Will Change.org change...well, anything?

Sonny Cloward, NPower NY

[Ed. Note: Some of the information in this article may be a little dated.  For more on the changes happening at Change.org, read our blog.] 

A little over a month ago, social good networking site Change.org launched with exposure few startups, much less nonprofits (which Change.org is not), could dream of - they got Techcrunched. Lots of do-gooders like me jumped on the site and were presented with the audacious yet simple question: what do you want to change in the world? The premise is pretty straightforward - connect people with one another and organizations to push forward common causes (i.e. changes). I perused the site, thought it was a great idea, didn't dig very deeply, felt a moment of kumbaya with my fellow do-gooders and then quickly forgot about it. And based on Change.org's Alexa traffic rankings, I wasn't alone.

So is Change.org just another fly-by-night project of some well meaning people with a good concept - just badly planned and executed - awaiting a slow descent into the dead pool? The site has a nicely streamlined and accessible UI, so it's obvious someone put some thought and resources into it. Yet it has nothing in the way of features that hook me and keep me engaged and active in issues and people that matter to me (via dashboard, email, or RSS). Or is it, as Matthew from theCoup.org said in the comments on the Techcrunch posting, "yet another website for me to log into? Another place to blog and check messages?" While there's a value-based incentive, we are becoming fatigued by social networking sites and more scrutinizing about how they are relevant in our lives and how we engage in them. In a landscape where there are really only two social networking players (MySpace and Facebook), where thousands of nonprofits already have pages where they connect with supporters - not to mention at least a dozen other comparatively minor social good networking sites - why Change.org?

2People.org – Climatize Your Network

Nathan Rosquist, The Interra Project
Reprinted from WorldChanging with permission

2people.org, a social networking site in the works by West Seattle transplant Phil Mitchell, is what he calls the “MySpace of climate action.” What sets it apart, however, from other social-networking sites (Be Green, Idealist.org, and Change.org) is its focus on action and commitment.

“We’re an online citizen network committed to closing the gap between what’s scientifically necessary and what’s politically possible. If you’re looking for ways to get involved and people and projects to connect with, you can find them here.”

Second Life as a Platform for Online Community Building

Andrew Hoppin, NASA Ames Research Center and YearlyKos Convention/Bloggerpower.org

Excerpted from Corante with permission

Second Life's greatest utility, to me, is that it better mimics the experience of being offline in the same room together than any other online medium. The experience of interacting there is vastly more social and immersive than, say, an online blogging community. High trust relationships are built quickly. Think Meetup, except that you don't need 40 people to be in the same place on the planet to have an effective Meetup.

Second Life is also a rich medium for content creation that can be "surfaced" to the Web for broader exposure.  More than 100 people participated in an anti-war "virtual march on virtual Capital Hill" that we organized between CodePink and RootsCamp in Second Life recently, and one of our volunteers made a video of the event that went mildly viral with over 50,000 views. The cost of creating it was $0.

NpTech Tagging Community

Marnie Webb, TechSoup

Beth Kanter, Beth’s Blog

Tagging facilitates the sharing of information among members of a distributed community, and it can also help form or catalyze a community. In some respects the NpTech tag serves as a beacon to attract people interested in sharing resources on nonprofit technology and makes it easier to form connections and relationships with new people. The NpTech tag is also easy to use - the services are free, and many people have already incorporated services like del.icio.us and Flickr into their knowledge management practices. Furthermore, many tagging services encourage connections and conversations around particular tags via embedded social networking features. For more on this, see
Marnie’s blog, and Beth's NpTech Tag presentation.