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