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.
Benetech | Jim Fruchterman, President
What's *really* new on the Web, as opposed to buzzwords and soundbites?:
Even though Web 2.0 is both a buzzword and a soundbite, I think that it does represent a general movement that is going to lead to very exciting things. Blogs, tagging, decentralization and open content are all examples of trends that are really going to shift things. The more you use these tools, the more you can see how useful they are, and how the combination of many hands makes light information work. Actually, we’ll building value in ways that were not conceivable with the old web.
Which tools best embody the new opportunities from your point of view and why?:
Google: we may be worried, but they are still not evil! We don’t think of Google as new anymore, but looking at all of the stuff they’ve rolled out lately, there’s a whole lot of new stuff going on.
Flickr: tagging plus Creative Commons. Love it!
Creative Commons/Wikipedia: the open content movement is the analog of the open source movement is the analog of the open technology movement (whenever we decide to name it).
iTunes: figuring out how to make cheap music distribution acceptable to both consumers and the music industry.
Who's doing the best work with the new tools (technically or in terms of social benefit or both)?:
Google: technically: they gathering incredible brainpower to themselves. Can they avoid wasting it? So far, so good. One example: by opening the API to GoogleMaps, they’ve created incredible opportunities for socially oriented knowledge creation.
Ubuntu: Mark Shuttleworth has backed this Linux distribution. Such a cool, socially oriented project. A major part of making Linux mainstream. Wish I was doing it!
What's the bad news? What are the greatest barriers preventing web-based technology from producing social change?:
What’s the great barrier to producing social change in general? Funding availability, especially to the most capable and dynamic groups. The web-based modifier doesn’t change that fact.
A second issue is the difficulty in designing effective software for the social sector. The sector is reasonably balkanized, and market incentives don’t provide enough push to make better software, with a few exceptions (i.e., fund raising software). Plus, the users are not developers, and so it’s hard to understand what mission-critical tasks the software can effectively assist with.
Distribution in the broadest sense is the third big barrier. Building it doesn’t make them come, generally. Marketing doesn’t come naturally to most social change groups.
IP rights are the fourth significant barrier. When the money is not there, owners of intellectual property believe they cannot afford to go after socially oriented applications.
Although these are all barriers, people are working on each one of them and making progress. We just need to make even more progress!
Subscribe
NetSquared Newsletters:
>>Subscribe to NetSquared News and other email updates.
NetSquared Community Blog:
>> Subscribe to the Community Blog RSS feed.
>> Subscribe to the Community Blog comments RSS feed.
