Flickr Photo: ChotdaAs many of you know, I love bacon. Ask me for my recipe for maple and bacon cake (with maple frosting!) some time. Maybe one reason I love bacon so much is because Bacon is the source of one of my favorite sayings. In 1597, Sir Francis Bacon said:

Knowledge is power.

It's practically a moral code at my house. But I've also been thinking about it in the context of nptech lately.

When the Internet first went mainstream, there was a lot of talk about how it would democratize information: more of us would be able to access more information more easily and we'd all become more powerful. Access to information is the key to Thomas Friedman's argument about how and why the Berlin Wall fell and why China is opening up, for example -- and communications technologies are behind all that.

In the early 2000s, I thought a lot about this. Yes, we did know more. More people were able to share what they knew, and more of us could access it. But it wasn't the dynamic, sweeping, grand experience that a phrase like "democratize information" might suggest. Here's why:

1. Lots of information opened up, but lots more is still locked behind walls in old delivery models. You still have to subscribe to many publications. You have to travel to get particular volumes or pay lots of money for experts to tell you what you need to know.
2. Access is not pervasive enough. The folks who, arguably, most need free and easy access to information and knowledge have the least access to the chanels that can deliver it. If you are poor in urban America, or if you live in rural areas, you can't afford or simply cannot get Internet access.

In the last year though, we've seen signs that the democratization of information is about to happen in a very real, rapid, Founding Fathers kind of way.

Social media has, of course, made sharing information easier than ever before. More importantly, the values of social media have begun to pervade all forms of media -- including very traditional places, like Harvard Law School. When an institution as venerated as Harvard Law, with so much intellectual property, decides to give it all to the public, that says a lot.

Secondly, access is getting easier. Say what you will about the "crumbling" muni wifi programs, wifi in some form is coming to your city sometime very soon. When Google, Comcast, Intel, and Time Warner get together to build a nation-wide WiMax network, you know that they mean business. It's not going to solve all the access problems, but it will explode how, where, and who connects to the Internet.

What does this mean for nonprofits? That's hard to say. Here are a two things I would start with:

1. Let go. Many of our organizations are organized around the notion that we have information that people need. We always will be. But more and more of our stakeholders will already know what we have to say. What they will WANT is a way to EXPERIENCE the information: to personalize it and share it with others.
2. Be transparent. People's expectations about how much and what kind of information they need to know about your organization will continue to expand. They will look for it, and they will expect to find it.

What would you add to the list?