collaborative and crowd-sourced claims watching for good governance in Burma and beyond

Networked Social Justice News Across Wisconsin

Young people, if empowered can be effective agents of change and help in developing an attitude of peace and non-violence in communities otherwise torn by war and conflict

Build innovative mobile applications of the interactive Ask Your Lawmaker widget and extend functionality of the website so that:Citizens can question their lawmakers directly from their cell phones and vote for the questions they most want answered. CNC reporters in the US Capitol will be notified when users submit questions and again questions gets enough votes. With their direct accredited access CNC reporters get citizen questions answered, and upload the audio and text to the web and the original questioners’ cell phone for them to listen, read, comment on and share.

Ushahidi is an open source software that solves communication and visualization challenges during crises situations through mapping and crowdsourcing. We are seeking support for further development of mobile functionality.

Media literacy tools Calendars Media Ownership (history, policy, effects, $$$) Washington D.C. Policy change efforts (issues legislation, representatives' contact info) Media Justice, Reform, Democracy sector activities Cross sector activities Local, regional, national, international media/communication rights activity More robust organizational information for partnerships and collaborations.

Ask Your Lawmaker draws its information from three primary sources: user-generated questions and comments; lawmaker responses to user questions; and CNC exclusive news reporting as informed by users of AYL widgets. Because widgets are customizable by state and issue, CNC reporters have a better understanding of local concerns and issues. The plan is to team with government transparency sites like Maplight.org and Open Congress, bloggers and issue-based sites and social networks such as Care2.com to provide AYL users with raw data necessary to inform questions and evaluate answers towards active and effective citizen engagement. We want to build APIs that link to supporting information from other sources, encourage collaboration and allow sites and blogs to build on the answers via partnerships with citizen journalists site such as Helium.com. where API would allow debate around lawmaker answers to continue and translate talk into action. We want AYL users to create and collaborate on news stories or follow-up on original CNC coverage by mashing up audio of lawmaker responses with supporting or contradictory data provided by partner sites, bloggers and public radio stations and first hand experience based on user comments.