Sorry for the delay folks, there's so much here at N2Y3 it can be a little distracting.

I've cut-and pasted my notes from the session, which aren't pretty, but they get the job done. If you have questions about my notes, or want me to clarify something, let me know.

I can be reached via director at knowledge as power dot org, and you can find my work at Knowledge As Power where we help individuals become effective citizens in the legislative process.

Greener One, for-profit organization, early stage company, with an
established product. Their mision is to put a green index at point of sale at
major retailers across the nation, and to have these indexes
across their full product category. A full life scycle analysis can be done on a project, but this is costly, at about $100,000 and takes 6 to 8 months.
In a different methodolgy, Green One scores these products by:
1. Creating criteria for over 3,000 product categories.
-Analyzing power uptake.
-If there's a "take back" program for the item.
What goes into the product.
The model behind the organization is based on incentives.
-Retailers have a competitive advantage by offering
their shoppers this information, which is licensed
for them. They can put it online or offline--on the
shelf.
-Their platform is Microsoft ASP, .Net

Ushahidi

Eric Burstman, grew up in Kenya and Sudan. Has been writing and blogging about Kenya and Sudan for the last two years. In January, Kenya "kind of blew up" we built something very quick, very rudimentary, the idea behind it was for ordinary Kenyans to report what was happening on the ground. 2. Record it. 3. Drill into the data/information and publish it. Ushahidi has expanded to South Africa. Version 2 is applying it on a global scale, to map and crowdsource crisis information on a global level.

To do this you need:

Geo-spatial data. Mobile phone information collection via Ushahid's mobil shortcode. Version two allows you to receive alerts if something is going on in your area. Ushahidi is trying to learn more on how to share data and systems to make a loose group that communicates together. There's really no tool to crowdsource information in Kenya--the mobile phone was the only technology to do that through, and messages had to be sent through 160 charicter messages. How do you use your time? You want to show what happened over time in that area, and visualize that data. Their 2nd version will be able to be deployed by anyone.

Business model: It's a nonprofit organization, becoming a 501c3 organization, registered nonprofit in Florida. They don't wanto make money off of this, but we do want to think about sustainability. They think there opportunities ahead, but we're not really thinking about sustainability right now.

Q: How will this really help people when violent events have
happened:
A: We're trying to draw attention to these acts.
We're also putting together people in need with local NGO's. That we provide people a platform to reach out for help. We're deploying the Ushahidi project in South Africa

Q: What challenges have you run into with governments in areas you serve? A: Any government can shut down a cell network. We're
thinkking about how to use SMS in a local network, how to
use other technologies. We rely on our communities to
help us adress those issues
A: Data poisioning--We have an activist type of tool. We
understand there might e bad data, but we try to cut down
on that through research and colaboration. but we know
when something is happening bbecause we receive a lot of
colaboration. We're also about to shut donw bad accounts.
We can't cover everything, but what we do is map reports
that we have access to.
Our agenda is related to crisis. --But it may expand to
things like, tracking AIDS patiens (private data) to
deforestation in Madagascar.
We give our website's viewers the ability to donate to
local organizations where a crisis is activ.
Q: Where are you putting this data out?
A: NGO's get it, we will also put this on our global
website later this summer, so crisis can be mapped around
the world.

Map This
A program for LA called healthycity.org
Partnership of several organizations. Developed from "What do
people in communities need to connect to resources or advocate
effectively?"
We aggregate a lot of public data about resources, such as health
information. So, you could look at Type II diabetes across a
geographic area and then link to health and human services.
We assumed that this public information is out there, but found
that isn't so. And county governments didn't really want us to
succeed. They said they'd build something, but they never did,
and we didn't believe that this data would be made avaialable for
our people.

We've had a lot of requests for other areas, and we've always
resisted, because to cost out this, it's expensive, so we wanted
to think through in a smart way how to share what we know, how to
collect it, etc.
Example: An agency was planning how to roll out preschools. We
demonstrated to them that there was a need in underserved areas,
and used our tools to work between the agency and the community
to map out opportunies within the area. The result was a 100
million dollars to fund preschools in this area.
Tips, Help, and Questions
Can you distingues between your project and One Economy's Beehive
Project
Daniel, of Tech Soup: One Economy is in this space already with
a community web interface that helps similar communities
A: We have the communities we're within, and resources that are
local, that distinguishes us. A difference our model has is how
to be a resource that draws people with deeper level data.
-Q: What is the level of integration of your data how do you
integrate?
-A: Two in One LA decided to share their data with us. When you
call 211 in LA, thier operators have our website on their screens.