By Dara Major
Philanthropy rocks! There’s a whole lot of collective intelligence in this community. How can we,together,get better at tapping into and using it?
As the LearnPhilanthropy team member leading our knowledge and content efforts (including framing initial ideas about what this collaborative network might support,and identifying relevant knowledge frameworks and content areas),I’ve taken a deeply engaged,social learning network approach – facilitating conversations with and capturing collective reflections by a really diverse community of stakeholders.
We’re kicking social learning up a notch through LearnPhilanthropy’s prototype platform,and excited about launching this new resource…soon. Meanwhile,with your help,we’re putting some cornerstones in place.
Big thanks to the more than 30 practitioners who,over just the last couple of months,have helped to inform and give shape to what we believe is the first general-purpose,field-wide taxonomy focused squarely on grantmaker learning. This “Real Simple Taxonomy” is a highly iterative work-in-progress,more user-generated folksonomy than the traditionally hierarchical taxonomy. Over time,it will be used to help inform search,browse,and whole lot of other activities on the platform.
But taxonomy is not the same thing as navigation!
Though we hope this entire taxonomy will make it into the platform…. to date,only a small slice of the taxonomy has actually been baked in to the platform pie. Most keyword topics or tags are not operational yet. That work is proceeding on a parallel but much longer technology execution timeline. Ditto re supporting contributions of additional tags and taxonomies by our community of users. In other words,this is a multi-faceted work in progress. (Oh to have Google’s development budget!)
Our Real Simple Taxonomy co-creators so far have come from,to name just a few places: Center for Effective Philanthropy, Fleishhacker Foundation,the Bill &Melinda Gates Foundation, Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, The William &Flora Hewlett Foundation, McCormick Foundation,and the Southeastern Council of Foundations. Thanks to all for taking a deep dive with us.
The latest version of the Real Simple Taxonomy is HERE !! It includes the complete set of key topics,or tags,such as due diligence,strategy,and capacity building…clustered into a few simple buckets. All contributed and road-tested by our co-creators.
Check it out! And if you have a taxonomy to share or would like to get involved,please do leave a comment or contact me at info@learnphilanthropy.net
