The Vodafone Americas Foundation announces its Wireless Innovation Challenge, a new competition that seeks to identify and fund the best innovations using wireless related technology to address critical social issues around the world. Learn more!
NetSquared is an initiative ofTechSoup
NetSquared enables social benefit organizations to leverage the tools of the social web.
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BookCrossing
Supporting organization:
Humankind Systems, Inc.
URL:
bookcrossing.com
Project Description:
This free service enables anyone to tag a book with a unique I.D. number that is registered with the BookCrossing web site, and then to "release" the book by giving it to somone else or by leaving it in a public place to be discovered by a stranger. The recipient or finder of a released book can then go to the BookCrossing web site and read about the book's previous travels, adding notes of his/her own about how it was found, whether he/she enjoyed reading it, and how he/she plans to release it to the next reader. In addition to the basic activities of registering, reading, and releasing books, the web site has been a springboard for special projects such as book rings, online literary discussions, face to face meetups, and special themed releases in which books are given away to complement an occasion or location.
Points of interest:
One of BookCrossing's taglines is "generosity is addictive" - another is "more like giving, less like keeping." All of this sharing is mediated through a web site, in which participants can track how many books they have distributed, how far the books have travelled, and how many different readers a single copy of a book has encountered.What we are seeing here is an enjoyable and scalable way of building social capital, in which sharing with strangers can be a hobby. Nonprofit and philanthropic organizations that go online to help achieve their missions need to learn lessons from the BookCrossing community about making generosity an exhilarating experience.
