A Mashup of 29+ Social Action Platforms

This year’s NetSquared Conference will bring together a unique mix of people from the public and private sectors to develop and release Mashups designed to provide deeper insight into the social issues affecting communities around the globe.

Those "people" are you — members of the NetSquared universe working on behalf of communities everywhere and the technical experts who care about these issues.

If we’re successful, we’ll learn something about cross-sector collaboration, meet new and interesting people, and build a unique gallery of Mashups that citizens, schools, and community-based groups everywhere can learn from, replicate, and build upon.

What will change in the world because this project happens?

The Social Actions mashup will free peer-to-peer social change campaigns from the social action platforms on which they were created, resulting in the unrestricted flow of active campaigns from the people who created them to the people who are most likely to get involved.

What is it?
The Social Actions mashup will popularize an open-standard for indexing peer-to-peer social change campaigns using the hListing micro-format, or something similar, and will provide stunning examples of how this semantic data once aggregated can be mapped visually according location, area of interest, or active participation.

How will it work?
The mashup will combine 29+ XML feeds of the latest peer-to-peer social change campaigns from a range of social action platforms.

Social action platforms that may contribute content include: BetterPlace, BringLight, CanadaHelps, Care2, Change.org, ChangingthePresent, ChipIn, Convio, DemocracyInAction, DonorsChoose, Facebook Causes, Firstgiving, Fundable, GiveMeaning, GlobalGiving, Helpalot, Kiva, ModestNeeds, MyCause.com.au, Nabuur, PledgeBank, Razoo, ShoutBack, SproutBuilder, SixDegrees, ThePoint, and ZaZengo.

This mashup proposal is being championed by Peter Deitz, a Montreal-based micro-philanthropy consultant and the founder of Social Actions. My goal in creating this mashup is to reclaim the internet’s bandwidth for citizen initiatives through a non-commercial project and in a spirit of sector-wide collaboration.

What information will people interact with to make this change?

Definition
A peer-to-peer social change campaign is any group action organized by an individual with the intent of rallying support for an organization, independent project, or specific outcome using social media.

Problem
On any given day, thousands of peer-to-peer social change campaigns are created using various social action platforms, ranging from widget fundraising campaigns created on ChipIn to online petitions created on Care2’s petition site. These campaigns, although viral in some ways, are restricted by the social media marketing skills of the people who created them. Currently, to get a complete overview of the sector, a potential collaborator has to visit each social action platform separately.

Solution
I am envisioning a public domain feed of new peer-to-peer social change campaigns containing up-to-date information about campaigns created on 29+ social action platforms. Semantic data relating to the location, subject, initiator, timeframe, and goal of each campaign will be encoded using an XML micro-format.

The micro-format for indexing peer-to-peer social change campaigns will permit any database or web application to parse the data for each campaign and represent it visually. Combining the campaigns of 29+ social action platforms will permit the same databases and web applications to run queries on and map visually the dataset as a whole.