New Opportunities for the Third Sector

One of the most popular IT buzzwords in the last year or so is the so-called ‘web 2.0’ or ‘social web’.

It seems like everybody is talking about it, even if most aren’t sure quite what it is! While it has all the hallmarks of a fad, web 2.0 is actually a game-changing phenomenon, the beginning of a new era in technology. And it’s one that promises to help third sector organisations operate more efficiently, generate more funding, and affect more lives.

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Web 2.0, the 'Social Web'

Avec Solutions endorses the paradigm shift towards what is being called Web 2.0 or the ‘social web’: the change from using the web to simply present information in top-down fashion to readers, to using the web as an interactive ‘social networking’ framework, engaging visitors in exciting ways and enabling them to become real participants.

Web 2.0 features built into or easily added into Joomla! CMS include:

  • RSS Newsfeeds – presenting information from the website in machine-readable (XML) format which makes the latest content available to a variety of different types of software (eg news readers, other websites). This would allow Hanna’s House to explore receiving and providing information through new online networks, and being included in news aggregators (such as Google News) is one of the surest ways of raising the profile of an organisation or project. It also allows users to subscribe to feeds and receive email or text (via an email-to-SMS service) messages to alert them to new content on the website.
  • Wikis (Mass Authoring) – allowing visitors themselves to easily add, remove, and otherwise edit and change content (cf Wikipedia). This is obviously not appropriate for all content, but it can create a high level of community engagement and grassroots participation in selected campaigns or projects.
  • Blogs (‘web logs’) – offering online news and diary-style entries, including video or audio ‘podcasts’ with a facility for users to comment on them. This would provide an informal way of communicating with stakeholders and the public, gaining feedback, boosting public awareness of key issues, and building online relationships.
  • Tags (‘social bookmarking’) – giving control to website users about how they categorise information (moving from top-down, librarian-style ‘taxonomy’, to what is popularly called ‘folksonomy’). Tagging allows for the kind of multiple, overlapping associations that the brain itself uses, rather than rigid categories. A document library that allows users to comment on how they used different documents, for instance, enables others to find documents based on those comments, not just a directory category, and also facilitates the formation of relationships and fosters collaboration based on common interests.

Avec Solutions believes that this new social web holds tremendous potential for not-for-profit organisations and small businesses to increase collaboration, effectiveness and impact.