Via the Charity Blog I came across the Village, an online massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) that immerses the player into the role of an entrepreneur building companies to bring prosperity to the villages of the Third World.

Inspired by the logic of Kiva - the micro-credit organisation that allows people to select projects they want to fund through an online database of micro-entrepreneurs - the Village aims to bring the real world of social entrepreneurship and the virtual world of online gaming closer together.

This is a good idea, but still doesn’t answer the question that has been bugging me for the last 6 months: could these two worlds - the real and the virtual - be brought even closer together, and integrated with the increasing universe of mapping tools that are being developed for non-profit organisations and NGOs?