[Standard disclosure -- this is an imperfect record of what I heard (further marred by a BSOD in the middle of notetaking), not a perfect transcription of what said.]

Jim Fruchterman, Benetech, moderated.

Alan [lastname?] - Yahoo

Youth Assets

Lindy Harmon, Project Champion, introduces Jennifer Sly.

Project mission

-- provide relevant content and resources to HIV orphans in S. Africa

-- use 20 assets, for example clean water.

Q: How are you going to address accessibility

A: A lot of our kids aren't literate -- we are looking at podcasting, voice mail.

Q: Youth engagement? How can you be sure that you can engage youth.

A: I've seen it work -- youth are the early adopoters of technologies. The ideas they will come up with will be amazing.

Q: Of your first countries, what will your platform be, will you be able to get cellphone plans for them.

A: We are only 2 months old, we are still trying to figure some of this out. We are starting with Swaziland, because there is almost 100% cellphone coverage.

Q: Your project sounds a bit like love of technology for technology's sake. You need to talk to the groups you want to work with to see what tech makes sense. Many people think that radio is the best way to reach people.

A: Need relevant content for the technology to be useful. Our organization will develop relevant content. Why local service providers would want to participate? We will collect data from the orphans.

[computer crash -- missed some stuff]

Maplight

Dan Newman, <a href="http://www.maplight.org">MAPLight</a>

We put together a big database to track all the money in politics in Congress and California legislators. Show people the connection between money and policy.

Q: It seems like people are apathetic.

A: This is designed to be information that is useful to people who are writing: journalists, bloggers, and analysts.

Q: How to you get info to people who don't care and ought to.

A: We can be better than cynicism, because we can reveal how the system is working.

Q: Good for tracking down details, but not good for building stuff for ordinary people.

A: we are not trying to be a social network, not trying to get everybody to come to our site. We expect trusted intermediaries will come to our site and take our information and redistribute it to their trusted networks.

Q: Why is maplight different?

A: We take the data about money legislators take and data about how they vote -- nobody else does that. We have partners who do parts of it.

Q: Is this just for big P politics?

A: This should be for advocacy groups as well. We are going to build widgets and badges.

Q: How can this tool repair the political process.

A: If you look at food processing issue I brought up this morning, it isn't which party is doing it. We need some kind of systematic change to the role of money in politics, like they have in Arizona and Maine.

Q: Why don't you have advocacy portion of site?

A: We are a neutral data vendor. Later we are going to put up links to a bunch of groups working on money in politics.

A: we use a standard 400 element taxonomy of industries used by Center for Responsive [didn't get]

A: we are targeting the top 10 states for state data. We have done California. New York is next.

Farmer2Farmer

Developing an open source web based tool for farmers. Need to put a stable and robust system in place.

Q: Don't farmers compete?

A: They compete between countries, but farmers in the same village tend to work together.

Q: Can't we integrate WTO compliance across all farmers [not sure I got it].

A WTO is a government to government issue.

Q: As regular coffee drinker, isn't there some way we can support your project.

A: Sustainable coffee share is rising rapidly, which creates a lot of opportunities for farmers. But to be certified as a sustainable coffee producer, takes a lot of paperwork. As a consumer, you have a lot of opportunity to support sustainability.

Q: I saw your website. I don't think you are communicating how great you are doing. As a tech guy, I am interested in how you will deal with tech questions.

A: I am happy to share tech details. We haven't communicated a lot of stuff. We have 16 organizations that are eager to start using the new release. People who are responsible for 70% of the coffee crop worldwide are interested.

Q: What about the movement for eating and locally?

A: I don't think that is worry worldwide for coffee growers. Coffee sales are up hugely in Japan and Brazil.

Q: How does this work in detail with the farmers.

A: During the season, farmers record inputs, after the harvest, we do a report back to the farmers, with graphs, which show how village does as a whole (and farmers are quick to figure out who is who).

Q: Asks about equal exchange, a group which sells coffee directly.

A: In Vietnam, the quality of the coffee isn't good enough.

Yanakana.org

A web product for non-profits to benefit from technology in developed countries.

Q: Can you give us an example of a success story.

A: there is a school in Guayaquil with bamboo walls over an estuary. They started a blog, got a media attention, got attention were able to get the school moved away from the estuary to a school with real walls. Second example is being here today -- we were only able to find our way here in California because of these tools.

Q: ??? [sorry missed]

A: We are going to do online and offline.

Q: Yours in the only project that asked for web expertise for accessibility.

A: In Ecuador there are great professionals to do web work. It is very hard for people to download and learn tools themselves.

Q: What is the big advantage that you will have over the free tools.

A: Support. And we will introduce non-profits onto how to use the tools. We will help them discover this digital world.

Q: Around here, we talk about Web 2.0 like it is falling off trees. But where you are from, how do people find out about these tools?

A: That is our offline strategy. There is a community of bloggers. A TV station launched a big brother show, and we started a blog about the show. Then our blog took off -- we got invited onto TV to talk about our blogs, and people went from our blog to the show. A community of blogs grew up around our blog.

Q: Have you looked at Spanish NGO tool [missed url].

A: Never heard of it.

Q: We assume that blogging and social networking will develop the same way in other countries as it has in the US. I think that is fallacious. How do you think these tools will develop in your country?

A: Organizations and people in country's like ours want to be heard. There was a President doing things people didn't like, people started organizing protests via forwarding emails -- there was no censorship. It ended up unseating the president.