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Involver: How Nonprofits Can Create Video Campaigns for Social Networks.
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NetSquared enables social benefit organizations to leverage the tools of the social web.
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OpenPlans.org
Voting Summary (Elevator Pitch):
OpenPlans is a free, hosted, and integrated suite of web-based tools intended to give active citizens the resources they need to organize virtually to effect real world change.
Supporting organization:
The Open Planning Project
URL:
http://topp.openplans.org
City:
New York
State/Region:
NY
Country:
USA
Project Vision Statement & Potential Social Impact:
Openplans.org seeks to bring powerful online social organizing tools to all. While Dean could afford consultants to set up his Dean space, the average cause is continually under resourced and not tech-savvy. We seek to drastically lower the barrier to entry for activists and community organizing by providing a completely hosted platform, free to use and free of advertisement. Just as sourceforge.net drastically increased the number of open source software projects by hosting tools, so too do we seek to let activists focus on creating change, not on the pain points of setting up technology.
Our initial releases aim to provide baseline web 2.0 tools. Initially this is collaborative editing of documents and web pages (wiki through wysiwyg interfaces), email lists/forums, group management and security, easy 'branding' of tools, blogging and shared to-do lists. Jargon-free documentation and user friendly interfaces ensure that anyone can quickly start effecting change.
Central to our longer term plans is encouraging open source concepts in organizing. Just as open source software benefits from re-use of components, so to will we enable any existing content to be marked as a template. The to-do list that guided a successful earth day beach pick-up in Pawtucket can be re-used in San Diego. This enables a persistence of information that is often lost when planning documents remain in individual in-boxes and hard drives, both for the group that created them and for other groups to learn from them. Social-networking tools will facilitate connections across projects, facilitating a meta-social network for those seeking to get things done.
Success will initially be measure by the number of active projects and users, but in the medium term we will measure success by the concrete outcomes from plans made on our site.
Sustainability (financial) model:
Though we've been called a "a sugar daddy funded non-profit open source utopia", OpenPlans.org is run more like a start-up than a traditional non-profit. It is incubated by The Open Planning Project, a 501(c)3, allowing us to focus on building great technology, figuring out a business model after reaching success. Though it sounds counter-intuitive, many internet start-ups are run this way.
We are investigating several ideas for business models. We will not compromise our commitment to providing baseline tools free of charge and advertising for non-commercial purposes. Instead we are considering pursuing contracts to build specific tools on top of our platform, letting users upgrade to 'premium' features (like using one's own domain name or having more than 2 gigabytes of space) for additional yet reasonable cost, and using the same software stack to run a site that lets commercial entities coordinate (as wikia.com has done with wikipedia's software). For organizations looking to have large-scale self-hosted deployments, we would provide enterprise level support and services. The long term vision of TOPP is to incubate several self-sustaining open source projects where profits are re-invested in to seed new endeavors.
Potential obstacles:
Distribution is perhaps the biggest obstacle, getting awareness of our tools and attracting users. We plan to partner with other organizations, and build in features that encourage awareness to spread through social networks (both online and traditional). Also, while we actively sought user stories from diverse sources to guide tool development, selection, and specification, there is always a danger that web applications will not be easily adopted by groups more custom to face-to-face organizing.
Resource Needs:
Financial resources obviously always help us move faster. Past that, the biggest anticipated needs focus on marketing, trainers to help others, and raising awareness. We have been intentionally keeping our work under the radar, except to the open source communities we are working in (for example there are 10 Plone-related groups, including several planning code sprints). TOPP is working to grow its network of contacts, but it is impossible to have individual conversations with all potential users. Outside organizations willing to help with tutorials, screencasts, blog posts, and feedback, focused on their particular use cases, will help us immensely.
Key Milestones:
Our team works in three week iterations, and recently we have shifted from working on all projects at once to focusing on one to two 'products' in our overall suite each cycle. This is because the current state of the site does not reflect the vast amount of development activity from the past six months. our individual products are approaching readiness, and the process of 'going live' is always more involved than one imagines.
In the next iteration we will deploy our 'task tracker' application, a shared set of to-do lists with a very Web 2.0 AJAX interface, that lets projects set up tasks and allows volunteers to claim responsibility for issues.
Following that will be a series of long overdue UI improvements along with a new wysiwyg editor, to make our wiki/document collaboration software truly compelling.
Listen, our mailing list/forum tool will deploy with a number of improvements, including new list types to better handle the fact we live in a spam-filled world.
Currently scheduled for the final iteration of the next 90 days is a multi-user deployment of Wordpress that integrates with our user account authentication. This is an aggressive schedule, but reflects deploying tools that have actually been under development for quite some time.
Project Summary:
OpenPlans is a free, hosted, and integrated suite of web-based tools intended to give active citizens the resources they need to organize virtually to effect real world change. OpenPlans hopes to decrease the barriers to entry for community members as they collaborate to improve their society. As an easy-to-use integrated on-line environment, OpenPlans offers proven, useful tools -- web space, wikis, email lists, forums, etc. -- free of charge and free of advertising. Users can form groups, find other collaborators, and use the tools to facilitate real world interactions. Uniting mature open source solutions, integrating with the latest web 2.0 tools, and developing new technologies, OpenPlans will evolve to meet the needs of its users.
