It turns out that there are a number of books with this title (and variations on the theme), but here is the version of the story that I know:
A cultural anthropologist went to do field research in a culture that had had little contact with western science.  He was particularly anxious to study the cosmology of this group.  He queried one of the tribal elders, who told him, "The world rests on the backs of four elephants."

The anthropologist immediately followed up with, "What are the elephants standing on?"

"A giant turtle."*

"What holds up the giant turtle?"

"There's another turtle underneath it."

"Yes, but what - "

The tribal elder sighed, and replied, "It's turtles all the way down."
So why am I telling you this? Because I feel a little like that benighted anthropologist.

On Monday evening, I attended one of Organizers' Collaborative's peer learning events, so that I could learn about using  cascading style sheets (CSS) with content management systems (CMS) from Ben Di Maggio.  Virtually all of the attendees had much more coding experience than I do, so I felt like I was starting from far behind.

My strongest asset as a learner in the field of technology (and therefore as a person who helps to bridge the gap for nonprofits) is also the one with the greatest potential to annoy presenters:  I'm capable of raising my hand, admitting that I don't understand, and asking if we can go back to the point where I got lost.

So my question was something along these lines:  "Let's say that I'm a 65-year-old technophobic social worker.  I just went to GoDaddy and bought the www.technophobicsocialworker.org domain name.  What do I need?  Do I have to buy applications?  Do I have to install them?  Do they live on my desktop or on a server somewhere?  How do I get started?"

If Ben was annoyed, he didn't show it; he was actually very gracious about it, and did his best to address my questions.

Ben (along with a lot of the coders in the room) is living in a universe where they know that the turtles are already installed and form a firm foundation for their everyday coding activities.  They know this tacitly, because things work in a fairly orderly manner, and they have experience adding turtles to the stack or moving the elephants around. 

My challenge is to put on pith helmet, go out into the field, and take the risk of displaying my ignorance by asking foolish questions about what is holding the world up. I need to make tacit knowledge explicit, a process that is often embarassing for me, and one that can seem entirely superfluous to those who are far more knowledgeable.

If I can learn to understand and operate successfully in the world that is resting on the backs of  elephants and turtles, and help other outsiders to do the same, then I'm doing my job.  But I'd like to be a lot better at framing the questions (and learning from the answers) when I approach the tribal elders for instruction about the way of the world.


* The novelist Terry Pratchett has made wonderful (fictional) use of this meme, and points out,

"The world rides through space on the back of a turtle. This is one of the great ancient world myths, found wherever men and turtles are gathered together; the four elephants were an Indo-European sophistication. The idea has been lying in the lumber room of legend for centuries. All I had to do was grab it and run away before the alarms went off."

For more background on cascading style sheets, see Ben Di Maggio's excellent list of CSS resources on the web.