Our country is facing the Iraq War, the War on Terror, the Drug War, environmental policies, support for Africa, education, and health.
Our congressional representatives are supposed to represent our interest, but are under increasing pressure from lobbyist, corporations, and big money.
Govit is a website that is inspired to help balance the power, and get your voice heard on the issues.
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.
As part of our digital Inclusion work, we are developing a holistic approach to media change. We realize the importance of creating a digital infrastructure that is accountable to and sustained by the community it aims to serve and support. The development of a community based DigiMapping system enables community members to identify and track their local technology assets over time would be helpful in creating a infrastructure that comprehensively addresses the access needs and concerns of historically marginalized communities and groups on their own terms.
A mapping system that focuses on neighborhood technology assets offers a strengths-based approach to developing priorities, and would address the limitations of needs-based development. For example, county-wide needs surveys that are designed to extrapolate results down to the neighborhood level neglect specific neighborhood trends. In addition, county-wide surveys are often landline/telephone based, and exclude important segments of the population such as those without phones or permanent homes. Factors such as language, calling hours, and sample diversity are variables that weigh heavily on the quality of survey data, and yet are easily dismissed once decisions are made. By focusing exclusively on what is deficient in a community, needs-based approaches fail to incorporate the positive characteristics of a neighborhood into the survey. This gap has social implications that are beyond methodological. Our goal is to create a new method which better reflect neighborhood needs, desires, assets, and capacities which would translate into more effective and sustainable improvements for communities.
The information available through our proposed DigMapping system would be helpful for funders, policymakers, researchers, and organizers engaged in sustainable development, technology infrastructure, and community building strategies.
Domestic violence is one of the most common causes of physical and emotional injury to women in the US. Emotional, financial, and educational barriers are often too great to shift away from domestic violence leaving thousands of victims trapped. Help resources are fragmented across states and have failed to achieve scale to overturn social conventions as well as provide proper resources. The R.I.S.E. (Reaching Information: Supporting Empowerment) Network will have the power to change that. It is the most ambitious effort in the U.S. to aggregate the right resources and technology to help men and women transform their lives and to initiate the process of healing from domestic violence.
R.I.S.E. is a multi-tiered online and offline community that provides safety, education, and donor-driven resources for abused victims, while also providing essential behavior modification, education and empowerment for families to usher in a new cultural understanding in our most challenged areas such as isolated immigrant communities. Taking full advantage of Web 2.0 and combining safe and secure device technology, R.I.S.E. will address the subtleties of anonymity while providing victims access to each other, experts, and community resources. Ex: Jane wants to leave this week. She has five minutes to check where a shelter is located in another city. She goes online to www.beckysfund.org, answers two questions about her location, need for shelter, and prints out the results at her local library. Then she clicks on the exit button which logs her out, erases the site from the computer's history, and takes her to a shopping site just as her abusive husband walks in the front door.
The National Institute on Money in State Politics offers its beta version of Legislative Committee Analysis, http://www.followthemoney.org/pvs/index.phtml a new tool that will contribute to a healthy democracy in 50 states. It makes transparent who gives campaign funds to members of every major legislative committee in the nation. Legislative Committee Analysis will launch during freedom-of-information’s Sunshine Week: March 16-22, 2008.
The new tool is a data mashup. It links Voter’s Self-Defense System http://www.votesmart.org/official_state.php with the Institute’s 50-state comprehensive archive of political contribution records www.FollowTheMoney.org.
With simple name-the-state and name-the-committee queries, each legislator’s contribution records are displayed by source. Visitors can use the tool to monitor who raised funds from companies affected by votes legislators cast on important policy issues. They can see if legislators have relationships with special-interest contributors; and use the information to inform their own votes in 2008 elections.
The Institute collects 90,000 campaign-finance reports filed by all 16,000 legislative, judicial and statewide candidates every election, and by about 500 ballot measure committees and 250 political party committees. It acquires and scrubs the data; codes contributors to 400 business categories; and displays the records at www.FollowTheMoney.org. The Institute delivers an open-access balanced picture of money in state politics, making political donation data that is otherwise difficult to access available in a high-quality searchable format.
The Institute continues to lead the way, delivering unprecedented access to the political money trail in the states.
Often, issue groups, journalists or researchers need more extensive data sets or analytical studies conducted with an independent eye. The Institute provides extensive custom research and composite data files beyond information offered through the site’s search engine. The Institute also helps other groups program APIs and widgets to their Web sites to provide targeted data from its archive out to new users. Call 406.449.2480 M-F, 8am-5pm.
The Institute will launch yet another transparency tool later this year, Lobbyist Link. Collection and input are underway for the massive project: a 50-state searchable database of all state-registered lobbyists and their clients.
The African Soul, American Heart humanitarian project, supporting Sudanese Lost Boy and war orphan Joseph Akol Makeer, will build a orphanage / orphan center in Duk Payuel, southern Sudan, to provide food, shelter, school supplies, and other basic life needs for the 2,000+ orphans of that village. A really successful fundraising campaign will allow us to build other orphanages / orphan centers for the 16,000+ orphans in Duk County, southern Sudan. The project team has 30 hours of video footage; we are working towards a 30-50 minute documentary about Joseph's life and his goal of building an orphanage in his home village. The documentary will be complete by fall 2008; a fundraising goal of $100,000 has been set for fall 2009, the orphanage / orphan center will be operational by fall 2010, although some aid can be delivered as funds are raised.
We envision a twofold change. The developing world [DW] will be lifted onto the first step of the ladder out of poverty and towards development they control; and N.Americans will recapture meaning through connection to something beyond themselves and something that will change the world.
Because DonorTrust (DT) will set a new bar for Non-Profit Organizations (NPOs) doing project work, we won't leave these NPOs without a solution. DT is OpenSource-any NPOs can use it and be empowered to live up to the NPO promise-to take care of the funds donors entrust to us, and then to PROVE IT!
DT builds community by:
- DT is a technology that empowers community-to-community (C-2-C) philanthropy. Classrooms, families, departments in corporations can create an online community to change the world by giving to communities in the [DW]. We are creating a tighter link between these communities.
- DT facilitates more personal communication between the individuals within communities - empowering people to reach out, ask questions, share thoughts, and become one community.
- Community in N.America will be enhanced by sharing in a common goal: participating in lifting villages out of poverty
- We will connect classrooms in N.America with those in the [DW] through DT, empowering students around the globe to work together on projects, learning from one another and together.
- DT is about empowering everyday people to do something about a cause they are passionate about. The technology will decouple the typical components in an Int'l development NPO:
a) advocacy
b) project implementation
c) back-office / admin.
By decoupling these components we can empower a person passionate about a particular cause or region (e.g. water, or Kenya) to advocate for those specific projects and we take care of the rest-crowd-sourcing advocacy, and allowing people to build their own communities in N.America.
-Macro: we want to build the community of the generation that ends extreme poverty. We provide the tools for people to join to change the world. Much like generations that came before us that were part of the peace movement, ending apartheid, ending slavery, or ending communism - DT will provide the ability for THIS generation to stand up and make a difference.
If successful, this project will give rise to the first complete, readily updated, and geographically presented portrait of Alaska's conservation issues. Conservation efforts across our state will be presented in their navigable context. People will be able to understand Alaska's conservation issues more readily than ever before possible, and through their own lens of importance, rather than digging through the many perspectives of individual, dispersed nonprofits.
The effort will raise awareness and support for conservation, as well as increase community spirt among the over 100 conservation groups across our state.
Those outside of Alaska often imagine Alaska as a pristine wilderness, with the Arctic Refuge being surrounded by oil developers poised and prepped for environmental disaster... while the rest of the state remains untouched and safe. But this isn't the case-- there are mining prospects across Alaska for gold, copper, zinc and more, plans to mine coal for shipment to Asia (a quarter of the Earth's coal reserves are here), shipping routes from the Pacific risking destroying the world's largest fisheries, and the last of the Earth's temperate rainforests, with more than half of them clearcut. Hundreds of thousands of Alaskans rely upon these resources for their livelihood.
By creating a platform for sharing information on the vast array of issues across our state, this project will change the way nonprofits work with each other, and greatly improve the way we communicate with the rest of the world. "Issue of the day" conservation trends can be muted in favor of greater transparency, public understanding, and cooperation.
Information like this has never been objectively collected and presented in one location because of the understandably inward focus of conservation nonprofits, which have a vested self-interest in presenting only their own issues. However, as the cost and means for presenting and revising content steadily decreases, and technological breakthroughs are provided by the Web, GoogleEarth, and GoogleMaps, we can create a truly groundbreaking website about an iconic place, offering a model for conservation cooperation applicable across the globe.
The conservation community has the willingness and data to make this happen. We need the expertise to design and market a winning approach.
A Superfund site is an uncontrolled or abandoned place where hazardous waste is located, possibly affecting local ecosystems or people. Sites are listed on the National Priorities List (NPL) upon completion of Hazard Ranking System (HRS) screening, public solicitation of comments about the proposed site, and after all comments have been addressed.
For many years, I lived in a very large Superfund site area without knowing and I'm sure many are in the same situation. This is because the EPA's pollution information is buried in the files on the web that are not easily human readable. Even the information provided by the EPA is only cursory, naming possible hazards and whether is has yet been deemed "clean."
The "EPA Superfund Mashup: Exposing Environmental Hazards In Your Area" Project will make the 200+ Superfund Site's information visually available and human readable. It will promote engagement and accountability in private and public cleanup efforts and encourage those who live and work in those areas to document cleanup efforts and the human effect of large scale air, water, and soil pollution.
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