In the circles I frequent, we talk a lot about nonprofit technology.

After all, our professional association is the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network, we refer to ourselves as nonprofit technology assistance providers, and this of course blog is called "Technology for the Nonprofit and Philanthropic Sector."

My friend John Lawler (to whom I sometimes refer as "the darling linguist of my heart") once made a pretty convincing argument that written language is a kind of technology.  And of course, stem cell research is a form of technology.  But that's not what we mean by nonprofit technology, even though the nonprofit sector does not lack for projects that focus on either written language or stem cell research.

So I have a nagging feeling that my colleagues and I are making a rather high-handed appropriation of the word "technology."  What we really mean is "information and communication technology," or possibly even "information and communication systems" for the nonprofit sector.  But these just have too many syllables for every day use.

I haven't worked out a way to assuage my nagging feelings, but I'm open to suggestions.

This article was originally published in my blog, "Technology for the Nonprofit and Philanthropic Sector," under a Creative Commons  Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License.