Draft Pitch for the NetSquared Mashup Challenge

 

Social Actions – A Mashup of 29+ Social Action Platforms

 

Social Actions is an aggregator and open API that aims to index every actionable peer-to-peer social change campaign on the web and then make that available to people wherever they find themselves online.

 

Currently, using the Internet to take action on an issue you care about requires finding your way to a nonprofit website or to one of the social action platforms that we’re aggregating from. Our goal is to guarantee that when you search for a campaign, or decide to take action to support or begin one, you can do that easily and immediately.

 

To date, we’ve built the initial aggregator on Ruby on Rails. Using RSS feeds, we’re pulling in actionable content from 19 platforms and we’re pushing that back out through a search interface, a Google map, and soon an open API.

 

Sustainability

 

I’ve been working with my team to figure out how Social Actions can financially sustain itself over the long term. There are certain criteria or limits that we’re placing on how to monetize this project.

 

From the beginning, we decided that advertising should not be a part of the answer. We feel that actions should stand on their own, without any distraction from the task at hand. We don’t want to be in a situation where Social Actions is taking a commission on what individuals contribute to a campaign in cases where the action is funding related. We want that whole donation to go through, as much of it as possible, minus whatever commission a social action platform has already arranged to deduct from a donation.

 

We decided that social action platforms would be interested in paying to participate in the open API so long as they got some value out of the experience. Our plan is to arrange partner sites – distributors like news sites, blogs, or social networks – to use the open API and bring actions to people where they are.

 

After you’ve read a news article or blog entry discussing a recent natural disaster, for example, maybe there will be a little widget next to the article that lists relevant action campaigns on Change.org, FirstGiving, SixDegrees, Zazengo, and other platforms. We’ll attempt to list the most value-added actions you can take at that moment.

 

Our goal is to see the open API used by highly trafficked places like CNN.com, or on the profile page of all of your Facebook friends, or on a nonprofit’s website. We picture the AmnestyInternational.org website, for example, displaying all of the letter-writing or petition-oriented actions that are relevant to the work they do so people can access them directly from their site.

 

I think this service is something that the platforms themselves would be willing to front the costs for in terms of development, maintenance, and perhaps some staff time in arranging these partnerships.

 

Using the Social Actions open API will always be free for the third party developer who has eyeballs to offer. This means that low traffic or low-budget sites can also make use of the API and create something new at no cost.

 

I’m also planning to sustain the Social Actions mashup through membership fees that social action platforms will pay in proportion to both the number of people we can say are seeing their actions and in proportion to whatever their annual budget is. A low budget social action platform is not going to have to pay the same amount to participate in our open API as a high budget, very commercial social action platform.

 

It seems to me like a win-win-win for the team working on Social Actions, for people who take action, and for the social action platforms that are always looking to engage more citizens around the world.

 

Social impact.

 

I have no doubt that when every day citizen philanthropists are given an opportunity to make a difference in the world they’re going to take those opportunities. The more people we can engage in that process of peer-to-peer social change, the more impact we’re going to have.

 

Technology permits us to move away from a model where a certain number of reputable nonprofit organizations carry out the work of improving the world and the rest of us stand by and let them do it.

 

Instead, we’re moving to a model where everyone can take some responsibility in maintaining our society and improving the conditions in which we live. I have volunteered all my time to this initiative because I feel that the social action platforms I’ve honed in on offer tools to really create an impact both locally and overseas.

 

By building out this API and by attracting more people to the actions that have surfaced through these platforms I feel I am accelerating the work that these platforms are doing and therefore am creating impact on a grassroots distributed level.

 

The long-term impact of this project will be to encourage existing organizations and foundations to repurpose and rethink how they go about engaging constituents, and how they go about programming and grant-making, with an eye towards engaging people around the world. Organizations and foundations can and should act as facilitators or scouts, identifying where great projects are happening and then accelerating them (much like NetSquared is doing).

 

We are attracted to this work because we know there is potential in these platforms to create broad social change. We’re doing everything we can to amplify their impact.

 

Innovation

 

Innovation is easy for me to speak to because I know there’s no one else doing anything similar to what Social Actions attempts to do. Nonprofits have set up walls and distinctions between themselves. The same thing is happening with social action platforms. As a result, collaboration is not happening on the scale that it could be.

 

Broad scalable peer-to-peer social change requires collaboration. We have succeeded in creating the appearance of collaboration with or without that deep down intent to collaborate among social action platforms. Right now, through the Social Actions API, what we have is the appearance of a mega-collaboration among social action platforms, the people that use them, and the nonprofits and independent projects that benefit from them.

 

I also want to say that on a technical level, what we are doing is quite innovative. We are creating a way to use the hLifting microformat to actually serve as a standard protocol for indexing peer-to-peer social change campaigns. We’ve taken a piece of technology that already exists, the hListing microformat, and we have retooled it for social change work.

 

Social action platforms can now publish all of their actionable content using the hListing micro-format. This encoding of the semantic data relating to peer-to-peer social change campaigns will facilitate the process of getting actions out there into the web. Our project is a live example of how the semantic web can help make sense of actionable content and lead to broad scalable social change. I’d say that’s pretty innovative.