Tomorrow is Net Tuesday. Net Tuesdays are social events held across the US on the second Tuesday of every month, and are part of TechSoup’s NetSquared project. At these meetups, social changemakers and technology specialists get together to discuss the incredible work being done with non-profits that are adopting networking and social technologies. You may know that the fabulous Veerle Pieter did the branding and identity work for the project, but you may not know a lot about the project itself. Netsquared was created to help non-profits utilize the community capabilities of the Internet to increase impact and social change. We have already seen the tremendous impact that social networking has had on the commercial world, now we want to see what type of changes can be made in the non-profit world.

While I was discussing speaking at the Houston Netsquared meeting tomorrow with Katie Laird I was reminded of a post that Paul Scrivens did last month. Scrivs joked about the members of the 9 Rules network getting together over a weekend and duplicating 37 Signals suite of products. He did point out that you probably couldn’t build Basecamp or any of the other products in the suite in a weekend. We all know that but what if you did attempt this idea with a twist? - that is get a bunch of IAs, designers and programmers together over a weekend to build an application that would benefit non-profits, but with all the bling of a Web 2.0 app? How could the power of Digg be applied to the latest United Way cause? How about promoting a non-profit, charity or cause based on those that your friends are interested in? How many simple applications could be built this way? With frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Django available, a working beta could be made available relatively quickly. So as much as I love 37 Signals products, I would really be interested in seeing what types of non-profit software the collective brain power of the Internet could produce. This is a perfect example of the giving back that I am always talking about. With that said, what would you build?