Net2 has a particular, personal resonance for me.

I started CompuMentor in 1987 after spending time on the Well, one of the first online communities. I met Howard Rheingold and John Coate there, and a bunch of other really smart people. Most importantly, at least from my standpoint, was that the Well seemed to me an inflection point, a new game in town, a "moment".  

It wasn't about the technology. For me, it's never about the technology. It was about social relations. You could talk to people in a different way; there was a different resonance to the conversation and because of that, different resources could be 'liberated' for social change. CompuMentor--which was based on the simple idea that we could create a viable structure for high level, in person technology volunteering at nonprofit sites--was an attempt to act on that idea.

18 years later, our organization has evolved in some surprising ways. I'm a sports nut and one of my favorite quotes is from the great baseball general manger Branch Rickey (the guy who took a chance on Jackie Robinson) who said, "Luck is the residue of design." We have had a flexible but pretty sound design and we have been pretty lucky. The product philanthropy program that lives at http://www.techsoup.org provides us with a revenue engine other nonprofits in our space don't have. Our job, as I see it, is to run a great program, derive substantial revenue and apply that revenue to projects that no one would fund, at least not at the outset.

Net2 is, at least from my pov, the Well redux. There's another inflection point staring us in the face, another wonderful moment to explore and exploit. John Markoff of the NY Times likes to talk about the 4th platform in the history of computing, i.e. mainframe>mini>pc>web. I agree and would stress that the importance of this shift cannot be overestimated for nonprofits and other social agents. For 18 years, we've been working on access, largely by trying to lower financial barriers to getting 'stuff'. I wouldn't for a second declare victory in this effort, but I will declare detente; there's a lot of 'stuff' out there for low cost and it's possible to conduct a gap analysis and fill the gaps.

While we, and others, continue to work on gap-filling, there's a tremendous new opportunity. What stands between npos and much greater mission effectiveness is no longer about money. There are still major barriers--time, knowhow, vision leap to  mind--but they don't necessarily cost dollars to solve. And it gets even better, because while the previous paradigms played to nonprofits' weakness--near-zero access fo financial capital--the new platform plays to their great and unique strength--high access to human capital.

In the end analysis, nonprofits and ngos build communities and are sustained by communities. The new platform and the new tools are all about communities. Wikipedia is a community, Craigslist is a community, Moveon is a community, eBay for crying out loud is a community. The blogosphere is a huge, fractious, disorganized community. The capacity to create content and easily share it with others are the bricks and mortar of community building, and nonprofits know a lot about communities (even if a lot of nonprofits don't know that they know it, but that's another blog entry).

So that's the moment, that's the opportunity. If the Wikipedia community can build Wikipedia with the smallest handful of grant dollars and paid staff, what could the AIDs community do if it embraced these tools? What could the peace community do? The environmental community?

And there's even more good news (hey, I'm a regular Little Mary Sunshine on this topic). It's already happening. Check out the case histories on this site--Net2 in Action--which are all smaller scale versions of the big dogs like Wikipedia and all focused on social change activity. If we, through Net2, can spotlight these successes, raise them up,  encourage later adopters to take the plunge, bring infrastructural resources (including dollars) into the mix, inspire/coordinate the efforts of the already substantial tech-helper community (that word again, but go to http://www.nten.org) , tap the brains of the technorati and the skills of the Open Source developers...well wouldn't that be interesting?

But every silver lining has a cloud, and one thing that has been happening is an odd and shortsighted manifestation of the unsavory phenomenon best described as "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."  Shared antipathy can be a powerful bond, even between people or institutions that are fundamentally opposed.  Nick Carr shake hands with Clear Channel! Drinks will be served on the patio and you can get pleasantly stiff discussing what a dastardly danger to us all is Wikipedia, that dastardly perverter of John Seigenthaler's biography.

More tomorrow (Little Mary will not be in evidence).