In 1999 I was serving as the information systems manager of Family Service of Greater Boston, a large private social service agency affiliated with the United Way of Massachusetts Bay. Before I was hired at FSGB 1997, the agency had gone to considerable effort to think about its strategic technology plan.  A couple of years on, things were going very well indeed.  Therefore my boss, Bill Chrisemer (then director of administration and finance, and a jewel among bosses - very smart, sane, and saintly) and I were invited to give a presentation on FSGB's strategic technology plan at a daylong workshop given by UWMB's Teaming For Technology program for a cluster of affiliated agencies.

Apparently, a number of our colleagues in other agencies thought that the presentation that Bill and I gave was helpful, so we were invited to give it again to yet another cluster of affiliates.  I had a chance to sit in on all of that day's workshops, and to chat over lunch with a large table of nonprofit workers from other agencies.  Most of them were not techies, but they all grasped the importance of using technology strategically.  We devoted most of the time allotted for lunch to comparing notes about local technology consultants, services, and products.

During the afternoon of the workshop, I had an attack of modesty about the effectiveness of our PowerPoint presentation, which did not seem to compare favorably with the benefits of schmoozing over lunch with other nonprofit professionals who were fighting in the trenches.  Chatting with Chris O'Keeffe, the senior director of  community benefits from UWMB who had made the workshop possible,  I pointed this out, and asked if they could follow up with an email distribution list or perhaps a series of brown-bag lunches.  (Later, this would be known as "building a peer learning community," but at the time I had never heard the phrase.)

Chris thought it was a good idea, especially the email distribution list, but said it might be a while before he could free up somebody's time at UWMB to make this happen.  Having discovered a free web-based email distribution list service (the now-defunct Listbot - we moved over to YahooGroups in 2001), I boasted that I could set one up in five minutes and run it myself.  Having received Chris's blessing, I proceeded to do that, inviting staff members from the various UWMB affiliates, and some others in the human service sector in Boston.

Within two weeks, we had over a hundred members.  It quickly became clear that a sizable minority was not really interested in information technology as such, but it data collection and analysis for purposes of outcomes measurement, program evaluation, or research.  Therefore, a separate list that focused on Best Practices was spun off, as was a list for discussion of  programmatic and clinical issues in Human Services. 

Around the same time, someone from the Massachusetts Audobon Society wanted to join, and a human services professional in Estonia also signed up - so our focus very quickly broadened from the technology headaches of United Way affiliates in Massachusetts to a broad range of issues pertaining to information technology for the nonprofit sector.

Now in 2005, the Information Systems Forum has (nearly as I can tell) about 2,700 members from about 60 countries.  It functions as a kind of benign international conspiracy to bridge the nonprofit digital divide in ways that range from the significant to the trivial. (It is, of course, far from being the only such conspiracy; see the N-TEN web site for many more examples.) The Information Systems Forum takes a fair amount of my time to maintain, but has become a paradigmatic example of a community that gives back far more than I put into it.