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Peter Deitz is a long-time member and contributor in the NetSquared community; he started the NetSquared Montreal group and his Social Actions project was a winner in the 2008 N2Y3 Mashup Challenge. Over the last few years, we have watched and supported the growth of Social Actions, including partnering for the Change the Web Challenge in 2009 - a Partner Challenge designed to tap into the NetSquared Community to find innovative ways of using the Social Actions API and data stream. We are really excited about the latest developments to the Social Actions API and the larger implications of what these updates mean for powering open data and supporting action around the world. To learn more about it, I caught up with Peter earlier this week to get all the details and am excited to share them here first!

Hear from Peter Deitz about the Social Actions API!

Let’s start at the beginning: What is Social Actions and where does the API come in?

I describe Social Actions as an aggregation of actions people can take on any issue that’s built to be highly distributable across the social web. We pull in donation opportunities, volunteer positions, petitions, event, and other actions from 60+ different sources. That’s today. A few years ago, we had just a handful of pioneering platforms in microphilanthropy.

The Social Actions project began in 2006. I wanted to make some kind of contribution to the world of microphilanthropy. My intent was to inventory every interesting action I came across to make it easier for people to engage in the causes they cared about. There wasn’t much scalability in the way I was pursuing the project.

In 2007, I realized that a much more effective way to aggregate interesting actions would be to subscribe to RSS feeds from trusted sources. I wrote about the potential for aggregating RSS feeds of giving opportunities in a blog post called, Why We Need Group Fundraising RSS Feeds. Three months later I had a prototype platform aggregating actions from RSS feeds, with a search element around that content.

Around  the time of the Nonprofit Technology Network’s 2008 NTC conference, an even brighter light bulb went on. I remember sitting in a session by Kurt Voelker of ForumOne Communications, Tompkins Spann of Convio, and Jeremy Carbaugh of The Sunlight Foundation. They were talking about API’s. (API stands for Application Programming Interface, and refers broadly to the way one piece of software or dataset communicates with another.) In fact, the name of the session was “APIs for Beginners.”

I knew I wanted to be in the session even without really knowing why. It was there that I realized my RSS-based process for aggregating actions could be so much more with a robust distribution component. I wrote a blog post called, Mashups, Open APIs, and the Future of Collaboration in the Nonprofit Tech Sector. I left that session knowing exactly the direction I wanted to take Social Actions.

And what would you describe as the social definition of Social Actions API - the purpose?

There’s a groundswell in interest, on the part of “non-nonprofit professionals,” to engage with social movements and causes. It’s well-documented at this point that people are hungry to engage with causes they care about in various forms.

The premise behind Social Actions is that there are enough actions floating around on the web that nonprofits produce, but that they’re not linked up properly or adequately syndicated. There are a million opportunities to take action on a cause you care about, but it’s not easy to find them. The Social Actions API attempts to address the distribution and syndication challenge while also encouraging nonprofits to make their actions more readily available.

What were the limitations that Social Actions and its API were hitting up against before the recent updates?

We have encountered a number of challenges over the years. Originally, adding actions manually. was difficult. That challenge was resolved by creating a platform that used RSS feeds to pull in opportunities,  which in turn evolved into the Social Actions API, allowing people to access the full dataset from any application that connected to it.

The vast majority of applications that have been built since 2008 match actions with related content: for example, by reading a blog post and searching the Social Actions dataset for related actions. The quality of the search results were limited by our querying capabilities and relevancy ranking. The results we were able to produce didn’t reflect the full contents of our database. They tended to reflect only the most recently-added actions, not the most relevant. As a result, we weren’t equipping developers with a platform that allowed for more accurate location- and issue-based searches. Until the recent enhancements, producing the best possible search results for a given phrase or keyword was a biggest challenge.

What did the recent updates accomplish, and how did the opportunity to make them come about?

The updates introduce Semantic Analysis and Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities to the Social Actions API and begin to connect Social Actions to the wider Linked Open Data community.

The enhancements effectively put Social Actions back on the cutting edge of social technology. These were changes that we had wanted to make for a long time. In Spring 2009, we were approached by a group that was building an advanced video + action platform and that wanted to draw on the Social Actions API. Link TV, in prototyping their ViewChange platform, noticed that the Social Actions API wasn’t producing the best possible results. They invited us to explore with them what would be involved in updating our platform so that ViewChange could feature more relevant results.

Link TV, along with Doug Puchanski and Rob DiCiuccio of Definition, helped us articulate the changes that would need to occur and then connected us with a funder who could underwrite what amounted to a very significant enhancement to our code base. In one month, we had approximately as large an investment in the technology as we’d had in total up until that point. It has been incredibly exciting to see how open source projects like Social Actions tend to grow in fits and bursts, depending on the demands and resources made available by users.

What do “Semantic Analysis” and “Natural Language Processing” mean, and how do they make the Social Actions API better?

Semantic Analysis and Natural Language Processing both have to do with the process of identifying the meaning of a collection of words together. Semantic analysis, for example, can help to identify the meaning of a phrase like “poverty relief” as distinct from what “poverty” and “relief” mean independently. The Social Actions API now uses a tool called Zemanta to apply these processes when searching the actions contained in the dataset. As a result, we can say with more confidence what an action is about and where it is taking place. When searching for the phrase “poverty relief,” for example, not only are the search results more accurate, but Zemanta helps us to identify other actions that might not in fact use that phrase but are nonetheless linked in meaning to it. It’s a difficult concept to explain, but hopefully this makes sense.

And what does “Linked Open Data” refer to?

Just like in 2008 when I had an “aha moment” about APIs, in June 2009 I had an “aha moment” about Linked Open Data. I was presenting Social Actions at the Semantic Technology Conference (SemTech), describing how Social Actions was an open database and how we encouraged developers to build open source applications that distributed this data widely. Ivan Herman from W3C listened to the presentation asked, “Why are you building something that’s so closed? Why aren’t you publishing this data in RDF?”

I was surprised to the say least. Defeated in fact. I had spent close to three years trying to build this open platform only to have someone more tech-savvy than me explain that what we had built was in fact still a closed platform. It turns out I was at the epicenter of the Linked Open Data community.  Their mission is to link the world’s knowledge in the same way that all of the world’s web pages have been linked to one another.

If you can imagine that today the web is a collection of links between pages, the web of tomorrow (proposed by these folks and Tim Berners-Lee) will be a collection of links between discreet knowledge, or datasets. Anyone will be able to follow the connection that’s been made between one repository of data and another the same way people can now hyperlink between one web page and another.

Linked Open Data essentially refers to building connections between these repositories in a standard format not unlike HTML and hypertext.

What role do API’s, and the people who build them, play in Linked Open Data?

The stewards of databases are no longer just asked to open up their datasets but to make them available in such a way that they link with other data repositories by design. In the case of Social Actions, Ivan from the Wc3 was effectively saying, “It’s great you have all of this data on actions people can take, but what are you doing to link that data with other datasets? What are you doing to help people make the connection between ‘poverty relief’ as an issue, for example, and existing data sets on the prevalence of poverty in a specific location?”

The Social Actions API now cross-references issues and locations with universal identifiers that have been assigned to them. Just like you might cross-reference the subject of a book with a Dewey Decimal number, we are now cross-referencing each action with a universal identifier that helps to link it to related data. Using Zemanta, we are able to provide URIs (Uniform Resource Identifier) from Freebase and DBPedia that make the connection between actions in our system and other material on the web that relates to the same topic.

You can see examples of this at http://search.socialactions.com. Search for any phrase. Below each result you’ll see a link to “Entities.”

Can you tell me more about what ViewChange has done:

ViewChange is an example of an application that queries our actions using Freebase and DBPedia URIs as well as traditional keywords and phrases. The application says to Social Actions, “Show me everything that matches this URI.” The same query is submitted to the Social Actions API as is submitted to any data repository - news articles, videos, blog posts, etc. It’s truly commendable that Link TV, through the ViewChange project, has driven these enhancements on our platform.

To you, what might the future look like for people who want to take action on the causes they care about?

The technology exists for us to do really amazing things when it comes to matching people with actions they can take to make a difference. The technology itself is advancing, opening up more possibilities for even smarter applications.

The future of social technology, specifically creative implementations of the Social Actions API and similar open source platforms, is very exciting provided nonprofits and foundations continue to make rich data available and link it up with other repositories in the way I’ve attempted to described. The future is also very bright if we continue to experiment with how these linked data repositories can be deployed for forms of community engagement that we would not have thought possible a few years ago.

If everything goes incredibly well in the coming years, what might emerge is ubiquitous infrastructure of enabling technology and complementary applications that continuously present individuals with meaningful and relevant opportunities to enact change.

—–

The Social Actions API – a pioneering open source project since 2008 – continues its boundary-pushing agenda by embracing the semantic web and contributing to the Linked Open Data cloud, encouraging the sector as a whole to leverage open source software and linked data for greater impact.

Visit socialactions.com today to learn more!

Earlier this week, we shared some of the lessons we learned from running the 2010 Camps Pilot. Not only did we learn a lot, we also got pretty darn excited for all that this network of changemakers can do! I’m writing today to share some of our ideas with you, ask for your feedback, and hear what you think about Camps 2011.

Cultivating the bottom-up

Communities have been solving their own problems for millenia. The networked nature of the web provides us with ways to harness new resources towards local issues, and our web-based platform provides us with a relatively easy way to surface and curate project success stories to our global audience. Together, harnessing human capital on the web, coupled with a networked approach to cultivating and supporting action networks offline creates an environment where there are entry-points for actors at both the local and global level. Funders, technology companies and volunteers are able to plug-in wherever most appropriate, based on their own capacities, interests and aspirations.

The Camps program is designed to provide both a space for people to share and learn, but also to develop new solutions. At the organizational level, we see our role as the ‘context providers’ — whereby, we create a framework for community organizing while providing some of the tools, resources and support in order to increase the likelihood of success of all participants. By design, we recognize that the energy, ideas and innovations come not from us, but from the bottom-up, and it’s the activities happening at the local level that can change the world. As regional events play out, our job is to curate the stories that emerge from the network, and to work with our partners to harness resources where there is need.

More breadth and depth

The 2010 Pilot saw events in 6 cities, in 4 countries (with over 500 engaged participants). We think the resources and lessons can scale further and have set new goals for 2011. Specifically, we’re aiming to mobilize at least 1000 people this year at regional events in as many as 10 countries around the globe.

You can check out the previous post in this series which included highlights of what we learned in the 2010 Pilot. What’s important to note here? We learned a lot, and will be bringing those lessons with us as we co-develop the Camps program this year with participating organizers. We’re committed to bolstering more resources towards the effort with our technology partners and sponsors, while addressing some of the barriers to collaboration we identified last year (including translation issues). As usual, we’ll be addressing these issues with the organizers, partners and participants, but if you have ideas or other examples we can learn from, please drop us a line any time!

From Local To Global: Surfacing Local Success Stories via NetSquared Challenges

Part of the NetSquared platform for the last 5 years has been the open innovation “Challenges” that open up a call for ideas to the world of innovators working at the intersection of technology and social change. Projects like Ushahidi, See-Click-Fix, and Frontline SMS: Medic received some of their initial funding through participation in the NetSquared Challenges and we are excited about the idea of combining the Challenge process with Camps taking place in local communities around the world.

Here’s the idea in a nutshell: Each Camp could administer a local NetSquared Challenge to surface great ideas for new tools, mashups, or strategies that local organizations are developing to extend the reach and impact of their work.

We are hopeful that by surfacing innovative Projects, mobilizing participation at the local and global level, and providing various entry-points for local participation, we can best leverage our position as a global social enterprise to harness resources on behalf of these projects. We’re excited about the potential of a community-driven approach, as it provides the communities we serve with the means to design social-benefit projects that address contextually appropriate solutions, while leveraging the knowledge, passion and interests of NetSquared’s mission-driven global network.

We are looking for your feedback to help shape the Camps 2011 plan! If you have thoughts on including Challenges or anything else, just leave a comment to let us know!

After a few years hosting a Global Conference in conjunction with our open innovation Challenge, we found that we had a room full of interesting, smart, excited changemakers. But, we also had a huge portion of our global community that couldn’t be in the room. In the summer of 2010, we tried something different: NetSquared Camps, a pilot in regional events. Working with a small group of motivated NetSquared Local Organizers, we distributed all of the resources associated with organizing our annual conference. In this two-part post, we want to share some of what we learned in the Pilot this summer and get your feedback on what we could do next year.

Is Local the new Global?

As the NetSquared Local network grows (events currently happening in 79 cities and 25 countries) we continue to explore the potential of a distributed event model for organizing and community building.

Highlights from the Pilot

Throughout the 2010 Pilot, we shared thoughts, notes, and ideas in real-time with weekly blog posts in the Camps Notes tag. We also connected with the participating organizers to get their feedback, ideas and insights to help mold the program for next year. Some of what we learned from those organizers includes:

What worked:

• Vetted participation: The NetSquared global network reaches tens of thousands of individuals. In order to vet participant engagement for trusted, community leaders we sought out pilot participants from Local organizers who already hosting monthly face-to-face events. We cast the call to the 135 volunteer organizers to join us for a Camp orientation call. A sub-set of about a dozen from the network joined us to discuss scope, roles and responsibilities and worked with us to develop a formal contract for the pilot. We plan to continue this process with our Local Organizer Network in the coming months, as organizers said it was easier to work in an environment and with people they already knew and trusted.
• Resources: NetSquared team translated the lessons learned from organizing our annual conference in an easy-to-use format so that others could build on what we had already tried and tested. Specifically, all organizers had access to the planning guides, templates, examples, and files via an online handbook and we continued to developed additional resources as new needs emerged.
• Accessibility: Our team remained accessible to organizers throughout the process, to ask hard questions, and address issues as they came up. Organizers had access to TSG staff via email to support Camp organizing efforts throughout the process, as well as well as weekly ‘coaching’ conference calls focused on addressing obstacles standing in the way of organizing the event. Coaching calls focused mostly on recruiting participants and volunteers, sponsorship and logistics.
• Promotion: We created separate pages on the site for each Camp event and promoted events across our online (and offline) channels. Organizers confirmed the value and the attention this support provided and we plan to expand outreach efforts for Camp organizers in the year to come.

Where we can improve:

• Unconference model: Some people attend unconference-style events all the time, and are comfortable with the format. Others, are less comfortable with a format that is more informal and demands participation in a way that traditional conferences do not. We’re still working on balancing the strengths of “unconference” model with its limitations. Strong facilitation, and a participatory culture where actors have a clear sense of (a) What they want to discuss (b) How to orient people around their work in an unconference-like setting. Moving forward, we’ll continue to integrate programmatic support to the unconference model in order to help organizers develop a framework for an agenda that maps to the local community’s expectations to be sure people at all levels of experience can participate.
• Shared planning: Everyone works a little differently, so even with a shared planning process (developed via Basecamp and the wiki), we struggled with finding the sweet-spot in supporting organizers with enough structure to organize tasks and milestones in a way that harnessed the diversity of needs from organizers. Moving foward, our planning efforts will focus on activities at the “Milestone” level in order to simplify communications on the project, while making TSG staff avail to organizers interested in tapping expertise when and where they need it.
• Language barriers: The NetSquared network reaches all around the world. To this end, we hope to tap into the knowledge of the community to translate documents and reuse for Camps organizers and participants beyond the English-speaking world.
• Sponsorship: This is the area with the most opportunity for new partnerships and engagement both at the global (sponsors that support the program or all Camps events equally) and local (sponsors that support the event/s nearest to them) level. We are thankful to our sponsors, SAP and Blackbaud, who took a leap of faith in supporting the global program last year, and are eager to work with them and other companies and funders interested in community-driven models. More details to come regarding plans for 2011 shortly.

If you’re interested in learning more, you can review the Camps Pilot pages, check out the Camps Notes series, or stay tuned for part 2 with details about Camps 2011 later this week!

The NetSquared.org website may be unavailable for up to 30 min today at 12 pm PST due to site maintenance. We are working to improve the Project Gallery and think you’ll really like the added functionality! If you have any trouble, find the site unavailable for more than 30 minutes, or anything else, please do not hesitate to let us know: net2 [at] techsoupglobal [.] org

The deadline for the New Media for Social Change competition almost here: December 20, 2010. Interested groups and individuals should read the Rules and Regulations and fill out the online submission form as soon as possible. If you have any questions or concerns that might keep you from submitting something, please feel free to contact One World immediately by writing Scott Hudson scott.hudson@oneworld.cz.

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This is cross-posted from my blog at AmySampleWard.org.

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We recently wrapped up the 2010 FACT Challenge, and while working to promote and support the Featured Projects and Winners, we are also looking ahead to upcoming Challenges. As always, we are actively improving the platform, including the Challenge process - the way it works for Project teams as well as the community. During the FACT Challenge, we heard from many community members, provided support when people needed help, and even worked to improve the platform in real time. During the Community Vote, I shared some of the feedback and updates on our work.  Now, we are hoping even more people will weigh in and share feedback!

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The French American Charitable Trust (FACT) Social Justice Challenge seeks to surface innovative Projects that leverage web and/or mobile technologies that foster collaboration around social justice issues.  The FACT Challenge’s 90 innovative Projects were put to the community last week, the vote results selecting the 15 Featured Projects to receive development support and move on to the round of expert judges for final selection.

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The French American Charitable Trust (FACT) Social Justice Challenge seeks to surface innovative Projects that leverage web and/or mobile technologies that foster collaboration around social justice issues.  The FACT Challenge’s 90 innovative Projects were put to the community last week, the vote results selecting the 15 Featured Projects to receive development support and move on to the round of expert judges for final selection.

15 Featured Projects

With thousands of votes from the community, the 15 Featured Projects include, in alphabetical order:

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Thanks to everyone who participated in the Community Vote this week for the FACT Social Justice Challenge! Voting is now closed. Your participation has narrowed the field of 90 innovatiove Project ideas down to the top 15 you think should be Featured Projects. 

All Projects will be notified on Monday and we will post on the blog and the FACT Challenge pages with the list of 15 Featured Projects moving on to the final round with the panel of judges.

If you have any questions about the FACT Challenge of the process, please do not hestitate to let us know: net2@techsoup.org