Social Actions Transition: Request for Letters of Interest

A short six weeks ago, Peter Deitz shared our intention to find a well-resourced and mission-aligned organization, or group of organizations, to assume ownership of Social Actions’ programs. Since then, we’ve received a number of inquiries and have had several one-on-one meetings with organizations that have an interest in carrying Social Actions forward.

We’re also seeing a range of creative proposals — for example Paul Lamb’s suggestions including stewardship by open source foundations or social entrepreneur funders, and a NetSquared-type transition campaign. See the comment thread here and add your thoughts!

As a next step in this process, we’re requesting formal Letters of Interest from those who have an interest in stewarding all or some of Social Actions’ programs. We’re posting that request here not just as an update but to encourage everyone to share it and chime in with ideas and proposals.

Get the rest of the details here.

Opportunity Alert: Four Powerful Enhancements to the Social Actions API

Social Actions has a fantastic opportunity to make four powerful enhancements to the Social Actions API in the coming weeks:

• Add the capacity for semantic analysis and weighted querying: Integrate the Zemanta API analysis, or something similar, into the Social Actions API and then fully support semantically extracted issue- and location-based querying in the Social Actions API. This feature would allow for weighted lists of topics and keywords or an emphasis parameter when external API queries are made.
  
• Provide support for knowing when actions are no longer active: Currently, the Social Actions API assigns an automated expiration date. Additional enhancements could involve supporting an expiration field in the live feed from partners and/or determining if an action has expired based on the content on the destination page.
  
• Integrate with other APIs and/or advanced feeds: The ability to make direct calls to open APIs and/or advanced feeds (provided they are available) to expand the number of data-points included in the aggregation.
  
• Add a minimum of three (hopefully more!) new sources that are specifically focused on global development-related causes.

Learn more and support this work!