Social Venture News from Yale SOM

Social Actions on one hand is an aggregator of social actions consolidating opportunities to be involved from organizations like Kiva, Global Giving, Climatepath and more than 50 others (check them out here) and on the other hand, they are an open source database that allows anybody to “pass along” their information to this database by encouraging developers to create tools to do so.  They claim over 60,000 causes which, I don’t doubt.

In addition, they have developed an online community of people who are sharing their experiences in this space.  How does this differ than other online communities in this space?  I just signed up and will share if I think its worth joining.

What I personally find the most interesting about what they are doing is creating a bridge between “tech people” and “social change organizations/people”.   One example of this is their Change the Web competition.  I am a firm believer that the web has still not found its footing to change the world.  This is a wonderful tool to getting us on track.  My question is whether we can provide a bigger incentive for more of the web world to get involved?

About Socialactions.com

We encourage social tech programmers to develop web applications that intelligently distribute the actions in our database across the websites, social networks, and mobile phones that millions of people use every day. The overarching goal of our work is to make the web more action-oriented, or in other words, to make it easier for people to make a difference.

Change the Web 2009
Change the Web 2009 is an online competition that will inspire third-party
developers to build innovative tools that make it easy for people to find and share opportunities to make a difference.

We anticipate hundreds of contest submissions in the form of fully-functional web applications that share one thing in common—they embed invitations to make a difference in the places where people already find themselves online.

The contest submissions will do nothing short of transform the web from a place to find information and communicate into a vehicle that facilitates sustained and meaningful action on the issues people care about.