At this summer's CTCnet Conference the thing I most took away--or rather, repeated to the most number of people--was something said by the keynote speaker, Ami Dar, the creator of Idealist.org.

He was asked by someone in the crowd something along the lines of "In what areas do you want to see nonprofits develop into the future?"

Ami Dar responded that an area that he saw as important was acknowledgement of nonprofit competition. His brilliant reasoning was this:

In for-profit companies, everyone accepts that competition takes place; it's a given. Businesses identify the areas in which they compete, and from this, also gain an understanding of the areas in which they don't compete. In the areas in which they don't compete, businesses can cooperate. Nonprofits, in general, are not aware of, or acknowledge that they compete (and they do), and because of this, they cannot collabrate as efficiently or as effectively as possible.

Last weekend I took 3 members from the club to a different club in the East Valley conglomerate. The program that they were running was called St.R.U.T. or Students Recycling Used Technology. The members had a chance to learn about the internal workings of a computer. How they go together and how they work. Then they had the opportunity to take an operating computer apart and examine all the parts and then to put it back together. Once together they were given a monitor, keyboard, and a mouse. The kids then had to see if the computer would start up and if not then with the help of the Tech Team leaders they trouble shoot the problems. The best part of all is when they were done they got to take the computers home with them when they were done. I was also allows to take apart a computer and take it with me. I am going to give it away to one of the members who could really use the computer.