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In 2005, more than 1,200 young people around the world created intimate works of collage art called "Peace Tiles." These individual pieces were assembled in large "adocacy murals" that were installed at various sites around the world on December 1, World AIDS Day.
The purpose of the activity was to engage young people in candid, supportive conversations about HIV/AIDS in their lives, and encourage them to share their "visual voice" through art. You can learn more about the extraordinary accomplishment of these young people at peacetiles.net
I'd like to keep this session as interactive as possible. Here are a few questions that I'd like to ask the panelists to get the conversation going:
Why are mashups useful to a non-profits?
What should you consider before you create a mashup?
If you have unique data or a service that you want to release for use, what should you consider and what are the benefits/pitfalls of releasing something, into the wild?
How do you get started? Reference Sites? Tools? (i've gathered a few on delicious any more to add?)
I'd love to hear stories from the audience about their experiences with mashups - have you ever created one and, if so, why? Did it meet it's goals?
What considerations are needed to ensure the accessibility of mashups to assistive technologies (AT) like screenreaders, used by six million blind and visually impaired Americans and more than 80 million worldwide?
Can we afford to just leave them out? Is all the responsibility on the AT or do developers have a role to play? How can we include these considerations as we introduce mashups to the nonprofit sector...or indeed to the general public?
Thanks!
I'm definitely interested in learning more about the ability of mashups to forward the social change agenda. Our organization provides technical assistance to social change community-based organizations, especially those working in environmental justice. There is a ton of data available, for example through Scorecard.org, the EPA, and the Right-to-know network. It would be interesting to see the different ways to reconfigure this data. Scorecard.org does this already in one way, but mashups, i think, could offer another way to go about doing it.
What if you could present virtually any data easily on the web? So easily that your average nonprofit employee could just upload a data file and have all the technical details worked out for them?
Generate crime maps to talk about why the police need to spend time in your neighborhood.
Zack Rosen shows us how its done today:
http://www.zacker.org/screencast-drupal-mashup-machine
Pretty easy, but not quite to the level of simplicity to be useful to tens of thousands of organizations. This is the type of ease of use we are seeking to build into CivicSpace On Deamand-- hide all the Drupal power and complexity.
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