Palo Alto Partners in Education (PAPIE) is a primarily board-driven organization with only 2 staff and a budget around $2+ million. We raise private funds to supplement public funds for all the public schools in our school district.

Challenge:

We needed a tool to ensure communication and collaboration amongst the board members, staff and volunteers. We also wanted to keep a history of documents, activities, decisions, etc. to ensure continuity due to volunteer turnover year-to-year. The tool had to be easy to use and very accessible. It had to be flexibly private, meaning that it needed to allow proper permissions for each person - ensuring that only the proper person(s) could see or do what was appropriate. It needed to combine a website and email communications to reduce duplication of effort.

Solution:

www.nexo.com

Nexo allows us to create a free group for PAPIE. We have a highly customized, private website that any authorized person can add to, change, or read. We also get an email group integrated with the website so that updates, alerts, news, etc. are easy to distribute (even automatic if desired) to the group. We also can have live chats on the site if desired. We have multiple pages and multiple sub-groups (board, marketing committee, development committee, etc). The site essentially defines our own social network.

The website allows us to share blogs, files, pictures, videos, calendars, events, to do lists, budgets, plans, press releases, contact information, RSS feeds, etc.

Impact:

Not only has nexo improved communication, collaboration and participation, but a by-product is that we have a back-up for our most important files such as board minutes, budgets, etc. These used to just be stored on one computer which is scary for many reasons. The site also makes is much easier to transfer knowledge from year to year since new  leaders/volunteers have the roadmap from the year before.

MobileActive is a global network of organizations, technologists, organizers, and activists who are using mobile phones in their social change work.

Mobile phones have emerged as a campaign organizing tool across traditional socio-economic and cultural boundaries. Mobile phone campaigns have swung elections through innovative get-out-the-vote activities, have been used to ensure impartial elections through monitoring, have resulted in massive collective action to free political prisoners, and are being used in public health strategies.

Yet, while there is significant innovation all over the world, there is little aggregation of lessons learned from these campaigns and activities that is being collected and aggregated by civil society practitioners for their peers.

MobileActive seeks to better understand the strengths and limits of the medium, available technologies for campaigners, share lessons learned, feature campaign examples and tech tools so to increase activists’ ability to organize our constituencies with this new technology.

MobileActive 2005 convened in Toronto to bring together, for the first time, activists from around the world to explore the use of mobile phones in civic action campaigns. The MobileActive community and web site is an aggregation of the learnings from this convergence, stories from participants and their projects, and resources for activists interested in using mobiles in their campaigns.

MobileActive is now growing the network of mobile activists, to share knowledge and skills, and to provide a peer network, training, and resources to those interested in exploring mobile phones in their civic engagagement, mobilization, and civic action campaigns.

If you used mobiles in your campaign, please share your story at http://www.mobileactive.org! If you need resources, let us know! And if you want to join this growing network of activists from around the globe, profile yourself: http://www.mobileactive.org/profile

Welcome to MobileActive - http://www.mobileactive.org

Lightstalkers is a networking tool designed for mobile journalists, especially photographers. Media professionals constantly on the move, wrestling with gear, visas, and communication, depend on each other for up-to-date intelligence and resources. By connecting them directly with each other, Lightstalkers and November Eleven support independent photography, journalism, and humanitarian awareness.

www.lightstalkers.org

www.novembereleven.org

A one page summary of the project can be viewed at www.kiwanja.net/frontlinesms.htm or full details via the dedicated project website at www.frontlinesms.com

For a full project description, along with additional screenshots and content samples, see www.kiwanja.net/wildlive!.htm

The Technologies for Conservation and Development (t4cd) project, run by ResourceAfrica and Fauna & Flora International, is finding ways to apply new information and communications technologies (ICTs) to conservation and development.

 t4cd interventions are designed to investigate the efficiency of technology deployment in conservation and development – in other words, what size and type of bang will we get for the technological buck that we put in? It aims to bring together various practitioners from the world of ICT, conservation & development to build new partnerships, investigate the appropriate use of existing technologies and generate new innovative tools for practical use in developing countries.

Inveneo combines VoIP, Wimax, cheap components, energy consumption reduction and free-software.