And those of you designing nonprofit sites exclusively also have no more excuses as the authors have outlined a set of usable design patterns for nonprofit Web sites. What’s interesting is that the authors specifically include blogs and discussion groups as a design patterns for advanced Web sites. As this book will eventually become a sort of Web Design Bible, I hope that nonprofit techies will take those recommendations and lay them out for their managers to consider.

A billion people in advanced economies may have between two billion and six billion spare hours among them, every day.

In order to harness these billions of hours, it would take the whole workforce of almost 340,000 workers employed by the entire motion picture and recording industries in the United States put together, assuming each worker worked forty-hour weeks without taking a single vacation, for between three and eight and a half years!

Perhaps THE seminal book on the Internet in the last ten years, Yochai Benkler’s Wealth of Networks is an intellectual smorgasborg of a book encompassing philosophy, economics, law and technical issues all at once. I can’t say how refreshing it is to read a book about the Internet that doesn’t have breathless prose about the new Internet utopia where bloggers and Myspace users represent the latest greatest conception of the American citizen. As a programmer and system administrator, I tend to see systems abounding throughout the Internet from it’s hardware to its network layers then its protocols and then eventually to the content that everyone creates as well as the systems that regulate that content. However, I only saw this as a system of systems with no reference to the motivations that drove the users who participated in the Internet. This book refreshed my perspective on the Web with a clear explanation of how the Internet is not merely a black box to which we add our content. This is the first time I’ve seen a book that describes systematically the design and contents of the Internet and the clear policy implications that can be derived from that description.

What’s ultimately the most fascinating and I believe the most relevant to us non-profit technology practitioners is this passage to be found in his chapter on “Some Basic Economics of Information Production and Innovation”:

Social behavior that traditionally was relegated to the peripheries of the economy has become central to the most advanced economies. Nonmarket behavior is becoming central to producing our information and cultural environment.

He cites the open source movement and collaborative technologies such as wikis and blogs as part of this new social behavior. What is ultimately disappointing to me is the implication that older models of nonmarket behavior (you know, old-school, brick and mortar nonprofits) are relegated to the sidelines on the Internet. They don’t know how or can’t participate in this new nonmarket behavior. Instead, you have new kinds of nonprofits such as Wikimedia Foundation and the Craigslist Foundation that are taking advantage of this collaborative space. This book has certainly altered my perspectives on the Internet with its insistent focus on nonmarket social behaviors being the primum mobile of the Web. With the Internet, we have the greatest volunteer force ever known and it’s just out there waiting for nonprofits to tap it.

If you’re interested in understanding how your nonprofit can tap into Internet users and their need to accumulate social capital via peer production, this is the book to get. There are multiple angles to consider in this book but I think even a cursory inspection will inspire people to rethink their Internet marketing approach.