One of the things that excites me about being part of the NetSquared community, and particularly about NetSquared Local, is that it engenders spaces where digital innovation actualizes the potential of the social web to address critical social problems offline. In the process, it is also deepening and strengthening - rather than weakening or diluting - the relationships and connections the social web affords us.

What happens when the social web collides with campaigning? How can we think about the new potential for advocacy? What happens when the cause escapes from the organizational box? is it something like Cloud Campaigning?

What connects Saul Alinsky, Egypt and Twitter? An alternative take on Best of the Nonprofit Social Web for 2007.

Categories include:

• 'best use of mobile to frustrate a despotic regime'
• 'best use of a sharing site to shock people out of apathy'
• 'best web-enabled ngo startup'

This year's Scrooge Award goes to YouTube for their shameful suspension of Wael Abbas's account.

Watch out for the BarCamp-like 'Social Innovation Camp' in London in early March 2008, with it's Netsquare-inspired aspiration to 'remix nonprofits for social change'. Hopefully some of the ideas cooked up there will make it to next year's 'Best Of...'

In response to Britt's post about NetSquared's "2007 Best of the Nonprofit Social Web" awards, I humbly submit my own organization, The Nature Conservancy, as an entrant in the Best Use of the Social Web for Raising Awareness by a Nonprofit category.

2007 has been a breakthrough year for The Nature Conservancy's web marketing efforts on the social web, particularly on social news and bookmarking web sites. After about nine months of building up trust and credibility in some of the major social news and bookmarking networks, we finally saw results in a big way this year, including:

"What do you think is the return on investment (ROI) of the social web for nonprofits?" is Britt Bravo 's latest Net2ThinkTank question. It's a hot topic for nonprofits and companies alike because of the time soaked up by tending social networking sites, but I think there's at least three dimensions to social web ROI for nonprofits, namely metrics, the paradigm shift and the new enclosures.

metrics

Non-profits aren't focussed on a financial return but they have a duty to use donations effectively. So it's good to see initiatives like frogloops ROI calculator for social network campaigns, which uses the tried & tested perspective of email marketing to calculate value for money. Metrics may be harder for the social web but nonprofits would be unwise not to try it - in part because the social web also leading to greater pressure for transparency.

paradigm shift

Even when the return rates are low, nonprofits should be investing in social web experiments because they herald a paradigm shift in how people will organise to have a social impact. In Participatory Web for Development I described how an era of mass collaborative innovation will lead to new ways of tackling social issues. Either nonprofits take part, or they risk being left on the beach.

the new enclosures

The big feature of the web 2.0 boom is the way that value generated by users is being cashed in by the site owners. As I warned in social networking and social change, one consequence can be nonprofits getting booted out if they get too 'controversial'. Monetisation of the social web is often done in a way that ignores the mass of contributors and threatens it's nature as a kind of common ground. As well as making creative use of this space we'll need to find collective ways to defend it. Mass investment of time, creativity and content implies a return for the common good.

Quite a few non-profit organizations have set up a presence, primarily via groups, on Facebook. This is because the platform is very friendly to the development, deployment, and utilization of applications and integration that help an NPO to work more effectively on its'objectives.

Look at the early accomplishments on the Facebook platform by NTEN, "Non-Profits on Facebook", and TED to see a few good examples in their early going.

Hi, I'm Jennifer Schlegel. I've been working back behind the curtain of this entire Net2 production, hoping we press enough of the right buttons to help make it all come together for you.

I voted today.

When evaluating projects, I considered the six net2 attributes and also tried to imagine how, if implemented, they would affect the lives of Africans - and in particular the struggles of African civil society organizations to serve the needs of their communities. The projects I chose seemed to me to offer the most revolutionary impact across Africa (and indeed across the world) in part because they make creative use of Web 2.0 to leverage their impact.

OK, I’ve checked them all out and here are my favorite NetSquared Innovation Award proposals. Britt asked us to choose just five, but I saw a good twenty to thirty that had potential:

1. Throngz: The Online Discussion Space That Comes And Gets You*

• Throngz can be used by everybody, not just by people working on hunger, say, or homelessness, or the environment, or whatever issue it might be.
• Throngz is a tool that can add value to every social networking site and to every community of people who long to make deeper, more substantive connections on the Internet.
• The challenges that motivated the creation of Throngz resonate with other Internet users.
• Throngz doesn’t depend on others being present at a particular site for you to interact with them. It helps cure us of “portal-itis.”
• Throngz counters the “diffusion of attention” that occurs each time we go on the Internet.

Tom Watson at onLine discusses many of the frustrations that led to the development of Throngz.