As reported in Network World today (2/28/2008):
Bill Gates is giving social networking another try and will use the LinkedIn professional networking site to ask how technology can be better used to support his charitable causes.
On Thursday, Gates, the chairman of Microsoft who will officially become a part-time employee of the company in July, will post a question to 19 million users of LinkedIn via its question feature. [Allan: LinkedIn Answers, I guess]
I’ve seen similar questions asked like this in LinkedIn. I wonder how many answers will be “nonprofits need websites” or “nonprofits need to be on Facebook”. All you FOSS advocates out there might want to say “nonprofits need to stop using Microsoft Windows in all its flavors”. It’s interesting that he’s using LinkedIn to do this considering that Microsoft just paid nearly a quarter billion dollars on Facebook.
I have a list of possible answers:
- “Gates Foundation should buy Blackbaud and give away Raiser’s Edge — hurrah!”
- “Gates Foundation should create a cyborg capable of smiling and miming like Marcel Marceau to cheer up nonprofit staff at events like NTC.”
- “Gates Foundation should genetically splice DNA from Bill Gates into nonprofit staff thereby creating a long lasting biological pool of willing Microsoft beta testers FOREVER.”
Add your own answers to the comments below…
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Bill Gates should buy the Blackbaud User Society and allow its staff to work on the project full-time. The staff would then develop an open-source alternative to Raiser’s Edge.