After successfully introducing free Wikispaces Plus accounts for K-12 education, Wikispaces has decided to give away 2 million free Plus accounts to higher education institutions!

So far Wikispaces have been helping primary and secondary (K-12) educators, but they have decided to "take it to the next level" and expand the programme towards the higher education. Wikispaces are a very useful space for teachers, students, professors, researchers and librarians who need a simple, powerful way to write and work on the Internet.

As a part of the free wiki programme Wikispaces is also planning to develop and release some of the tools and features that educators request most often.

I recently had the opportunity to connect with Peter van der Linde, the co-founder and director of Akvo. Akvo is a platform dedicated to realizing drinking water and sanitation projects in developing countries across the globe.

Looking for a way for your community members to contribute information to an online collective database? Why not consider a wiki? A wiki is a website that allows multiple contributors to easily add, edit, and contribute content, images, web links, and more. Wikis are specifically designed for collaborative editing and are used as public websites, for personal note taking, in corporate intranets, and for knowledge management systems.

The IS Hub is a collaborative concept that, when achieved, will create a cohesive network of web platforms to help improve the lives of people all over the world.  You are invited to collaborate at an upcoming workshop on April 8 in Utrecht to help shape the future of this technology. The goal of the workshop is to share the IS Hub externally to find people to help develop it further. Rooted in the 2.0 philosophy, the organizers hope that by sharing the idea they can join forces to create something extraordinary.

Here is an explanation of the IS Hub from the workshop coordinators:

Wikispaces is looking for translators - interested in helping out?  Wikispaces wants to offer the wiki platform in additional languages and needs the help of others who have strong written fluency in English and the additional language of choice.  This is not a paid-for opportunity, but one that will greatly impact the community of Wikispaces users.

Desired languages include:

The N2Y4 Conference is only days away.  Things are all coming together - whether it's the N2Y4 widget, the terrific lineup of speakers, or a jam-packed conference agenda - but do you know how you're getting to San Jose?  If not, or if you've got a ride to share, we've got the N2Y4 Rideshare Wiki here for you!

This is a great book for non-profit leadership to sink their teeth into.  It's both hi-level and granuar in scope, providing you with content to start a creative fire within your organization to anaylze/implement/adapt a new tool for collaborative endeavors as well as give you prolific, quality examples of how other organizations have increased mutliple capacities by leveraging wiki into their bucket o' resources.

Yesterday I asked you what kinds of case studies of nonprofits using the social web you'd like to read about on the NetSquared Blog.  In a comment on a different post, Joe Solomon reminded me about the socialmedia4change wiki.

The socialmedai4change wiki is a community wiki of examples of how nonprofits and social change makers are using social networks for social change.  It has examples of how people are using:

At Ushahidi we're using Basecamp for a lot of project management activities.  It's a good tool, but we've found that it just doesn't cut it as a knowledge repository.  We knew we were going to have to find a wiki engine to use for our knowledgebase, but didn't realize how many options (good and bad) that there are in the wild world web.

 

Wiki Software or Hosted Wiki?

Britt Bravo is on a much-deserved vacation, so I'm stepping in for her to keep news and information about the social change web coming your way!

NTEN and Beth Kanter are leading the nonprofit technology community in the We Are Media Project: The Social Media Starter Kit for Nonprofits. The community, by working wikily, is building a toolkit and instructional guides about the use of social media in helping nonprofits distribute their stories.