I'm retiring this old .Text blog in favor of a WordPress blog I set up on my server in about a half hour. I'm looking forward to allowing comments again, as managing comment spam forced me to turn off commenting on the site. Anyway, the new site will be at http://cknowledgeworks.com/blog .

Old posts will be archived at http://cknowledgeworks.com/blog/index.aspx .

While these are not by any means a direct indicator of what nonprofits need, these do represent the intersection between what nonprofits are not doing and what a tech assistance provider like NPower has been thinking they should be doing. In my experience this corresponds pretty between what I've seen at nonprofits. Some kinds of key nonprofit needs are underrepresented, such as for website planning and strategic integration of technology with nonprofits missions, which are areas that future TechAtlas assessments should work to include. Sometime soon, I'll add the top 10 recommendation lists for each of the core TechAtlas Assessments.

More than 9000 of the core TechAtlas Assessment surveys have been taken by nonprofits in the US and around the world. There is much to be gained by analyzing the results. Doing so yields new understanding of the conditions of technology that nonprofits operate within, and can help inform future strategies and directions for technology assistance.

You can filter the results by State, or by organizations outside the U.S. To do so, at the end of the web address for the assessment results, add "&state=WA" for Washington or any other state abbreviation. For non-US organization results, add &state=OU. So for the Basic Technology Assessment results, go to: http://techatlas.org/tools/results.asp?asid=252&state=OU

These results provide the aggregate of all user results. TechAtlas partners can view the results for just the organizations they work with, and drill down further for more detailed analysis and to see graphical charts of results.

Let me know if you notice anything interesting or unexpected in these results. Reach me at phil at penpixel.com.

Most commonly given recommendations:

The breakfast I attended where Lance Armstrong gave the keynote, was phenomenal, inpiring an attitude of victory and passionate persistence.

The colorectal support group was another fascinating window into some ways of seeing cancer. I consider myself the same as always, wholely my healthy growing older self. Some people have described entering and living in a new 'cancer world', and identify themselves with that. I don't see things that way. I see myself as increasingly aware of the health that I have, and also aware of cancerous tumor tissue in my body that's on it's way out, as I and my docs and family and friends are unleashing a still swelling floodtide of healing. I feel I can still afford to think of this cancer as a bump in the road and as a wake up call to live better now. The cancer doesn't define me, it's a project I'm working through. At this point, I'm preparing for and headed for serious surgery, a controlled injury, in my mind somewhat like a controlled car accident. It makes me wonder why I hadn't been preparing for a car accident before (where do you go to prepare for a car accident anyhow?); by eating as well as possible, tending my body with loving thoroughness, while I also do what I can to tend my family and other needs. If you've not seen me in a while, I think you'd see me looking as well or better than ever. I can think of no better option than to be at my best now ~~as if there were some other right time to be at my best ;)

It's funny. I've always thought of myself as really lucky -- I've been undeservedly blessed in so many ways, on so many days, when I've seen others often having less luck than I. Now, I feel this is a chance for me let others feel lucky, not to be in my place and facing these peculiar challenges. You should rightly feel lucky to be cancer-free, and I'm grateful for your good fortune. What makes me smile even more, though, is that I really am doing and feeling better than ever now, so ironically, while I wish all of you the greatest luck in avoiding cancer, I have to confess that there are some really amazing perks to this club, and I don't feel unfortunate.

The support I've received from friends and colleagues and families has been unbelievable. The PhilCare wiki has been tremendously successful in coordinating support and care for me. There's a long discussion to be had describing why this method of organizing and distributing care tasks is far superior to other methods, and how this is a good example of what web 2.0 tools can deliver that earlier web tools could not, more on all that another time.

I’m also seeing that here there is a certain solitude and the need for it. Impossible to describe, being alone with my cancer. Sensing inside me a part that is being destroyed and removed, which had before (for some years) been growing unchecked and more dangerous each week. There’s strong will to change anything that could have been unconsciously contributing to the cancer, and also to nourish my life as I know it and love it. This has brought me a new diet and renewed focus on myself and my well-being, and on what I care most about – my family, my dreams and ideas and way of seeing, my love for Adrienne, choosing and having and holding (and expressing[!]) my experiences well, my friends and community, my work in its best form, my peculiar passions and small adventures.

From here, there's much progess behind, which bodes very well for the future.

So much has happened in the past few weeks. So here are few snips:

Oct 28:
50% done with radiation

still feeling strong and putting away the copious delishes that people have been bringing by. Thanks Mom for all the great dishes too. Managing my eating carefully, I've avoided most all nausea and other side effects. I had a great 2 hour nap this afternoon.

The old saying is that you don't find out who your friends are until you really need them. I always thought this meant you found out that you had many fewer friends than you thought you had. For me the opposite has been true. I have far more friends than I thought. I am daily humbled by the sweetness and depth of your friendships. Today my friend Steve took me to radiation, and we had a conversation that I'll always remember -- not because it was earth-shattering, but because it was so fresh and true; it was honest friendship speaking.

Nov 12:
finishing treatment week #4

Thurs morning, I awoke with a calm confidence that I'm getting through this, living through cancer, quite well. I had a vivid sense that all obstacles can be diminished, moved, or navigated past. That the human spirit can get accustomed to any hardship -- and in fact any hardship can be turned into good work. And that life is really just made of work and gifts. We're only given the life we're given. No more, no less. We're given the life we live. And at the end of the day, as I lay down my head, it's good to think and dream about how I lived this day.

Nov 15:
last week of radiation under way

So far, so good. I have weird reactions to many smells and foods. Adrienne is sticking right by me. I'm walking around the block and breathing and certain that there's no hardship that can surround the human spirit. That said, it's also clear that some hardships that I thought were real are in fact imaginary -- they can just disappear. And often, stresses are merely worries in disguise, and these too can be fruitfully discarded. As an adult, I've found myself getting into certain binds: unhealthy work habits, self-denial, misrepresenting my love for people I care for, etc. It's good to undo these.

I've been stunned by the strength of my body's ability to heal. Mouth sores disappeared by themselves in a couple days. A road rash on my elbow from a bike accident this August healed so fast. I can feel my heart working extra, rebuilding the radiated tissue in my pelvis. My white blood cell count has stayed stable, even rebounding some last week. Fatigue and weakness and sweet rest can feed rejuvenation. I'm thinking now that the soul and the mind must also have this ability to heal and rejuvenate, and reflecting on what that looks and feels like. I had a flash last night, seeing the moon between clouds and near Mars, closing my eyes I felt a latent, enormous power all around and heard the inner sound of my body -- the sound of bloodflow you can hear sometimes (well, I hear it sometimes anyhow).

last week, particularly in the waiting room with other cancer patients, I was thinking of cancer as a prison sentence. Since our loved ones are with us in the waiting room, we don't talk about this, but if alone i'm sure we'd ask each other the key prisoners' questions. what are you in for? meaning both, what kind of cancer do you have, and what is your sentence. there's a sense of being there because something happened, but not really having a clear idea what. some have a sense or a fear they're guilty -- having done any number of things that contributed to the cancer, but others of us just seem to have been put here for an unknown reason. The sentences are all life sentences, the range of years we can expect to live, maybe 3-50, or 5-10, or 1-2. the very idea of this kind of a sentence seems perverse. Life expectancy is something general that we think applies to individuals, to ourselves, but really I think life expectancy is a kind of joke -- it's a joke that instead of making you laugh, it's a story makes you worry -- you could say it's a sick joke. But good prisoners turn this around -- learning to pronounce their sentence with a smile and a gleam in their eyes that reveals how they value themselves, and which commands attention and shows their toughness. Before getting this sentence, there was no judge or jury or trial as far as we could see. like the bound man, who wriggles out of his confinement only when he stops resisting it, we can escape. the woman in the waiting room with the central IV line by her collar-bone, she was free; with every beam from her bright eyes speaking freedom and strong awareness and appreciation.

So, maybe cancer isn't much like prison after all. Maybe it's more like an injury. Cancer is like being rear ended in a car crash. you don't see it coming, it packs a wallop, and you may never truly know what caused it. Near-fatal injuries carry with them an uncertainty of healing. But mostly, injuries happen, they heal as well as possible, and people get on with their lives. Now that's something the human condition can handle. Get well and you're done. Injuries can persist, but they don't carry a threat of recurrence, that crazy spectre of uncertainty.

Much of the stress of cancer for me has been the uncertainty of it. will the treatment succeed? will i have a recurrence? will the side effects or surgery have permanent consequences? No one knows. I secretly think that most doctors have a hard time with uncertainty, just as the rest of us do. The funny thing is, that when you try to pin down uncertainty, it disappears, probably because it never exsited in the first place -- uncertainty is just a gap between now and one or another event in the future. Of course we don't know the future, how good or bad it will be; or if it will be at all. and we all live with this every day just fine -- or so it seemed to me. but now that i have this uncertainty of invasive treatment and recurrence, i'm tempted by this idea that i should worry about that. I now live with a greater potential for some unpleasant futures. I remember a story about fear, in which someone points a gun at you and you ask, what is it that you fear, and it's not the gun, it's the fear of the bullet entering your body; which isn't happening, and may not happen at all. The fear is the ghost of an imagined future, and if there's one thing I know about the imagination, is that it's one of the few things I can change by my choosing.

I was thinking of my life as a canvas thick with paint, lush colors, greens and reds and blues. And i see myself painting over sections, and adding new canvas to make more room. Feeling, of this life's work painting, that it's wonderful in all it's aspects, it's color and darkness, it's incompleteness and completeness, the work of changing and painting it, and the pleasing pause of just looking at it and being with it, watching the images shift and develop.