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Networks & Impact

Collaboration Tools for Social Change

From the first wiki in 1995 to shared online spaces built by foundations: how groups working on social problems have used collaboration tools, and how to pick one.

By Working Wikily Newsroom · 3 min read

Groups that work on social problems often spread across cities, time zones and organizations. Shared online tools let them keep one set of notes, compare plans and ask each other questions without meeting. The tools are only part of the story, but they set what is practical, so it helps to know where they came from and what has worked.

Where the wiki comes from

A wiki is a website that its audience edits directly through a browser, with no single owner of each page. Ward Cunningham built the first one, WikiWikiWeb, and put it online on March 25, 1995. He took the name from the Hawaiian word for “quick,” after hearing about a shuttle bus at the Honolulu airport. Wikipedia launched in January 2001 and by 2007 ranked among the ten most popular websites, which made the wiki idea familiar to millions of people who had never heard the term.

Why the tools matter less than the habits

A 2009 report from Monitor Institute, Working Wikily 2.0: Social Change with a Network Mindset, makes the point in a sentence: it is not the wiki, it is how wikis and other social media tools produce a new, networked way of working. The authors describe that way of working as built on openness, transparency, decentralized decision-making and distributed action. A team can install every tool available and still work in a closed, top-down way.

Examples from practice

The first three come from the 2011 funder’s guide Catalyzing Networks for Social Change, which notes that creating spaces where connections can form means paying for the infrastructure.

  • A custom space for a field. The Lumpkin Family Foundation created goodWORKSconnect.org as an online place for people in nonprofit capacity building to connect, share information and learn from one another.
  • A standard platform, reused. The Hawaii Community Foundation used Ning, an off-the-shelf social networking service, to host a community of learners for its Schools of the Future work.
  • A mix of online and in person. Making Connections Louisville held monthly “Network Nights” for residents.
  • Tools that hand work to the crowd. The nonprofit KaBOOM! gave communities a social networking site, online training, do-it-yourself content and a map mashup so they could organize their own playground builds, according to a 2010 Monitor Institute case study.

Choosing a tool

The sources above agree on one ordering: problem first, tool second. A 2010 article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review lists, among its lessons, putting problem-solving ahead of technology adoption. Some questions that follow from that:

  1. What task is stuck? Sharing documents, holding a discussion, mapping who is involved, or collecting reports each call for something different.
  2. Who has to use it? A tool the people you need will not open is not collaboration, whatever its features.
  3. Where will the information live? If the host closes or changes terms, can you export what you built?
  4. Who looks after it? Someone has to welcome newcomers, tidy pages and answer questions. The funder’s guide calls this role network weaving and says it needs dedicated time.

A short caution

New tools come and go, and the products named here may look different now. Check a tool’s current features, terms and costs on its own site before relying on it.

Sources

More on networks and impact

How Funders Can Build Network Capacity
Networked Nonprofits: Working Through Connections
Open Data and Crowdsourcing in International Development
The Working Wikily Report