CivicActions

The 21 Featured Projects competed at the N2Y3 Conference for a share of $100,000 and other benefits. The winners have been just been announced:

1st place: shahidi: Mapping Reports of Post-Election Violence in Kenya

2nd place: KnowMore.org Firefox Extension

3rd place: Social Actions

And the $10,000 prize for the DonationNow Mashup Challenge sponsored by the Case Foundation was awarded to Tweet4Good.

Congrats to all!

Geekcore: bloggers, virtual revolutionaries, nerdnetizens. Commmonly seen at: NetSquared, CivicActions, NTen, and the Web of Change Conference.

I Heart Miro has created the absolute easiest (and most passive) way to support the Participatory Culture Foundation's FOSS Miro project.

By just installing the Firefox extension, anytime you shop at Amazon a small portion of the proceeds will go to support Miro.

The extension works by adding the Miro referral code to the URL when you browse on Amazon. When you buy something, the Amazon referral fee is donated to their a 501c3 non-profit.

Joe Solomon introduced me to the project and posted on the NetSquared blog about abstracting the project to support any non-profit.

What about going a step further, and being able to select Drupal, the Free Software Foundation or any other Free & Open Source Software project - and then select from a list of affiliate programs such as iTunes which will donate a 5% commission on all qualifying purchases. (like your DRM-free purchased music)

At lunch today I had a great connection with Joe Solomon, a Social Media Consultant, who is the Project Lead of the KnowMore.org Firefox extension.

When installed, KnowMore's icons integrate into Google's search results to help users understand data from the KnowMore database.

KnowMore is community dedicated to chronicling corporate abuses, worker's and human rights, fair trade, business ethics and the environment, via a vast user-generated wiki database.

The extension is powered by KnowMore's new API which enables any developer to take KnowMore's corporate data and build web apps that empower consumers and help citizens hold corporations accountable.

Usability Principle #1: You can't join the party if you can't find the front door.

Monday night, after using the three-day weekend to re-landscape my front yard and launch my new un-business, I faced the reality that I had to get to San Jose for the NetSquared Mashup Conference at 8am. (The day after a three-day weekend seemed a strange scheduling choice.)

I went to the NetSquared site to find the conference location.

This proved surprisingly difficult, as I couldn't find any link referencing the logistics of the conference. After clicking back and forth through 20 other links featured above the fold, I found it discretely hidden in a side bar labeled "Hot Spot."

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What I didn't realize until later was that the address didn't identify the building number (Cisco has 2 blocks of buidlings with the same general address). None of the the employees I asked in the parking lot had any idea where the "Vineyard Conference Center" was. Should I be looking for grape vines?

The MetaVid project captures legislative proceedings and make full video streams accessible and searchable from the text transcripts.

Check out MetaVid directly or search Pelosi

Brief Update from NetSquared:

Aaron's del.icio.us links from the conference.

Leveraging Identity on the Web: http://www.identitywoman.net/?p=769

The Future of FreeCycle Cellular Osmosis

Easy-to-build widget apps: http://del.icio.us/pava/widgets

Share your PowerPoint: http://www.slideshare.net

Make easy forms: http://wufoo.com

Forum Hosting: http://www.lefora.com

Community Mapping: http://www.yourmapper.com

Purchasing Power: http://knowmore.org

Favorite Presentation: How to Use Your Community

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Aaron Pava and I are at the NetSquared Conference, a gathering of social changemakers and geeks. This year the conference focuses on "mashups" for social good. Web mashups combine data and functionality from two distinct sources. Two iconic mashups include (Oakland Crimespotting, which maps crime data to Google maps, and Mapskrieg, which combines Craigslist apartment listings with Google maps.)

My buddy JD Leahy presented The Rosetta Project--an awesome endeavor to preserve endangered languages. Their mashup is considered to be in the "hackable" phase because it already maps audio and data about these languages onto Google Earth. At the conference, passers-by gazed at the crystal ball of alphabets and the 3" disk archive of 14,000 pages of language documentation on 2500 languages.

We just heard two-minute intros of the featured mashups. Some themes: Transparency in government (congressional bills), transparency in corporate practices (Know More, a Firefox add-on that indicates a companies environmental rating you when you're on the company's site). Recycling consumer goods (Freecycle: community-based cyber-curbside). New Orleans restoration. And all things related to maps (Green Map). I want to check out my local GreenMap group... obsess over map iconography, and invite people to participate in the EcoCitizen Trading Card project.