We wanted to let you all know about a few opportunities we will soon be adding to our get involved page. In case you hadn’t noticed, now would be a pretty exciting time to join the Squarepeg team; you’d be able to say “I was with Squarepeg before Squarepeg was big.” Unfortunately, you would not be able to say “I was with Squarepeg before Squarepeg was cool (the geek kind).” We all win some and loose some.

Don’t match the descriptions below? Well, if you are a talented techie, organizer, or consultant of any type, with an enthusiasm for our cause, we’d love to hear from you. Or perhaps you know someone who matches this description; we’d really like to know more about them. Email is a great way to introduce yourself or your friend and let us know why and how you might like to get involved.

As usual, freely tweet or copy and paste all or part of this anywhere you think it might be useful. Thank you.

Recommender technology (role may be filled by one or more persons).

Squarepeg looking to expand our team.
contact Isaac Holeman, isaac [at] squarepegged [dot] org
www.squarepegged.org

Qualifications:
Interest in and familiarity with recommender technology; experience implementing recommender systems strongly preferred.
Willing to work without pay at least temporarily.
Must know or be interested in learning Ruby.
Excited and motivated by Squarepeg’s social mission.

Bonus Criteria:
Likes to have fun while collaborating with cool people (you thought fun was a no brainer? Well, let’s just say we take our fun pretty seriously).
Work experience in the social sector or with feisty, entrepreneurial web startups.
Interest in open source communities.
Interest in being a medium to long term part of the Sqaurepeg team.
We believe in strength through diversity. Whatever variety you bring, we’d love to have it.

Responsibilities:
Regular communication with the rest of the Squarepeg team, online or in person.
Explore verious open source and home brew recommender technologies, help the Squarepeg team decide on most viable options.
Help implement a scalable recommender system that effectively suggests actions of interest to users.

Benefits:
Really great karma for becoming part of an important cause.
Grow as a developer and build your portfolio by working with a talented team.
Become part of Portland’s creative startup scene.
Visit John at his other job and receive a prize (free micro at the brew pub!)

More about the Recommender:
Tag based or Collaborative Filtering. (Tag based may be a lot easier for the initial launch)
Recommender system runs as a separate class of functions that the web app can make calls on.
example, The front end web app makes a call on the recommender by delivering two hashes of tags, one for a user and one for an event.  The system responds with a 5-point rating saying how closely these two hashes match based upon similarity of tags.

Time Committment:
Minimum 5-10 hours per week. May vary based on skill and previous experience with recommender systems.

Developers (looking for 2-3)

Squarepeg looking to expand our team.
contact Isaac Holeman, isaac@squarepegged.org
www.squarepegged.org

Qualifications:
Interest in and familiarity with software development; especially back end developers.
Willing to work without pay at least temporarily.
Must know or be interested in learning Ruby on Rails.
Excited and motivated by Squarepeg’s social mission.

Bonus Criteria:
Likes to have fun while collaborating with cool people (you thought fun was a no brainer? Well, let’s just say we take our fun pretty seriously).
Work experience in the social sector or with feisty, entrepreneurial web startups.
Interest in open source communities.
Interest in being a medium to long term part of the Sqaurepeg team.
We believe in strength through diversity. Whatever variety you bring, we’d love to have it.

Responsibilities:
Regular communication with the rest of the Squarepeg team, online or in person.
Collaborate with project lead to build Facebook and open social apps for the Squarepeg service.

Benefits:
Really great karma for becoming part of an important cause.
Grow as a developer and build your portfolio by working with a talented team.
Become part of Portland’s creative startup scene.
Visit John at his other job and receive a prize (free micro at the brew pub!)

Time Committment:
Minimum 5-10 hours per week. May vary based on skill and previous experience with Ruby on Rails development.

Tax accounting

Squarepeg looking to expand our team.
contact Isaac Holeman, isaac@squarepegged.org
www.squarepegged.org

Qualifications:
Interest in and familiarity with small business accounting; experience with technology startups preferred.
Willing to take Squarepeg’s social mission into account when determining fees.

Bonus Criteria:
Excited and motivated by Squarepeg’s social mission.
Likes to have fun while collaborating with cool people (you thought fun was a no brainer? Well, let’s just say we take our fun pretty seriously).
Work experience in the social sector or with feisty, entrepreneurial web startups.
Interest in being a medium to long term part of the Sqaurepeg team.
We believe in strength through diversity. Whatever variety you bring, we’d love to have it.

Responsibilities:
Help Squarepeg organize and manage it’s books and prepare taxes.

Benefits:
Really great karma for becoming part of an important cause.
Grow and build your portfolio by working with a talented team in a quickly growing organization.
Become part of Portland’s creative startup scene.
Visit John at his other job and receive a prize (free micro at the brew pub!)

Time Committment:
May vary based on skill and previous experience with small business accounting.

When we first started talking about the ideas that became Squarepeg, we were just a few friends sharing experiences and trying to become better organizers. Working with a lot of college aged folk in Geek friendly PDX, we were experimenting with how people interact online and offline, and how interactions in those different mediums affect each other. We felt our tool kit for the online side of things wasn’t as robust as it could be, as it ought to be, so eventually we set out to build a tool that would address a few important problems:

1. Mainstream social sites (Facebook et al.) are difficult places to engage people in meaningful change. A grajillion social cues, expectations, and subtle influences make these mediums tend to fall short of the potential for using social technology to inspire action and organize it efficiently. After looking around (an awful lot) we didn’t find any smaller niche sites that were really consistent with our principles and ideas about how change happens, so we set out to build a destination social site that could meet our needs as organizers.
2. One of the biggest problems with major social networking sites is that they act like information silos. When you’re working the web profile to profile (shaking digital hands), organizers must type information over and over. Too frequently, that information spreads within the network, but never makes it to the other places people congregate. Social change organizations often let information get rusty in their own silos – their website, blog, or even email – because they don’t have the technological capacity, human resources, or savvy to push their message to a larger audience. We wanted to make sure everything on the Squarepeg destination site spread out to every corner of the Internet where people are active. Automatically, so that organizers could spend more time with their offline work.
3. Spreading information from place to place like that turns the Internet into a giant copy machine. And ultimately, it doesn’t matter if the perfect opportunity shows up on the site you already love if you still have to look through a sea of 20,0000x*6^372 other opportunities to find it. People are more likely to be inspired, and feel empowered to act, if they are presented with just a few actions that are targeted to their specific interests. So, we decided to work up some recommender algorithms so that we could suck in a ton of actions, but only spit out the actions that are most likely to be relevant and actionable to a given user in a given place at any given time.

So, we met with many people, and kept organizing for other pet projects, creating a little buzz, and getting a ton of feedback about our plans. Attending the netsquared conference in May was a wonderful catalyst for this feedback; we were really encouraged that people liked our core ideas. Many of them were trying to deal with the same problems we had recognized and were excited about having our help. We started to notice a trend, though, that people were a lot more excited about our solutions to the second and third problems than they were about seeing us create another destination site. Some people were frank about being invested in some social media tools, and stretched too thin to be an early adopter of another destination site. Others felt that in this case, collaboration has more merits than competition - that we should work to improve existing sites like change.org or the point rather than pushing the sector forward with our own example. A third group, perhaps the most persuasive, wondered if a more focused approach might deliver a more effective solution, especially for an organization that is just getting started.

Not long after the Netsquared conference the Squarepeg team sat down to talk about refocusing. We brainstormed, we slept on it (tossed and turned) , and ultimately decided that we would be more useful to the social sector if we focused on solutions to the last two problems above. We would like to make it so that social change opportunities don’t get stuck in silos anymore, and we want to offer people and organizations some recommender tools to help them sift through all those opportunities and find the handful of opportunities that they are going to be really jazzed about. This means you will be able to choose where you interact with the data. Whether you are organizing an event or looking for an opportunity, we’ll do our best to let you use the tools you are most comfortable with (existing social networks, widgets and blog plugins, email).

The moral of the story is that we’re acting on your feedback. This isn’t an isolated event, it’s our philosophy - We’re Listening. Thanks for helping, and keep it up too! Let us know about your ideas, concerns, brilliant schemes, and how you would like to engage with Squarepeg. While you do that, we’ll keep working to get this show on the road. In fact, this post is way overdue because we’ve been so busy building these applications. We’ve made a lot of progress already, and we’re happy to announce that we will start some private beta testing September 1st. Gee, fall is coming right up, isn’t it? We’d better go get back to work, and we hope you’ll stay tuned.

cheers
Isaac and the Squarepeg team

Last week John and I got back from a grueling conference at Cisco HQ in San Jose. The conference was hosted by Netsquared, a project of Techsoup, and they brought together a big bunch of the most active people in the Internet and social change space. Squarepeg was one of 21 featured projects competing for the hearts and the votes of all the attendees. We didn’t end up taking home one of the top cash prizes (all the big winners have public beta or full release sites up, and we think they earned their rewards). We were able to bring home a few grand, receive some wonderful feedback, and meet a lot of really great people who are now interested in Squarepeg. We were a bit slow to blog about the experience because we’re still synthesizing and learning from all the interesting ideas we heard (and read about after the fact on blogs, video interviews, etc.). We couldn’t possibly convey everything that happened during this action packed conference, but we’d love to share a few ideas that caught our interest.

People really liked that Squarepeg is a communication tool for people who are organizing face to face meet-ups, rather than primarily a place to express ideas, concerns, and solidarity (exclusively) online. I guess others also feel room for innovation in this niche.

We’ve always said that integrating our technology with what’s happening on other sites or with other tools is very important. A few people at the conference actually thought that bringing a recommender system and combatting information overload on other popular Internet spaces is one of the most interesting things we are doing. We’ve discussed possibilities for open social apps, Facebook apps, etc., but of course the issue at stake is deciding what to focus on. What do you think? Is disseminating the recommender technology to other social sites as important as creating the perfect environment for effective activism on our own destination site? Shoot us an email if you have ideas.

For two days we met with 20 other featured projects, and even more Internet change makers who represented their own work less formally. Some of these projects were way inspiring (at times even intimidatingly cool!), but we noticed one significant disconnect almost across the board. Most of these innovators are building tools to facilitate more and better conversations, without addressing (at least during their presentations) whether the stakeholders in any given cause or organization are ready for more public conversation. Props to Holly at NTEN for blogging about this before us. Her explanation is that some people aren’t very comfortable (yet) with publishing their thoughts for the whole world to see. I agree with her, but I don’t think that’s the only important explanation. Frequently, facilitating a dialog with just one of the many causes I care about isn’t direct enough social change for me to bump it to the top of my long list of priorities. Sure I might consider myself a stakeholder if I think the cause is important, but is it enough of a priority that I want to drive the conversation? Or, if I already feel like I’m an expert, is more conversation with mostly newbies what I want/need? The answer to that question has a lot to do with the individual involved, how their personality fits with they cause they have identified, and how the particular cause/nonprofit is engaging them. These are problems we’re trying to address, but this post is long enough though, so we’ll blog more about that soon.

All in all it was a wonderful conference, and we’d like to offer one more huge thank you to all the online voters who sent us there, and to all the other conference projects and attendees. And of course, netsquared/techsoup, you are uniquely wonderful and we promise to be in touch. You’ll are great.

When we first set out on this grand adventure, we thought we would become a nonprofit 501c3 organization. After all, “social sector” and “nonprofit sector” are synonyms, right? Nonprofits are the trustworthy agents of social change, right? In many cases these assumptions are accurate, nonprofits do a lot of great work, but we had a few deep-seated organizational commitments that made us think critically about whether we might be different.

First, as college students who would rather be activists than waiters, we have to get by eating our fair share of top ramen and..uhh… plastic? Anyhow we have a very personal empathy for a lot of people and organizations who can barely pay the bills at the end of the month. With each decision we make, we are also really dedicated to stepping back and thinking about the big picture: how does this make the world a better place? While we are crafting our product we want to think beyond, how does this make donors happy? We want to ask ourselves “is this tool, or this feature, or this graphical flourish going to make activists happier and more effective at changing the world?”

For many organizations, some compromises would be in order. For us, a few simple solutions presented themselves, one of these was to show ads to people who didn’t want to or couldn’t pay to use the site. This is a very easy way to generate enough revenue to make sure our work is sustainable, scalable, and all around the best it can be. After we did a little research though, we discovered that advertising is not an acceptable form of income for nonprofits. It is taxed as “unrelated business income” and if it exceeded 2/3 of our total revenue (and we really thought that it might), then we could loose our 501 c3 status.

So, what is a social enterprise?

Basically, social enterprise is a marketing buzzword analogous to “Web 2.0” (which means ajax and a few cultural things). Activists and scholars are still debating what the term actually means;* suffice it to say that we increasingly agree that becoming a nonprofit is not the only valid organizational route to social change. In fact, more and more of us believe that even companies and corporations can choose to make social justice the cornerstone of their organizational DNA. We don’t care enough for this name game to call ourselves social entrepreneurs, but some thought leaders in the social enterprise movement did encourage us to investigate the Limited Liability Company structure. This legal structure offered us a few major advantages over becoming a nonprofit.

Agile: Simple set-up and tax reporting. Takes thirty minutes and costs 50 dollars to set up in Oregon versus months/years and hundreds/thousands of dollars for a nonprofit.

Safe: Offers us limited liability – if we make a big mistake we could loose the venture, but they won’t garner our children’s children’s wages.

Flexible: Can pass through taxes to our own tax returns, or file to be taxed as a corporation. Also perfect for a hybrid nonprofit/llc business model.*

Independent: We are allowed to make money. In our particular situation we felt that building a site that could make a little money would not distract us from our mission as much as trying to build an organization and a perpetual fundraising arm that people wanted to donate to.

So in the end we decided to become a limited liability company, and we formalized that intention by filing articles of organization in Oregon (you can do it on their website now!) on December 20th, 2007. For us, the moral of the story was to be true to our goals and think carefully about our current and future needs. Organizations are about as diverse as the people they serve. A llc was the right legal structure for us, even though we hope we won’t make a dime unless we are making the world a much better place. If you are considering founding a venture, you should definitely consider all your options, and check out what some of the people in the social enterprise movement are doing. Of course, we’d also be happy to offer advice about going through this process, just shoot us an email.

Notes: Various groups favor very different definitions of social entrepreneurship. For the time being, you can expect to hear us call ourselves social entrepreneurs about as frequently as you will hear us call ourselves a ¡Revolutionary Web 2.0 Phenomenon! (never).

In the future we might found a nonprofit to partner with our llc. Or we might not. We’ll probably wait a while before we reexamine whether that kind of complex but interesting hybrid legal structure would fit our mission and our organizational capacity.

In recent weeks we’ve met with people from a few organizations that we thought might want to use Squarepeg. We have a hard enough time containing our enthusiasm already, so you can imagine how we felt when they said this about us.

Kirsten Merrell, Awards for Excellence Coordinator, AFS Intercultural programs -

We sat down to speak with Isaac from Squarepeg and were really impressed with some of their ideas and what they are doing. We work mainly with young people and have been trying to figure out how to connect in a way that is productive for us and satisfying for them. Squarepeg seems to be working on some of the problems we’ve been trying to solve, so we’re excited to give their site a test run in the coming months.

Nick Triolo, eMarketing Assistant, AFS Intercultural Programs -

Squarepeg’s vision is a progressive movement to leverage current social trends to create substance, change and, finally action. No longer is “social networking” only the simple act of peering into the lives of others. It now can be used to share ideas regarding the stuff that really matters, the issues that need a true compilation of perspectives. Squarepeg seems to be working in this direction, and I fully support and encourage the proliferation of such social networking enterprise.

Dr. Eban Goodstein, Project Director, Focus the Nation -

With Focus the Nation, we have a lot of participants who are dispersed pretty much all over the country. Having everyone feel connected to this movement and our impact is a big challenge for us, but to be honest I feel like dedicating resources to social media has burned us more than it has helped. We just haven’t been able to find the return on investment yet, but Squarepeg seems to have solutions to some of the issues we’ve been struggling with. If we invest in online communication, we want it to help us move people offline, so we’re excited to have Squarepeg use Focus the Nation as a testing ground this fall.

Rick Ray, Technology Manager, The Archimedes Movement -

The Archimedes Movement is working to engage citizens from all walks of life so that we can advance solutions to the common problems we face, starting with the health care crisis. We have nearly 40 community chapters. Though most of our supporters are here in Oregon, they are dispersed geographically. We would like to feel more connected to all of our members (and the members to each other). We have created a drupal-based site, pages for each chapter and can schedule events, but it just isn’t doing quite what we want and we aren’t able to invest a lot of resources into improving it right now.After talking with the people from Squarepeg, we think integrating their software with our current site might be a great solution so that we can get better feedback from all our members and make this grass-roots process more democratic. We’re waiting for them to finish the beta site, and hope to see it soon.

A bit about these organizations:

AFS Intercultural Programs is one of the world’s largest community-based volunteer organizations dedicated to building a more just and peaceful world through international student exchange. Nearly 13,000 students, young adults and teachers participate in AFS programs each year.

On January 31st, 2008, Focus the Nation organized teach-ins, workshops, and debates on the topic of Global Warming Solutions for America with over 1900 universities, schools, and civic groups. They engaged over 1 million people, and aim to engage over 5 million during a day of focus in 2009.

The mission of The Archimedes Movement is to create a new space for civic engagement outside our traditional legislative and governance structures to advance solutions to the common problems we face. They have nearly forty community chapters, mostly in Oregon.