Nonprofit Online News

The Side-Effect Principle: How Stakeholders Share Information as a Result of Other Goals

By and large, people don't share information online simply for the purpose of sharing. They do it for their own reasons. I'll be teaching a workshop next week on stakeholder-generated content and this will be one of the key strategic insights. See what you think of The Side-Effect Principle: How Stakeholders Share Information as a Result of Other Goals

Building Your Online List Seminar Moved to January 13, 2010

For the first time in years, I double-booked myself for teaching an online seminar. (I'll be at a public interest gathering in Aspen, CO in December.) Because there is a lot of value in the live versions of our seminars, we rescheduled this one: Building Your Online List: A High Integrity Model for Reaching Large Numbers on the Internet. It will now be held on Wednesday, Jan. 13, 2010, making it the first workshop of the new year for us. See you there!

How the Web and the Weblog have Changed Writing

Philip Greenspun is a visionary technologist and a very charming writer. I recommend his piece on How the Web and the Weblog have Changed Writing. In particular, I believe that most nonprofits have substantial mismatches between their media and their messages and could really learn a lot from this article. If you are publishing online in any fashion, if you're consider weblogs, or if you are thinking of so-called "user generated content" (which I think should just be called "content"), you own it to your stakeholders to read this.

Session Notes from Web of Change 2009

I was unable to attend this year's Web of Change gathering at Hollyhock, but there are some good Session Notes accumulating online. These are in fact all notes, rather than articles, so be prepared to use them as the basis for an email to the presenters or a lot of online searching for named examples and resources. I recommend you start with the first one on the list (which is my personal favorite): Technology and True Love - Integrated Engagement Tracking.

Six Online Community Vendors for Associations: An Analysis

Maddie Grant and Lindy Dreyer at SocialFish have published an analysis of Six Online Community Vendors for Associations. I'm disturbed by the fact that every single one of the chosen applications is a proprietary application provided by a single vendor. Another way to do this analysis would have been to compare open source platforms - such as AroundMe, Elgg, Mahara, NewsCloud, and many others - and then compare the vendors competing to provide you with strong service. With single source proprietary vendors you are far more likely to get locked in. While the analysis does look at open APIs, it does not do an assessment of exit costs. But if the culture of your organization prefers the single, commercial vendor model, then I do in fact recommend this analysis. Furthermore, as a set of benchmarks for looking at open source solutions, it's also quite useful.

The Economics Of Trust

The World Bank isn't my favorite institution, but it nevertheless produces some great thinking and some great resources. For example, Steve Knack of the World Bank says: "If you take a broad enough definition of trust, then it would explain basically all the difference between the per capita income of the United States and Somalia." In The Economics Of Trust, Tim Harford looks into this analysis. This suggests a much larger role for civil society in the wealth of nations than just its percentage of the employment base. It also bodes ill for the climate of rapidly devolving trust in the rise to power of the paranoid right in the United States.

Anti-Abortion Extremism Online

Sadly, Muslim charities are more often labeled as terrorists in the U.S. than anti-abortion extremists who genuinely organize violent actions. But First Monday has some interesting research into Anti-Abortion Extremism Online that gives us a very good look at the line that gets crossed when activism turns into aggression. The article is also a lesson in the layers and complexities of online organizing and community and the various roles played by different people and sites. This is a worthwhile read.