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Most people would help out occasionally if an acquaintance came to them and asked them for something specific. You use your social network to find someone in a position to help, because of their location, their skills, their resources or their contacts. The idea is to extend the Linked In concept beyond employment help, to other help. It would have to be possible to opt out of notifications, to enter a timeframe for the request (so they age out) and an urgency. A system of tracking the 'favors' a person has done could give people who accept more responsibility more priviliges. Example: checking on an elderly relative in another state after a storm.

This resembles your Net2/TechSoup conference. I'm working on a college, but to create a sense of community online, I've been dreaming of avatars. Games have them, and I recently started experimenting with Second Life. Your conference gave me the idea to simply do it in Second Life - build virtual classrooms and auditoriums, etc. How this would work with tuition, salaries, and college credit will have to be worked out.

It may be my machine, but the videos of your conference show me that Second Life is still jerky and not intuitive to operate.

I had been thinking of how to transport avatars into my website; the other way around might work better (and cheaper).

Birdie Newborn, Dean

Beach College

www.beachcollege.net

I would like to see netsquared evolve into a better care2.com community where members can meet each other and invite each other to participate in their foundations or social cause.

NABUUR.COM has created something special and probably unique: the possibility for Local Communities around the world to bring specific problems to the attention of concerned 'Neighbours' around the world, who then jointly solve that problem via the Internet.

The basic tools, procedures and systems are in place. 79 local communities now take part. 200 local communities will be served by the end of 2006, 1000 by the end of 2007, many more after that. Given the number of people that would like to engage directly with a meaningful cause, this will become an enormous force for the good. But we need your help to get there.

The flow on the site needs to become much more fluent, fun, transparent, effective.  Wiki's, maps, video's, stories, rss feeds, etc probably need to be added.  What needs to be done first? Who can do it? Who is willing to make this happen in the next two years?

Whether for emergency preparedness, school system communication or other community organizations, it's sometimes easier for people to get to a cell phone than something connected to the internet. A method for broadcasting information from a central database and receiving it on a cell phone for non-profits, and for sending in from the cell phone to the database would be a tremendously helpful structure for broad-reach programs.

Each and every "tech idea" should be obliged to have a creative off-line companion ...

Create a cross-reference system (maybe database) that can be used to translate tags.

The translation can be between languages (like english and spanish). But the "translation" can also help with consistency between browsers on the web, or between differing technologies, like cellphones and laptops.

Since tags are metadata, their purpose is factual. Precise numerical coding can help distinguish the difference between "baking" ceramics and "baking" bread.

The CyberInstitute uses United Nations classification and coding systems for products and processes. These are not visible to the user, but it facilitates language cross-referencing.

This system could be expanded to include all possible tags, and then user-friendly interfaces could be developed to use them.

Imagine you could submit your donor database to a trusted platform that would run your donor database up against that of other nonprofit "members" and provide you with category level data about your donors. Do they support animal rights groups? Political candidates? Arts and Humanities? What could you do armed with this data in your communications and fundraising?

Netsquared or Nonprofit Technology group on LinkedIn

I think there is a need for a website that can collect phone calls in audio format. That way we can change the entire idea of podcasting and can make it very relvant for the Southern grassroots people. How? They can use their cell phone to call different numbers in relationship with their requirements. These numbers can be the tags and it can go directly to a website. We can create refernece desk from where the replies can be relayed back as an audio SMS to that cell phone number. At the grassroots level, audio centric technology has a great demand as it can bypass the entire literacy and language issue.

Partha Sarker
Bytes for All

If Amber Alerts, EDIS and E911 is working; then we should be able to mash all that up with Frappr and Flickr groups to get the word (and pictures) out about abductions and show their location. Forward thinking, blogging police departments could really leverage local citizens, especially the well-connected, always on Millennials.

What am I not seeing here about how to effectively use inexpensive technology? We need two things that go together:

1. We need smart card-type technology that is cheaper than smart cards. We want to enter client information for homeless individuals (with their permission) and give them the cards. They go to various agencies for services--where their client inforamtion is brought up through the smart card connecting with a web-based database. The cheapest cards with photos are about $2-- too expensive.

2. We also need a cheaper way to input information into web-based databases about the homeless than using laptops or desktops that are connected to the Internet with DSL or better (wireless or not). And ideally this cheaper technology could be taken to use in mobile environments, under bridges, in parks, where homeless people are.

Tracking the funding applications pipeline (funnel), amounts applied for, due decision dates, dates money due etc . linked to a cashflow management tool. Needs to incorporate fund raising projects, donations etc.

We already have this, but I think it could be invaluable for other non-profits in communicating their mission and results. It's a program call "Visual Communicator Studio 2" which allows me to video blog, post streaming video ALREADY imbedded in a web page (No html knowledge necessary), as well as VERY high-quality video. It's GREAT!!!! Of special note, I want to assure folks that it's not only for the web, but we're producing a :30 program on our ministry using this software. Thanks!

Non-profits need an affordable client tracking and outcome system. The system needs demographic information along with client participation information, lenghth of stay,...
The system also needs to be able to pull specific information for reporting purposes. Most grants are requesting outcome reports but many non-profits cannot afford the software that is out at this point.

Secure referral interface for medical/social agencies
to apply to foundation for assistance on behalf of clients.
Must meet HIPAA compliance standards.

Free clinics are nonprofit organizations that use volunteer health professionals to provide free or low cost health care to uninsured individuals. Free clinics need a patient registration system to input demographic and clinical data on their patients--but free of the insurance and billing complexity found in commercial products. Also these commercial products are too costly for most free clinics.

Many nonprofits want to manage information for volunteers or members submitting regular reports by paper or email. Volunteers or members have wildly varying locations, computer skills, software, and platforms, and so most of the forms used for this purpose, if electronic, produce inconsistent results -- they look different when opened onscreen, or use a program the member or volunteer doesn't have on his or her computer, etc. And if they're done by PDF and printed out to be submitted in writing, the information has to be redigitized before it can be used -- and nonprofits don't have enough staff to handle re-typing that kind of data (and scanning/OCR has its own similar challenges).

A system that allowed for simple data management online -- like a database of upt to, say, 20 customizable fields -- that accepts input through online forms would help address this problem. The resulting database content itself could be viewable as a web page, and/or reside offline in a common program format like Excel. The important thing would have to be that the online forms the volunteers or members can pull up and fill out using their browser, would have to either post the content directly to the database online, or autogenerate some type of report (like csv) that could then be opened and pasted into Excel.

Content quality from the reports could be controlled by a) allowing the nonprofit to customize the form ahead of time to request the information it needs to be getting; and further by format restrictions that only permit date formats where a date is requested, using pulldown menus or checkboxes for sets of data, and also allowing occasional text fields.

The model for this is a database like etapestry (www.etapestry.com), but without being focused exclusively on contact management, finance, and fundraising like that database is. In other words, if a nonprofit accepts reports from its volunteers who go on working trips for the nonprofit, and wants to design a database that contains information only from those reports about the field conditions, the dates and locations of trips, recommendations, activities, etc., then the nonprofit would benefit greatly from a database like I'm suggesting.

It'd be neat to have a button in your IM client that allowed you to easily blog an interesting conversation. Posts could show up formatted similar to chat windows. Great for print interviews... but some interesting privacy problems arise that would have to be worked out.

An easy way for bloggers to submit a blog post as a letter to the editor of a local or national publications based on zip code search.

A nonprofit version of paypal -- something that offers ubiquitous online payment system but with lower overhead and/or profits returned to the nonprofit community. Clients could choose to donate a percentage of profits to charity of their choice, too.

A low-cost voicemail-to-email and/or voicemail-to-fax solution (possibly something that can be self-hosted?) Current systems on market are expensive for small nonprofits.

A way for nonprofits to offer guaranteed secure, private and untraceable email addresses to supporters, members, or members of the public. Could be crucial to enabling honest discussion or feedback on sensitive public issues.

Cheers & jeers system for commenting on others' blog posts in one's own blog; a way of conveying support (or disdain) for a blog post without having to write a full-blown post, and ensuring that the cheer or jeer is tracked back to the original site.

The goal is to reduce the echo chamber factor in the blogosphere while still allowing the politically/civically useful phenomenon of indicating some level of public support for a given idea or post.

Web conferencing "lite" for nonprofits, allowing browser sharing (and possibly desktop sharing) via a chat client. No other bells and whistles, just something that allows browser sharing, chat, and possibly also desktop sharing. And for free or very cheap.

RSS-to-SMS tool that lets nonprofits pipe news to supporters' cell phones by using their outbound RSS feeds.

Double-blind list search tool that lets nonprofits upload their list of supporters/members and find out what other organizations in a given zip code have a substantially overlapping -- or substantially diverging -- audience.

A venue directory for nonprofit organizations that would let people list and perhaps even book venues in their area that are available for community events.

A system for embedding a "message of the day" in the e-mail signatures of supporters.

For example, if I support the Humane Society, I could opt to include a little bit of code in my sig line that would dynamically pull a picture of an animal up for adoption, different animal each day.

Confidential groups for del.icio.us bookmarks (not just individually private bookmarks, but a way of sharing bookmarks with an exclusive set of users).

Possibly via a "for:" tag for groups (as currently available for individuals on del.icio.us).

A blogging platform/tool specifically designed for nonprofit users. We'd need to spec out requirements.

(already out there, needs some refinement - could be super-handy!)

Right now if a site aggregates multiple searches or strings as RSS feeds (e.g. Yahoo! news alerts for both "nonprofit technology" and "nonprofit Internet") it is likely to aggregate the same item multiple times.

It'd be great to have a service that culls duplicate items from a local site (the site doing the aggregating) rather than just offering the option of rolling multiple RSS feeds into a single feed, because an aggregating site may want to set up different feeds different ways (e.g. assigning specific tags to all items in a given feed).

The idea is for nonprofits to be able to easily find a wide range of content they are entitled to repurpose and/or republish. This feature could refine the Creative Commons search feature in Flickr (allowing nonprofits to do a single search to see ALL content they can reuse by checking the relevant checkboxes) but extend it to all content in the Yahoo! family, generating a single RSS feed from the output.

It'd be handy to have a permanent mirror for non-profit campaign sites to preserve temporary campaign sites for future reference. Something like a campaign-specific wayback machine.

Get Tivo to create a 'community happenings' channel that lists local community events from upcoming.org.