The World Summit Youth Award is a global contest to create inspirational online content promoting the Millennium Development Goals set by the United Nations to create a humane, just and liveable world. 

"The World Summit Youth Award showcases you as young developers and serves as a platform for people from all UN member states to work together on the efforts of reaching the Millennium Development Goals!"

Award Guidelines

Ning has gone a long way since they were featured on the Netsquared blog back in March 2007. Besides offering many more features than they had back then, there are now more than 500,000 social networks on Ning.

We recently got interviewed by the folks at Ning along with the folks from the ASPCA Online Community about our use of their platform in TuDiabetes.com and EsTuDiabetes.com to run our social networks for people touched by diabetes.

Hey Folks, 

NetSquared will be undergoing some scheduled maintenance over the weekend and access to the site may be limited at times. Not to worry, we’ll be back up and running strong by Monday morning for the launch of the 2008 USAID Development 2.0 Challenge.

See you then!

The NetSquared Team

Here's my contribution to this month's Net2ThinkTank question posed by Amy Sample Ward,

"What are the key questions nonprofit orgs should ask to help them determine how to prioritize social media training and experimentation as they do their technology and organization-strengthening planning?"

1. What are the goals you are trying to achieve this year?

3. If you don't know the answer to #2, ask yourself, where can I get a general overview of social media tools, along with examples of how nonprofits are using them?

Paul Bulenzi (Local Representative for Jinja-Central in Uganda)and Siegfried Woldhek (founder of NABUUR.com) demonstrated together for an audience in the Netherlands of 150 innovation managers how NABUUR works.

Through Skype, Paul Bulenzi raised a question about the shipment of mosquito nets from the US to Uganda. The audience came up with a number of possible solutions by sharing their ideas live and real time.

One of the participants, Fons Sweegers, got in touch with a friend in the Netherlands who has a girlfriend in Uganda. She works for a US company that can probably help with the shipment. Now that's networking!

The following is a shout-out to all of my peeps in the business of online community management / outreach, many of whom have expressed, in one form or another, a moderate sense of terror regarding job stability in the present financial crisis. Considering I am not an economist, and that I have a mere bachelors degree in political science and philosophy from a state university, one might want to take the following with a grain of salt but... I do have a bit of hope regarding the opportunities provided by this somewhat grim economic environment.

We have seen it and heard about it time and again, but the Obama campaign is capitalizing on social media use and setting some great examples for nonprofits and other social change campaigns looking to try something new.  Without any candidate endorsement, we can look at the success the Obama camp has had and try it out in our own work!

Newest in the playbook: iPhone app

On the official Barak Obama website ,supporters can now download and use the Obama iPhone application.  As the site explains, the features include:

The Hub at Kings Cross, in London, UK, is officially opening its doors today.  Social innovators, entrepreneurs, collaborators, nonprofit organizations, and other social good types are already filling it up and taking advantage of the other Hub locations.

Hub Spaces

You aren't going to let each other down.

You all post on the blogs with generosity. You share your ideas and help others with theirs. And when we ask you to vote on the projects, you step up an do it thoughtfully.

Innovations happens where there is desire, need and constraints.

And we know that people who are working to make the world a better place are working from a place of passion. They all -- you all -- see the need and you are still getting up every morning and trying to make change. And that makes for a creative energy that sparks innovation. Innovation happens, not in spite of constraints, but because of them. And it's innovation that can really work.

You need help to make the innovation real.

I am happy to share an early testing release of the NewsCloud Social Media Toolkit with you.