NetSquared: In the Beginning

In the beginning, TechSoup’s Marnie Webb, Daniel Ben-Horin, and Billy Bicket created NetSquared to "remix the web for social change." The year was 2005. TechSoup was then called CompuMentor. The Iraq War was raging. Pope John Paul II died, and Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. The buzzword then was Web 2.0, which heralded a new, participatory web culture.

Online social networking was just being born. Facebook was just getting its first venture funding, YouTube was just starting, and Twitter was still a year away from being founded.

Marnie, Daniel, and Billy had been following developments at O’Reilly Web 2.0 and knew something new and interesting was going on. They originally wanted to organize a conference to convene social innovators and social entrepreneurs on the nonprofit tech cutting edge to see what everyone was doing.

What Is Web 2.0? 

To get going, they built the first NetSquared website using open-source Drupal. The idea was to embed the functions of existing social sites like Meetup, Flickr, and del.icio.us social bookmarking (now called Delicious) by using their APIs on the site. (An example of an API is when you put a Bing or Google Map on your website.)

The NetSquared website was itself designed to be a model Web 2.0 site in which people could interact and collaborate with each other to create a virtual community. Most of the content was (and is) user generated. I remember that it was simply not cool to just go there and look at things. You had to say something on the blog, or post a photo on Flickr, or organize a Meetup.

Here were some the baffling hot new things that charity techies and geeks for good were buzzing about:

• Blogging and the blogosphere
• Citizen journalism (which would became a force in igniting the Arab Spring)
• Google Maps
• One Laptop Per Child (just launched that year)
• Podcasting
• RSS feeds
• Skype
• Tagging
• Technorati (the first blog search engine at that time)
• Text messaging
• Wikipedia
• Wikis 

What People Were Saying

Here was the Philanthropy News Network announcement of the project:

"TechSoup NetSquared, the project to increase nonprofit effectiveness through Web-based social tools, has added a case study section to its website. 'Net2 in Action' highlights more than 30 real-life examples of nonprofits using this new breed of Web-based technologies to tackle issues such as reaching and mobilizing constituencies.

"Similar to their corporate counterparts, nonprofits are discovering that they can increase their effectiveness while maintaining lower operating costs by utilizing Web-based and open source tools. These innovative tools are meeting the fundraising, grassroots mobilization, volunteer engagement, and issue awareness needs of many organizations."

NetSquared Up Close and Personal

Billy Bicket got the first Net Tuesdays going in San Francisco. These were in-person meetings that were made possible by the website Meetup. Billy was formerly director of partnerships at Meetup.com and had shown the power of it during the 2004 presidential campaign.

Net Tuesdays became a series of national and international face-to-face meetings connecting industry and nonprofit techies. They eventually became hugely successful NetSquared Locals in several countries.

Here’s how Daniel Ben-Horin described the potential of the project at the time:

"What stands between nonprofits and much greater mission effectiveness is no longer about money. ... In the end analysis, nonprofits and NGOs build communities and are sustained by communities. The new platform and the new tools are all about communities. Wikipedia is a community, Craigslist is a community, Moveon.org is a community, eBay for crying out loud is a community. The blogosphere is a huge, fractious, disorganized community. The capacity to create content and easily share it with others are the bricks and mortar of community building, and nonprofits know a lot about communities (even if a lot of nonprofits don't know that they know it, but that's another blog entry).

"So that's the moment, that's the opportunity. If the Wikipedia community can build Wikipedia with the smallest handful of grant dollars and paid staff, what could the AIDs community do if it embraced these tools? What could the peace community do? The environmental community?"

20-20 Hindsight

I have to admit, it took me awhile to get some clarity on what this was all about. But it was an exhilarating time. NetSquared finally held its first conference the following year and was off and running.

Lots of the social media and interactive Web 2.0 things that it celebrated are now commonplace, and nonprofit technology and effectiveness still requires money. But we’re much more connected online — for better or worse.

If you’d care to have a look at the immense excitement that Web 2.0 was generating at the time, have a look at the original series of NetSquared blog posts.

Image 1:  NetSquared classic home page, circa 2005 (gorickjones)

Image 2: The NetSquared site 1.0 (cambodia4kidsorg)