Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

As I’ve mentioned before, there has been a lot of thought and interest in the issue of opening up social networks, outside of what has been, until last week, totally closed silos. I linked to a great thought piece a while back on opening up the social graph (that is, your network of friends.) Jon Stahl pointed me to a great article, also about opening up the social graph. There is a Google group (called Social Network Portability), that you should definitely join if you are at all interested in these issues. Of course, OpenSocial has blown the doors off of all of this, and what’s come out of it is quite interesting. Folks on that list are beginning to talk about how to implement portability.

There are an amazing number of new sites that have launched over the weekend (I imagine people sitting in their home offices with lots of caffeine and pizza.) Here are some I’ve found so far, that I’ll be following:

• OpenSocial Zen - meant to be a place for developers to share ideas. They haven’t really started yet, but hopefully it will be an interesting place to watch
• OpenSocial Directory - a directory of the apps that already exist to use OpenSocial (talk about caffeine and pizza!)
• OpenSocializr - a Ning social network on OpenSocial (I guess that’s logical)
• OpenSocialBlog - an interesting blog about OpenSocial

Why do I have the feeling that every domain with “opensocial” is taken (opensocialblog.com, opensocialcats.com …)

So why is this important for nonprofits? First off, it means that in the short term, it will be possible to write just one application, and reach multiple social networks, thus expanding reach. In the long term, if the whole web 2.0 cyber world becomes, instead of a bunch of walled gardens where data moves in only very limited ways between them, a fully permeable space where data flows freely, it will be possible for nonprofits to have much greater reach and impact, whether it be for fundraising, advocacy or constituency-building.