• A simple example: If you search for 'PHP' you get web/programming volunteer opportunities, and also results for the Phillipines, whose currency is abbreviated as 'PHP'. Most people want one or the other! You can run a search, 'tune' it, and enjoy the benefits of a clutter-free personal RSS feed. Same goes for a Java programmer who wants to help out but keeps seeing actions related to coffee or the island in Indonesia.

• A medium example: A volunteer coordinator working on an emotionally charged issue wants to provide a search page for volunteers that only returns results that they think help the cause, not hurt it. The coordinator crafts a search, tunes it, and drops it in the Social Actions widget they're already using. Voila!

• A "shoot the moon / pie in the sky" example: The teams responsible for the big volunteer and donation opportunities portals out there integrate the Social Actions Tuner into their websites. Since they can track users and their clicks, they could automatically provide personalized, filtered lists of actions to individuals and groups - seamlessly and behind the scenes. The result is that people find more actions they're interested in sooner.

Why do we think this is cool?

On the surface it's a cool toy that might be useful to people who are really dedicated to searching out the latest and greatest volunteer and donation opportunities. The interface is open and ready for other apps to use it, just like Social Actions. Social Actions Tuner could be hooked up to any tool out there - any of the other social actions entries, any of the big sites like Volunteer Match and Idealist, anywhere people are viewing and searching social actions.

For programmers, it is also an open interface (API) of tools. You can send it social actions data in two piles: examples you want, and examples you don't. It will return a reusable chunk of data that you can use to continue 'training' your filter or to retrieve better results.

Social Actions Tuner relies on these excellent projects as building blocks:

http://www.socialactions.org - Volunteer and Donation Data Aggregation

http://www.nltk.org/ - Natural Language Toolkit (open source, python)

http://cakephp.org/ - PHP development framework (open source, php)

In addition:

Prelude Interactive has been in the business of creating websites and web tools - along with the user interfaces, project management, design, and other stuff that goes along with them for 5 years.  Since mid 2008 we've been dedicated to the technology tools and unique problems of the nonprofit sector.

We've worked with other REST-based APIs on the web:  Twitter, Social Actions, FriendFeed.  We've also worked with some large datasets (USPS, NetFlix).  We explored an idea similar to Social Actions about a year ago - and until we found Social Actions we have been frustrated that it didn't exist yet. 

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