Should There Be A Nonprofit Category on Digg?

Comment

Comment by Beth Kanter on September 27, 2008 at 9:30am

Also, I don't think it is either/or in relation to movement building versus organizations. I think they will both continue to co-exist - and there is a whole spectrum of types of networks and how organization leverage networks.

Comment by Beth Kanter on September 27, 2008 at 7:38am

Some interesting comments on the cross-post
http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2008/09/should-there-be.html#comment-132386828

Christine: We also need more than technology when it comes to Digg - we need to really encourage and build a network of nonprofit/social action diggers. The community comes first - and that demonstrates interest and perhaps adding those features. Jonathan Colman and Danielle Brigida have amazing jobs at this. There are different ways to approached networked action - you're talking about the "here comes everyone" type of network. There's also other types.

Comment by Beth Kanter on September 26, 2008 at 7:10pm

Christine: I had the same concerns as well - to silo or not to silo.

Maybe the idea is here that we're just showing DIGG that there is an interest in nonprofit social change content and that opens the door to your idea ...

Comment by Christine Egger on September 26, 2008 at 4:49pm

Beth, it's so exciting to see you posting here! Great question. I'm actually on the fence about pushing for a Nonprofit category. IMHO the nonprofit community hasn't been served well at all by being lumped into a single category named for their legal structure. It completely obscures the contribution each organization makes uniquely to every single Digg category. If the Corporate Social Responsibility movement had preceded the creation of 501(c)3's, would we be encouraging a CSR category or just encouraging more CSR stuff within the existing categories? If we agree with Bob Edgar's comment at Monday's National Conference on Citizenship, that "people today are joining movements rather than organizations," we might be better off pushing for labels that refer to movements/issues rather than organization-types.

Along those lines the Action category could make sense, but if the idea is to pepper all of our daily goings-on with opportunities to seamlessly take action so whatever issue we're impacting moves in a positive direction (regardless of whether that action is nonprofit-, CSR-, or especially "none of the above"-related) it might be cooler to 1) encourage Digg to display related ways to take action on things that have been Dugg, and 2) encourage Digg functionality on all of the campaigns created on social action platforms.

Peter, this reminds me of the cross-silo conversation we had on Wednesday about another category-heavy site. Might be that encouraging Action categories is the best next step to take, but categorization of any kind is inconsistent with that "massively scalable and phenomenally decentralized" infrastructure we're driving towards. I guess I'm just sort of hoping that it's not too early to encourage building action-connection functionality across silos where ever they exist.

Thanks again, Beth, for prompting thoughts :)

Comment by Chad Norman on September 26, 2008 at 4:41pm

Someone would certainly notice if this hits the front page of digg. Between all of our combined social graphs, surely we can make that happen.

Comment by JoeSolomon on September 26, 2008 at 4:37pm

I just twitter'd asking people for ideas for reaching out to Digg. Hmmm...maybe Digg'ing this post? http://twitter.com/engagejoe/statuses/936269987

Comment by Peter Deitz on September 26, 2008 at 2:51pm

Beth, I'm with you. Not only do we need a Nonprofit category -- we need an Action category. I wrote to Digg 6 months ago about both issues. Still no answer!