In Philadelphia, a fair number of the better private secondary schools are run by Quakers. I graduated from one of them, the William Penn Charter School, in 1985, and benefited not only from a good education, but also from the school's forward-leaning approach to technology, even back then. I saw my first PC (actually an Apple II) in the school's computer lab in 1980, when I was in seventh grade, alongside several pre-historic VAC minicomputers donated by alumni affiliated with the Dow Chemical company. My friends and I spent a lot of hours poking around on the Apple IIs, learning BASIC and Pascal, a little bit of assembly language, and enough about the disc operating system and cryptography to break the copy protection on our favorite commercial videogames.

Today, Penn Charter remains at the forefront of technology education. I just received an email from Michael Moulton, the technology director, regarding Generation Blend. Among other things, he pointed me to the notes to a presentation he gave on the connection between Quaker philosophy and Web 2.0 technology, in which he observes how the spontaneous, informal culture of Quaker society and religion are consonant with the emergent, open and participative nature of collaborative content and social computing. Whether this has any direct benefit to the school, which already enjoys a wealth of resources and a talented student body, remains to be seen. However, it does underscore a fundamental point: organizations that already embrace open cultures are likely to encounter fewer "hidden" issues in the deployment of social computing technologies, be they generational divides or other issues in management and practices.