The Tides Foundation – known especially for their work in fiscal sponsorship – launched their first blog recently with a post titled “Why Does Infrastructure Matter?” Ellen Friedman, the Tides Executive VP, writes:

“If we don’t pay attention to the infrastructure we are putting in place to support the work necessary to implement our visions, the lack of strong organizational practices and efforts will ultimately cause us distraction from our work, at best, and at worse, result in the dissolution of the very organizations we have created to do the work. I believe that efficient operational infrastructure, like that provided by Tides, is a critical part of facilitating social innovation and making the world a better place. Good nonprofit infrastructure provides a strong foundation on which to build solid programmatic work.”

This sounds right on all counts, and it strikes me that “infrastructure” is a great way to think about what we’re trying to work towards with Nonprofitmapping.org. Like a city and its roads, bridges, water manes and subways, the nonprofit community could use a support structure of widely accessible, low-cost infrastructure on top of which their real work – changemaking – can happen.

“Open source infrastructure” might get even more to the point. Imagine if both nonprofits and philanthropists had free access to timely and comprehensive data about who’s doing what, where. And what if the tools and knowledge for visualizing that data in maps, graphs or infographics was also free and open source? Today’s mashup culture could make short work of these kinds of free resources, and churn out some insightful and surprising new knowledge about the nonprofit world.

The initial driving goal for our team – mapping the effects of the economic recession on nonprofits – brushes against an even broader question: How might the information gap between nonprofits and foundations be filled in more substantively? One could imagine both questions being answered with the creation of an open-source data infrastructure for the nonprofit world – a project that’s ambitious, but also screams for a collaborative approach. Thankfully, that approach appears to be on the upswing these days, made possible, not surprisingly, by the Web.

We hope to put a finger on new tools and resources coming available in this vein (think ManyEyes and Data.gov), test them out, and report back with critiques, suggestions and insights. We aim to bring original things to the table too, like the Nonprofit Data Scorecard, which we think will help to build a fertile soil for the kinds of open source infrastructure the Tides Foundation points to. Will all this add up to a new culture of collaboration sprouting through the cracks in the post-recession nonprofit pavement? We hope so!

Image credit: Flickr/joguldi, Creative Commons license.