Reader (1000+) Social Networking Sites Move Into Charity World. Causes.com is linked to Facebook and among a crop of new sites that try to use crowdsourcing to build interest in charities and causes, and to help them attract donations.
Crowdrise, Jumo, Causecast, Causes on and others try to use social networking and crowdsourcing to build interest in charities and causes, and to help them attract donations. “2010 has really been the year of the social network for social good,” said Katya Andresen, chief operating officer at Network for Good, a nonprofit that handles processing and other administrative chores for many of the new sites. In a recent study of online giving, Network for Good found that the experience when donating online is important to people.
“I think many of these new sites are trying to make online giving, which is rather transactional in nature, an experience of greater intimacy, and that’s valuable,” Ms. Andresen said. But to many in the nonprofit world, the value of the sites remains to be seen. Predicting Tie Strength With Social Media. Using the Internet to Scale (June 15, 2010) A look at how KaBOOM!
Has used the Internet to disseminate its model, empowering local communities to self-organize to build their own playgrounds. There has been much talk lately about social innovation and scale, especially with the recent launch of the eponymous White House Fund to scale “what works.” But more attention has been paid to the social innovations themselves (i.e. interesting programs or organizations), than to innovative approaches in how to scale. At Monitor Institute, where I now work, we are particularly interested in the latter—including more networked approaches to scale, rather than traditional organizational growth. In our recent SSIR article, Working Wikily, you’ll find many examples of how nonprofits have used online and offline networks to scale their social impact. So when we were asked last winter by the award-winning nonprofit KaBOOM!
We spent several months studying KaBOOM!’ And the results have been impressive. With assistance from KaBOOM! Crowdrise-Online Fundraising With a Few Twists. May 12, 2010; Source: ABC News | Online fundraising is getting more and more popular and also more and more crowded.
But one site that has a chance to run away from the pack was launched this week by the actor Edward Norton, star of the Incredible Hulk, who came up with the idea last year after taking part in New York City's marathon to raise money for the Maasai Wilderness Conservation Trust. Norton's site, Crowdrise, lets people create their own pages to raise money for any cause or organization of their choice. Drawing on the same popularity of social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook that let “people share their personal narrative,” Norton says Crowdrise gives users a “platform to say, these are the causes I care about, I am volunteering and sponsor me.” In addition to being free, Crowdrise offers users prizes and reward points based on the outcomes of their fundraising efforts.
SNA in R- How to load a network. R for networks: A short tutorial. What is R?
Copied from R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is a GNU project which is similar to the S language and environment which was developed at Bell Laboratories (formerly AT&T, now Lucent Technologies) by John Chambers and colleagues. R can be considered as a different implementation of S. There are some important differences, but much code written for S runs unaltered under R. Getting help with R R is easy to begin to use but somewhat more difficult to master. If at least you remember the name of the function you need to use, type help(functionname), as in help(help) [Note that the text of this document is interspersed with R commands that may be copied and pasted directly into R.] It is also good to know that most documentation includes a "see also" section, so if you can think of a function that is similar to the one you want, sometimes "see also" can be helpful.
Social Network Analysis with sna. Statnet. Competencies for Network Success.