We're finishing up our review of US-based projects that were nominated for a chance to go to the NetSquared Conference with a list of projects from the Western United States.

Next week we'll show you the projects that came from Canada, South and Central America, Africa, Europe, Asia and Australia.

If you would like to become a member of the Innovator Support Network and help out one of the projects we've highlighted this week in the Northeast, Midwest, South or West with your expertise, services, products, or other resources, contact Billy Bicket at bbicket@compumentor.org.

NOMINATED PROJECTS IN THE WESTERN US
Alaska, Arizona (3), California (36), Colorado (3) , Hawaii (1), Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon (5), Utah (1), Washington (2), and Wyoming

Arizona

Freecycle.org (N2Y2 Featured Project and Third Place Award Winner)
Elevator Pitch: By empowering globally local social networking, we have created a gift economy/community. The magic: it’s easier to give something away than throw it away & keeps it out of landfills; a cyber-curbside; a digital segue from commodity to community.

NiJeL: Community impact through mapping – Harnessing the local knowledge of refugees
Elevator Pitch: Refugees spend valuable time searching for nearby services and a social network. NiJeL will create an interactive mapping tool to give refugees and their providers a valuable baseline of spatial data and allow refugees to map their new communities.

HELP International Telemedicine Humanitarian Emergency Mobile Medical Clinic Network (N2Y2 Featured Project)
Elevator Pitch: A telemedicine-based on-line community of physicians, financial donors and emergency personnel bringing advanced medical assistance to disaster zones and areas of chronic humanitarian need around the world.

California

100 Innovators - the world's most important story has started to unfold (N2Y2 Featured Project)
Elevator Pitch: This decade, the impacts of leading social entrepreneurs will explode. It's the world's most important story, and Innovatorz.org will tell it. We produce and distribute killer online media for award winning social entrepreneurs.

A Light on Money and Politics: MAPLight.org (N2Y2 Featured Project and First Place Award Winner)
Elevator Pitch: MAPLight.org illuminates the connection between money and politics. We connect campaign contributions and votes for U.S. Congress, providing groundbreaking transparency so that bloggers, journalists, and citizens can hold legislators accountable.

Amplafi: A Social Network for Organizations
Elevator Pitch: Amplafi turns up the volume on the good stuff. Our web-based communications tool allows orgs to build responsive interest-based coalitions. We harness tagging—connecting change-makers—and cut background noise to increase desired communications.

Aspiration's Social Source Commons (N2Y2 Featured Project)
Elevator Pitch:The Social Source Commons helps nonprofits find appropriate software to support their work, and share knowledge about tools. It is the only venue on the net striving to build a complete inventory of what software is available for nonprofit needs.

Avatar Action Center
Elevator Pitch: The Avatar Action Center is an educational organization constructed in the virtual world Second Life to raise awareness around sustainability issues and encourage people to take action toward positive change in the real world.

Best of online collaboration and communities
Elevator Pitch: Improve how people use online community and collaboration tools by publishing best practices and case studies as a "Top 10 List," five screencasts, a community blog, an email and Web forum discussion group, and a free downloadable Guide.

Cauzoo- Give. Together.
Elevator Pitch: Cauzoo is MySpace for charities and users, mixing viral and grassroots marketing to connect folks around common charitable interests. Uniquely, Cauzoo will give charities 100% of the money generated from user donations and affiliate shops.

Central Vibe
Elevator Pitch: Web 2.0 social networking wireless, tools to link and find new friends using major networks,chat, video and SMS based messaging.An easy to use software suite that charities,churches,villages, and members of the outside can look in.

Change.org
Elevator Pitch: Change.org is a social network for hundreds of social causes and over 1 million organizations.

China Digital Times
Elevator Pitch: China Digital Times is an uncensored news portal covering China's political and social transformation. CDT uses the power of the Internet to bridge the language and cultural gap and overcome state censorship.

Dreamfish
Elevator Pitch: Sustainability requires that we get creative and work together now. The mission of Dreamfish is to help change makers to make the world thrive with creative environments and tools, across culture, generation and profession.

Fair Wage Guide - Empowering Craft Artisans with Wage Information via Technology
Potential Social Impact (partial): The Fair Wage Guide will improve the lives of artisans by making fair wage information available and accessible via technology. By giving artisans wage data and a mechanism to value their time, they are empowered with the tools they need to negotiate for higher wages.

FreePledge
Elevator Pitch: FreePledge turns every day online shopping into charitable acts, providing nonprofits with an innovative way to raise funds, empowering customers to support their nonprofits at no cost and helping retailers build a social responsible brand.

Fundraising For The U.S. Veterans
Potential Social Impact (partial): My goal as an americorps worker is to generate enough publicity to help fundraising more donations towards our us vets site located in inglewood. which is a living facility for the veterans.

Future 5000
Elevator Pitch: Future 5000 is the largest online directory and network of progressive youth groups in the country. It is designed to strengthen our networks, maximize our resources and leverage community power.

General SocNet for Politics (name TBD)
Elevator Pitch: SparkLoop is a politcally focused social networking tool where anyone who cares about democracy - from the barely activated to the committed activist - can go to respond to stories, communicate priorities to elected leaders, and connect with others.

Global Women's Leadership Network (N2Y2 Featured Project)
Elevator Pitch: The Quality of Women's Leadership equals the Quality of Life on this planet

Grant Wrangler
Elevator Pitch: Grant Wrangler is a free grants listing service for teachers, librarians and parents to find funding for schools. Grant seekers and grant givers will use our site to share, communicate and collaborate outside of the application and award process.

HIV ATLAS: Serving positively proud people
Elevator Pitch: HIV ATLAS is an international technology initiative connecting Wants and Haves in the field of HIV/AIDS with a local perspective and global mindset.

Huichol Cultural Survival
Elevator Pitch: The Huichol Indians are intact as a pre-hispanic people, but their cultural survival is in peril. Much hard work has taken place to protect this universal treasure, yet time is running out for the Huichols. We must increase our efforts now.

ManorMeta
Elevator Pitch: The living learning lab ManorMeta is a visionary multimedia series sharing problem solving adventures, diverse young leaders, musical stars and AI characters in an amazing mashup for web, virtual worlds, television, film, comics and print media.

MyBloc.net
Elevator Pitch: MyBloc.net Uses web 2.0 tools and the skills of emerging people of color organizer-technologists to increase the effectiveness and impacts of base-building organizations while laying the foundation for the progressive youth leadership pipeline.

My MoSoSo
Elevator Pitch: My MoSoSo is a free wireless software application that helps people meet virtually and then collaborate in real life to achieve mutual or complementary goals. My MoSoSo users enjoy a sense of community that is unprecedented in human history.

NewsTrust
Elevator Pitch: NewsTrust.net is a free online social news network that helps people find and share good journalism. Members rate articles based on core journalistic principles such as evidence, fairness and context, and discuss their findings with others.

Nonprofit Support Yellow Pages
Potential Social Impact: Emerging nonprofit leaders need easy access to local resources and services that support their mission. Whether it is grant writing assistance, tax advice or event planning, nonprofits across the country could benefit greatly from a simple directory of local nonprofit support resources. By connecting an entire community of nonprofit leaders with resources they need, we can impact the effectiveness of social sector work throughout entire metropolitan areas.

Not Just a Number
Elevator Pitch: Not Just a Number is a violence prevention, community journalism website, created to give Oakland California a place to share stories, connect and develop solutions for social change.

Open Source Urban Tree Map
Elevator Pitch: The Tree Map project is an open-source, web-based, tree-map that helps community-based tree organizations work with city agencies and the community to track, manage and quantify urban forest data, as well as calculate the environmental benefits.

ParkScan.org
Elevator Pitch: ParkScan.org is a public portal that empowers San Francisco residents to submit observations to responsible city government agencies regarding maintenance issues that need attention in parks, playgrounds and trails.

SFZERO.ORG
Elevator Pitch: SFZero is a free game and online social network that challenges players to complete social, cultural and artistic projects. Our goal is to develop a system that allows anyone to use our model to create powerful, socially relevant games.

Stop Prisoner Rape Information Outreach
Elevator Pitch: Stop Prisoner Rape is the only U.S. organization exclusively dedicated to combating sexual violence in detention. SPR will create an interactive on-line repository that incorporates first-hand survivor accounts, media coverage, and policy analysis.

The Martus Project - Secure Information Management
Elevator Pitch: The Martus Project – Greek for “witness” - is a free, open source software tool that helps non-technical users in the human rights field capture, backup and protect their most valuable asset: information.

The World Café GiGis (Girl Geeks) Project
Elevator Pitch: The GiGi’s project applies understanding of social networks, community development, and online technologies, to enable the World Café global network to become increasingly self-organizing, self-sustaining on behalf of life affirming futures.

Village the Game: Play the World of Social Enterprise
Elevator Pitch: Village is an online world and strategy game designed to get people addicted to third world development. Form a team, build sustainable enterprises that eradicate poverty, and discover the power you have to transform the real world.

Walden III: Digital Utopianism and the Virtual World
Elevator Pitch: Walden III is an academic experiment that would explore whether Virtual Worlds, such as Second Life, can better facilitate the exchange of cultural artifacts across borders more harmoniously and equitably than the real world.

WiserEarth (N2Y2 Featured Project)
Elevator Pitch: WiserEarth is an international directory and networking forum that maps, links and empowers the largest movement in the world–-the hundreds of thousands of organizations within civil society that address social justice and the environment.

xigi.net
Elevator Pitch: Think of xigi (ziggy) as the Bloomberg of the emerging capital market for good. It provides news, research, analytical tools and due diligence for investors and wealth managers who care about financial and social impact in their decision-making.

Colorado

My Colorado™
Elevator Pitch: Rather than seeking a gift from those with means, My Colorado™ offers young people the means to give! My Colorado is a social networking tool engaging young Coloradans in philanthropy and community engagement.

Sourcetree Commons: Geeking our way to a better world
Elevator Pitch: To develop better social software, we must use these very tools in the communities that are building them. We leverage social software to amplify the creative power of geeks and provide increased resources, efficiency, feedback and support.

YNPN Information Network
Social Impact Potential (partial): The primary goal of Denver YNPN is to support the advancement of young professionals entering the nonprofit sector to ensure community organizations are able to successfully meet current and future community needs.

Hawaii

ChipIn - Scalable, Affordable Distributed Fundraising Tools
Summary: ChipIn turns blogs, social networks and Web sites into powerful, distributed fundraising systems, making raising or collecting money more conversational, successful, and fun.

Oregon

Access to Markets and Education: Fair Trade Language Tutoring via Webcam
Elevator Pitch: Speak Shop reduces poverty by creating a global marketplace of language tutoring via webcam, linking tutors in developing countries with a world market of learners, forging microentrepreneurs and fostering cross-cultural learning and respect.

Hooze & Wagn: Organically Grown Public Data on Products and Companies
Elevator Pitch): Hooze.org and its Wagn underbelly are for collaboratively gathering and broadcasting convenient, trustworthy public data about products and companies. With wiki spirit and database power, Hooze gives citizens a new economic voice.

PulseWire: Connecting women to transform our world.
Elevator Pitch: We envision PulseWire as an electrifying new tool with the power to unleash the transformative potential of women’s and girl’s voices ─ at a time when empowering women is recognized as the most effective way to solve global problems.

Grow Link
Elevator Pitch: Grow Link is a social marketplace to host wholesale-direct trades between regional farmers and food buyers. It will enable traceable product aggregation and distribution, through both existing distributors and contracted logistics providers.

Maps 2.0 – Geospatial Tools for Nonprofits and Humanitarian Relief (N2Y2 Featured Project)
Elevator Pitch: Maps 2.0, a collaboration already under way, will launch the first online resource for nonprofit and humanitarian organizations to share best practices in geographic information systems (GIS) and digital mapping tools.

Utah

Memorial De Colosio
Social Impact (partial): We would like to give the people in the squatters village or "colonios" in Peublos Negras, Mexico a new lease on life by building them a new village and in sheparding them with other NGOs to new dreams including education and sustainability.

Washington

NewsCloud Open Source Media Platform (Expanding Access to...)
Elevator Pitch: NewsCloud is an open source platform that reduces barriers for community groups integrating news-based social networks into their existing Web sites. NewsCloud seeks funds to make its platform as easy to install and extend as Wikimedia, Drupal, et al

Online Tax Tools and the Earned Income Tax Credit
Elevator Pitch: NPower’s EITC Project partners with nonprofits that serve low-income communities to teach their clients how to use technology to calculate EITC eligibility and file tax returns which helps move them out of poverty.

Photo Credit: Sunset Over the West Mesa by Adam Wolf.