HI, everyone, don't know if you saw a very interesting article in the Chronicle of Philanthropy by Marica Sharp of Millenium Communications called Technological Revolution for the Greater Good (attached). It's a nice summary of the kinds of online activities that are spurring greater use of the Internet by nonprofits and greater promise of increased efficiency, community building, participation.
It is, of course, well written as Marcia is a great writer. But, I have a few challenges to pose to it, particularly as it relates to what we reported in our paper, Power to the Edges.
First, Marcia talks a lot about large investments in large platforms. What we've seen over the past few years is that the Internet is fertile ground for small investments in small efforts, particularly by individual activists, which spiral into big things. This is how moveon.org, meetup.com, and even E-Bay started. Rather than spend our time as a sector spending millions of dollars on big platforms, we should be spending our energy seeding small, agile efforts that can be sustained and scale as necessary.
