Friday, October 21, 2005
Open Tags and charity
I'm seeing the world in a whole different lens because of posts I'm reading by Jeff Jarvis, Stowe Boyd, Marc Canter and others regarding Open Tags and open social networks in general. GiveMeaning.com is very much a work in progress. It's purpose is to create web spaces for specific charitable goals which aggregates people based on a shared desire to see the same benefit to a community.
We just raised $32,000 in 4 weeks for a woman who has had cancer three times in her young life all through her GivingGroup, essentially an exercise in viral marketing.
But I'm now realizing we are a closed community, which is very much not in keeping with the spirit of why people care. I'm really interested in the OpenTagging movement and I'm hoping some of the fine minds I'm tracking back to might take a look at the GivingGroup concept with a mind to the OpenTag discussion that has been going on.
What is the best direction our development team should take here, recognizing that whenever a human interest story initiates in a community, people immediately mobilize their own response to that issue. How do we recognize and aggregate their initiatives in such a way that doesn't splinter disparate energy expended in the name of the same goal?
As an example, could a GivingGroup be a microcontent spec which as part of its componentry would itemize the cost to achieve the goal and then allow individual blogs to collect different types of contributions which would update the total goal? Recognizing that concerned citizens will always initiate their own events, fundraisers, awareness initiatives around the same goal, what must GivingGroups do to help coordinate and harness those individual contributions in a de-centralized, open world?
Reading Drummond Read's discussion on OpenTags, I wonder if it would be useful to build a charitable authority that would host a charitable folksonomy? The idea of actually creating a mechanism that would allow you and I to each raise awareness for a different part of the same project and for progress on that part to be reflected on your site would be amazing.
Many thanks to any contributors in the spirit of building better communities (online and offline!)
Tags:Open Tags
Jeff Jarvis
Dinnerbuzz
Social Architecture
socialnetworks
internet
A Distributed World
--Tom
We just raised $32,000 in 4 weeks for a woman who has had cancer three times in her young life all through her GivingGroup, essentially an exercise in viral marketing.
But I'm now realizing we are a closed community, which is very much not in keeping with the spirit of why people care. I'm really interested in the OpenTagging movement and I'm hoping some of the fine minds I'm tracking back to might take a look at the GivingGroup concept with a mind to the OpenTag discussion that has been going on.
What is the best direction our development team should take here, recognizing that whenever a human interest story initiates in a community, people immediately mobilize their own response to that issue. How do we recognize and aggregate their initiatives in such a way that doesn't splinter disparate energy expended in the name of the same goal?
As an example, could a GivingGroup be a microcontent spec which as part of its componentry would itemize the cost to achieve the goal and then allow individual blogs to collect different types of contributions which would update the total goal? Recognizing that concerned citizens will always initiate their own events, fundraisers, awareness initiatives around the same goal, what must GivingGroups do to help coordinate and harness those individual contributions in a de-centralized, open world?
Reading Drummond Read's discussion on OpenTags, I wonder if it would be useful to build a charitable authority that would host a charitable folksonomy? The idea of actually creating a mechanism that would allow you and I to each raise awareness for a different part of the same project and for progress on that part to be reflected on your site would be amazing.
Many thanks to any contributors in the spirit of building better communities (online and offline!)
Tags:Open Tags
Jeff Jarvis
Dinnerbuzz
Social Architecture
socialnetworks
internet
A Distributed World
--Tom
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