Continuing our series on how nonprofit organizations can tap into the human capital potential, I thought it might be helpful to pull together some resources that will help nonprofits avoid common pitfalls and follow best practices when working with volunteers.

Whether you are a nonprofit just starting to use human capital or have already established internal structures to manage your volunteers, engaging them in meaningful and productive ways can be both rewarding and challenging. 

Posting the initial run of this project URL http://mobile-democracy.re-configure.org has me thinking that "Collective Intelligence" + SMS is something to figure out how to develop further.

Something I will be mentioning in the project overview is the essential need for translators and perhaps employing people from http://www.telelanguage.com

[My project link]
[My profile]

Location

WOW! What a Difference a Week Makes! Where to start.... Since I began this blog and really launched my serious research into what WYSE needs to do to get our new web presence and WYSE Community Communication System (I just made that up...but I like it) in place, so much has fallen in my lap and I am energized and inspired. Day 1: I did an orientation with two new board interns who were recruited from RVLDP. http://www.lajcc.org/rvldp/index.html They are both women, although we tried to recruit men. These women are like walking/talking gifts to our organization. One of them has extensive web marketing and development experience and connections.

Over at TechCrunch I've been reviewing more web 2.0 startups than you can shake a stick at; while the crowd over there is generally not focused on social change, an awful lot of interesting things come our way that could prove helpful in a nonprofit context. Here are some of my favorites from last week, in order of usefulness.

An OPML file is, in this case, a single file you can use to subscribe to a number of RSS (definition) feeds all at once. This means that with one link you are subscribed to all future content from selected sources. I think that selecting a handful of key feeds in certain topic areas and offering those to other people is going to be a powerful way that information-overload gatekeepers help the rest of the world find and easily subscribe to the best news sources available. In this sense everyone who puts together OPML files is like an editor of anthologies; only the authors that the editor selects provide ongoing, dynamic contributions.