writing. Thus far I have had conversations with all the WTC members (each organizations assigns a single person as the WTC liason, not always the ED either) and now I'm moving into the writing phase.
While I was researching these organizations and digging through archives of information, I found a survey that was sent out to seventy five organizations (thirty four responded) all focused on technology. While reading the results I thought it might be fun to do some comparisons of the 1999 results and what these organizations would say today, so I created another survey and began a short report. I'll post that report at a point when it is approved by my committee, but here are some of the findings in short:
In 1999, only half of the employees had email access; in 2007, eighty percent have access to email.
In 1999, little more than half of the employees had access to the Internet; in 2007, all have access.
In 1999, about forty four percent of organizations had webmasters; in 2007, ninety percent have webmasters who spend an average of 3.5 hours per month on the site.
In 1999, the barriers for enhancing technology were lack of funding, lack of staff expertise and lace of staff time; in 2007, the barriers remain the same.
Replacing hardware and staff training remain the top priorities for the next 2-3 years.
So, the more things change, the more they stay the same! I am quite surprised at the results of this survey and hope to drill into this further.
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