Alexandra Samuel, Social Signal

Alexandra gave a presentation on this topic at last year's Nonprofit Technology Conference. You can see what's scheduled for the 2007 NTC here. (And yes, Alexandra will be there with an update.)

Yes, businesses hype Web 2.0. But nonprofit organizations and advocacy and community groups are in an even better position to take advantage of the move towards bottom-up,
user-driven, collaborative communities.

That's because nonprofits are all about connecting with people. Nonprofit groups live or die based on their ability to communicate complex issues to large audiences, engage supporters in their cause, and foster collaboration within and across organizations.

The latest generation of web tools offers ever-expanding ways for nonprofits to extend and deepen their collaborative capacity. To understand these tools and learn how to use them effectively, you need to understand the three basic building blocks of the most exciting nonprofit technology projects:

RSS (really simple syndication): A format for storing online information in a way that makes it readable by lots of different kinds of software. Many blogs and websites have RSS feeds, which are constantly updated versions of the site's latest content in a form that can be read by a newsreader or aggregator (a program for reading lots of blogs in one place).

Tags: Keywords that describe the content of a website, bookmark, photo, or blog post. You can assign multiple tags to the same online resource and different people can assign different tags to the same resource. Tag-enabled web services include social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, photo sharing sites like Flickr, and blog tracking sites like Technorati. Tags make it easy to organize, retrieve, and discover information.

Social bookmarking: Social bookmarking services let people store their favorite websites online and with other people, making them a great way to discover new sites and people who share your interests.

All three of these building blocks unlock momentous possibilities for collaboration, both within your organization and across different organizations. Let's look at two examples:

NPTech tag

If you're responsible for solving tech problems, finding new tech tools, or planning tech strategy in your organization, you may have the sneaking feeling that somewhere out there is another person who has already found the answers you need. NPTech is a very simple way to find those solutions. NPTech is a tag that a bunch of people decided to use to mark any web resource, blog post, or photo that had to do with nonprofit technology.

Some of these people use del.icio.us to save helpful webpages, and when they save a webpage related to nonprofit technology, they tag it NPTech. As a result the del.icio.us NPTech page is a great collection of resources that anyone can access. When these people blog about nonprofit technology, they tag it NPTech. As a result there's a Technorati page with all kinds of blog posts about nonprofit technology, as well as links from del.icio.us and photos from Flickr.

And thanks to RSS, you don't have to visit Technorati or del.icio.us everyday to stay on top of all these great resources. If you subscribe to the RSS feed for the NPTech page in these services, new resources will show up in whatever you use to read RSS feeds.

The great lessons of the NPTech project are

1. These tools make online collaboration CHEAP and EASY.
2. You don't need to get everyone to agree to play nicely together. If you have some people who you want to share resources with, just pick a tag and start using it. Others will join in if it's useful.

Let me give you a more ambitious example:

Telecentre.org (Full disclosure: I worked on this project)

Telecentre.org is a venture of Canada's International Development Agency that is also supported by Microsoft and the Swiss government. Telecentres are community technology centers, and in many developing nations and in rural areas are often the only way people can access the Internet. Sometimes they provide phone service and technology training too. Telecentres are supported by various regional networks around the world, like CTCNet in the United States. But until now there's been no formal way for a network of telecentres in Africa to share resources with a network of telecentres in Latin America. Telecentre.org aims to change that by providing lots of training and networking opportunities and an online network to support learning and exchange among telecentre networks.

Any telecentre network in the world can create its own website as part of the telecentre network. And any telecentre training event can create a website too. All these individual sites are tied together via RSS and tags.

For example when telecentre.org conducted a major gathering at the World Summit on the Information Society, it set up a separate site at wsis.telecentre.org. The main telecentre site then subscribed to the RSS feed from the WSIS site and republished selected content onto its main site. This site was tagged "WSIS" so it would be easy to organize and find on the main site.

The great lessons of this project are:

1. RSS can provide an easy, low-effort way to tie diverse organizations' websites into a loose network, in which each site selects the highlights from other organizations' sites that are most relevant to their own members and remixes them into a fresh take.
2. As RSS makes it easy to add more and more content to your site, you have to think about how to organize all this shared content so it's useful and accessible. Tagging can provide an easy way to organize content into loose categories.

I hope both of these examples will inspire you to take a fresh look at ways you can collaborate informally and formally with other nonprofits. And I hope they'll encourage you to explore the wide range of Web 2.0 tools that can expand your communications with supporters, staff, and members of the public.