The traditional philanthropic model revolves around money…Money is important, but it’s not everything… When I talk to friends and colleagues in the nonprofit sector, what I hear again and again is a desire for knowledge.There are a lot of reasons why nonprofit executives are hungry for knowledge. They work on particularly stubborn problems…This knowledge transfer is already happening, but not effectively. Face-to-face conferences are expensive and often logistically impossible…like all personal networks, they don’t scale efficiently…

That is from a nice post by Michael Idinopulos over at SocialText. I really like how he highlights the importance of knowledge as an equal partner of money in the equation. He goes on to say:

The absence of a strong market mechanism and regulating institutions allow bad management practices to endure.

The interesting thing about markets is that they involve transactions - someone provides something to someone else for something in return. It doesn’t have to be money - it can be status, a favor, or just a good feeling. But without this “something in return,” markets don’t function well.

Michael goes on to say:

It’s not hard to imagine a better way. I’m envisioning an online knowledge networking tool for nonprofits…

How can we make such an online knowledge tool into a well-functioning market so that it gets widely used? That is the $64,000 question.

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