By Todd Cohen

Community is the core of the National Strategy for Nonprofit Technology, a growing network of leaders who want to help integrate computers and the Internet into the work of nonprofits and the nonprofit sector.

In Mexico, writes Pete Hamill in "News is a Verb" - a terrific essay on the state of journalism at the millennium - the heart of a community is called the zócalo. A kind of plaza, it's where people get together, swap gossip and goods, get news, do deals, come courting.

In America, Hamill laments, the only institution akin to the zócalo used to be the local newspaper. But papers rooted in their communities and serving as a kind of town common are old news, replaced by chain-owned commodities.

Richard Civille, a veteran of nonprofit tech work, wants to see a virtual town common for the nonprofit world.

He calls it a Web "portal" - like Yahoo! or Excite - that would be an entry point for anyone wanting to plug into the community of nonprofits, philanthropy and civic action.

"Some think of portals as cheesy strip malls, but this portal will be much different," Civille says.

Think of the nonprofit portal as an online plaza like the zócalo. It will be the heart of the nonprofit community - a marketplace where nonprofits can find and exchange resources and connect with other organizations and people, and where the general public can connect with nonprofits.

The site doesn't exist yet, although numerous nonprofit groups have developed sites that offer lots of information and links for nonprofits and people trying to find them.

The partners in the National Strategy (including me) are working to help create a marketplace tentatively known as the "Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network," or N-TEN. A key to creating the marketplace will be to get a nonprofit Web portal up and running.

No one will own the nonprofit portal, although a new or existing nonprofit entity could end up administering it. The site also could tie into a host of sites developed separately by individual nonprofit organizations, such as Action Without Borders, CompuMentor, Guidestar, the Information Technology Resource Center, IGC and the Philanthropy News Network.

In fact, some or all of those sites could work together cooperatively to help create the portal.

Civille, executive director of the Center for Civic Networking in Friday Harbor near Seattle and a partner in the National Strategy, estimates that building the cooperative portal service could cost millions of dollars and take several years.

With initial funding, however, a working prototype could be created serving a single geographic region, such as the Pacific Northwest. That prototype - and tools developed to use it, such as software to manage relationships between nonprofits, tech assistance providers, foundations, corporations and the general public - could be expanded over time to serve the entire sector.

Here's how the cooperative portal might work:

First, it would be designed like a map of the world. Anyone wanting to find information about a particular country, region, city or even neighborhood simply would click on the appropriate spot on the map.

Keys to finding information would be zip codes and three-digit Internal Revenue Service codes for charitable groups.

Nonprofits and anyone else could find out about organizations in their hometown that provide tech assistance, or find links to and create partnerships with groups that work in the same field of interest, such as social services or the arts.

Companies and organizations that provide tech assistance to nonprofits could post information about their services. And members of the public could find information about and connect with nonprofits, volunteering or contributing online.

"The service brings together nonprofits, the public and technology assistance providers in one place, as well as donors," says Civille.

The cooperative portal service also would provide software tools that nonprofits could use to manage relationships, assess their organizational strengths and weaknesses and measure their use of technology and its impact on their services. (Another initiative of the National Strategy is to help develop such measurement tools - the subject of my next column.)

Civille emphasizes that none of the services he envisions for the portal site are unique.

"You can do searches on the Web and find all of these services," he says.

What's different, he says, is how those services will be linked, allowing users to move easily from one online resource to another - and to connect with one another. The goal, he says, is to offer services of interest to as many nonprofits, service providers and members of the general public as possible - using each to attract the others.

"We are creating a larger marketplace of ideas to drive the general public to issues that nonprofits address, increasing their constituencies, increasing their fundraising prospects and increasing the reach of their missions."

Like commercial Web sites, the nonprofit portal would generate revenues from advertising, membership fees and charges for transactions conducted over the portal, such as the sale of tech services or products.

The cooperative portal service also might create a kind of barter system that would allow users to exchange products, services and know-how - assigning values to those exchanges, with a portion of the value going to the portal service.

And the site would include public service ads that would create opportunities for visitors to personally participate in organizations and issues they care about.

A nonprofit Web portal clearly is needed and would give nonprofits an invaluable resource. By boosting its construction, the National Strategy would help ensure the creation of a virtual "town common."

Friday: Creating online tools nonprofits can use to evaluate their use of technology and its impact on their services.

Previous columns in the series on the National Strategy:
Doing good by plugging in (3/5/99)
Lending a hand to an invisible market (3/12/99)
Microsoft opens window on nonprofit technology (3/17/99)
Building an online tech co-op for nonprofits (3/19/99)
Coordinating tech assistance for nonprofits (3/24/99)
Forging tech tools any nonprofit can use (3/26/99)

Todd Cohen can be reached at
tcohen@mindspring.com