Expanding People's View on World Issues

The 4 main interfaces/data sources that people will interact with - news from http://daylife.com and http://groundreport.com and SMS/messaging capabilities from Twitter and Flurry mobs.CBC 'Pop Demand' allows users to specify keywords of social change that they want to keep track of. Users can submit these keywords, which are evaluated and added to the social channel taxonomy. Once the request for certain keywords exceeds a certain number, this keyword becomes an official channel. Some examples channels:* Crisis & Conflicts * Education * Energy * Social Sector Finance * Microfinance * Women's Rights * Cultural Rights * Child Rights * Human Trafficking * Poverty * Human Rights * Environment * Health * Community Improvement * Arts & Culture * Public & Social Benefit * Safety & Disaster * Employment Issues * Urban DevelopmentA user can subscribe to one or more channels over SMS. CBC continuously polls the news for these keywords, and notifies the subscribers of the respective channels over SMS or twitter with a summary of news of those keywords. CBC uses twitter to send and receive SMS. Twitter users can send a direct message to the daylife twitter user dlfe, to recommend keywords for subsciption (eg d dlfe tax 'microfinance'). The CBC system saves the keyword and adds it to the channel request list. News messages are also sent to the users as direct messages to their twitter user ids.

The core idea behind Your Mapper is to create an easy way to make public information that has long been locked up in internal government databases, and present it to the world in a way that is visually appealing, easy to understand, and local.Examples of these kinds of datasets would be crime, restaurant health reviews, traffic accidents, building permits, sex offender registries, property values, and pollution sources, or anything that can be linked to a physical address or location. Because each government office stores each of theses items internally in very different formats, it would take too many resources to create a relationship with these local agencies and obtain data dumps on a regular basis. Your Mapper empowers concerned citizens to collect and share this information, since they know their town or city and have a good idea of what others living there would want to see made public.I do not believe that altruism alone is enough to encourage local Mappers to load and maintain quality local data, so Your Mapper actually compensates the Mappers based on the amount of website advertising and embedded map revenue generated that is specifically related to their maps. This would empower the Mappers to become "local experts," much like Google's Knol project and Helium.com does.