An Online Toolbox for Australian Social Innovation

Hi Don, This looks to be an excellent idea similar to the social enterprise that I co-founded in the United States - IdeaEncore Network (http://budurl.com/PA0130). Our experience supports the need for such a repository and I agree with most of nemo's points above. In our experience, this is not a technical issue (though the technology is critical), it is primarily and incentive alignment issue. How to encourage people and organizations to take the time to share more materials and to share them more broadly. To that end, the following are a few addition attributes that I would suggest you consider: 1. add a method of aligning individual AND organizational incentives for sharing. We have built our tool to enable organizations to create earned income (selling ideas) as a 'nudge' to take the time to share. 2. add a method of protecting intellectual property while encouraging sharing. Creative Commons (http://budurl.com/PA0130a) has done this work superbly in over 80 countries. 3. DO require sign-in to download and rate/comment. We use this as a method of ensuring a feedback mechanism to those who shared items (so it's possible to know who benefited) and also a way to enforce licensing. 4. Encourage organizations to place audience appropriate links to sub-sets of the master list on their own (or co-branded) websites. As an example, we have a service whereby associations and other organizations can subscribe to a standardized RSS feed or can create a customizable feed (RSS or iFrame or we host) to create their own online library from the common pool of resources. The combination of the above, we hope, will reduce re-invention of tools/templates AND, importantly, create a self-sustaining, self-reinforcing knowledge sharing network. Off-list, we would be happy to share lessons and explore ways to collaborate (so you don't have to re-create your own technology platform, for instance). Scott Bechtler-Levin IdeaEncore Network

Online peer mediation is always a tricky one to pull off. This will need some thought. Establishing authenticity will be the site's greatest challenge Maintaining the reliability and datedness of articles is also tricky. I think a solid system will require users to take significant 'ownership' of their articles. Have their name next to the articles and have them responsible for maintaining it. Giving other users a system to support the author of the article by letting them know something's out of date or might be incorrect etc. Rated articles translate into ratings for the author, weighting their articles in search results and weighting their vote correspondingly. There's a lot of templating to go into something like this... the immediate search functionality is what we call an AJAX realtime search lookup... also the existence of an API to allow the site to extend to other mediums - all of these basically mean you're looking at a Service Oriented Architecture with a decent database. I can really only recommend a .Net application backend and SQL Server database, which is what I develop in. Hosting is usually slightly more expensive, but development and maintenance is much less painless and more reliable than open platforms such as php running on mySql.

Hey Donnie, I'm not sure I have enough experience in social innovation to comment on the usefulness of the purpose (help people to find resources for social innovation in Australia), but my common sense tells me it is a good idea, and I trust you for that! About the toolbox implementation, here are my 2 cents: make it a public wiki! Everyone could access it, you could search it. You can even put some forms for people to submit their resources. And courageous registered users can edit the wiki, add other's people recommendation. If you want to prototype it, Google Sites (wiki), along with something like Google Spreadsheets forms would be of great help. I'm sure there are plenty of other tools that would be great for that too. Do it! Laurent