A global wealth mashup would help students and people from various countries understand and visualize the disparity in wealth among countries and cities around the world. Often, people recite statistics about the US being in the top X percent in terms of per capita wealth globally- (generally a figure around 1%) with most other countries lagging far behind. Hearing this statistic is compelling, but seeing it would be compelling in a very different way, and would allow for easier comparisons. For educational purposes, I'd love to see a mashup that takes per capita income by country and city (info available from many sources) and 'color codes' that on a Google map or Google earth map. A country view would show the average per capita income by country for comparison globally- (shades of green from darkest green as wealthiest to white for the poorest countries) and then users could zoom in to a country to see how wealth changes across a countries regions and by city. Users could also input 2 country or city pairs to compare two places to each other, adjusted in a specific currency. Why? I think seeing regions with vast swatches of white, and only pinpoints of green, would help people understand the disparity of wealth across regions better than a list of countries and numbers, which are often just listed alphabetically.

By some counts, there are more than 18,000 civil society nonprofits/NGOs registered in Lebanon, but only a fraction of them are actually operational. Information about where they’re working, their funders, their successes, and their grantees is often hard to find. The lack of organization of and access to this data not only reinforces rampant corruption but also makes it difficult for donors and volunteers to find partners to whom they are willing to contribute funds or time. In addition, there is a lot of overlap between NGOs. Our mashup would help identify areas of redundancy and neglect, render them visually, and become a call to action to distribute resources accordingly.

There is nothing like this in Lebanon, or perhaps the world? If we were able to realise our concept, it could become a model for other countries in similar circumstances and/or link into a global network.

Around the world, social change organizations are discovering the power of competitions and challenges to identify and award breakthrough social innovations. The World Bank has dedicated $45 million through the Development Marketplace. This year Skoll Foundation has committed approximately $10 million to their challenge. Others like Changemakers, Net Squared and the Case Foundation are managing impressive competitions and identifying important social innovators and their innovations. These competitions hold the potential to identify and fund innovative, early-stage projects with high potential for development impact. Often held online, at the global, regional and country level they attract immense talent. But what happens to the winners of these contests? How do they go on to scale-up their impact through dissemination and replication? Winning a prestigious award within the social development sector shouldn’t be a dead end. It should be a launching pad. Impact Ventures seeks to assist and accelerate the connection between social innovations identified and vetted through diverse competitions and the social entrepreneurs and organizations ready to put them into practice around the world.

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.