NPSL: Nonprofits in Second Life

About the Nonprofits in Second Life (NPSL) Community
The Nonprofit Commons project, managed by TechSoup, is a virtual community of practice for nonprofits to explore the opportunities and benefits of Second Life. Nonprofit Commons (NPC) currently consists of two virtual locations (sims) housing over 65 social benefit organizations, managed by a community of volunteers, under the leadership of TechSoup.

The NPC1 sim is donated by Anshe Chung Studios and NPC2 sim is donated by TakingIT Global. NPC was designed to lower the barriers of access to Second Life, to create a community of practice for nonprofits to explore and learn about the virtual world, and to investigate the many ways in which nonprofits might utilize this unique environment. Through this community, we provide free office space to qualifying groups, meet and collaborate, create a cooperative learning environment and foster outreach, education, fund-raising, all in a virtual space.

What does the NPSL community do?

We focus on providing an accessible entry-point to Second Life and on creating a community of NPOs, not just having NPOs live separately and exist separately in-world. We believe that Second Life is a wonderful place not just to entertain, but also to collaborate, educate, inspire and assist our fellow avatars (and the humans behind them). You do not have to be a resident of the Nonprofit Commons to get involved with our community. We welcome all who wish to join us as partners, collaborators or supporters. This site provides documentation and other helpful information not only for NPC residents, but for any nonprofit that is interested in learning about Second Life.

Do you have an in-world group?

There are two in-world (in Second Life) groups - "TechSoup" and "Nonprofit Commons". The TechSoup group is open to anyone interested. The Nonprofit Commons group is a residents-only group and will only accept residents of the Nonprofit Commons. If you are not a resident, join the TechSoup group to receive notices about nonprofit news and events in Second Life.

We have a community of nonprofits in Second Life and hold regular weekly meetings every Friday from 8:30 to 10:00 a.m. PST. If you're curious about our Second Life, but are unsure about getting involved, our meetings are a great place to meet others in the community and get a sense of the work we do.

How can I participate?

There are a number of other ways to find out more and start getting involved in our community:

* Visit us in world: Teleport SLURL to NPC1 Plush
Teleport SLURL to NPC2 Aloft
* Attend the weekly in-world meetings or view notes from past meetings
* Subscribe to, read, and comment on this Nonprofit Commons blog.

* Volunteer

* Join our discussion group at http://groups.google.com/group/TechSoup-Second-Life. This Google group is also good for all announcements and discussions.

*Post related pictures on Flickr and tag them "npsl".

*We save items on the web (blog articles, news, relevant links) under the tag NPSL. Use this for del.icio.us and technorati tagging. This tag is fed into our blog.

*Follow us on Twitter.

*Add Nonprofit Commons to your Second Life profile picks.

How can I get an office space?

You can find out more information on obtaining virtual office space in the Nonprofit Commons on this wiki page.

About the Nonprofit Commons Blog

We launched this blog to record the nonprofit activities of our community in Second Life, promote nonprofit events, discuss nonprofit best practices for fundraising and community building in-world and to learn how we can further our real world missions by learning from each other through these experimental efforts. If you're putting Second Life to work on behalf of the nonprofit world, and you'd like to add your voice to ours, we welcome your participation. We hope you'll feel free to log in, start commenting on others' blog posts and write some of your own. To become a community blogger, please register for an account and email megan [AT] techsoup.org with your user name for approval.

If you have questions about joining this community, or if you would like to speak at one of our meetings, before our community of nonprofits, please email megan [AT] techsoup.org or susan [AT] techsoup.org.

In addition to this blog, please visit our FAQ and our wiki to help contribute to our growing knowledge-base for this evolving community.

What are your guidelines for participating in the blog?

• If you want to comment here, great! We ask only that you avoid the usual blogging red flags (Spam, libel, hate speech, obscenity, off-topic rants and personal attacks), and that you post under either your real name or your avatar's name.
• To blog here, you must be actively working with a social benefit organization on a paid, contractual or volunteer basis, and you must be engaged with Second Life. Again, we ask that you post under either your real name or your avatar's name.

For technical questions, contact Matthew [AT] dogstar.org.

Thanks for coming... and see you in-world!