Since I'm always muttering about how we need better knowledge management in the nonprofit sectiteria as a labor of love and sabbatical project.

Here's the idea (taken from the project's home page):
Capaciteria is a comprehensive, searchable database directory of administrative resources that help nonprofits leverage their own capacity. It promotes peer review because members can comment on and rate individual resource links as well as add useful new links. Like Google, search requests return link results weighted to rise based on ratings and popularity given to them by nonprofit users.

According to Jonathan, the web site has been launched with about 1,000 resources that he selected,* but "Capaciteria will be most useful if people are rating, commenting and adding their own useful links."  Amazingly enough, the project is a low-budget, one-person operation that may go far in demonstrating that "sometimes the best solutions are neither costly nor complicated."

Here are a couple of developments I'd love to see as Capaciteria grows:
Shoestring-style usability tests, to ensure that first-time visitors can easily find answers to their most pressing questions.

A failure-friendly approach that encourages users to comment on and rate resources that don't quite work, in a way that empowers the folks who created the resources to improve them.

One possible model for Capaciteria's future could be the Mechan-X-Files, which are run by the hosts of Car Talk.  What I really admire about the latter is the rating system, which is based on factors that customers - rather than marketers or auto mechanics - think are important when they are looking for someone to fix a car.  If Capaciteria can cultivate this kind of usability (ideally to be combined with the high spirits, humor, and helpfulness that so many of us cherish in the Magliozzi brothers), then it will go far in meeting some deeply felt needs.


*  This blog isn't one of them, nor are any of the email distribution lists that I moderate.  Not that I am bitter.


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