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Ninth Anniversary of Nonprofit Online News
	Nonprofit Online News was launched as a weblog nine years ago yesterday, although the word "weblog" had yet to be coined. With the support of our readers we have more compelling resources and more original content than ever and the prospects for our tenth year are very exciting. Thank you for being part of it! Posted: 4/2/06; 10:18:24 PM #

Make a FOIA Request

You're probably aware by this point that the U.S. government is spying on a wide range of nonprofit organizations and their volunteers, particularly those that are working for peace and justice. Although your right to be free from such spying is vehemently opposed by the Bush Administration, they still occasionally concede that you might have the right to know you are being spied upon. The Freedom of Information Act, which achieved its current form after a similar period of executive abuse (the Watergate scandal), gives you the means to request such information. The Reporter's Committee for Freedom of the Press is helping people file Freedom of Information Act Requests through a simple web based form. I encourage every reader and their colleagues to complete this form. Let's find out what's going on! Posted: 4/2/06; 10:15:28 PM #

Stakeholder Commitments and Initiatives

The World Summit on the Information Society's Golden Book is a directory of 375 projects (downloadable in its entirety) from around the world which are working toward the eleven WSIS "Action Lines". Only a small portion of these are strictly civil society projects, but my reading of it gave me a unique global perspective on the advancement of ICT for development and the closing of the digital divide. Posted: 4/2/06; 7:56:14 PM #

Democratizing Innovation

Katrin Verclas recommended Eric Von Hippel's book Democratizing Innovation last week and now I want to recommend it to you, in turn. It's a great companion book to Lessig's Future of Ideas, but it has its own critically valuable points to make, particularly in the way it lays out a vision of user driven innovation. I believe the nonprofit sector is at best ambivalent about empowering stakeholders and with regard to innovation, often we don't even really know what we mean by the term. There are several chapters of Hippel's book that could help our sector sort out its confusion: Innovation Communities, Toolkits for User Innovation and Custom Design, and Linking User Innovation to Other Phenomena and Fields. Posted: 4/2/06; 7:46:50 PM #