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.

Growing concern over climate change has prompted significant growth in voluntary markets for carbon offsets. This growth in the voluntary carbon markets represents a valuable new source of potential finance for sustainable development projects. However, only a limited number of development projects capitalize on this new finance source due to high capital costs and a low carbon price that undervalues their offsets. Live Climate solves this problem.

LiveClimate.org is a retail website that links greenhouse gas offset projects in low-income countries, with buyers who value the social and environmental co-benefits of their carbon offsets. The Live Climate retail channel directly connects the offset buyer with the project in a developing country that generated the offset. Vivid descriptions of the community, and people affected by each project and clear descriptions of the social co-benefits inform customers as they select an offset project to buy from. A mashup of maps and project information would allow customers to see where they will make an impact. Customers can get ongoing information about the projects they support through RSS feeds and continuing pictures.

Live Climate’s mission is threefold: 1) Fight climate change by financing verified greenhouse gas abatement projects, 2) Transform the voluntary carbon market to serve the poor by communicating the full social and environmental value of these projects, and 3) Raise the over revenue and share of the carbon market going to small-scale clean development projects.

The voluntary carbon market has come under significant scrutiny in recent years due to lack of transparency. The market continues to be dominated by a handful of large players, however, many new retailers have emerged even with the backlash due to low barriers to entry. These offset retailers all operate according to the same model looking to compete through price and brand name. Live Climate enters the voluntary carbon market with a fundamentally new product and business model. Operating as a non-profit, Live Climate will attract customers looking to maximize the social impact of their carbon offset purchase.

Live Climate is currently in Phase 1: Website Development and Pilot Launch. We plan a full launch of the website in early summer and are looking for help to make the site more interactive, through maps, connecting users, and personalized information.

It looks like green is the new black: eco-chic is everywhere. Companies large and small are trying to cash in on the new eco-economy, showcasing their supposedly green initiatives at every turn.

But how much is green, and how much is one big greenwash?

Greenwashing is a practice of deceiving consumers about the environmental practices of a given company. It's all around us: oil companies making billboards about their one solar demonstration project, coal corporations claiming to be “clean” on television, bustop ads promising environmental enlightenment if only you buy the latest eco-widget.

Progressive and enviros alike have been grumbling about greenwashing for a while in their own narrow circles. It's time to expand that dialogue, harnessing the power of the mashup to catalyze powerful direct action where it counts: in the real world.

Here's how it works: you see a nauseatingly dishonest example of greenwashing near your office. You take a picture of it, and upload it on WeGreenwashYou.org. You plot the location of the billboard on a Google Map, and add a link or two to reports and articles verifying that the billboard is a blatant Greenwash.

And then the fun begins: the community of users gets the chance to Greenwash the Greenwashers.

After watching a quick video-tutorial about how to make simple, cheap paintballoons, the anti-greenwash army finds your billboard. They load up a couple of balloons with greenpaint, launch them from a distance: SPLAT! Job done, and the renegades escape safely under the cover of night.

They make a quick video of their billboard liberation (anonymity preserved by concealing their faces with—what else—green handkerchiefs) and upload their photo/video/text report. Another victory in the public space, another corporation held to a higher standard of honesty. And if the corporation disagrees, let them comment on the action and take part in a lively discussion about the true definition of “environmentally friendly.”

The public will thank you for saving our common visual space from deception. And who knows? Eventually corporations might think twice about greenwashing and might even start some real greening.

Hundreds of environmental organizations will be able to collaborate, add/see/utilize each other's posted environmental events from all over the world.

Work has already begun and well on its way, but we need a programmers to implement certain features.

We have found over 100 event calendars so far (and are still receiving an average of 1-2 per day) and contacted many of them. It is very difficult for an event planner to submit to so many calendars, as well as people looking for events needing to search many calendars. We aim to allow one submission which will spread to all calendars/social networks/websites/widgets to easily find events. All organizations will spend less time inputing events, approving events, and finding events.

Events will be spread virally across the internet to spread awareness of local events which showcase events, workshops, classes, film festivals, conferences, etc. Those events bring awareness to environmental efforts and education for protecting and enhancing nature and the environment around us.

This all includive calendar will also allow event registration, social networking around the events, carpooling to events, and a place to share photography/video of the events.

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

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.

Climate Adaptation 2.0 will empower people to develop their own climate adaptation strategies at the individual, family, and community level by combining local knowledge and frames of reference with existing data layers and models.

This project will produce a working model on one island in the eastern Caribbean demonstrating how communities can become empowered to develop their own climate change scenarios and strategies. This will be applicable in small island developing countries in general, and in coastal zones worldwide.

Inhabitants of coastal zones everywhere are vulnerable to natural hazards linked to climate change. Nowhere is this vulnerability more acute than on small tropical islands. In the eastern Caribbean, natural hazards usually take the form of extreme weather events. Climate models suggest that the intensity of tropical storms will increase, and also that dry seasons may become more pronounced, resulting in both floods and droughts. In addition, sea level rise is expected to hasten coastal erosion, and the rise in sea surface temperature is expected to further impact already stressed coral reef environments. All these factors are expected to have profound implications for livelihoods of island inhabitants, either directly (e.g., stressed reef resources result in declining fisheries) or indirectly (the quality of tourism destinations erodes, leading to a loss of revenues and jobs).

Government efforts to address natural hazards have a general myopia with regard to needs and concerns at the scale of communities. Communities cannot find their reference points in official maps and strategies. This project will mash up "official" geography, climate models, and community maps to develop a climate vulnerability atlas that is accessible at the community level.

Natural Areas Association’s (NAA) is developing a model collaborative and networking tool for the conservation community. Through NAA’s proposed mashup, environmentalists will be able to communicate more practical information, at one time, better. Natural areas are “areas of land which have scientific, educational and esthetic value by reason of distinctive natural features. These include areas having unusual plant or animal life and areas having remnants of the original vegetation which have not been disturbed by the activities of man.” – George B. Fell, founder of the NAA and The Nature Conservancy. Natural areas managers who can share recent study findings, new management techniques, methods, and tools will both disseminate and learn from information and help to increase the amount and quality of our planet’s biodiversity. NAA proposes a mashup that disseminates large amounts of constantly changing, comprehensive, technical information, (by emailing website registrants, based on their registered interests, or via a search engine or site search) to anyone taking action. NAA’s website will provide relevant answers and solutions to broad and deep natural areas conservation and management questions.

Policy-makers and the public will have a greater understanding of the latest climate change research (such as the "Big Melt" of last summer in the arctic), future scenarios, the urgency of acting immediately and strongly, the huge opportunities for a "new deal on green jobs," and the consequences if we don't. This will impact the next President and Congress, who *must* pass and begin to implement binding global agreements and national policies on reducing greenhouse gases. The impacts will be both direct (allowing elected officials to see a more clear and direct view of the science and policy options) as well as indirect (supporting and growing the growing movement for climate change action and climate justice).

This project also creates a new platform, which could have many other applications: a way of combining web video and the intelligence of hyperlinking, using the timestamp inherent in all digital video (hr:min:sec) as the central reference point. It allows existing video, from shorts to feature-length documentaries, to be "sliced and diced" in a way that gives the viewer more control over the "flow" of the information. This benefits learning by (a) chopping up long narrative content into more bite-sized blocks; (b) allowing the mashup of smaller bits of video which have logical links into a new narrative; (c) giving the user the option to investigate 'tangents' off the main narrative without getting "lost on YouTube", and (d) allowing the viewer to fit new information into her brain in the order and way it makes sense to her, not to the filmmaker. It speaks to the shorter attention span of the "YouTube" generation, while maintaining the integrity of the information presented. Finally, it uses video, rather than text or traditional web content, at the center of a mashup of information which brings viewers to other content online, as their curiosity leads them there.

The project will change how we look at the world, thinking spatially and in terms of layered interwoven societal drivers.

With a map as the primary navigation tool users can access information on local, regional, national and international scales about:

1. The challenges;

2. Available resources;

3. Who is working to overcome the challenges; and

4. How 1,2 and 3 can be synergised.