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.
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.
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.
Ushahidi was initially set up to mainly document incidents of violence, looting etc. during the post-election crisis in Kenya. Over time the website began document peace efforts and ways to help.
The impetus behind the website was a belief that the number of deaths being reported by the government, police, and media is grossly underreported. We also were of the view that we don't have a true picture of what is really happened/is happening- reports that all have us have heard from family and friends in affected areas suggests that things are were worse than what we have heard in the media. Beyond trying to present are fuller picture of what happened based on citizen reported information, we also want to create an archive of events that occured after the election results were announced.
Once we are done with the mapping of incidents, we also hope that we can begin to put names and faces to the people who have lost their lives and create a memorial of sorts.
What’s the point of all this you might ask?
Well, Kenyans have demonstrated their capacity for selective amnesia time and time again. When this crisis comes to an end, we don’t want what happened to be swept under the rug in the name of “moving forward” - for us to truly move forward, the full story of what happened needs to be told - Ushahidiis our small way of contributing to that.
Ushahidi will change in the world in the following ways:
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