Givvy is a comprehensive online giving management system launching in early June. This is a real project with a dedicated team working without funding at this point.

Charitiable giving is personally and emotionally rewarding. By providing a framework and set of tools to improve the way we support our causes, Givvy users will feel more satisfied and successful with their giving.

Givvy is a system to enable donors to accomplish the following:

1. easily create and manage their giving plan
2. research over 1 million charities/nonprofits
3. execute their giving (donate thorugh Network for Good) and track donations made via other methods (mail, phone, etc.)
4. analyze their giving footprint - what types of charities, what geographic reach, how close their actual giving is to their plan, etc.

At Givvy we believe that better tools for giving can result in a better world.

This is a simple mashup using Network for Good’s donation API, with a particular focus on enhancing the donor experience with a virtualization of recent donations.

The NFG API mashed-up with a Google map would show all donations made to specific causes (by location) for a given time period over a US or World map.

This could be used on the homepage of Network for Good - to inspire others based on the action currently taking place.

Under the Youth Leadership program, Technology for Youth aims to close the gap in terms of education and opportunities. In areas where 50% of families do not own a personal computer in their homes, we hope that by establishing a computer center for youths in our community and utilizing educational software this would enhance learning and youth interest in technology.

Our existing project is already helping many thousands of people to build a strong vocabulary (including many on donated licenses). We are a 501(c)3 nonprofit located in Sebastopol/Sonoma, and match online memberships with free licenses for disadvantaged students. This year, we will give free licenses to all 3rd graders in the Bay Area.

At eSpindle everything is about customizing learning to one's needs, and nothing is out-of-the-box. People can add words that are important for them, and do then receive customized tutoring, where each word is matched with audio, definition, sample sentences from our 100,000 word database.

We want to create a public, free-for-all platform where users (and other smart and generous people) can share word lists, so others can use them to have an easier time academically, or with their personal goals.

This will be a huge help for English language learners, students, and people entering a new field. Such a platform would empower them to increase their verbal skills without assorting to labor intensive flash cards/word lists/manually manage their progress.

Research has shown that users need to be exposed to a new word eight times, if it is encountered randomly in a text, before they actually store it in long-term memory. One sighting is normally enough to anchor the word in memory, if the word has been properly introduced beforehand.

This mash-up could build a repository of lists that can help people find, for example:

... words one should know when going to law school
... terminology related to global warming
... terms important to genetics
... words you'll need to read Ulysses... and survive
... Shakespearean terms to get more enjoyment out of his writings, etc.
... glossaries correlating with common text books (in all academic fields)
... lists assorted by subjects, to help English language learners build their vocabulary (body parts... herbs... cooking terms... internet lingo...)

If some of you have learned English as a second language, you know that it is a hard language to learn. Some say that 13% of all English words are illogical, meaning the spelling or pronunciation do not make sense.

eSpindle was designed to make the process more efficient and pain-free, and a word list mashup will help people manage their progress, accelerating their success.

The Nonprofits of the SF Bay and Silicon Valley become better networked and informed of like-minded people and groups they might not have been aware of, right in their area. Promote local organizations that really make a difference and how you can help.

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.

Thousands of communities will be able to access data and map resources in their neighborhoods quickly, easily and at no cost to them. Advocates and service providers will be able to use a high-quality, well-designed, reliable platform for uploading data of their choosing and mapping that data against a wide range of demographic data, area resources, and other variables. This project will also allow nonprofit and community advocates across the U.S. to share and learn from each other how they can better use the power of mapping to advocate for and inform change. Not least, communities will be spared countless hours of effort and scarce dollars trying to build such tools from scratch, enabling them to focus more on the important work of finding the right data locally and interacting with people and organizations in their communities. The goal of our project is to make the public functionality of HealthyCity.org, the mapping tool we developed to serve Los Angeles, available throughout the U.S., free of charge, to nonprofit and community organizations. We believe this can be done in a fairly cost-effective and sustainable way, and we are looking for good thinking on how best to do it.
Examples of how Healthy City has worked in Los Angeles include:
- Mapping of overcrowded, multi-track calendar schools, to support a proposal of $25 billion in school construction bonds approved by California voters
- Analysis of areas of highest need for preschool facilities in Los Angeles, leading to over $100 million commitment of funds to develop preschool space
- Mapping of violent crimes and analysis of prevalence of gang crime, to identify priority areas for the City of Los Angeles
- Mapping the mismatch between concentrations of homeless people and availability of shelter space
- Grants analysis for foundations, including determining the location of grantees, the dimensions of their service areas (with information gathered by survey), and the magnitude of grant dollars relative to target population in grantees’ service areas

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 scores from the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment showed that U.S. 15-year-olds trailed their peers from many industrialized countries. The U.S. students were further behind in math and science, trailing counterparts in 23 countries. How are our children going to be able to compete with the children of the world? The answer is not well. In addition, we are not graduating enough students with the necessary skills to sustain and improve our economy. We really need to get our kids to be inspired about subjects like math and science early as possible.

This is where Speaker Match comes in. Speaker Match is an online service to help teachers discover and invite professionals from the industry to speak at their classrooms. For example, a highschool instructor teaching algebra can use Speaker Match to invite game designer or NASA scientist to speak about their career and how they use algebra for their work. Getting the students excited about their studies and what they could do with it - is the primary goal of Speaker Match. Success our economy and society will depend on it.

Travel destroys prejudice and expands tolerance. Travelers are pushed outside of their comfort zones and exposed to different ways of living. Local people get economic opportunities and a stage by which they can continue to develop and share their unique culture with others.

As the Internet provides more links directly between individuals, travelers can find more detailed information on places, but searching for this information is still time consuming. The latest Web 2.0 tools can help travelers find information down to the smallest street corner.

Why this matters:

As the world gets smaller, it seems everything is becoming the same. But if you dive a little deeper, every place is unique and has its own story to tell. Short of hiring a local guide, you might never find this out. Greater understanding of others and their view of the world is vital to achieving peace as the world becomes smaller.

For example, in the first few days after Hurricane Katrina, people from outside the New Orleans area were suggesting that New Orleans not be rebuilt. To the residents of New Orleans, this is unthinkable. The people of New Orleans can use the tools that Geogad provides to help others see beyond the current damage and to virtually tour the city that they love and are rebuilding.

Background:

1. People love to travel and to learn about new places. As vacations get shorter and free time disappears, people don't have time to research the local histories of the places that they visit.

2. Travelers have limited time and cannot always meet the scheduling constraints of organized tour group. These mass-marketed tours may waste a traveler's time with places that do not fit their interests.

3. Local people have a wealth knowledge about their homes and favorite places but are not easy for travelers to find.

What Geogad Mobile Tours will do:

1. Create a tool for travelers and local people to share information on a very detailed level on a location-by-location basis.

2. Let travelers share and rate information on individual tour stops that influenced them with others.

3. Build a community to share the local histories of places with the people across the world.