Why Social Actions Tuner?
Social Actions Tuner is a tool to help connect the right volunteer and donation opportunities with the right people. You feed it examples of what you do and don't want to see, and soon it will be able to sort or filter the search results the way you would. The result is that people find more actions they're interested in sooner. How much potential is lost because the right opportunity was on the 3rd page of results instead of the first?
- A simple example: If you search for 'PHP' you get web/programming volunteer opportunities, and also results for the Phillipines, whose currency is abbreviated as 'PHP'. Most people want one or the other! You can run a search, 'tune' it, and enjoy the benefits of a clutter-free personal RSS feed. Same goes for a Java programmer who wants to help out but keeps seeing actions related to coffee or the island in Indonesia.
- A medium example: A volunteer coordinator working on an emotionally charged issue wants to provide a search page for volunteers that only returns results that they think help the cause, not hurt it. The coordinator crafts a search, tunes it, and drops it in the Social Actions widget they're already using. Voila!
- A "shoot the moon / pie in the sky" example: The teams responsible for the big volunteer and donation opportunities portals out there integrate the Social Actions Tuner into their websites. Since they can track users and their clicks, they could automatically provide personalized, filtered lists of actions to individuals and groups - seamlessly and behind the scenes. The result is that people find more actions they're interested in sooner.
On the surface it's a neat trick that might be useful to people who are really dedicated to searching out the latest and greatest volunteer and donation opportunities. The interface is open and ready for other apps to use it, just like Social Actions. Social Actions Tuner could be hooked up to any tool out there - any of the other social actions entries, any of the big sites like Volunteer Match and Idealist, anywhere people are viewing and searching social actions.
For Technical Folk
For programmers, it is also the Social Actions Tuner API, an open interface of tools. You can send it social actions data in two piles: examples you want, and examples you don't. It will return a reusable chunk of data that you can use to continue 'training' your filter or to retrieve better results. We've only recently finalized the API and data formats, so contact Ehren Foss if you would like to know more.
Also, the source code is available via SVN: http://svn.preludeinteractive.com/socialactions
Social Actions Tuner relies on these excellent projects as building blocks:
http://www.socialactions.org - Volunteer and Donation Data Aggregation
http://www.nltk.org/ - Natural Language Toolkit (open source, python)
Logistic Regression with Stochastic Gradient Descent - Naoaki Okazaki
http://cakephp.org/ - PHP development framework (open source, php)