Hi, Evonne Heyning here liveblogging from the Tech Innovation room at N2Y2 for the last session of Tuesday's event.   During the break we had a great discussion on participation in these sessions; for those of us who are in the audience there have been many questions on the backchannel on how the audience can be more effective participants in this process.   Billy @ TechSoup and Jean ~NurtureGirl~ Russell had some great comments on ways that VCs, foundations, busiensses, nonprofits and technology gurus can come together to add value to these discussions.

Please note that we are liveblogging here; not every word is here but I'll get as much as possible along the way.  

Projects Presenting

Global Women's Network Leadership

Loretta Donovan, champion, Worksmarts

Linda Alepin GWNL, Santa Clara University

LALEPIN:   We are not technologists; we know more about leadership and IP around leadership.   We have a web 1.0 info site and will be moving to a web2.0 site with a partnering organization we found here at NetSquared.   On every table we have a matrix of what we're looking for, easy and more complex and expensive.

Panel:   What are you looking to create:

LALEPIN:   We are going to be like a mothership. For instance for our Turkish programming it will reside on their sites, not ours, but we'll have information in Turkish and English.  

Panel:   Why create your own web2.0...you answered that question.   How are you going to reach out beyond your small network, reach a woman in Namibia for instance?  

LALEPIN:   We are asked to come into these countries and we work with organizations with reasonable infrastructure....this is a training exercise.   We are trying to do these things to learn how to implement the technology and communication and build the network out.

Panel:   Is your goal to empower these organizations or build an individual repository for individuals?

LALEPIN:   There's no substitute for face-to-face training for customization and sitting next to someone as you learn with them.   Each of our cohorts are not only friends but supporters for life.   Face to face is not always feasible or possible so an online repository is something we would like to have; we want these leaders creating this information.   One of our leaders spoke in Spanish right to the heart of people -   "start with what you have".

Audience:   One of the issues you're dealing with is barriers to technology.   Can you speak to using tech to overcome these barriers?

LALEPIN:   So far the women we have worked with do not have much access to tech, but have no fear of it.   We have to use things like cell phones, 60,000 kiosks in villages in India...we are going to have to reach out and tap into these emerging networks.   We are going to ride piggyback.

Audience:   Use of pervasive cell phone technologies, how are you going to bridge from web to cell phone?

LALEPIN:   I don't know if we have an answer yet.   Right now it'll be on paper, carried by people.   There are many things we take for granted now that we'll have to feel our way to a solution.

Genocide Intervention Network: to build out the idea (or brand) of the anti-genocide movement. Give people the idea and space to come together for resources. Content available to everyone regardless of organizational affiliation, use these tools to speak with your own voice: GINet facilitates this dialogue.

Ivan Boothe, Genocide Intervention Network

Ruby Sinreich, champion, Lotus Media

Panel:   I was glad to notice that you're using existing social networks to build your membership.   Where are your target members and how can you pull them in for dialogue?

IVAN:   We have a presence on a number of social networks, myspace, facebook, etc.   We have had different levels of response but it's hard to judge whether that's the nature of the SNS.   Our strength is in our student wings, so we look for social networks in the 14-22 age range; we go where our people are.  

Panel:   I like how you are creating a resource center for advocates and activists.   Are there other things that LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, etc do to make your work easier to find, integrate, use?

IVAN:   Facebook could be more organization friendly but that's not their approach.   The ways for integration are more along the lines of widgets and Change.org, fundraising tools, advocacy badges, etc.

Panel:   Once your community is linked and talking, what actions do you take on genocide?

IVAN:   That's the point we integrate with our existing websites like www.darfurscores.org   we have a toll free hotline and student groups mobilizing; once people are connected it's about getting them involved in existing campaigns.   Ask the Candidates, our new campaign, starts low-level discussion around the issue of Darfur with candidates.

Panel:   Advertising, do you have a sense of how to move the needle with Google adsense, etc?   Do you have a sense of whether you could create a service to help fill out other SNS?

IVAN:   Most of my experience is in development in open tools like Drupal; we provide documentation on what works whenever possible.   We are interested in creating things that benefit the whole community.   In terms of targeted ads, we are still looking at our options here.   You can look at images of our long term plan you can view the images.   http://www.genocideintervention.net/sample/

Panel:   The word genocide is very loaded; will it limit you in the long term?

IVAN:   We talk about mass atrocities and we do not make the determinations on what is happening on the ground.   USHMM, Human Rights Watch, etc. make the call and we trust in their work.   We look to see where our members are going....Uganda, Congo, other areas where it may not be called "genocide".

Panel:   What is the right format for stories for your community?   How do you plan to get information out there?

IVAN:   We want to figure out ways to get them out to existing social web networks.   We want pictures on flickr, videos on youtube as well as on our site.   It will depend on what people want to do and see; we have seen a lot of interest in creating videos to present at their events.   A lot of the videos are basically slide shows with music.  

Aspiration: Social Source Commons

Gunner (Allen Gunn): Aspiration

Tim Westcott, SSC project manager and advocate standin

Aspiration is a nonprofit that exists to help other nonprofits use technology tools.

Panel:   We think you're starting on something fantastic.     At google we get tired of posting everywhere.   What are the incentives working at a key organization to come in and post what they're using?

GUNNER:   SSC is designed to aggregate and connect what already exists.   TechSoup is great, Idealware is a lot smarter than we are; so what we do is automate and aggregate.   If we create the traffic where the quality of signal to noise is ideal.

Panel:   Tech people and community people often do not understand each other, how do you bridge that?

GUNNER:   A layered approach.   Most NPTech people are isolated, underpaid and not given the resources needed to do their jobs.   We want to give them access to information, collaboration.   The most fundamental unit is the STORY and we are looking at layering dialogue and other storytelling elements to help share antedotes to know what works.   Our next step is to help our audience look at exactly what they want to do and then connect them through it.

Panel:   On signal to noise or bad information; you have a desire to fully automate but you need a lot of facilitation.  

GUNNER:   We are not solving that problem yet because there's a derth of information on what's working.   The supply side is really not there; it's hard to find quality information.   With user-supplied data we ask our users to keep it high quality.   We had a self-service account up early and moderated account creation; we interview new users just long enough to tell who they are.   From the social engineering it's less of a problem than you might think.

Panel:   Beyond a toolcentric approach, moving to narratives:   Have you thought beyond that to integrating the tools to give people clickable advocacy tools right from the site?  

GUNNER: In a completely different program we are talking with dotOrganize and other groups, there are good groups like Sunlight foundation having that discussion.   We are treating it as a separate program because interoperability is not a tech issue; it's an organizational issue.   We are absolutely agnostic and will put it all out there if users find it useful.

Panel:   User-generated only?

GUNNER:   We are deliberately avoiding original content.   As we move forward we are building toolboxes out; we are funded by CTC California to put together media tools to show people how to use these tools online.   We have a training program, toolboxes but we are not trying to be an idealware or techsoup.  

Panel:   Is your own website accessable to those with disibilities?

GUNNER:   We have not had the funding to do the accessability work yet.   We had two sessions this winter/spring to educate on how to develop more accessable tools; we care about that and accessability is an important part of that.  

Audience:   When is the offline version coming?

GUNNER:   SSC was engineered with this in mind long term.   The Wireless Networking for the Developing World toolkit that we're bringing in included a discussion on how to do this work offline.   We will not be doing the linux distribution but we can create the shopping cart and start shippping software and tools around the world.

Audience:   Localization is tough -- languages are one thing, but getting people talking across language barriers is tougher.   Tagging across multiple languages is a big problem.   How are you addressing this?

GUNNER:   Many challenges exist.   Our philo is that tags should not be rigid; they must be user-generated tagclouds where in every language people are able to share their tags.   Every data has a locale tag; when we look at how to bring these fields across locales we look at universality of those fields (not every country has zip codes, but URL field will be constant).   We are just about to GPL our code and we didn't do a great job of separating our layers yet, but we know what we need to do.      

Nabuur

Christine @ Empower, their champion, introduces Rolf and Siegfried of Nabuur to connect people and projects around the world.

ROLF:   We have a great model up, we want to get more visitors to the site and get better connectivity and get their stories online.

Panel:   You mentioned that you want to scale to 10,000 villages.   How do you scale to 100,000?     Is the primary issue the number of volunteers?

NABUUR:   We have to get out of the way and get our nabuurs to promote the site, we just need to open up the pipe a bit more.   We have 9,000 volunteers registered now.

Panel:   Can you replicate or reuse the work again?   Can these resources be available to others and learn more lessons without the volunteer need?

NABUUR:   We need a whole list of things including volunteers; take a look at the cards on the table and let us know what you can help us with. Some programs scale up quickly and we need help from others.   We are looking at the wikipedia model to structure our resource center, identifying what a nabuur wiki resource could look like.

Panel:   I played with the website and liked how it works, coming up with a plan, etc.   Do you have a model where someone can phone up and get involved?

NABUUR:   I think it's our task to make it easy for people to get involved.   We need SMS connections in Africa, for instance.   Getting our information available via SMS will address some bottlenecks.     We can also lower barriers to entry.

Panel:   Are you sure you want to go with the wikipedia model?

NABUUR:   Right now a village comes up and figures out a plan, the checks and balances are guarded by the community.   We want to get to a higher standard, to build a repository or log where there is order to the endless contributions.   We haven't optimized the site for experts yet; it's built for nabuurs but we would like to enhance it for expert use also.

Audience:   In looking for the tasks for the taking they are fundraising, business planning, are there categories that are more amenable to virtual volunteering?

NABUUR:   We focus on matching up volunteers and opportunities through our matchmaker.   A neighbor is not an expert, not even a friend....these are people with an interest in reaching out.

Audience:   Do you have some good success stories to share?  

NABUUR:   There are success stories on the site and we are now collaborating with people here who can help us create video stories for more prominent and inspiring stories.