The Philanthropic Family

“What if social entrepreneurs could easily find peers in their issue area or region and unleash creativity, connections, capital, and collaboration to fulfill their world-changing missions?

“What if foundations could showcase their social entrepreneurs contextually on a variety of related websites, and help them be found by funders and media?

“Civic Ventures (sponsor of The Purpose Prize), The Draper Richards Foundation, ideablob, PopTech, TheSchwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, and The Skoll Foundation have pooled their data to create an open database of information about vetted social entrepreneurs.”

What is a Social Entrepreneur?

Depending on who you ask, a social entrepreneur could be anyone from a person who starts a nonprofit to fill a need in their community to someone who starts a for-profit to fill that same need using a market-driven, sustainable business model. For example, a company that sells organic fruit juices with a commitment to sustainable farming and fair labor practices might be considered a social enterprise. Whether their legal structure is nonprofit or for-profit, a social entrepreneur puts the social benefit ahead of any profit motive.

What is the Social Entrepreneur API?

In its most basic form, it’s a searchable database of social entrepreneurs that have already been screened by a well-regarded organization and found to be outstanding. There’s a basic search function available here, right now.

For example, entering the term “Chicago” into the basic search interface returns 16 results, ranging from the highly lauded and internationally famous founders of Shorebank to the relatively unknown documentary film producerShakeela Hassan.

But what does that API part mean? In my limited technical understanding, it basically means it’s “open source” data that any developer can use to build their own interface, widget, sidebar, whatever. If you want to take the database and create your own custom interface that’s available from your own web site, go ahead. That’s what it’s there for.

Who Built It?

The group behind this new API, Social Actions, is comprised of some of the most giving, committed, collaborative people I know. They aren’t trying to “own” or “control” data, they’re just trying to get information out there, figuring the more we can share knowledge, the more everybody wins. Congratulations to Peter Dietz and Christine Egger and the whole crew for making this happen.

For more information on the Social Entrepreneur API, see the official announcement with links to other relevant documents and resources.

Tags: charity, philanthropy, social actions, social entrepreneurs

This entry was posted on September 3, 2009 at 8:52 am and is filed under Social Enterprise. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.