A spectacular new idea

A while back I mused about a new basic category of non-profit, something like "macro archives". A couple of weeks ago a spectacular new example of that impulse was made public, called the Encyclopedia of Life.

Funded by several large foundations and led by a veritable who's who of conservation and ecology heavyweights, the EOL aims to bring together all knowledge about the world's 1.8 million known species of plants, animals and fungi (a list which continues, of course, to grow). The wiki-based model they are using seems ideal for the purpose, though unlike Wikipedia this one's content will be professionally moderated -- so one interesting question will be just what the qualifications are to contribute information. (In the U.S., U.K. and a few other places they will have to figure out how to deal with information from legions of serious amateur restorationists and ecologists.)

As the project's newly-named executive director puts it: “I dream that in a few years wherever a reference to a species occurs on the Internet, there will be a hyperlink to its page in the Encyclopedia of Life.”

The news coverage has all focused on what I just summarized, and it's pretty cool. But I bet professionals in the nature-conservation sector will end up even more excited by something else buried at the end of the press release: "To provide depth behind the portal page for each species, the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), a consortium that holds most of the relevant scientific literature, will scan and digitize tens of millions of pages of the scientific literature that will offer open access to detailed knowledge. In fact, the BHL now has scanning centers operating in London, Boston, and Washington DC, and has scanned the first 1.25 million pages for the Encyclopedia."

That part is, for me, even more mind-boggling than the big wiki. Ecology is just one of many fields in which more knowledge has been rigorously collected during the last century or two than in the previous history of humanity combined, but so much of that understanding remains captive in printed pages in scattered archives. Scanning such vast piles into modern digital technology is a huge step forward towards that "Star Trek shipboard computer" fantasy: letting machines carry out the gruntwork of collecting and sorting information so that human ingenuity can be devoted entirely to the analysis and critical thinking which makes us unique in our world.
Coooool!

Making it easier and easier to be charitable

The second edition of Giving Carnival (which is a periodic roundup of blog posts about a particular topic) added a couple of new entries to the growing list of new and interesting web-based services for would-be donors to non-profits, in addition to DonorsChoose.

For instance Changing the Present is working on several clever features aimed at encouraging charitable contributions in lieu of holiday or birthday gift-buying, such as a personal registry like a bridal registry. Network for Good is the leading "charity portal" online, where individuals can search for non-profits by keyword or name or type. Global Giving performs the same service, targeted at matching American donors with overseas causes.

iGive is I believe the oldest catalogue site that directs a portion of purchases to non-profits; they are a for-profit enterprise which collects commissions from the participating merchants. Their competition includes Greater Good and, in the United Kingdom, Shop2Give.

Give Meaning attempts to make it easy for individuals to band together, sort of create online giving circles around a specific cause or recipient non-profit. (An essay by the founder describing how he arrived at that notion is here.)

I'm curious what impact professional development directors are perceiving from all this. Are existing checkwriting donors going online, or is it bringing new ones -- has anyone done any hard datagathering yet around questions like that? For that matter does this sort of thing in the long term reduce the market value of salaried fundraising staffers (because it gets easier to fundraise without them) or increase it (because charitable impulses are more and more enabled thereby enlarging the pool of regular small givers from which to try to find future major donors)?

addendum on massive archives

Turns out that the Internet Archive and like-minded groups, including at least one major foundation, see Google's book-scanning project as dangerous and hope to match it in a more-public, not-for-profit form. That Associated Press article does a good job of summing up the disagreement and the various parties' motivations.

P.S. I note that the "Open Content Alliance" includes Google competitors Yahoo and MSN (i.e. Microsoft) as well as Adobe. So it has an element of alliance of convenience, though mostly it's major universities and libraries.

Information Age nonprofits

We may soon need to add a new entry to the standard categories of not-for-profit organization (arts, social service, education, environment, religious, museums, etc.), one which this era's defining technology is enabling: non-profits devoted to exhaustively and permanently recording information and making available universal searching of it by anyone. Or as one group's mission statement puts it, "Universal access to human knowledge."

The key impulses distinguishing these efforts from libraries and history museums would be the "exhaustive" part and the "practicable searching" part -- maybe the category name would be something like "macro archive"? (Yecch, maybe not.) History museums do not attempt to house every single iota of information from an era no matter how trivial; and even in the greatest most comprehensive library in the world you can't easily search within all the texts it holds.

One obvious example is Wikipedia. Another is the Internet Archive, which recently got some press (2,300 storage servers and growing!). Project Gutenberg was an early significant step in this direction and remains a growing and vital resource. A targeted non-profit application of the impulse is the Mormons' vast and growing archive of family-tree information (which I can attest from personal experience is truly offered free to one and all without any questions about religious affiliation or intention).

Google's controversial archiving project represents the same impulse but in a for-profit form, as does Bill Gates' photos company called Corbis. Actually Google has for several years been making freely available a narrow but deep slice of the Internet Archive's turf, a complete searchable archive of "newsgroups", which were the dominant online forums for years before the World Wide Web became the Internet's front end (use their "advanced groups search" link.)

There may be more such efforts underway or in the works, these are just the ones I've noticed.