I like what Wyclef said. People don’t want charity and pity, they want opportunity to do their thing.

That’s why microfinance and platforms like Kiva and Wokai are so powerful. Collaborative lending and you create your own life. Then pay us back and we do the same again somewhere else.

All the charity and aid in the world wont empower people.

Creating opportunities will.

I am curious about the crowdsourcing angle specifically, since a lot of what we see happening revolves around this in Social Media. My optimist perspective is that the “dogooder space” is growing in size, and effort should be put into to scaling it more and more.

To Weingarten’s punk angle, My gut is that the ratio of truly innovative solutions to so-so solutions will probably not change all that much whether the doogooder space is 10,000 individuals, or 10,000,000. I think some people are born innovators, and like pulling together different entities creatively, and others are not. Having access to massive amounts of catered information will not change this a ton IMO.

However, I think that having massive amounts of people stumbling upon social issues due to crowdsourcing buzz is not a bad thing, as it increases awarenes around issues.

“crowds have terrible taste.”

Maybe they do, but that taste evolves with whoever is leading the masses in a direction, so lets crowdsource the masses down a road that is conducive to long term solutions to the problems we face.

:)

http://twitter.com/scotteverett

I’m a relative newcomer to the online dogooder/nptech platforms, having only started following such blogs in recent months. I’ve learned so much from these spaces, and it’s helped me expand and deepen workshop and consulting practices I’m beginning. But I always found it curious that with all the info and ideas available and circulating, the circulation seems to end up staying in a pretty tight circle.

If we tap into the interdisciplinary facets of this stuff — and when it comes to collaboration, social tools, and changing the world, there’s plenty of room for interests to intersect — it gives people the chance to see that working at a nonprofit or donating money aren’t the only ways to contribute. I think there’s a lot of potential yet to be unfurled, and it seems pretty exciting to me.

http://freedimensional.ning.com/ for example, is a funky space for artists and activists to intersect. Great example of what we can build with, I think.