Want a N2Y3 recap?
View attendee blogs, vlogs and comments at Be NetSquared. Watch our NetSquared channel on Fora.tv
NetSquared is an initiative of TechSoup
NetSquared enables social benefit organizations to leverage the tools of the social web.
- Home
- Project Gallery
- Anti-Genocide Action Tracker: Genocide Scores for Every Legislator and State
Anti-Genocide Action Tracker: Genocide Scores for Every Legislator and State
The Idea:
What will change in the world because this Project happens?
The Genocide Intervention Network seeks to create a new website, modeled on our successful Darfur congressional scorecard, DarfurScores.org, tentatively named GenocideScores.org. This grows directly out of our mission, to empower individuals and communities with the tools to prevent and stop genocide.
Our current site tracks each legislator's record on bills relating to Darfur. Hillary Clinton's scorecard, for instance, tracks the senator's record of co-sponsoring and voting for most important bills on Darfur. Sam Brownback similarly scores high for his outspoken record on the issue.
The process of a bill moving through Congress, however, is somewhat obscure. Action alerts are posted when a bill is coming up for a vote, and e-mails are sent to members in important states and districts. Yet most visitors won't know at a glance where a particular bill is, or which states or districts are most important to passing the bill.
Moreover, two additional campaigns have achieved significant momentum: the Sudan Divestment Task Force and the Teach Against Genocide campaign. These measure success on the state level — "Which states have divested?" or "Which state legislatures have approved genocide education?" While visitors to these sites can view information for their particular state, the particular status and action needed in a given state is not always immediately apparent.
Don't other sites track legislation? Why create a new cause-specific site? It's true that other websites track bills as the move through Congress. The difference with GenocideScores.org would be two-fold: First, it would incorporate state-based campaigns as noted above. Second, and perhaps most importantly, it would be curated by our advocacy staff to ensure anti-genocide activists are provided with the most effective information and tools. General legislation-tracking sites will never — and are not designed to — support advocacy on a particular cause, but our staff will ensure that the alerts people get on a particular bill or campaign tell them exactly how they can have the most impact.
What information will people interact with to make this change?
GenocideScores.org would provide four main assets to the anti-genocide community:
- Aggregate anti-genocide data. Not only records on Darfur legislation, but on any anti-genocide bills relating to our areas of concern, or recognition of historical genocides such as in Armenia. Each state would also display its status on divestment and genocide education. Subsequent campaigns could also be added.
- Clear illustrations of legislative status. Instead of simply being an entry on a scorecard, each bill would have its own graphical timeline, and members would be able to track progress of a bill through e-mail alerts or RSS feeds.
- Most importantly, cross-indexing, allowing specific alerts to be generated for members based on location. When a bill is coming up for a vote in Congress and a senator from Connecticut is the key vote, Connecticut members automatically receive an alert. When a divestment or genocide education rally is planned at the Nevada statehouse, all Nevadans on the site know about it. This information — where geographical power lies in each case — is viewable on the bill's timeline, so members can notify their friends in CT or NV of the need to take action.
- Finally, embeddable badges to allow people to display the current genocide score of their state and district.
What else have you done in this Cause Area?
GI-Net raises both funds and political will for civilian protection. Our Darfur program trains peacekeepers for firewood collection patrols; our 1-800-GENOCIDE hotline enables citizen advocacy.
The Sudan Divestment Task Force has successfully lobbied for divestment in dozens of states.
Teach Against Genocide is working with Facing History; only 4 states have genocide education in public schools.
GI-Net embraced social networking and social media as a core part of its mission. Its initiatives are used as models for other organizations. We had a Featured Project in 2007.
We are an partner in the Save Darfur Coalition and worked extensively with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Armenian Nat'l Committee of America, US Campaign for Burma and others.
Cause Area:
Cause Area Tags:
Project URL:
http://www.darfurscores.org/Supporting Organization:
Genocide Intervention NetworkSupporting Organization URL:
http://www.genocideintervention.net/Financial support?:
NoCity:
WashingtonState/Region:
DCCountry:
United States
The Assessment
What kind of help or resources do you need to turn your project idea into a completed mashup?
While we have some talented developers on staff and are active in the Drupal community (upon which DarfurScores.org and most of our websites are built) we unfortunately do not have the financial capacity to take this to the next level. We would appreciate financial support or pro-bono technical assistance.
We believe there are some exciting tools in developing this tool, drawing on some of our ideas from last year, including the ForwardTrack software. We'd be happy to talk to developers about integrating their own tools into this site.
Mashup Data Sources
The Team
Host
Comments
other genocides
on the move from DarfurScores.org to GenocideScores.org, do you plan to tackle Genocide in general? if so, an interesting thing to add to tracking congress regarding Darfur would be to look at how different legislators react to the Turkish lobby and the Armenian lobby who are fighting over the recognition of the Armenian Holocaust as a genocide. This issue still has political implications almost 100 years later, and when certain legislators are working to deminish recognition in this genocide for political reasons, it says something about their character and trustworthiness. I would expect a legislator to be consistent in these matters, otherwise any positive actions can be taken as political interests without any principal behind them or merit.
I wonder what did Hillary think of darling Bill at the time this happened:
"When the issue last arose, in 2000, a similar resolution [condemnation] also won approval by a House committee, but President Clinton then succeeded in persuading a Republican speaker, J. Dennis Hastert, to withdraw the measure before the full House could vote. That time, too, Turkey had warned of canceling arms deals and withdrawing support for American air forces then patrolling northern Iraq under the auspices of the United Nations."
Updates
So we've been battling around a lot of ideas on this project and ways to take it beyond the website. Our original thought was to have RSS-feed Spring Widgets taking info that we would feed to a state or district-centered drupal site to give individual users updates on their home spots, but now we're also talking about the possibility of doing custom widgets that might communicate with the site via an API to be able to deliver background information and action alerts to a badge that a user could stick on their own webpage or social networking profile. Has anyone out there ever tried experimenting with such a system before?
Peace,
Ben Drexler
Genocide Intervention Network