Social Actions
I stumbled across an interesting RSS feed a week or two ago (thanks to Google Reader, not Stumble Upon, despite the fact that I stumbled upon it). It’s called Social Actions, and it might be trying to dragging the nonprofit/NGO/volunteer technology and data marketplace into the Web 2.0 era. In particular, I think the “Change the Web” contest sounds like something the legions of unemployed web developers can have some fun with in 2009.
I sent Joe Solomon an email and he responded, gleeful that they were attracting the attention of technical people.
I wonder how similar it is to a project I proposed to Smart Volunteer earlier this year, to create an open data interchange format for social actions, giving, and volunteering, both skilled and unskilled, in person and remote. I’m absolutely not trying to claim credit for the idea, which I found has existed for a long time despite nobody big altering their business plans so they can push it (eh-hem, Volunteer Match and Guidestar?)
The term “Social Actions” is pretty good – I tried to think of something more informative that’s also short and punchy and I couldn’t. They have also elected, apparently, to largely piggyback on other services like Facebook and Twitter, which is much smarter than trying to build yet another database from scratch. The only thing I would add, someday, with infinite time and development resources, is a distributed hosting system where the RackSpaces and Amazon EC3’s of the world can donate a few idle virtual servers here and there to run the data backbone for the world’s NGO’s, kind of like the World Community Grid.
Maybe I’m putting too much on their shoulders…but at least someone’s trying, and at least Google was able to find them for me, which means that I’m not the only one reading their feed.
