Making the site

On Helpalot you can leave messages on the guestbooks of personal pages, but there wasn’t yet a good place to have a more general centralized discussion. We thought about adding groups and having different types of them (organizations, companies, soon to be non-profits, etc) and we might add those features in the future, but we felt it would change too much of the fundamentals of the site. We first want to learn more about the core of the site, before we want to alter the structure. 

The now the plan is to have a forum somewhat seperate of the rest of the site. Then we will send a newsletter every month or two with some updates on what is happening on the site, trends we spot, and we will ask a question to the community. With idea to drive traffic to the forum and via the forum back to the site.

The idea is that using a newsletter people are more likely to be on the Helpalot site when others are too, making it more relevant for them to ask questions to each other and share their knowledge.

At the moment we have set up a forum, but its not fully integrated with the rest of the site yet (for instance the design and navigation part). So a bit prematurely I’ll give you the link:
http://www.helpalot.org/forum/

Introduce yourself over here:
http://www.helpalot.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=8

You don’t need to register to leave a message.

Social Actions is a website that is working to bring information of different social causes websites like Helpalot together. I had some email contact with Peter Deitz, creator of Social actions, and joined the Google Group working on a mash-up he’s working on.

I hope this is the beginning of something big. It deals with a problem that you see on the internet in many fields; There are a number of sites dealing with (user generated) content in a field. There is no monopoly of one site and it is difficult to find out for users where to search or become active.

We want ways to make use of the diversity and different evolutionary paths different sites are taking to make sure a field keeps innovative, but also we want an easy overview and integration of information.

It all deals with the fragmentation and integration of information, and aligning common goals while keeping individual custom tailored goals in place. Probably one of thé problems of the internet right now and even more so in the near future.

Once we find out/design a good model for how to set up a collaboration in the field of social causes that works on all levels and for all parties involved, it might serve as a good example for other fields.

So I guess the question is, how to design such a model. Getting the different websites involved with this problem by working on this social actions mash-up is step one.

If this grows out to be a major meta platfom, I wonder if we’ll end up with a meta meta site that integrates these types of meta websites into one website that gives you full access in an easy way to all information that is available in the world on any topic.

I’d also like to be a part of that project, so when you’re reading this in 3 years and working it; email me .

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/200

Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, asks why we aren’t more compassionate more of the time. Sharing the results of psychological experiments (and the story of the Santa Cruz Strangler), he explains how we are all born with the capacity for empathy — but we sometimes choose to ignore it.

A nice video, that has a section in it that relates to the new website I’m thinking of that has not yet have a name (a product social context website).

Supporters of US republican candidate Ron Paul collected 6 million in one day. You can see how the money was donated on this graph. I find it really interesting how straight the line of this graph is going:

http://www.ronpaulgraphs.com/dec_16_vs_nov_5_total.html
The last ‘money bomb’ ended at almost exactly 4 million, and it was as if supporters collectively (and subconsciously) decided that 6 million should be the new target.

(The relation to Helpalot is that it’s about the collective wisdom. Something Helpalot is trying to tap into, in order to make it easier to find trustworthy charity projects.)