I think I first met Peter Deitz at Web of Change, talking about his work as micro-philanthropy consultant, and his idea to mash up the actionable opportunities on all the platforms for social change. That became Social Actions, a platform where you can find things to do: join an event, sign a petition, donate to a cause, give out a loan, volunteer.

Those things you can do come from a variety of sources, like Care2, GlobalGiving, Kiva, Idealist.org, and starting this week, also from NABUUR, the online volunteer network.

It's the outcome of a meeting Siegfried and I had at NetSquared with Peter, Christine Egger, and Phil Klein in May this year.

Social Actions won several prizes around that time, which really got things moving faster and faster. Amidst the turmoil of migrating NABUUR to Drupal, and Social Actions stepping into a roller-coaster speed-up of development, we managed to output the NABUR volunteer tasks in RSS to feed into the Social Actions search engine.

In the meantime, Social Actions has released a "Related ways to take action" widget that you can put on your blog or website. It will suggest things you can do based on the content of the page, and I have good hopes that that will also help NABUUR tasks get more attention by being listed elsewhere. And hopefully we'll take a next step towards a "world-wide do good" widget to give people a chance to donate, loan, or act.

Peter also has managed to keep the discussion moving about a suitable microformat to add more semantic information to such an RSS feed. That should allow for even more targeted display of opportunities to do good.

A special thanks as well to Billy and Marny and the folks at Techsoup who organised NetSquared. The groundwork for the NABUUR-Social Actions connection was laid out there, and we'll continue to build on that :-)