This is a great book for non-profit leadership to sink their teeth into.  It's both hi-level and granuar in scope, providing you with content to start a creative fire within your organization to anaylze/implement/adapt a new tool for collaborative endeavors as well as give you prolific, quality examples of how other organizations have increased mutliple capacities by leveraging wiki into their bucket o' resources.

 

Yesterday I asked you what kinds of case studies of nonprofits using the social web you'd like to read about on the NetSquared Blog.  In a comment on a different post, Joe Solomon reminded me about the socialmedia4change wiki.

The socialmedai4change wiki is a community wiki of examples of how nonprofits and social change makers are using social networks for social change.  It has examples of how people are using:

At Ushahidi we're using Basecamp for a lot of project management activities.  It's a good tool, but we've found that it just doesn't cut it as a knowledge repository.  We knew we were going to have to find a wiki engine to use for our knowledgebase, but didn't realize how many options (good and bad) that there are in the wild world web.

 

Wiki Software or Hosted Wiki?

Britt Bravo is on a much-deserved vacation, so I'm stepping in for her to keep news and information about the social change web coming your way!

NTEN and Beth Kanter are leading the nonprofit technology community in the We Are Media Project: The Social Media Starter Kit for Nonprofits. The community, by working wikily, is building a toolkit and instructional guides about the use of social media in helping nonprofits distribute their stories.

Social Actions Labs is where we'll be building applications this summer that combine 19 social change and fund raising platforms like Care2, Change.org, and Kiva.org -- and present their actionable opportunities in highly useful & innovative ways.

We just started a wiki and are inviting the community to contribute their ideas for web applications and mash ups!

Imagine a Wordpress add-on that recommends actions based on the content of the post.
Imagine a Firefox Extension that alerts you to relevant social actions as you browsed the web.
Imagine a widget that lists actions that have nearly reached their goal -- only a few extra signatures or donations needed.

We want your ideas for connecting people to social actions. We'll be building 3-5 web applications this summer -- and will be choosing the community's most rock star ideas to take to the next level.

Check out the Social Actions Labs Wiki to see the 20+ ideas so far contributed by Beth Kanter, Amy Sample Ward, Tom Watson, and others.

Thanks for sharing!

- Joe Solomon, Social Actions Labs Lead Scientist and Evangelizer

I am writing to invite you to participate in an experiment of sorts... a scan aimed at understanding how innovation works in small (<$500,000) and mid-size (<$2.9m) nonprofit orgs. This project was created to collect and share information how organizations come up with innovative ideas and new solutions and to ascertain whether or not organizations currently use innovation strategies (specific tools and practices) to support social innovation.

Earlier this week, conn+ipedia had its public launch. It is a wiki designed for those working for the common good as a place to share knowledge and connect around People, Places and Things. It's a new kind of wiki, built on Wagn, that combines wiki with database functionality. Here are some links to get you started:

Read some of my thoughts on what I learned from the development process of connec+ipedia!

Read some reasons why I think connec+ipedia will change how you think of a wiki!

You vote, right? But do you use Congresspedia, Wiki The Vote, the SuperDelegate Transparency Project, OpenSecrets.org, FedSpending.org, or PublicMarkup.org to be an informed voter? They are all projects whose creation was facilitated by the Sunlight Foundation to educate citizens and increase transparency in politics.

On March 28th, I talked on the phone with Ellen Miller, the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Sunlight Foundation, about their work. Ellen is also a NetSquared Advocate. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation. You can also listen to it on the little player below, or on the NetSquared Podcast.

Ellen Miller: The Sunlight Foundation is a two-year-old organization that is a combination of a grant-making, and operational institution that focuses on creating greater transparency for the work of Congress.

Thanks to Tantek Çelik for setting up a wiki for us at http://NetSquared.pbwiki.com. I have posted partial chat transcripts there on the N2Y2 page. Here's day 1 and day 2.

I made these transcripts by just copying the log whenever I remembered, so there are some gaps especially at the beginning. Please fill in any bits if you also saved it.