Sunday, December 17, 2006

Web 2.0 for NPO (Nonprofit organization)

Web 2.0 is absolutely a trend that NPO should pursue.
I have a study as posted in the following.
Web 2.0 also has some problems that people start to notice. First of all, sharing is limited and diverse.
Various tools exist: Blogs, Flickr, BT, …. It is not uncommon
that one has to combine several services in order to make things done.
For example, save the documents in Google Docs, store the photos on Clickr,
and write blogs on SixApart.
Second, existing Web 2.0 service providers give limited storage and functions.
There is no roadmap about the new features people
are looking for. Change of the platform is not straightforward, either. For example,
people better not decide to move from Blogger to Xuite, because there is no import
function.
Nonetheless, I think one can still leverage the existing nice services such as Flickr, Google Docs, and Blogger that
are already popular. These services seem generic and have uses in many ways.
As to the mission critical applications that NPO want to build, Web 2.0 essentials can be built into these systems
from scratch. For example, we can do AJAX programming to make the GUI more usable and friendly.
We can also let users contribute and share their data, and even enable them to mash services up, just to name a few.
A far dream may be a Web 2.0 platform that NPO can host their mission critical applications.
In that case, all they need is learn how to use the systems without the bothering IT maintenance problems.

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