For the past 15 years, I've dabbled a bit in the world of open source software. During most of that time, I've worked within communities free of corporate structures, many of which have produced some of the best software the world has ever seen without any corporate governance.

The background explains why I'm so interested in seeing things done in a different, corporate structured way, in the Salesforce.com world this week. Starting today, the Salesforce Foundation is bringing together a small team of developers to Washington DC for code sprints on the Nonprofit Starter Pack, a set of tools that organizations can use to more effectively use the Force.com platform for fundraising, contact management, and more.  I'll be among those folks contributing ideas and code to the project, and looking forward to collaborating with my buddies in the Salesforce world.

Make no mistake about it: the Nonprofit Starter Pack is the single most important open source contribution Marc Benioff has put his company's 1/1/1 giveback model towards supporting. And, with the not-so-new-but-still-new-to-me code repository (hello to GitHub) and great leadership, the project is moving down an exciting path that I foresee disrupting the nonprofit CRM marketplace in a very positive way.

There's a lot of blah blah blah these days about social media this and that. We get it. It's cool. We're down with the Twitters and the Facebookery.

But what does it all really add up to? If you share something, how to know if it means squat?