A guy named Peter Deitz had an amazing idea. He would aggregate individual nonprofit actions and opportunities for change from many sources. That way, someone could search a central database by where they lived, or what issues they were interested in, and they would find ways to make a difference. He called this Social Actions.

They made it open-source and invited anyone who wanted to add actions to the database or develop new applications using the database. A plug-in was developed that would allow websites such as EarthFirst.com to list “related actions” at the end of every blog post. This would be done like Google does contextual advertising — it would use the text of the post to deliver up relevant opportunities. For example, a post about a round of whale killing in Japan might like to a Greenpeace action against whaling. Social Actions’ actions come from Care2, Change.org, DonorsChoose.org, DemocracyinAction, GlobalGiving, Idealist, Kiva, SixDegrees and VolunteerMatch and others. Very cool.

It seems our friends at Google and some folks from the Obama team thought this was a good idea, or they had the same idea, and they have created something called “All for Good” that is similar — a central database of ways to make the world better. All for Good has Google behind it, which gives it power of course, and we hope very much that they will build upon and not feel in competition with Social Actions.

As part of the All For Good effort, YouTube has launched a new project called YouTube Video Volunteers. The goal is to match people with video skills (shooting, editing, music, etc.) with nonprofit organizations that could use those skills. Cool!

At See3 we have been telling organizations forever (or so it seems) that they must SHOW their stories and stop thinking about their website like a brochure — it’s now an interactive channel that you need to program. Lots of organization could use help in developing more video assets and we say, great!

You can see more about this new initiative here:

Here you can watch the NerdFighters talk about this new opportunity.

And another fun video to recruit video-makers from the YouTube community: