Technology is moving beyond the mere crunching of data to connecting people and what they know. Survival is increasingly determined by the successful development of organizational knowledge assets --the facts, experience, and insights garnered from work. These public knowledge assets are at risk of being privatized, colonized or cannibalized.

This paper is a call to action. In it we provide definitions of knowledge and lay out some key challenges and opportunities for the nonprofit sector. We call for the building of a nonprofit knowledge system and suggest prerequisites for such a system.

This working paper was published on the website of Knowledge in the Public Interest. The author also has a blog on social innovation.