N2Y2 Con: Aspiration Social Source Commons Intro Presentation

Aspiration Social Source Commons is a Featured Project at the 2nd NetSquared Conference (N2Y2).

Project Summary

The Social Source Commons (SSC) helps nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations find appropriate software tools to support their programmatic work, and share knowledge about using those tools. It is the only venue on the internet striving to build a complete inventory of what tools are available for nonprofit needs, in both general and sector-specific categories.

SSC is a standards-based, open source web platform for mapping "what's out there� and �who's using what� in nonprofit software, based on a model that blends the sharing ethic and passion of nonprofit and NGO technologists with the best new internet technologies and information models. SSC builds on the "social network-driven" software selection paradigm that pervades NPO/NGO technology (�hey, what are you using for...?�), allowing users to discover tools and connect with allies by asking:

* What are others using? Which tools are most popular?
* Who else is using what I'm using, and what are they saying about it?
* What tools exist in a given category?
* What new tools are people discovering?
* What am I not using that I could be using?

The platform documents the landscape of software tools available for NPO/NGO use by letting nonprofit techies compare what tools they use. The architecture is based on sites such as wikipedia.org, del.icio.us and flickr.com that leverage collaborative editability, democratic categorization schemes, and ease of use to build shared knowledge stores. SSC is designed to enable peer supported, collaborative sharing of software knowledge.

SSC is not just an inventory tool; it aims to be an information "prism" through which relevant information feeds, updates, and new resources can be aggregated and redistributed per tool, per category, and per user. SSC takes advantage of the emerging RSS paradigm to "push" information to each user in a personalized fashion, and to allow other sites and sources to query and publish SSC data.