Gina Telaroli
December 11, 2008 | 4:05 pm EST
Each week, Social Actions community members post links and news about online social activism - This round-up is a summary of the links that surfaced in the last 7 days. You can share links and news for future Social Actions rounds-ups in the Peer-to-Peer Social Change FriendFeed Room. Check out past roundups here. You can also tag your delicious bookmarks with “p2pchange” or include “#p2pchange” in your tweets - we’ll scoop them up and review them for future Social Actions Roundups.
Social Actions roundups are syndicated on CauseGlobal, CauseWired, ContributeMedia, NetSquared, and TakePart.
Upcoming Events
Tom Watson will host an online chat at Philanthropy.com (Tues, Dec 16) on the subject of, “Using Online Tools for Activism.”
TakingItGlobal will host a launch party in Toronto (Tues, Dec 16) for the launch of its version 6.
George McCully will speak at the Ethos Roundtable in Harvard Square (Tues, Dec 16) on the subject of, “Philanthropy Reconsidered in the Internet Age.”
ChristmasFuture will launch (Tues, Dec 16) its first TweetsmasFuture campaign.
Kiva will host (Wed, Dec 17) its first community conference call for lenders.
Youth Assets is a pretty amazing organization that is “committed to engaging and empowering youth in southern Africa, particularly orphans and other vulnerable children, by utilizing information and communication technology in new and innovative ways.”
And right now they need your help, watch the video below and then takepart at Netsquared to vote for Youth Assets’s Kuluma project in the 2008 USAID Development 2.0 Challenge!. You can find the Kuluma Project here : http://www.netsquared.org/projects/kuluma. Your vote could help Youth Assets get 10,000 dollars to empower youth! You can also vote for up to 5 projects - all of which could use your help.
Here is this week’s installment of the Social Action Roundup from Social Actions.
This week’s roundup draws attention to two contests that illustrate the impact social media technologies are having on not just private and nonprofit initiatives, but public spending as well.
USAID’s first-ever open source challenge – the 2008 USAID Development 2.0 Challenge hosted by Netsquared – is ready for your vote. Today through December 12, vote for up to five of your favorite projects from over 100 entries, all of which use mobile technologies for social good.
The recently-completed Apps for Democracy challenge resulted in 47 apps that made use of Washington DC’s government data catalog. As we covered in Roundup #16, this contest delivered a 4,000% ROI for its organizers. This week, Peter Corbett of iStrategyLabs reports on lessons learned and the buzz this contest has generated for creating more open source challenges for government agencies.
And speaking of government, President-elect Obama’s transition team announced this week that the Change.gov website now falls under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Here is the weekly roundup! Thanks Social Actions! (psst! Check out their new awesome design)
Photo by Maneno.org
Spot.us, a new platform for community funded journalism, officially launched this week! Spot.us enables the “public to commission journalists to do investigations on important and perhaps overlooked stories.” It’s a great idea with an awesome and well though-out execution. Spot.us is also the first open-source action platform, which may enable others to re-use and adapt the code to launch their own platforms. You can check out the code and also contribute on GitHub here. For more, check out the launch post here as well this MediaShift post.
Congrats to David Cohn and the entire team of Spot.us!
Links & Discoveries of the Week:
Social Actions News & Updates:
This was a whirlwind of a week for the SocialActions community!
What are Social Actions Roundups?
Each week, Social Actions community members post links and news about online social activism - This round-up is a summary of the links that surfaced in the last 7 days. You can now share links and news for future Social Actions rounds ups in the Peer-to-Peer Social Change FriendFeed Room. Check out past roundups here.
Social Actions roundups are also syndicated on CauseWired, TakePart, and NetSquared.
New: You can also tag your delicious bookmarks with “p2pchange” or include “#p2pchange” in your tweets - we’ll scoop them up and review them for future Social Actions Roundups.
Related:
Here is the Social Actions roundup from last week:
1 - Philanthropy 2173: Mobile texting moves to Mobile Volunteering
Lucy Bernholz introduces and shares the potential of TheExtraordinaires - a tool that’s under development and will enable you to volunteer via you cell phone.
Note: TheExtraordinaires is also seeking an iPhone coder (and launched a cool video to boot)
Hundreds entered.
Twenty one made the first cut.
In the end, only three were left standing.
They now take their rightful place as the sexiest, most eligible non-profits alive.
I write, of course, about the winners of Netsquared.org’s Mash-up Challenge: a competition for the best use of web tools for social good.
The 21 finalists — some of which are mere concepts, some of which are established websites looking to expand and scale — ranged from:
A proposal to use your mobile phone to do impromptu volunteer activities…to a system for getting targeted alerts about pending genocide legislation… to a site that allows everyday citizens to submit questions for journalists to pose to lawmakers…
Over the course of the two-day Netsquared Conference at the Cisco Center in San Jose, CA, the 21 finalist projects presented, jockeyed, politicked, and schmoozed their way toward the final voting session, during which conference attendees voted on their favorites. I myself was on the receiving end of an outrageous bribe — a bic pen — by a non-profit that shall remain nameless.
Check out my video blog on the winners:
Here’s my other coverage of the event, starting with my favorite post:
Live-blogging from Netsquared: Second Life and the Non-profit Commons (the most meta panel I’ve ever attended)
More videos and posts after the jump…
Live from the Netsquared conference in San Jose, CA: 21 non-profit finalists are competing to win $50,000 in prize money for the most innovative use of social media for social good.
Here’s an interesting one:
Tom from Knowmore.org, which gives ratings for corporations and organizations based on their social responsibility
My take: Beautiful. The underlying technology is cool: Wikimedia-powered database of companies’ and organizations’ social responsibility levels. That means everyday citizens are esponsible for writing the articles. Knowmore’s staff translates those articles into a ranking.
But the Firefox extension could take it to the next level. Just like Compete.com gives you an at-a-glance ranking (however flawed) of a given website’s traffic, this Firefox extension could instantly help you decide whether you want to patronize a given company. Example: You’re Googling snow shoes to purchase. You can instantly choose between a company that’s socially responsible and one that’s not. Could be game-changing. Not only be empowering consumers, but also for shaming offending companies into cleaning up their act.
I’m at Day 1 of the Netsquared conference in San Jose, CA. (Netsquared is an organization that helps non-profits use the web for social good.)
Hundreds of organizations submitted their web projects to be considered for Netsquared’s $25,000 prize. The 21 finalists are giving lightning pitches right now.
Here’s my take on some of the coolest:
Description: Get alerts from your mobile phone about volunteer opportunities that you can do right there, right now.
My take: Very cool idea. Meets people where they are. Makes altruism easy. Big fan.
Description: Capitalnewsconnections.org-powered system. You submit questions for accredited journalists pose to lawmakers and decision-makers in D.C. and other places. Submit your questions via their website or a widget.
My take: Power to the people. Would be a lot more satisfying than just adding your name to a petition or a robo-email.
More after the jump…
