The Listening Post Project

The Listening Post Project at the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies is an exciting example of the uses of the web to diffuse knowledge in a fast and open manner. It is this free and open generation and sharing of pertinent organizational information that makes such projects a fundamental feature of the "participatory society."

At the heart of the project are the nonprofit organizations that will serve as organizational "listening posts" on the most important pressures affecting nonprofit organizations and their subsequent responses.

According to the Project's website, "The Listening Post Project was designed to fill this critical gap by creating a solid base of useable knowledge about how nonprofit organizations are responding to the range of critical challenges they are facing at the present time." Its three "primary purposes are 1)to assess the health of key components of the American nonprofit sector; 2) to determine the challenges these organizations are confronting; and 3) to help organizations identify how best to respond."

"The project relies on organizational 'listening posts' — i.e., organizations across the country representing diverse fields of nonprofit action — that participate in regular "Soundings" through which they report on key trends and developments affecting them, and express their opinions on an array of topics deemed most important to the sector. The project summarizes the resulting insights in a series of quick-turn-around Communiqués, commissions case studies on promising approaches, and organizes Innovators' Roundtables for practitioners and educators in the field."

Overall, it is an exciting project that is well worth following.

Nonprofit Networking: The New Way to Grow

Summary of an article Nonprofit Networking: The New Way to Grow by Harvard Business School professor Jane Wei-Skillern. May 16, 2005.

Professor Wei-Skillern's main argument focuses on how nonprofits can achieve substantial gains in their social impact not only by growing, but often through the judicious use of decentralized networks with existing organizations--ranging from "sector-level umbrella organizations, to intraorganizational networks, to grassroots networks." She cites the National Audubon Society in the United States and Guide Dogs for the Blind Association in the U.K. as good examples of this.

Such networks are inherently more participatory in their decision-making structures and, as Wei-Skillern suggests, may hold carry great potential for helping charitable organizations maximize their mission.

ServiceLeader.org: Virtual Volunteering

ServiceLeader.org contains a variety of resources for setting up and managing "virtual volunteering" programs. This is an example of increasing "participation" in two important ways. First, the site deals with an emerging form of volunteering that is inherently decentralized and participatory. There are important managerial implications of such forms of volunteerism. Hence the site. Second, it's an example of how the spread of advanced information and communications technologies are facilitating the rapid diffusion of specialized knowledge bases like ServiceLeader.org. These knowledge bases and "leadership libraries" are participatory both in the extent to which decentralized groups of individuals can create knowledge and in how diverse individuals can acquire that knowledge in a wholly decentralized format.