I'm genuinely excited to introduce Marc Manashil to the community today.

We’re currently looking for a veteran community builder with experience growing and managing community-driven projects in central and eastern Europe and around the world.

Here’s a quick summary of the role:

This job is an opportunity to translate your ideas and best practices for increasing civic participation and engagement into programs that currently reach more than 100,000 organizations in over 35 countries around the globe. The ideal candidate is a  creative web veteran who brings a range of inter-disciplinary skills to developing, launching and managing community-driven activities at NetSquared.org and other CDI initiatives.

When we launched the NetSquared conference in 2005, our premise was simple.  We set out to produce an event that brought together people working in the public and private sector who were interested in the potential of web-based tools and strategies to transform the way entrepreneurial nonprofits and social innovators operate.  The conference, held at Cisco’s headquarters in the heart of Silicon Valley, brought together around 300 people from foundations, corporate developer networks, and entrepreneurial social innovators working at the intersection of technology and social–change projects.

Over the last four years, the annual conference has been a success on so many levels. 

Aspiration notes:

The big question for Net2?

* How to tighten n2y4 challenge framework in way that makes work/participation compelling to a a relatively small # of mobile app developers around the globe?

* What’s fundamentally missing from the n2 challenge framework from a ‘web/mobile dev’ perspective? What tools are missing?

* Who might help us answer these q's?

Interesting Projects/Organizations to research:

* Open Handset Alliance

* Twitter Voter Project Key Learnings:

1. Mobile Platforms. We need to help our constituents better understand the benefits and costs of mobile platforms.

Solutions might include:

(a) articulating said costs and benefits for the net2 community

What happens when everyone asks people to vote about everything?

Check-out the copy from an email I received from Yugster.com below, and pls share via comments how your organization/company/group is addressing this dilemma.

Hey Yugsters, As crazy as it may sound, it's November already!

The NetSquared team has received a couple of questions about the Mashup Challenge application process that we'd like to share with the community in real-time.

Question: Can last year's applicants or participants apply to this year's Challenge?

Answer: Absolutely, yes.

Question: Are we accepting applications from people outside the United States?

Answer: Yes. We encourage applicants from around the globe. Having said this, we recognize the limits of our application form, which is currently only available in English.

We need someone with wordpress theming expertise to help us bring the "Donate Your Brain Campaign" to life. If you're interested in contributing ~5 hours of time to this project, or know of the right someone who might be, please drop us a line at billy AT compumentor.org.

The Donate Your Brain Campaign is all about making it easy for techies and engineers to contribute their expertise to nonprofit and ngo projects around the globe.

I had the good fortune to sit with Shannon Raybold at a recent conference to learn more about her approach to web campaigns with the United Nations Foundation.

Here's the transcript.

Billy Bicket: Can you share a quick summary about who you are and what you do?

Sharon Raybold: Sure, my name is Shannon Raybold. I’m the Internet Director at the United Nations Foundation. I develop and manage the online strategy that includes fundraising for multiple campaigns from climate change, to malaria, to sustainable development and advocacy on UN related activities. Part of my work is focused on moving the UN Foundation from a completely offline organization into an organization that taps into the potential of both on and offline outreach and tools.

BB: How are you organizing your efforts relative to that giant challenge?

SR: I’ve started small and I’m showing progress points -- via sign-ups to the site, traffic and donations. Since the beginning of the year we’ve seen our online supporters grow by 90%. With one campaign--nothingbutnets.net-- we’ve raised $3M online alone over one and a half years.

I'm on a call with Heather Cronk from http://www.pledgebank.com and was so inspired by how easy this tool is to use that I decided to start my own campaign during the call. Though my pledge is super-local, and kind of heavy -- in that it asks a lot of others interested in joining me -- I'm excited to see what emerges here.

In solidarity,
-bb