The value of nonprofit "pracademics" seems self-evident to me. Highly effective practitioners in our sector and rigorous researchers in the academy should be able to communicate with and learn from each other.
Of course, I'm all for talking across boundaries - having been involved in any number of strange juxtapositions, ranging from interdisciplinary studies in the academy, to interfaith dialogue, to nonprofit technology. I'm an old hand at crossing organizational cultures, but I have to acknowledge that there are a lot of difficulties and barriers.
I try to refrain from harranguing professional researchers about how much my fellow practitioners and I have to teach them. However, I feel fairly free to nag nonprofit practitioners about learning from experienced researchers. For example, sometimes nonprofit organizations are interested in whether their web sites are useful and appealing to visitors, so they decide to create an online survey. It just so happens that creating a valid survey instrument and analyzing the results is a special skill set. No matter how smart executive directors (or webmasters) are, most of them lack the training and experience. In cases such as these, it makes a lot of sense to think in terms of pracademics.
My friend John McNutt is certainly doing his part, having founded an email distribution list for nonprofit pracademics and another for nonprofit informatics research. I haven't yet persuaded him to register for the upcoming Nonprofit Technology Conference and help me with the task of nagging practitioners and recruiting researchers to the cause - but I note with great pleasure that the conference will have a panel on "The State of the Art in Nonprofit Technology," and that a call for scholarly papers has been issued. Kudos to Katrin Verclas, Michael Gilbert, and Paul-Brian McInerney for taking the initiative on that! Moreover, the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network and the national NPower network are working together on a field evaluation project, in an effort to measure the effectiveness of technology assistance for nonprofits.
We're definitely making progress. I hope that the next breakthough will be to come up with a more felicitous word than "pracademics!"
