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Big List of NGO & Public-Good open project feeds

Here’s a list of news feeds I’m following that fall into what I generally call the NGO/public-good/nonprofit space.  Essentially, that means open source / open data efforts that cover education, medicine, humanitarian needs, civic involvement, and just a whole bunch of other things that don’t revolve around sales, software engineering itself, or Internet infrastructure.  They’re only partially sorted.

Did I leave any off? Send me an email, or post a comment, if the robot-filter is feeling friendly today.

It seems like there ought to be more, but for some reason a lot of the groups that are active in this space FAIL dramatically at RSS.  Take Open Source Ecology (//opensourceecology.org/), for example.  They do some amazing stuff with construction and tooling for economically-struggling communities. You’d think they’d want to publish their news, but their “blog” page (*their* name for it, mind you) has no RSS or Atom feed of any kind.

Don’t believe me? Check it out: //opensourceecology.org/blog.php

I’d suggest you write to them and say “hey, I’d really like to follow your organization, but your news site offers me no way to do that. What gives?” Except that I’ve already done that, and they didn’t even reply, much less fix the site.  On the plus side, the Freedom Of The Press Foundation was in exactly the same situation up until a few days ago (well, the same except for the added irony); when I notified them via Twitter, they also did not reply, but they did silently fix their site.

Anyway, I hope you’ll find some interesting sites and projects on this list.  I may re-post to add to it later if I get a significant chunk of new feeds.  But it’s a refreshing set of content to browse through, since all of it is focused on helping people, one way or another.

[ed. note: I did try making this available as a “Google Reader bundle” which is a new feature, but sharing it is tightly bound to keeping it inside of Google Reader itself, which kills most of the value]

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