What Is The Social Actions Open API and Mashup All About?

Posted by Peter Deitz on May 1, 2008 at 10:00pm

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Later this month, Social Actions will be headed to the NetSquared Mashup Challenge to win support for its open API and mashup of 29+ Social Action Platforms.

Earlier today, I spontaneously recorded this video conversation with Justin Massa, founder of MoveSmart.org, also a finalist in the mashup challenge.

Thank you Justin for the collaborative opportunity and for throwing such great questions at me.

Note: The opinions expressed in this video are my own, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of other team members working on Social Actions or any of the participating social action platforms.

Tags: n2y3, p2psocialchange, social actions

Comment by phil klein on May 3, 2008 at 1:03pm: as described in your video, i think for the most part that your vision for aggregating and distributing actionable items is not only smart, right, and possible now, it's also an inevitable development, which hopefully you can help steer towards the good, and wisely. woefully, i wanted to post this while half through the video, and now i can't return to the middle. Ad channels have historically not lent themselves to vehicles for good actions, (perhaps with a few PSA campaigns aside), so i think it will be a big challenge (especially given ease and low transaction costs for posters), to keep a strong focus on meaningful actions and prevent the same kind of drift that for example has resulted in many nonprofit email campaigns becoming more akin to spam. Some end-user filtering options would also make lots of sense. there's a great deal to unpack in your vision. Thanks for stepping ahead with this project!

Comment by Peter Deitz on May 5, 2008 at 6:52am: Hi Phil, Great thoughts! And thank you for taking the time to post a comment. End-user filtering will be critical. The Social Actions open api and web applications that make use of it will have a hard time recommending meaningful action if they are not aware of the interests/priorities/talents of the prospective action takers. I agree with you that data portability in the micro-philanthropy space is likely to emerge, with or without Social Actions. My goal is to make sure it emerges as soon as possible and in a manner that truly reflects the potential of technology to connect "helpers" with "doers." A group of us transcribed and honed the message of this video. If you get a chance, please have a look at our work-in-progress pitch for the Net2 Masup Challenge.