Building community in your area? Check out the Community Organizers Handbook. Includes everything you need to start and grow a NetSquared Local group or any other community-powered program.
NetSquared is an initiative ofTechSoup
NetSquared enables social benefit organizations to leverage the tools of the social web.
Social Source Foundation | David Geilhufe, Co-Founder
What's *really* new on the Web, as opposed to buzzwords and soundbites?:
Technology is better approximating how face-to-face communities really work and we are still in an experimentation phase. Innovations in just the last year take this technology that approximates how face-to-face communities work and allows it to scale. Human-scale, face-to-face communities might only work with a 1,000 individuals, innovations like tags, RSS, trust solutions, identity solutions, etc, are allowing much larger groups of people to approximate a face-to-face community.
Which tools best embody the new opportunities from your point of view and why?:
In technology, tools evolve and change. Unlike a hammer, on the web, the tools evolve every month. When was the last major evolution of a hammer? This means we shouldn't talk about tools or software, but we should talk about people organizations, communities and ecosystems that create, sustain and manage the evolution of tools.
One of the most exciting ecosystems is coming out of the intersection between the CiviCRM, CivicSpace and Drupal communities. Nonprofits and NGOs are starting to build on a common technology platform and intermediaries like the Social Source Foundation and CivicSpace Labs have been created to take a single non-profit's solution and make it available to thousands of other non-profits through open source licensing and a network of software developers and consultants.
The new opportunity is not a tool in this case, but a cost- and time- efficient distribution method for a continuously evolving tool set.
Who's doing the best work with the new tools (technically or in terms of social benefit or both)?:
The best work is coming from two directions. The first direction is understanding nonprofit needs, translating them into "web 2.0" concepts and figuring out what technologies meet those needs. Folks like ONE/Northwest with their database program and CompuMentor with Consultant Commons are great examples of this approach.
In the middle of nonprofit needs in search of technology solutions (direction 1) and nonprofit solutions in search of adopters (direction 2), are intermediaries like Aspiration with their Nonprofit Software Survey and CompuMentor with NetSquared.
What's the bad news? What are the greatest barriers preventing web-based technology from producing social change?:
The bad news is distribution and adoption. The commercial technology industry is predicated on 3 to 5 year adoption cycles which sustain the evolution of technology tools. Huge non-profits with huge budgets can play in this world, but the vast majority of community based agencies and grassroots groups experience a 10 to 15 year adoption cycle. We still have small grassroots groups struggling to effectively deploy basic database technologies.
For large non-profits, commercial firms will do the work of an intermediary... training, education, marketing, consulting, support in deployment of new technologies. They do this because their is money to be made.
But the vast majority of the nonprofit sector is being redlined when it comes to web-based technologies. Just like poor communities didn't get broadband telecom services from big corporations because there was no money to be made, community-based and grassroots groups are not being served by commercial firms.
Without a structure of intermediaries providing training, education, marketing, consulting and support in the deployment of new technologies, the backbone of social change--- community-based and grassroots organizations-- will not have access to the technologies that could offer them new, often more efficient and effective, opportunities to create social change.
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