Here's a wrap up of a session from yesterday, with an overview of three N2Y3 featured projects. Each were incredibly interesting for me to listen to, and I hope the notes I took are helpful for all of you out there. If you need some clarification (the notes are a bit rough), feel free to contact me at director at knowledgeaspower dot org.

Maplight.org
Politicians need money to run, and overwhelmingly, they get their
money from .interest groups.
Maplight is dedicated to illuminating the connection between
money and politics, it's our way of helping create change.
Our site is a resource for bloggers, citizen-actiists,
journalists, and organizations.
Through our site, you can see corelations that previously were
never able to see.
This work we do is available almost immediately, whereas before,
it could take days or weeks to create this.
The campaign finance story is a part of every story that is on
policy.
Our message is working, we've generated 17 stories in the last
four months. We've had 90,000 visitors, and half a million
through our widgets.
We have a handful of staff.
We have a proposed product to map money in politics. We highlight
any issue you care about, you can view by demographic
information, showing campaign financing across the nation, and
we're working towards each city, state, and town.
We serve the need of the growing community of people who wish to
hold their elected officials accountable.

Asset Map.org

Their approach: Across the world, communities experiencing
crisis, have untapped assests for which they could create
sustainable change. Outside actors rarely enage or build upon
these assests. A group of community researchers have found best
practices from assessing and organizing community development
which engages communities in their own development.
After 20 years of civil war in Uganda, a sustainable peace has
become a possibility. Most civil society projects there aren't
connected, are often duplicated, and are heavily dependent on
outside organizations. We help these organizations reorganize
and show demonstrable impact.
Example: One Mango Tree, an organization that opens up markets
int he US to products produced in Uganda. St. Monica's, another
similar project, needed more market opportunities. One Mango and
St. Monica's might never find out about each other in Uganda, but
if there is a group of people who know enough about each
organizations that these organizations could use a tool to
quickly and effeciently find each other.
This is a real-world/offline mashup. We are doing digitally what
trained practcioners have been doing on the ground for 30 years.
We are trying to digitize their work, to equip civil society
leaders on the
We're developing offline organizations that have access to
information through on the ground organization, and through
databases of international aid organizations.
Primarily, this is a user-generated database.
Augmenting that, we're pulling in data from needs assesments,
government agencies, etc. that are not currently easily available.
Q: Who has access to this information?
A: All of the information is open, and anyone can add to the
asset map. There is going to be a group of on the ground
organizations and activists supplementing this.
Q: Why not use a wiki?
A: The current options for assest mapping don't exist. Social
networking, custom databases, wikipedia, there's no effective
search or filtering information, for particluar issues,
challenges, or capacity, or asset maps.

Square Peg

John Wagner and Issak Holman

Square Peg is a social tool that mashes up friend data and
actvist projects.
We filter down the information and
We are hoping to be a really scalable system, the communications
tool we're building is designed to e an effective communications
tool for people to make change on.
We're ot trying to create new tasks for activists, you already
have things you want to solve, and you're probably taking
actions. We're going to make it easier for people like you to
find you, and for you to make connections with organizations.
We have a recomender system for projects and individuals.
Our project: Because we belive activism happens because of
friend connections, groups, events, etc. To combat information
overload, we bring in the recomender system. This takes every
action SquarePeg recommends brings it to the real world, through
face-to-face networks. We're integrated with other social
networking sites and change tools (Change.org, WordPress,
importing friends, etc.). This increases data portability.
Q: From Ben Rattay from Change.org "How you get people to go to
Square Peg wth a value proposition unique enough to compell
people to visit?"
A: This was the first question we asked ourselves. We want to
start very locally. We started really early partnering with
large nonprofits. Networks provided by nonprofits and colleges,
we're hoping to reach critical mass, and to move up and out from
there.
Q: Can you highlight the ways it is different from Change.org,
Care2, etc.
A: It's an important question. Differing from Change.org, it's
great for diseminating information and networking, but not for
people who are looking to organize actions. Unlike Care2, we
don't do things like petitions, we're interested in putting feet
on the ground.