Hi Marnie, Sorry for not replying earler. BarCampBirmingham ate my homework.
Rather than having mulitple databases scattered around and spending staff time updating and verifying information, I think microformats can be used to mark up a nonprofits about page in a way that allows the data to be maintained in one place and displayed in many.
Sounds right along of the talk that Tantek gave at NetSquared.
But I'm not sure how to represent the NTEE code. Is the below correct: <div class="vcard"> <div class="adr"> <div class="org fn"> <div class="organization-name">CompuMentor</div> <div class="street-address">435 Brannan St., Ste. 100</div> <span class="locality">San Francisco</span>, <abbr title="California" class="region">CA</abbr> <span class="postal-code">94107</span> <span class="category">T40—Voluntarism Promotion</span>, <span class="category">W50—Telephone, Telegraph and Telecommunication Services</span>, <span class="category">U41—Computer Science</span> </div> </div>
This sounds about right, although it would be cool if there was an authoritative source of NTEE codes, so that we could convert them to tags: <a rel="tag" href="some.gov.or.org.authoritative.source.of.ntee">U41--Computer Science</a> This would allow you to not worry about having to define sub-formats for marking up category titles, I think.
2. Nonprofit also need to display the area in which they provide service. This might be limited by zip codes, counties, state or countries. I'm not sure how this could be marked up. In the above example it is: Service Area: United States, Canada What would be the best way to represent that?
I think that's a separate hCard. I don't know how it fits into org hCard though.
3. While the NTEE describes the category and subcategory to which a nonprofit belongs, it might be useful for an organization to indicate that they are a registered nonprofit or nongovernmental organization. This, I could imagine, would help extend this internationally (the NTEE code is US) and might be what is searched for when figuring out the display-side of the problem. So, should nonprofits identify that they are nonprofits? If so, should that just always be the first category or is there a better way to do this?
I also see this as a tag of some sort... I don't know for sure.
4. I think the benefits to nonprofits are greater solving multiple entry/multiple database problem above. Do these sound like reasonable benefits to you all: * By using microformats, nonprofit organization can keep their about current and marked up appropriately and not spend time updating their entries in any I&R databases. Individuals and organizations wishing to display service providers within one service type, region or a combination of both, can use microformats as the base for the data they display and be able to spend fewer resources keeping a database current. * Marked up data can allow nonprofits core information to by displayed in unexpected ways without any action on the part of the individual nonprofit. * The nonprofit controls the infomration about themselves and does not have to worry that others will get incorrect input information about the nonprofit. * Using tools such as the various greasemonkey scrpits, flock and firefox extensions, individuals can easily add information about a nonprofit to their address books. * Can map services to locations on a map which can be a nice display but also help to show locations lacking certain service types
This is a good summary, and I am sure there are more points that the collective wisdom of uf-microformats can bring up. :DG< _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
