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Tech Talk: Scott's Take on Nonprofits and BitTorrent

As an Experience Analyst here at Idealist, Scott Stadum spends a lot of time exploring the latest tools and ideas the internet has to offer. He's also this week's Featured Changemaker on Change.org. Here's a piece he wrote recently about BitTorrent:

For most nonprofits, sharing content they've created, such as videos, large documents, or audio files, with people who might benefit from access to the materials is cost prohibitive. As a result, they offer little or rely on third parties for storage and distribution. Nonprofits have the potential to reach new audiences by taking advantage of a file sharing technology called BitTorrent.

It works like this: you (the nonprofit) have a file you want to share. You can create and "seed" what's called a torrent file and then point "tracker services" such as LegalTorrent toward that file. Other people with BitTorrent can start to download it, and the more that happens, the faster it is to download, and the more accessible it becomes. When enough other people are sharing it, you won't have to host it on your server anymore. See the benefits?

With BitTorrent users in parts of the world with slower connection speeds will have access to video, audio, images and other documentation. Content that otherwise would never have seen the light of day can be set free.

Despite the well-documented controversy around peer-to-peer file sharing services, finding legitimate torrents isn't difficult: Legaltorrents.com and Torrentfreak have terabytes (read: lots and lots) of legal and Creative Commons-licensed content between them.

I would love to see nonprofits with large repositories of archived information open up their files for the rest of the world. There's plenty of value in the content we're sharing, but what about the content we aren't sharing?