I recently watched "Us Now", a one hour feature about how collaborative tools can help us make better decisions.

Interesting examples, many of them new

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Social media doesn't mean you do less organizing — it means you (can) do it better, or at least differently. You still have to use all the old skills of coalition-building, strategic planning, creative social action, managing relationships and preventing burnout. None of that goes away just because you're engaging with people on Facebook instead of in town halls.

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In the Netherlands an online market place was started for private initiatives in development: The 1% club. They use almost all web 2.0 tools thinkable. I believe in this instance many more 'official organisations' could learn a lot from them with regard to use of interactivity and open initiative.

They look a bit like Kiva, but the difference is that they are not an organisation. They rather match organisations with donors.

Just wanted to say a big "THANK YOU!" to everyone who has supported assetmap.org/uganda in the Netsquared Mashup Competition.

Its been especially great to see the number of Uganda focused organizations who've mobilized their communities to help develop a tool for collaboration. This is the type of community support we need to make this idea a reality.

Thanks finally to the Netsquared staff for putting on a great competition!

Hi everyone,

 We've built and posted a new sprout for Assetmap.org/Uganda on our homepage, which is, as you might have guessed it, http://www.assetmap.org/uganda

Looking forward to hearing any and all comments!

 -Nathaniel

Please support our project, Assetmap.org/Uganda in the Mashable competition. You can vote for us here:

http://www.netsquared.org/2008/conference/projects/assetmap-org-uganda

By mapping information about ongoing community-led philanthropic partnerships in northern Uganda, assetmap.org/uganda helps American citizens aggregate their resources to support post-conflict transformation.

We hope to facilitate collaboration among American donors and volunteers by providing a digital tool that:

Web 2.0 Expo is looking for 10 innovative nonprofits using the web for social change to give booth space to. I'm not sure if it is space in their San Francisco, New York, Europe or Tokyo Expo, or all of them.

Leave your suggestions for organizations they should give a booth to on the Web 2.0 Expo Blog.

On the Worldbank's Private Sector Development Blog, I found "an imaginary wish list of start-ups in a Development 2.0 world" (a post by Giulio Quaggiotto). One of the ideas on the wishlist is:  

One of the interesting things about social networks is that you get an insight in how people are connected with others and organized into subgroups of the total social network. Social networks make it very transparent how users are (or could be) linked to other users. These links can be made directly by the users (e.g. friends or contacts) or they can be established by the internet application based on the user generated data (e.g. people that share the same interest, location, organization, etc.). When these links and subgroups are established, the social networking application is then used to share and discuss information.

Britt Bravo from Netsquared invited me to contribute a blogpost with my ideas about the return on investment of the social web for nonprofits.

Since I think inviting bloggers to write a blogpost about a certain topic is a great method of generating ideas, I'm respond with this blogpost. Let me answer it from the perspective of nonprofits working for international development.