June 30, 2016
I’m surprised to be writing this piece. I’m surprised because a public-interest technology project led by Foundation Center , GlobalGiving , GuideStar , and TechSoup — and supported by luminary funders like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation — doesn’t seem like it…
November 13, 2013
Technical development of the first Basic Registry of Identified Global Entities (BRIDGE) release is currently about a half-way to completion. If you have been following the project you will know that BRIDGE aims to revolutionize data interoperability in the global social sector by uniquely identifying all the world’s NGOs in…
June 3, 2013
The Basic Registry of Identified Global Entities (BRIDGE) is a new collaborative project that aims to revolutionize information sharing, in order to better understand the flows of philanthropic dollars and enhance transparency and effectiveness in the global social sector. Recently, Victoria Vrana, senior program officer at the Bill & Melinda…
February 4, 2016
Most of us take it for granted that the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration assigns every vehicle a Vehicle Identification Number (or VIN). This number makes it possible for buyers and sellers to track the story behind a car. With a bit of research, consumers like you or…
June 30, 2016
I’m glad to be prompted into writing, as I think we’ve been remiss about keeping people posted about the progress we have been able to make on BRIDGE , as well as any evolution of our thinking about what BRIDGE could be. I’m hoping that in this and future posts…
November 3, 2014
The Basic Registry of Identified Global Entities (BRIDGE) is a new collaborative project that aims to revolutionize information sharing, in order to better understand the flows of philanthropic dollars and enhance transparency and effectiveness in the global social sector. BRIDGE is a system that assigns non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and…
March 5, 2013
How is technology drawing us closer to meeting needs on the groun? We count on it to connect us in ways not previously possible, but the recurring question is, “What are we doing with it?” Daniel Ben Horin surveys this landscape through the dual lenses of data and technology for…
May 3, 2018
Challenge Digital tools have empowered nonprofits and civil society actors to collect, store, and process more data, and sometimes particularly sensitive data, in the course of their ordinary service delivery. Organizations have new obligations to protect and responsibly handle client data, and are exposed to new risks, as the interaction…
October 13, 2017
Listen to Lucy Bernholz, Cinthia Schuman Ottinger, Beth Simone Noveck, David Borenstein, and Neville Vakharia discuss the new machine-readable Form 990 and the opportunities and challenges presented to U.S. nonprofits and civil society. Recent regulatory changes have made e-filed Form 990s, the data-rich annual financial disclosure forms for U.S. nonprofits,…
May 6, 2015
In 2002 we began to build an online funding bridge between passionate individual donors—people whose gifts are often seen as too small to be meaningful—and smaller organizations whose impact has been all too easy to ignore because of their size or remoteness of their work. Today that funding…
