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.

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…

(full list of finalists)

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…

Read the rest of this entry »

The 3rd annual Netsquared Conference just announced the winners of its mash-up competition — whose entrants are non-profit organizations using web tools for social good.

First prize ($25,000)

Ushahidi.com, a tool for mapping reports of violence and other unrest on GoogleMaps

Second prize: ($15,000)

Knowmore.org’s Firefox Extension, which alerts users when they visit web sites of companies with corporate abuse records, took the $15,000 second prize.

Third prize: ($10,000)

SocialActions.com, a search tool for social action campaigns, took home the $10,000 3rd-place prize. (They also found out they snagged another $10,000 cash injection from the Case foundation.)

(Here’s the list of 21 finalists .)

Here’s the video of the announcement and reaction shots from the winners:

Benji Burrell, the driving force behind iLoveMountains.org, (see my earlier post here) explains how he leveraged contributions from Leonardo di Caprio, Woody Harrelson, Willie Nelson and Ed Norton to push forward his advocacy campaign against mountaintop removal coal mining.

Video shot at the 3rd annual Netsquared Conference in San Jose, CA.

From a session at the Netsquared Conference panel on “Bringing Your Community to Life”:

The panel leader, Alexandra Samuel, the young CEO of Social Signals Networks, a consulting firm for the development of online communities, rammed the following point home:

Paraphrasing:

Most organizations spend ten times more time and energy guarding against unwelcome user contributions than they do encouraging helpful contributions.

Instead of worrying about the potential effect of one potential nasty user comment, concentrate on the things you need to do to facilitate one hundred good comments:

• Focus by promoting conversation
• Make it happen, don’t wait for it
• Connect like-minded participants
• Connect complementary threads

A David vs. Goliath story:

How did a few neophyte activists from Appalachia get the rest of America and Congress to care about the ostensibly hyper-local issue of mountaintop-removal coal mining?

Background: It’s cheaper for energy companies to extract coal from the earth by slicing the tops off mountains than it is to tunnel underneath them. The result: over 470 mountains in Appalachia have been demolished, leading to a host of environmental problems: destruction of natural habitats, flooding, pollution, etc.

At first, spreading the word was done via old-school Web 1.0 websites, earned media coverage, and face-to-face organizing by local and regional organizations.

Problems with that approach:

• Hard to convery scale of mining
• National face-to-face organizing costs a lot
• Missing an organizing presence
• National legislation needs a national network

Solution: iLove Mountains.org — a Web 2.0-tricked out resource center and action center

Check out the highlights of the site after the jump…

Read the rest of this entry »

Try to grok the meta-ness of this scene:

I’m at a Netsquared Conference panel in San Jose. Four panelists are at the head of the room. They’re talking about how non-profits are doing community-building and program events in Second Life, the popular virtual world.

Each of those panelists’ avatars are sitting at a similar table in a similar panel room in Second Life. We in San Jose are watching that virtual panel taking place on a projection screen behind the real-life panelists.

But making it even more meta, the video of our real-life panel is being streamed live into Second Life and projected onto a virtual screen behind the avatars.

So we’re watching them, watching us, watching them. Or is it the other way around?

This quick video I shot of the scene might help:

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:

Peter Dietz from SocialActions.com, which allows uers to search for social action campaigns across 29+ websites

My take: Great idea, but the engine has to be comprehensive to have utility. If I can’t be sure that the engine is returning every action out there (within reason), then this could be one utility I use, but not the only one. (The search engine isn’t there yet.)

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:

Bryan Hayes from AskyourLawmaker.org, which allows users to submit questions for journalists to pose to lawmakers

My take: Power to the people. A lot more satisfying than just adding your name to a petition or a robo-email. Great manifestation of direct democracy.

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:

Pete Manzo from Healthycity.org, which allows users to get detailed demographic info about their neighborhood