The Social Source Commons helps nonprofits find appropriate software to support their work, and share knowledge about tools. It is the only venue on the net striving to build a complete inventory of what software is available for nonprofit needs.
We need strategic planning for revenue & partnership. We've had a successful user-driven product design model, but re-assessment of our product strategy is critical.
We need to assess our outreach & messaging. Aside from our blog, we're not being intentional about our community building. We need to better assess and meet the needs of our users.
We need performance analysis/optimization for our Ruby on Rails application, and analysis to make the platform more accessible for visually impaired and other special-needs user communities.
A great range of resources exist to inform software selection, use and support in NPOs and NGOs, but they are not well connected, and rarely share common formats. There is no place for comprehensively mapping the full range of "what's out there" and "who's using what", and in turn aggregating relevant information for tools and categories of tools. There is also no general platform for sharing collective software knowledge in geographic, subsector and other specialized contexts.
Anecdotal inquiry and formal research both indicate that software selection in the NPO/NGO sector is usually done by "asking friends what they use". Such "social network" methodology has the built-in advantage of establishing de facto support networks, as those same people who recommend tools are only a phone call or email away for questions. But such processes are limited by the size and capacity of the network, and can never be considered comprehensive or best practice.
When considering how nonprofit technology assistance providers search for and select tools, one need only survey the archives of various NGO/NPO technology mailing lists to observe a pattern repeating itself on a regular basis: a list member asks a question of the form "who's using what for tool category X". On categories ranging from case management to survey tools to simple utilities, responses come from all over the globe, establishing a snapshot inventory of tools, tips and caveats. But just as quickly as these de facto catalogs are built, they roll up into mailing list archives, unlikey to see the light of day again, and fated to be recreated weeks or months later.
A resource that empowers nonprofits by systematically inventorying available tools, and connects that inventory to the wealth of relevant information resources is long overdue. Social Source Commons aims to meet that need.
The platform has been grant-funded to date, and will continue to be for the near future.
We are integrating the tool into the Aspiration event process that we use with all our convenings, which has become a revenue source generating over 50% of our core operating costs, and we envision SSC as a knowledge repository around which we can build consulting practices in the future, analyzing tools and gaps in the nonprofit sector for those doing market research and researching technology proposals.
But for now, it's a classic web 2.0 revenue story: we lose money on every click, but we make it up in volume!
Social Source Commons is a community platform that integrates information from other sources and allows users to share knowledge about nonprofit software.
We are addressing several obstacles:
Negotiating data standards for categorizing information about nonprofit software, from sources such as TechSoup, Idealware, and Tactical Tech.
Creating a substantially large database to generate value for our users and motivate them to contribute their own knowledge
We are looking for funding to build our sub-communities features.
We will make it up as we go along, in classic Agile fashion :^)
Seriously, we will
* Develop use cases for sub-community features over the first 2 weeks
* Prototype wireframes in partnership with our user community in weeks 3 and 4
* Test refined prototypes using our distributed usability methodology (as designed in the www.flossusability.org program)
* We will use Ruby on Rails to implement the prototype in weeks 5-9, iteratively deploying and letting users give us the tough love on our build server
* We will do formal usability testing once we reach code complete in week 11
* We will take it live, warts and all, in week 12, and improve from there based on user feedback
The Social Source Commons (SSC) helps nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations find appropriate software tools to support their programmatic work, and share knowledge about using those tools. It is the only venue on the internet striving to build a complete inventory of what tools are available for nonprofit needs, in both general and sector-specific categories.
SSC is a standards-based, open source web platform for mapping "what's out there” and “who's using what” in nonprofit software, based on a model that blends the sharing ethic and passion of nonprofit and NGO technologists with the best new internet technologies and information models. SSC builds on the "social network-driven" software selection paradigm that pervades NPO/NGO technology (“hey, what are you using for...?”), allowing users to discover tools and connect with allies by asking:
* What are others using? Which tools are most popular?
* Who else is using what I'm using, and what are they saying about it?
* What tools exist in a given category?
* What new tools are people discovering?
* What am I not using that I could be using?
The platform documents the landscape of software tools available for NPO/NGO use by letting nonprofit techies compare what tools they use. The architecture is based on sites such as wikipedia.org, del.icio.us and flickr.com that leverage collaborative editability, democratic categorization schemes, and ease of use to build shared knowledge stores. SSC is designed to enable peer supported, collaborative sharing of software knowledge.
SSC is not just an inventory tool; it aims to be an information "prism" through which relevant information feeds, updates, and new resources can be aggregated and redistributed per tool, per category, and per user. SSC takes advantage of the emerging RSS paradigm to "push" information to each user in a personalized fashion, and to allow other sites and sources to query and publish SSC data.
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Comments
Multilingual software
This sounds like a great idea. How will you be relating to products in languages other than English? Israel has a large 3rd sector and I am interested in a one stop shop for tools that support or are in Hebrew.
Ruth
Awesome project, awesome team
Has my support, and we'll be including it as a staff pick in the emails Grassroots.org is sending out this week.
A great tool, with really great people behind it. If I were a better Koolaid maker, I'd offer to help directly.
Good luck!
Dave.
An outstanding project
Aspiration's SSC is a proven and widely used resource, and it will become more valuable as the number of users grows. The sub-community feature will be a tremendous feature. HumaniNet plans to use it in our Maps 2.0 initiative. No better way to nurture virtual tech communities!
dissemination?
Gunner, Very glad to see this project here. Can you say a little about how SSC will be marketed to nonprofit sector and the volume of use you expect to see over time? And how will you know if it is having the impact you believe is possible?
Thanks!
/daniel