Crossposting from my blog at NetSquared

Many NGOs are good at forming strategic alliances to achieve their objectives (they're usually also good at competing each other nearly to death, often at the same time, but I'll keep that for a different post maybe). Yet, at the level of web technology, this usually seems to be limited to the level of exchanging tips and tricks, perhaps some RSS feeds, and referring each other to providers and vendors.

Two major developments are changing that situation now:

1. Many organisations are investing in Drupal for their web platforms. This creates an eco-system where it's easier to exchange actual technology, and to talk about it on a higher level of abstraction of artefacts and concepts.
2. There's an exploding interest in the NGO world to align strategies and investments in technology. The "Tool Pool" discussion revived at the Ecampaigning Forum, and the NetSquared conference next week brings this closer as well. Not to mention to emergence of more and more BarCamps like Social Innovation Camp.

Nabuur has been pioneering online volunteering since 2001, and is currently redesigning their organisation: how to put "web 2.0" into the DNA of everything that's happening? And how to engineer that, rather than try and hope it works?

So I spent the day with Nabuur team members, who invited René Jansen to facilitate drilling down to the core of their activities. René is one of the authors of "The Realm of Sociality: Notes on the design of social software", a paper which won the Best Paper Award 2007 at the “International Conference on Information Systems” in Montreal, last December, and (to me, at least) introduces the concept of "sociality" as the centre of the design process.