A more astute reader than I, Sam Caustus, has posted a link to glowfish.org which seems to follow a very similar model to Change.org. Taking an admittedly cursory look, it’s built on a triad of audiences: nonprofits, constituents and foundations. I have to say that the “foundations” leg of glowfish.org’s triad threw me for a loop. Historically, foundations have been wont to include themselves in the Web fray. Witness Ford Foundation’s brochureware Web site. From this cynic’s point of view, foundations support transparency in OTHER organizations not for themselves.
Glowfish also posits that foundations would want to use Glowfish to post grants. I have to say, VERY interesting but again, highly unlikely. It’s hard to predict anything yet as there seems to be only one foundation listed on Glowfish right now.
Historically, foundations are unlikely to post their grants on any Web site besides theirs and again historically, foundations are wont to create a common format for their grant applications. Could sites like Change.org and Glowfish eventually change nonprofit history? My guess is no but they’re certainly welcome to try! I’m a little wary of that eventuality occurring myself since neither of these sites have an open API that would allow for programmatic access to the grant data. Of course, it’s still too early in their respective lifecycles but it is something to watch out for.
As an aside, I LOVE the idea of people with little experience in our sector trying to reform us from the outside. These new social networking applications (Change.org, rethos.com, and now Glowfish) are great but unfortunately, they need to understand our sector a little better and realize that grant information is treated like intellectual property by many foundations. They are not interested in centralized databases simply because there’s no motivational factor behind it. What possible advantage could a foundation accrue from centralized grants databases? From their point of view, it only increases the number of incoming applications which is probably already hefty.
There’s also a tiny little bug in the registration process. I was hoping to see if my org was already in their database but my org’s name is long and their text field wasn’t long enough to contain it. As a result, I had to skip the “find your org” section of their process. I don’t understand why they don’t just get the Guidestar database and use that to seed their tables. Is there a cost issue involved with that?
All this said, I urge you all to sign up and contribute to both Change.org and Glowfish. Change.org has the slicker and more interesting interface but social networks aren’t about the technology, it’s about the number of people in them (ahem, Myspace). It’s in our interest to have multiple social networks supporting our sector as that way we can use the threat of competition to hang over their heads. I don’t want us to be faced with the situation three years from now of having to deal with a monolithic social network that doesn’t have an open API (that darn Myspace again).
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