A coalition of non-profit organizations, technology developers, designers, marketers and others has unveiled the alpha version of a new Web service dubbed All for Good in an effort to build some sort of ‘Craigslist for volunteer services’. The metaphor stands, and not only because Craig Newmark from the popular free classifieds service is one of the backers of the project (Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post is also said to be on board).
All for Good basically lets you browse volunteer activities and find related events based on your geographical location and/or interests. The site brings together listings from organizations and local groups to help you find volunteer activities that fit your time and talent. If you ‘like’ a certain item, you can share it with your friends across various social networking services, hopefully spawning more attention and the possibility for the activity or event to spread virally within your network.
According to the about page, All for Good was “inspired by the call of President Obama to engage more Americans in service”. The link to the White House is notable: according to a report by MSNBC, the seeds for All for Good were planted by people who advised Barack Obama during the transition period. Two names that circulate: Jonathan Greenblatt, a faculty member at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California at LA, and Sonal Shah, former head of global development at Google.org who currently leads the new White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation. The report also cites Kate Bedingfield, a White House spokeswoman, who apparently said she felt All for Good is “an exciting and innovative idea” and added that the White House is working with the corporation to explore ways to use the tool.
The site is in the process of being transferred to a new non-profit organization called Our Good Works, formed by some of the people who initiated the project. For the moment, the project is hosted and managed by Google, and several of the search and advertising giant’s engineers developed All for Good as a 20-percent project (as widely known, Google lets engineers spend a day a week on projects that interest them).
In the spirit of openness, All for Good is completely open source and lets people log in with a slew of digital identity providers, including Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, Yahoo and OpenID. The service also comes with an extensive API that makes it possible for third-party developers to create applications based on data generated by the All for Good community.
(Via Ostatic)
How does this compare to Change.org?
Actually, it’s more comparable to Serve .org (http://serve.org/) – the White House is reportedly looking at how to work together with the All for Good folks.
actually, it’s most comparable to socialactions.org
I had always thought that this would have been a page under the existing Craigslist structure at some point.
Then I saw this and thought, damn, makes much more sense carved out. Slick!
Google Cache Server is Down .. Now I tried to view some pages from Google Cached it is showing the error message :
We’re sorry… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.
Steps to Reproduce :
Search anything in Google ( I searched — web hosting provider changed)
and then Click on Cached link on Result page.
The link is given below…
http://img200.i...googleerror.jpg
is the ScreenShot of the Problem
This is one of the better projects/sites/communities I’ve heard about in years. It will excel and do great things in my opinion, and I’m glad someone set aside the resources to develop it.
Love this initiative: combining voluntereing and social networking.
It’s amazing how their “like” feature is similar to Friendfeed’s. In fact, it’s exactly the same.
But it’s smart, ’cause Friendfeed rocks! And it’s not a première: Facebook did it, Twitter will copy it too
reminds me alot of http://www.volunteermatch.org/
a great site that does not get enough coverage.
not sure how All for Good is any different.
All For Good is open. VolunteerMatch is closed.
This is what VolunteerMatch should have done a long time ago.
dipeek, got to agree with you on that one.
Not anymore: this week VolunteerMatch announced all its volunteer opportunities are available under Creative Commons license. We made the move in part to ensure our data was available at All for Good. While All For Good’s *code* is open, they were asking partners to sign content deals on Google contracts giving them express license to do whatever they wanted with the data – commercial or not. As a nonprofit ourselves, we want to make sure the information is available for public good, not private interest. Working with a Creative Commons license is the best way to do this.
Some details:
http://www.volu...ressroom?id=524
What is the BDF?
There is already established Volunteer Match.
Google got too much time and money on its hands.
What is the BDF?
There is already established Volunteer Match.
Google got too much time and money on its hands.
Sorry, forgot to add great post! Can’t wait to see your next post!
Yeah, agreed. AllForGood is basically just a jazzed up social networky Volunteermatch. But perhaps the nonprofit world needed a jazzed up social networky VolunteerMatch to get people to use volunteer matching sites at all. Almost unfair, but true. That’s the value they add.