If you're trying to change the world, it's easy to use tech in conventional roles: to substitute a listserve for a direct mail list, a website for a newsletter, a database for a filing cabinet. What's much more difficult - and really the next needed step - is to figure out what new possibilities for nonprofits are emerging from technological innovation: how NGOs can move beyond doing old things better and use new tools to create more powerful ways of working together.

One of those tools is definitely the blog. Worldchanging ally Jon Stahl is working with the Canadian Dogwood Initiative to explore how a small environmental group can use blogs and other tools to communicate in more powerful ways. Now, Jon's written an outstanding summary of that work, its results and the lessons they've learned. If you're interested in how the civic sphere blogs, this is a small piece of essential reading.

Thanks for the link, Alex. It was actually our conversation yesterday that spurred me to actually write this up.

I do think that the results are still unknown -- the site has only been live for about a month, and Dogwood Initiative hasn't yet done much outreach around the site. It will be interesting to keep an eye on their site stats over the coming months.

But I am definitely confident that the quality of content they're producing will attract a solid audience.

Posted by: Jon Stahl on January 23, 2004 2:18 PM