William Neuheisel

Last week, the location based social network, Foursquare, released its new Explore feature. The new feature centers around recommendations technology to help people answer the question, “what should I do?”

The recommendations engine carries some exciting possibility, and may even help break the flat-lining usage of location-based services. The app will mine your check-in history to glean information about your preferences, and locate ‘expertise’ within your friend list to help you discover new places, food, and activities you may enjoy.

As you can see from the category list though, there is one omission that should have been obvious: volunteering.

I’d love to see Foursquare help people discover great places to volunteer in their community. This would not only increase volunteerism, but would help drive innovation in the nonprofit sector, the same way that food critics and Yelp reviews drive improvements in the restaurant industry.

80 million Americans volunteer every year at roughly 2 million nonprofits. I hope Foursquare will not miss a major opportunity to enhance the activity that so many find so rewarding.

For those of you who’ve spent any time around me, you’ve likely heard this before. But for those who don’t know this about me, I’ll repeat it: my grandmother is my personal hero.

For years she has worked tirelessly for several organizations in North and South Dakota fighting against domestic and sexual violence against rural and native women; helping to found or lead many of those agencies. She has logged tens of thousands of miles driving across the sparsely populated regions of the western Dakotas, going wherever she was needed to provide safe transport, or to advocate for victims of abuse. Her strength in the face of that crushing violence and abuse, and her overwhelming compassion are a continual source of inspiration for me. I love talking to her when I am down, because she always fills me with hope.

This weekend, she told me the story of Pretty Bird Woman House, a women’s safe-house whose board she serves on, and which was founded by her friend Jackie Brown Otter (whose sister, Pretty Bird Woman, was kidnapped, raped and murdered). Shelters like these are desperately needed in these areas, but due to a lack of funds, Pretty Bird Woman House was on the brink of closure. Fortunately, however, Amnesty International issued a damning report on violence against indigenous women. This report was picked up on by Daily Kos, which also mentioned the crisis of Pretty Bird Woman House (here and here).

Within hours, people who had read the Daily Kos blog set up a donation website and raised over $9,000 in 24 hours. As you can see, I’ve posted a donation widget to help support this fund raiser to help support this critical program.

Most people’s Grandmas bake pies and crochet. Damn, I’m lucky…

I recently came across a very interesting idea. The basic concept is that a website called Wikileaks would provide a Wikipedia type platform for sharing leaks, while preserving the anonymity of the leakers. Supposedly the site would wash any identifying IP’s and ISP information and would be accessible to non-technical users. The stated goal is to bring transparency to

“oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to those in the west who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their own governments and corporations.”

This is theoretically a GREAT idea, and I love the thought of using collaborative media to tackle authoritarian regimes. However, I am highly skeptical. The potential for slander, rumor, and hate-mongering (say for example, someone posted a false leak to stir up racial or ethnic tensions) is bit off-putting. The sites FAQ claims that such abuse would be counteracted by other users in the same way that Wikipedia is self-policed by its users. This sounds good in theory, but even Wikipedia has not had stellar success in this area. And Wikipedia has a large base of people who are attracted by what Wikipedia does for them; it provides information that is useful for anyone. It is hard to see how your average person will find much reason to visit Wikileak, meaning that its users could turn out to be a rather immoderate group.

And of course these governments could possibly post their own disinformation on this forum. If it is truly anonymous, then the Chinese or Burmese governments could just as easily post as could a dissident. The worst offenders would simply block access to the site, as they already do for much less anti-authoritarian sites.

The site hasn’t launched yet, so we’ll have to wait and see. I hope I’m wrong on this one, but either way it will tell us something interesting about the limits of wiki driven social change.