Sunwheel is the operating name of my consulting activities, as well as a place I hope to use to place some essays I've been working on regarding technology and nonprofit organizations.

Those consulting activities revolve around helping organizations, primarily in the arts and often community-based, come to grips with both what they want to do with technology and how to do it. I am primarily interested in working with small to mid-sized organizations, but look at things on a case-by-case basis.

I believe in the empowerment model, so I'm not really into setting up situations where I need to have an ongoing hand in things. I'm happy to be an ongoing resource, but not someone who, say, updates web pages, scripts, etc.

That said, my services generally revolve around the following areas:

• Website or online analysis. This involves taking a close look at an organization's site or overall online activities to consider both how well things are going overall and, perhaps more importantly, how what exists matches up with and conveys the organization's mission. This can be something as simple as a one-shot report, or can go deeper and extend into corrective steps or future planning.
  
  
• Technology assessment, planning, and/or deployment. This can involve an assessment of where an organization's technology is currently at, where it might be going, actually working through the purchasing and deployment aspect, or a mixture of all or any of these things. I am not a vendor and I hold no particular prejudices regarding this or that brand or type of technology -- I believe in defining what will work best for a particular organization and situation.
  
  
• Facilitation of meetings to define needs and goals. I have done this in a variety of situations, from gatherings in Africa and India where people from dozens of countries worked to find and define a common ground, to working with the staff of a particular organization to examine workload and flow. One of my strengths is the ability to be extremely flexible in such situations, to work with various personalities and agendas, and to adjust as needed to whatever comes up while still moving toward the defined goals for the meeting. I have worked with people from a wide variety of cultural and artistic backgrounds, and enjoy this immensely.
  
  
• Workshops and presentations. I have done dozens of workshops on technology planning, web building, online marketing, etc., and presentations on all of these as well as technology funding, staff technology needs and training, the changing landscape of technology and how it affects nonprofits, the development of online arts activitiy, and so on.
  
  
• Web design and creation. I can do this myself in certain situations, but will preferably work closely with an organization to define and create a site and an overall plan for maintaining and expanding it.
  
  
• Database design and other scripting or programming activities. I can work in a variety of database formats, create SQL scripts, and also do Cold Fusion scripting. This is placed last in my list as I am not generally looking for this kind of work, but will do it in specific situations when needed.
  
  

I have worked with a variety of clients, including the Ford Foundation, Flint Cultural Center, National Endowment for the Arts, the Michigan Association of Community Arts Agencies, Artserve Michigan, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Mid-America Arts Alliance, The Texarkana Regional Arts and Humanities Council, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Triangle Arts Trust of Britain and several of its members: Khoj International Artists Workshop (India), the Caribbean Cultural Center (Trinidad) and the Kuona Trust (Kenya.)

Here is a with a link to my home page, which is rather out of date, but which has a resume.

At this point, there are only a couple of pertinent links, I expect to expand and flesh a lot of things out this winter.

The first link leads to some presentations on technology planning I did for Technology & Nonprofits conference, in NYC in February 1999 and in Chicago in May 1999. Each is different.

The second is to the online courseware for "Rewiring the Arts Organization" which is a class I team-taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Winter/Spring 1999. This one definitely needs cleanup, but it's got the best resources right now. I intend to extrapolate the information away from a calendar-based structure to a more subject-based approach.

Finally, there's this other area where I will dump miscellaneous things. Right now there's a short article I did as a handout for a conference held by the Illinois Arts Alliance in May 1999.

And I do promise that a few far more recent things will go up around the beginning of the new year!

Please feel free to contact me at any time for more details about any of my services or activities.

Complaints to /dev/null, which is where the null devil lives.

Joe Matuzak
jmatuzak@sunwheel.org

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