During the month of October, we reached out to members of TuDiabetes, asking for video submissions on which they described life with diabetes through one of the five senses (sight, touch, hearing, smell and taste). This contest was called Making Sense of Diabetes.

This is the compilation video we've produced in time for World Diabetes Day (Nov. 14), highlighting some of the best contributions made during the contest. We hope it will help people who do not have diabetes to better understand what life with diabetes is like.

The event is called The Big Blue Test because the blue circle is the international symbol for diabetes. The idea of a shared "blood sugar test-in" started with an activity organized in July 2009 by TuDiabetes. More than a thousand people participated then. Now, we seek to reach thousands of people with diabetes through seven other diabetes social networks and Twitter. The activity incorporates 14 minutes of physical activity to reinforce the importance of exercise.

People with diabetes have to test their blood sugar routinely. It can be a very lonely activity. So we want people to take The Big Blue Test, to shed light on this chronic condition and the importance of exercise on World Diabetes Day.

Although we've gotten some amazing submissions for Making Sense of Diabetes so far, we thought it'd be a good idea to collect some tips for those who may not be as inclined to appear in front of the camera and a few others for those who want to do it but are not quite sure how to complete SOME part in the process of putting together a video for Making Sense of Diabetes (or anything else, for that matter). Here you go...

FIRST THING: THE STORY

I wanted to share with you our most recent diabetes awareness project at the Diabetes Hands Foundation, called Making Sense of Diabetes

We are seeking video entries that tell about the impact diabetes has on our lives through one of the five senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell. Watch this video to learn about the project and please help us pass the word around about it (perhaps one of you will take us up and help us make sense of diabetes.

Disclaimer: I am not an attorney. The following post cannot and should not be taken as legal advice (it isn’t). It’s just meant to give you references to consider your legal options as you are deciding what is the best course of action for you to pursue in order to get your not-for-profit idea off the ground and to make it sustainable.

When you want to create social change there are several ways to accomplish it. You can do it by being part of a larger organization (a for-profit with a deeply engrained social credo and a track record of socially responsible behavior or an established nonprofit that you feel identified with), you can start your own nonprofit organization or you can go at it alone. Right? Well, sort of.

July 14, 2009 was the day that we held the test-in where we called on 14,000 people with diabetes to share their glucose reading at the same time: 4 pm ET. We reached out to hundreds of media outlets through a press release that we got feedback for from a number of PR specialists. Although we did have one interview about today's event with a Hispanic station in Los Angeles, the result of the day's activities was really the fruit of the diabetic community coming together.

The call to action was easy:

We've called upon our members in TuDiabetes and EsTuDiabetes to share the story of their lives with diabetes in creative ways. One of those initiatives was called Diabetes Supplies Art, a project through which members built their own pieces of art with their used (and sometimes unused) diabetes supplies.

We took some of the best submissions and created this video to help shed light on the challenges that people with diabetes live with around the world.

Last week, I was happily surprised by an initiative that @JaimeH, one of our members in TuDiabetes, came up with. She has a way with graphics, so she offered to make Virtual Santa hats for people on Twitter in exchange for a micro-donation of $1.50 to benefit TuDiabetes.com.

That started Dec. 3. To date, she's raised a little more than $250! Talk about perseverance... and people keep asking how they can get their Virtual Santa Hats!

Recently, I woke up with an idea for a video leading up to World Diabetes Day, this coming Nov. 14. It would have a fun theme, a-la-Charlie Chaplin, with some unusual photos that would hopefully get people's attention... so I wondered whether using some ACTUAL music like the one Charlie Chaplin's movies had would be possible.

It turned out that his first movie, Making a Living, was in the public domain. With some trial-and-error on iMovie, I was finally able to extract the audio track from the video (Archive.org carries the entire movie, for you to download) and with a few hours of editing work, this is what resulted:

With a few more days to go before our deadline of Nov. 1, I wanted to appeal to the rest of the NetSquared readers to help us reach our goal of 20,000 signatures, in an attempt to appeal to Google so they will consider doing a World Diabetes Day doodle on Nov. 14.

So far we have collected a little under 9,000 signatures (using iPetitions.com, if you are curious) on DiabetesDoodle.com.