I think 2008 will be a year with a lot of positive social change and NetSquared will have nice part in it :).

Best wishes for 2008 to you all!

Julius
Helpalot.org

Helpalot helps you find a charity project you can trust, using your social network and feedback from the community

Last week we've put the site live: http://www.helpalot.org

You can get an account and put a charity online so others can find and evaluate it. We've set it up so we can translate the site relatively easy, so if you'd like to help out with that or anything else, contact me on Helpalot.

For those who haven't heard about the charity social network site under development called Helpalot, I've put a video online (on youtube).

I graduated on this project (and other work) for my Masters in Interaction Design. Feel free to post it on you blog :).

Hi all,

I've been posting some blog items here on Netsquared about my graduation project Helpalot; A charity social network site with evaluations, where you can state on your personal page who your friends are and what charities you support.

There are some great developments I quickly want to share with you: I now have help from Derick, making it no longer a 'one person effort'. The Helpalot Foundation will see the light next month and thanks to the financial backing of Herman Wiegerinck co-founder of VODW marketing, we will be able to develop the site and aim to launch the site in the beginning of 2007. 

As a student Interaction design in the Netherlands, I'm working on a charity social network site with evaluations for my graduation. The goal is to make it easy to find a charity that fits your intentions and you can trust.

I've made some screenshots in photoshop. At this moment I have about a week to hand in the concept document and I could use your feedback. You can see the screenshots and read more about my project at my project weblog: http://www.makingthesite.com

To learn more about the project, you can also watch my presentation at the SIGCHI conference on YouTube (10 min.).

Presentation on YouTube (10 minutes). 

June 8 I was able to speak at the SIGCHI conference - The Web and Beyond (http://www.thewebandbeyond.nl) about Helpalot. It's a social network site with evaluations.

More on the project on the project weblog http://www.makingthesite.com

Helpalot will be a site where you can have personal page stating what charities you support, who your friends are and much more. One element is evaluations.  You can read more about the project at www.makingthesite.com

While I'm still working on writing down the details of the concept, I was easily able to set up a test version for the evaluation part.

What you can do on the Ning test site; Evaluate charities. It's as simple as that.

http://helpalottesting.ning.com

For the Helpalot project I have set up a survey. I'd like to encourage everyone that's involved in charities in one way or another, to fill in this survey. Your knowledge is valuable.

Let me quickly explain the project:

It's a website with the goal to make you find your charity. The site uses social network aspects to create quality information. You can have a personal page that states what charities you support, also you can read, write and rate evaluations and much more.

The Techsoup event on social networking was really nice. I learned a lot and even made some connections with people that might be usefull for my project. I thought it would be a good idea to put a list of links that where mentioned in the discussions. It proved to be a lot of work, so I might have missed some (you can put them in the comments).

So here are the links in a semi-random order taken from the techsoup forum. First the links from this techsoup post jlorance wrote:

In my last post I asked for your help picking the right name for my project. Thanks for all your feedback. Helpalot will be the name, it's short, easy to remember and is informative about the content of the site.

As a reminder a quick summary of the project; building a decentralized charity website with social network aspects. 

Now I'm going towards building a first test version. I plan to build it in May, so I can start testing in June. I could use your advice on how to go about this. The way I see it now, I have three choices: