Amnesty’s Dan McQuillan has made a rallying call for a Netsquared this side of the pond - which could be an "incubator for web-enabled social change in the UK & Europe".

Dan identifies some possible goals:

• To stimulate web-enabled social innovation
• To create a an online-offline community for learning skills, sharing experiences and developing expertise
• To sustain socially progressive activity through alternative business & organisational models

I like the emphasis Dan gives to "activism", and "the organisational question" in particular…

As originally reported by Kerri Karvetski on her kk blog, LinkedIn has soft launched an initiative to put its powerful network to use to effect social change.

In this post I explore how not-for-profits might engage LinkedIn members in a relationship that goes beyond giving, by which I mean the other things donors can give, as Jeff Brooks has written about elsewhere.

I found something interesting in my garage earlier this week.  A tatty old piece of card?

Before the computer... or at least before they became part of our lives... I give you, The Telephone Tree.

I won't cross post the whole thing, but you can read the full story on nfp 2.0:

My Social Network, circa 1987

Does anyone else remember networking this way? It's so much easier now (I think).

I admit it. I get excited about widgets.  I think they are beginning to show their potential as one of the most dynamic ingredients in the emerging Web 2.0 toolbox.

Widgets - or badges, gadgets, whichever you prefer - can prove a winner for not-for-profits. Two reasons. Actually, there are probably many more, but two is a good start:

• You move beyond the single website model and turn the entire web into a distribution system for your content / stories
• Smart widgets will (hopefully soon) allow you to report back on how you are making a difference

Over on nfp 2.0 I've written a long (to long?) piece about 18seconds.org, Justgiving, Carebadges, smart widgets, the potential of networks for extending the reach of your widget and for communicating success. Quite a lot really.

It has become almost de rigueur these days to ponder the meaning of social media measurement and 'engagement'.

It’s one thing to have an engaged website, but more and more the action takes place in other places, in existing communities and social networks.

Charities must turn from ‘owning’ their cause to enabling networks.

Earlier this week I posted some collected thoughts on this topic: Engagement is not made to measure.  I'd welcome your comments to move the debate forward.

Over on nfp 2.0 I've posted what I think (and hope) will be some of the trends we may (there, I'm hedging a bit...) see with regards non-profits and social media.

Bear in mind that I've written this from the perspective of where we are the other side of the pond (which is, I reckon, a year behind North America. Discuss!).

I was struck by the clarity of thought and purpose expressed in the podcast posted recently  by Alex Samuel on her Social Signal blog. Mapping organisational structure onto web innovation is broadly something I explored in my "buzz director" post (although I think I agree with Beth that this title could be improved!).

Owen Gibson writes in The Guardian that Save the Children has become the first UK charity to participate in Second Life.

Participants in Second Life will be able to travel to its “Yak Shack” and pay 1,000 Linden dollars (the game currency, named after the company that conceived it) for their own pixillated yak. 

The Yak Shack concept was created by Ogilvy Advertising and works well as an extension of the charity’s “Wish List” virtual gift catalogue.

It's a particular crusade of mine to encourage not-for-profits to identify an internal champion (or recruit a virtual volunteer) to take on this role. Call it what you will, and David Wilcox and Beth Kanter, have both had a go at (re)inventing job labels. I like Beth Kanter's "Social Media Coach". But how about "Cause Evangelist"? Anyway, you get the idea.

Interest in social media among not-for-profits right now is high. A good many are researching good practice and developing their strategies for participating in and monitoring social networks and the blogosphere.

With this in mind, I thought I’d have a stab at unpicking the role of "buzz director"...

Kresta King Cutcher has been posting images to Flickr since September 2005. To date, her images have been viewed over 136,000 times.

I’m among those who have been touched by Kresta’s work, so I asked her a few questions about her Flickr journey, and the impact the photo-sharing community has had on her work.