The hardest thing about N2Y3 is figuring out which of 21 innovative, creative, and passion-filled projects which will get my vote. (It's a good thing that they'll all receive a share of the $100,000 prize money.)

It's day two and this morning, three of the project teams provided details about their specific plans, their mashups, and their important work.

City of New Orleans Mashup for Citizen Monitoring of the Recovery

As data collection happens block by block in New Orleans after the floods, government is deciding to demolish houses -- and many times the residents are the last to know.

The mashup, still under development, will provide a citizen-driven tool for the notification of demolitions by overlaying maps from the city's online permit database and online database of blighted and adjudicated properties. Those will be cross referenced with the city assessor's database and integrated with resources available at the city GIS website, including lot overlays.

Many times, the homes being demolished aren't the ones in the worst shape. For example, if a developer wants to widen a road, they will simply work with the city to demolish houses and schools.

This project will create a way for concerned citizens to find information and build presentations. This project will be the key to creating persuasive documents, helping citizens bring information and layer it over flood maps, and press send to their city legislators. The project creators say that when people in city government see the maps, and they respond to it. And this gives the power back to the people.

A sample map is posted here.

Genocide Scores: The Anti-Genocide Legislation Tracker

Most of us think we can't make a difference and that we're helpless against the legislative process. This project is designed to empower anti-genocide activists with the tools for community-based education, user-generated content, and pool the collective knowledge of a growing movement for change.

The folks at the Anti-Genocide Tracker organization do offer some tools already and have some legislative clout. Now, they want to create a way for you to visit their site, enter your zip code, and give you a way to, for example, find out what you can do in five minutes and have an impact. Or perhaps you could call your legislator and help pass a bill that will work toward ending genocide.

Funding would also help to create a user interface, widgets, and build a larger network of people talking about this project.

If this works, an environmental activist or any other activist could use this to help them achieve their goals -- and ultimately end the horrors of genocide.

MetaVid

If you've ever spent hours watching CSPAN, you know that finding information you need is not the easiest process. MetaVid came out of an artistic desire cut short the process of looking for congressional video for a video for an art project.

Currently, Congressional videos are released into the public domain, are not subjected to copyright, and open to reuse. So the project founders started taping CSPAN's feeds of US House and Senate, digitizing it, and putting it online.

Every second within the day of proceedings is accessible, so can a blogger could create unique URL to that portion, download, or embed a clip.

To make the video footage searchable, the founders used metadata -- closed caption feeds became a search index. Now, you can simply type in the name of your representative to see if they're representing you.

Because it's all open source, this technology can be used by anyone and applied to local city council meetings or used to transcribe parliamentary proceedings.