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"TheCommon.org is a new site that's designed to help community members connect with those within a particular community that can help.  It's a matchmaking site, at its core, with very specific designs on how existing organizations can help their members.  What happens is an individual that needs help with a particular project can list their needs.  \nFor instance, you may need help organizing a neighborhood run to raise awareness and donations for the fight against lupus.  What you do is go to TheCommon.org and seek out an existing community that works with lupus, then you pre-register.  By doing so, you're actually requesting to become a member of this existing lupus-focused community.  Once you've been confirmed by their admin as a community member, now you can submit the needs you have for organizing a neighborhood run.  \n\nOther members within that community have already listed their skills, so TheCommon takes the needs from you and the skills from other members, and matches the two together.  It's quite simple in concept, but a bit tricky in its implementation, especially for a web-based service.  To make things slightly more complicated, TheCommon restricts members with needs from seeking out members with matching skills.  \nThose members that have the skills can see their matching members with needs.  The whole thing is a rather opaque method (for non-members) of matching people together for a larger cause, but one thing is for sure\u2014such a method will likely keep non-serious members from participating in the site.  Consider it quality assurance.  \nThis method also leads to an acute self-selection process that leaves TheCommon.org likely to be filled with action-oriented communities that typically deal in the non-profit or related sectors (quite unlike sites like Hire a Helper), though this doesn't necessarily need to be the case.  Based on the registration process, however, it's clear that TheCommon.org is aiming to populate its site with faith-based and mission-based communities.  \nI'd probably prefer a much more transparent approach to the site as a whole, partly because I've witnessed situations where the mere power of suggestion (i.e. allowing a member to register their needs independently of a pre-existing community) can help encourage organizations to build their web presence on certain websites.  But as TheCommon.org appears to be rather focused on an offline manifestation of the work its doing in the online realm, its method has its merits.\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2008/03/27/thecommonorg/>