Marnie Webb asks a great question: Wonder what flickr has to do with nonprofits? Or maybe the question should be what can nonprofits do with flickr as answered in the comments. Inspired by Marnie's musings, Deborah Finn suggests that flickr is great source of highly quality nonprofit stock images, although suggests understanding how flickr creative common licenses work before plunking photos into a powerpoint.
Nonprofits could use flickr to document and share a process with colleagues or staff in a remote office, similar to how these educators are using flickr. The opportunities for shared knowledge capture are powerful and fairly easy to set up and use -- by simply by using the comments to have a dialogue around the visual. Take this example of an art history class.
Tharum, who works for a a Cambodian NGO, recently wrote about how flickr helps more people learn about Cambodia. I was inspired about the possibility of how the Cambodian blogosphere might share knowledge cross-culturally across the globe via flickr. Flickr can help us learn more or document more about an event, place, project or whatever - by having a specific group of people tag the photos of what they were documenting and then commenting to share different views/contexts of the images.
So, as an experiment, I've put a post on Cambodia4kids and we will see what happens.
More to think about ...
Update: Chris Dover from Relay Blogger just posted a comment saying that "I see Flickr as a great way to connect and build a community and inspire discussion." Chris is spot on!
I have seen how Flickr could be used for educators, but have not really seen how nonprofits could use Flickr.
After reading your blog entry, Deborah's entry, and Marnie's entry, I have started exploring Flickr more. I brainstormed ideas for how nonprofits could use Flickr. Then I started thinking about new tags and new ways of using nptech.
I just wrote an entry in my blog at http://eweinb04.blogspot.com/2005/08/tagging-missions-of-organizations.html
Posted by: Emily | August 02, 2005 at 03:35 PM
"and then commenting to share different views/contexts of the images."
This is absolutely right. Comments and descriptions of pictures add an entirely new layer of meaning. Sunrise becomes a little bit more than just the start of a new day ...
I see Flickr as a great way to connect and build a community and inspire discussion.
Posted by: Chris Dover | August 03, 2005 at 08:11 AM
Hi-
Our Organization, Clear Path International is using Flickr. We love it and use it A LOT on our site.
WE have uploded over 1500 pictures, soryted by tags and use the "badges" to create randomly generated pictures from our archives on our pages....
We love flickr!
check out our tags: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cpi/tags/
-James
Posted by: James Hathaway | August 06, 2005 at 04:57 PM