ConsultantCommons.org
I don’t know how useful this is, but I just learned about ConsultantCommons.org. Here’s what they say it is about…
ConsultantCommons.org provides an online collaboration space and community for non-profit technical assistance providers to collaboratively build and share knowledge. The goal of ConsultantCommons.org is to provide a resource for nonprofit technology assistance providers to share and develop consulting tools and resources. The system is designed so that consultants can find, contribute and collaborate on tools and information they use to maintain a consultancy and provide services to nonprofits.
I don’t know what a “non-profit technical assistance provider” is. Nevertheless, Zac Mutrux added one of my articles on my experience as a consultant to ConsultantCommons.org. He can do this because my blog is available under a CreativeCommons license. This is the first application of CreativeCommons to my work.
You do know that you can copy and paste the content of my blog and reuse it, right?
Is ConsultantCommons.org a useful service? Well, for real cheap, they are able to build a site packed full of content and do it without breaking any rule. More importantly, they can prove that they didn’t break any rule because the CreativeCommons is explicit and anyone can check that, indeed, the content of my site is available under such and such a license.
I was chatting with a colleague yesterday about online courses and content reuse (think learning objects). She was pointing out to be that the greatest difficulty remains the licensing. Reusing content is a pain because you might have some components of a course licensed for a specific course, and if you want to use them elsewhere, you’ve got to go hunt for a new license. Nobody wants to be a license hunter. Especially not if you are a university professor where this sort of grunt work is looked down upon as opposed to creating the content from scratch.
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Thanks for your comments on the resource. One small point of clarification: the majority of content on the site right now is not repurposed/republished from other materials (appriately licensed or not). Most of it comes from CompuMentor’s own archives. The first step we took to get the content was to open source our own intellectural property. ConsultantCommons.org is our site.
Also, to be clear, we’ve set the site up so that anyone can, in turn, republish what’s on their. We’ve also set user rights such that anyone can do, essentially, the same things with the site that we can.
And, if you’re interested in what a nonprofit technical assistance provide is, NTEN — http://www.nten.org — is a great resource.
Again, thanks for furthering the discussion. Thanks also for good content.
(and, yes, I work for CompuMentor)
Comment by marnie webb — 15/4/2005 @ 18:35
In American English, a “non-profit technical assistance provider” is an individual or organization that has specific expertise in an area of interest to nonprofit organizations, and offers consulting or other services.
Nonprofit organizations are also sometimes referred to as charities or non-governmental organizations outside the USA.
So a technical assistance (TA) provider could offer services to help nonprofit organizations improve their fund-raising methods, or the way they provide services, or the way they manage their information technology. Frequently these TA providers receive funding from a state government or private foundations to help certain types of nonprofit organizations.
Technical assistance providers who specialize in information technology are referred to as “non-profit technology assistance providers.”
CompuMentor, the organization Marnie and I work for, is a major non-profit technology assistance provider located in the United States. ConsultantCommons is one of our newer efforts. One of our better-known programs is TechSoup Stock, which distributes to non-profits software donated by vendors such as Microsoft. Although we’re based in the US, we also offer this service to charities and nonprofits in Canada.
http://www.techsoup.org/stock/canada/
Call or write any time for more info.
zmutrux@compumentor.org
aim://xurtum
+1-415-633-9437
Comment by Zac Mutrux — 22/4/2005 @ 19:15