Third Sector Connector Blog

I woke up thinking about Tinker Toys this morning. Those little wheels, spokes, connectors, and green fans were “the bomb.”  Often, my sister and  I would build fully-loaded little farms complete with animals, trucks, windmills, and barns. Or sometimes we created huge cellular-looking blobs with random hubs and spokes, together sculpting a funky abstract nexus of modern art.   Whatever emerged from our play, it always had its own “je ne sais quoi” of connectivity.

The creation of the Internet and the emergence of Web 2.0 has filled me with the same sense of wonder about its potential for connections. For those of us who are web-connected (or web-addicted), the world is now flat and our degrees of separation continue to shrink. We routinely connect globally with colleagues on LinkedIn and Twitter, and we swap stories, pictures, and videos on FaceBook. We StumbleUpon, Digg, Buzz, and Wave.  Hand-written letters and cards were first replaced by email, and now are down to cheery 140-character tweets and text messages.  Brief repeated encounters with an amazing variety of people now pepper our online days and nights.  Venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson has diagrammed his network of global friends and I find that it looks like the string art I made in my post-Tinker Toy days.

While we find new ways to connect globally, the very essence of our humanity also draws us nearer to each other. As social beings, we live, love, and work in communities.  Whether in rural communities of farmers, small towns populated with multi-generational families, or large urban cities surrounded by suburbs, we still rely on local connections for much of our day-to-day lives. Connections, that for many of us, are forged by nonprofit community-based organizations.  They are:

• The local hospitals and clinics that provide us with medical care.
• The free-standing libraries where we research and read, and access the Internet if we can’t afford access at home.
• The performing arts organizations that foster our love for music, dance and theatre.
• The advocates that preserve our local habitats and protect our waterways.
• The day care centers and the after-school programs that serve our youth.
• The adoption centers where we find our furry family members.
• The helping hands that provide us with emergency food and housing assistance and keep us safe during disasters.

These organizations don’t work in isolation, though.  Together, they form a network of resources that allow all of us to remain fully participating and thriving members of our communities. They inform and refer us, provide critical services, and collaborate  in ways that benefit us all. They are the neurons that are the basic building blocks of our communities.

So, Tinkers Toys took me to string art and neurons, and I now find myself thinking about the tapestry of humanity:

• How can we take our global string art and weave it into our local neural networks?
• How do we find ways to benefit from this new tapestry?
  
• And, what does that tapestry look like?
  

Would love to hear your thoughts.

–Laura

p.s. Thanks to @askdebra for a comment that she made yesterday during the #NPCons twitter chat about, “Humanity opening doors.”  It was part of my day residue and inspired some of my thoughts.

At the beginning of the new year, sector guru Beth Kanter posted her three words for 2010, and invited her blog readers to post theirs in response.  I violated the rules by posting four, but it was only three concepts so I still think it’s legitimate: “Challenge, Change, and Collective Co-Creation.”

Challenge: When we launched, we invited you to join us and help us build a site that would be valuable for community-based nonprofit organizations and those who serve them. You took us seriously, and almost all of your feedback was focused on improving access to our Nonprofit and NGO tips.  Here’s a list of the top requests that you made:

Can you make it easier to navigate to the tips?
Can you break out the tips by categories/subject matter?
Can we get email notification every time a new tip is posted?
Can we subscribe to comments on tips so that we can follow the dialogue?
Can you make it easier for us to share the tips with others?
Can you give us guidelines so that we can contribute tips ourselves?

Changes:

• There’s now a “Tips” tab built into our site navigation on every page.
• When you click on that tab, you’ll find our detailed categories and subcategories.  We’ll add to this as we go.
• Members can now receive notification of new tips by email.  Here’s how.
• Members can now log in and subscribe to comments in individual tips. It’s as simple as checking a notification box at the bottom of each tip.
• Sharing a tip is easy!  Each tip has a “share” button that makes it easy to share via popular social media sites, and other locations on the Web.
• New visitors and folks who haven’t logged in can also click a “like” button to let us know the tip is a favorite.
• Read our FAQ for members who want to submit tips. Even if you have your own blog or website, there are several advantages to being a Third Sector Connector Tipster, too.

Collective Co-Creation: Here’s where we’ve been spending the most time, although it’s been mostly under the hood.  We’ve been working closely with the members of our first Get Local community in Coastal South Carolina to improve and expand our services before we roll them out to other communities.  What started as a separate website that was a matching service for community-based nonprofits and the businesses that serve them has taken on an entirely new dimension.  Our programmers have integrated the first version of our local service into our global site, and it is now easily scalable and replicable within other communities.

Within our Get Local communities, our nonprofit members can now:

• Interact with other local nonprofits in private local-only forums set up just for nonprofit leaders within a specified geographic region.
• Post to a shared calendar of events and trainings that can be viewed by the general public.
• Reach out to the community via our local nonprofit directories.
• Easily find and hire nonprofit-friendly businesses and service providers.
• Access Third Sector Connector’s global news, tips and forums from one integrated Web interface.

Read more about the benefits of having a Get Local community and how to get one.

We’re still working out some minor nits and bugs, and we hope you’ll let us know if you find any problems. In any case, we hope you’ll take a look around, share some tips, help us spread the word, and join us if you haven’t already done so.  After all, we’ve still got more than half the year to go, and plenty of room for more challenges, more changes, and more collective co-creation!