I have been thinking about the software tools we call "Management Systems" - like Content Management Systems, Document Management Systems, Learning Management Systems... I've also been playing a lot with an open source tool called Elgg, and have also played, in the past, with Crabgrass, another open source ... "SNMS"? What do these tools allow you to do? They allow you to create stand-alone social networks. Think a whitebox version of Ning, or Facebook. Elgg, a LAMP(hp) project, started it's life as a learning platform with social network features, but has transmorgrified into a social network platform with learning features. It's definitely a new project, and a very new community (with some huge warts) but it is promising for organizations that want to create private (or public, perhaps) social networks that include groups, discussions, document sharing, bookmarking, blogs and other things. Crabgrass is written in Ruby on Rails, and has groups, messaging and wikis, among other features. It's a particularly interesting project, because it has a definite political purpose:

Designed for social movements working for social justice, Crabgrass will consist of tools which allow people to connect, collaborate, and organize in new ways and with increased efficiency. In particular, we aim to help groups to communicate securely, network with other groups, and make decisions in a way that is easy to understand, transparent, and directly democratic. Where traditional social networking is about connecting individuals, Crabgrass is social networking to facilitate network organizing.

In the end, I don't advocate that organizations build new public social networks in the vast majority of situations - I think they should find the people where they already are. But private social networks have their place, and can provide a compellingly interesting platform for our nonprofit standard "members only" websites. People are getting more and more used to social networks as the vehicle for connecting to others, and this is one way to provide this in a private setting.