LIVE BLOG: Alexandra Samuel of Social Signal is presenting on "Bringing Your Community to Life" at the NetSquared Conference. I'm Ivan Boothe, liveblogging for Rootwork and Philly NetSquared.

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To begin, Alex offers free chocolate to those who offer suggestions on what to discuss. Instant community-building!

Topics:

Thank you to all those who supported the Genocide Intervention Network's proposal for the NetSquared Mashup Challenge! We were honored to be nominated by the community as a 2008 Featured Project for our proposal to upgrade and extend the DarfurScores.org website:

The Genocide Intervention Network seeks to create a new website, modeled on our successful Darfur congressional scorecard, DarfurScores.org, tentatively named GenocideScores.org.

Our current plan for the site — which could change as we explore different options and hear feedback from our members — has four main components:

• Collecting together anti-genocide data, not only on Darfur but on each of our areas of concern. Instead of being limited to only legislative records, each state would list its status on other anti-genocide initiatives like Sudan divestment and genocide education.
• Provide clear illustrations of legislative status. Instead of just hearing about a bill when a member of Congress does (or doesn't) vote for it, we'll be tracking bills as they move through each chamber.
• Cross-index a bill's status with a member's location. When the latest bill on genocide prevention is up for a vote, anti-genocide activists whose members of Congress represent key votes on the legislation will be able to receive automatic alerts.
• Provide embeddable badges or widgets for activists to place on their profiles, blogs or websites. At a glance, both you and visitors to your website, blog or social networking profile will be able to see how your state and legislators are doing on the question of genocide. And when urgent action is needed, these badges will be automatically updated with a special link to take action.

Now, we want your feedback. If you have a chance, read through our proposal for DarfurScores.org and leave a comment — tell us what you like, what you think could be changed, what we're overlooking. Remember that this is all about our core mission: empowering individuals and communities with the tools to prevent and stop genocide. We hope this project will result in a valuable new tool, and we'd love to have your input!

—Ivan Boothe, Internet Strategy Coordinator for the Genocide Intervention Network

P.S. If you're interested in the work we're doing, follow us on Twitter!

Earlier this month, NetSquared was generous enough to fund my attendance at the Lullabot Drupal Intensive workshop in Providence, Rhode Island. Drupal is a free, open-source content management system that allows non-technical users to update your site and is capable of powering blogs, community sites, action-oriented campaigns and social networks along the lines of MySpace and Facebook. Lullabot, a Drupal development firm that involved in much of the Drupal development, has a keen interest in Drupal for nonprofits.

In return for NetSquared's generosity, I wanted to post some tips for nonprofits thinking about using Drupal for their sites. I'm convinced that, under most circumstances, Drupal can be a powerful resource for online advocacy and social change.

The Genocide Intervention Network is a small, non-profit organization located in Washington, D.C., that works to mobilize an anti-genocide constituency in the United States and Canada to raise the costs for inaction by politicians in the face of genocide. GI-Net empowers individuals and communities with the tools to prevent and stop genocide, in particular by protecting civilians in Darfur, Sudan.

Because of increased momentum and support, GI-Net is currently hiring for several positions:

The text of my "speech" to the NetSquared 2007 Conference.

The people of Darfur are not destined to fight. The peoples of Rwanda, of Bosnia and Guatemala, of Cambodia and Armenia, the Jews of Europe were not a lost cause. Nor were they simply a natural disaster, to be met with blankets and gauze. Who would have suggested that the appropriate response to Auschwitz was bags of rice?

Yet that is our response to genocide. Humanitarian relief organizations are doing vital, breathtaking work — but it’s up to us, as members of the human race, to work to change the situations that necessitate that humanitarian relief. The pattern to date has been ad-hoc groups coming together around a particular conflict, creating some noise and holding some demonstrations, and then fading away just as quickly when the mass atrocities lessen.

The Genocide Intervention Network was established to give our members a more lasting voice, a more permanent effect on the situation — to create a permanent anti-genocide constituency, that makes political inaction in the face of mass atrocities all but unthinkable.

I attended NetSquared last year for its inaugural conference, and I wrote an introduction entitled Can Blogging Stop Genocide? If you're interested in all the details about who I am, how I got here and how it's connected to the project I'm proposing at this year's conference, check out that entry.

What I really want to focus on in this post is how to find ways to collaborate with other participants at the conference, rather than be swallowed up by the competition. But first, and quickly by way of an introduction, I'll say that the Genocide Intervention Network's mission is to:

empower individuals and communities with the tools to prevent and stop genocide.

Perhaps you can see that this fits pretty naturally with the spirit of "web 2.0" and social networking -- user-driven projects, user-generated content, network-centric advocacy, etc. As a result we've engaged in a number of such projects in the past, and happily share our experiences with other organizations.

As everyone has mentioned, picking just a few selections from the excellent proposals to nominate for the NetSquared Technology Innovation Fund is very hard, given the quality of the proposals — I can't imagine anyone will be voting for fewer than 10!

I helped to develop the Genocide Intervention Network's proposal — An Anti-Genocide Community: Building the Political Will to End Genocide — and thus one of my ten votes will be going to that project.

I had a few qualifications in building my list — criteria that encompass our own proposal:

• At least half of the projects I nominated would be located in the Global South, because of the large divide that already exists between technology in the Global North and the Global South — and NetSquared's position to help alter this.
• The projects I nominated would be grounded in community concerns or community initiatives. For me, that is broad enough to encompass a "community" of human rights workers or even, potentially, nonprofits. But I wanted to see a demonstrated need for the technology or service.
• Needless to say, the projects I nominated would be involved in innovative community-building and/or social networking. A number of projects seemed like very worthwhile charities but outside the scope of this particular conference/fund.

Although these two panels were held separately, I thought that they related so well that I'd present them together.

Leveraging the Power of Participatory Media

• Colin Delany, e.politics (presentation slides and resources available online)
• Michael Silberman, EchoDitto

The Future of Online Outreach

• Marty Kearns (and Ruby Sinreich), Green Media Toolshed (closely-related essay available on Netcentric Campaigns)

Joshua Levy at the Personal Democracy Forum has a post today about the use of MySpace for political campaigns and by advocacy organizations. He interviews Scott Goodstein, who has worked on the Save the Internet, Save1800Suicide and Military Free Zone campaigns, and me (I work for the Genocide Intervention Network).

Are you interested in changing the world by supporting the first-ever permanent anti-genocide constituency? Do you spend a lot of time online and know what an effective advocacy campaign looks like? Can you build a website from the ground up?

If any of the above appeals to you, we hope you will consider the Genocide Intervention Network's online anti-genocide organizer and web developer unpaid internship this fall at our office in Washington, D.C. GI-Net is committed to building the first permanent constituency dedicated to ending genocide. GI-Net empowers its members with the tools to prevent and stop genocide. Currently we are focused on ensuring protection for civilians in Darfur, Sudan.