Growing concern over climate change has prompted significant growth in voluntary markets for carbon offsets. This growth in the voluntary carbon markets represents a valuable new source of potential finance for sustainable development projects. However, only a limited number of development projects capitalize on this new finance source due to high capital costs and a low carbon price that undervalues their offsets. Live Climate solves this problem.

LiveClimate.org is a retail website that links greenhouse gas offset projects in low-income countries, with buyers who value the social and environmental co-benefits of their carbon offsets. The Live Climate retail channel directly connects the offset buyer with the project in a developing country that generated the offset. Vivid descriptions of the community, and people affected by each project and clear descriptions of the social co-benefits inform customers as they select an offset project to buy from. A mashup of maps and project information would allow customers to see where they will make an impact. Customers can get ongoing information about the projects they support through RSS feeds and continuing pictures.

Live Climate’s mission is threefold: 1) Fight climate change by financing verified greenhouse gas abatement projects, 2) Transform the voluntary carbon market to serve the poor by communicating the full social and environmental value of these projects, and 3) Raise the over revenue and share of the carbon market going to small-scale clean development projects.

The voluntary carbon market has come under significant scrutiny in recent years due to lack of transparency. The market continues to be dominated by a handful of large players, however, many new retailers have emerged even with the backlash due to low barriers to entry. These offset retailers all operate according to the same model looking to compete through price and brand name. Live Climate enters the voluntary carbon market with a fundamentally new product and business model. Operating as a non-profit, Live Climate will attract customers looking to maximize the social impact of their carbon offset purchase.

Live Climate is currently in Phase 1: Website Development and Pilot Launch. We plan a full launch of the website in early summer and are looking for help to make the site more interactive, through maps, connecting users, and personalized information.

By seeing an animated model of a changing world, people will better apprehend their context and the context of others.

Our mashup links an interactive map generators, our own and google earth and others, with bulk statistics on a wide range of issues. At our site, we host videos and snapshots of 3D interaction with the mapped data, AND we output KML files that load easily into Google Earth and other geobrowsers. As such, we are a multipurpose bridge between statistics and mapping environments, and by connecting these two domains will improve understanding of local and global concerns.

In regrad to the Net Squared community in particular, all NGO Issue advocates will have a new top-notch tool for drawing attention to their causes. By supporting their concerns with relevant data AND by making it easy to absorb the data, their issues will recieve more attention. For example, when looking at life-expectancy in Africa, and then seeing it drop during the genocide in Rwanda, and again as AIDS spread through the south, viewers will apprehend the gravity of these issues much better than if they only hear numbers or see tables.

The same impact can usefully be applied to charting changing unemployment patterns or crime statistics in a city and countless other issues. Our team is keen to work with the Net Squared community, to serve as a bridge for them, to bring in and forge connection to whatever data they are interested in seeing. We are presently providing access to the data of many international organizations and also have brought in data for neighborhoods and cities across the US. We are eager to expand our data offerings and have automated tools for creating connections to new sources.

It looks like green is the new black: eco-chic is everywhere. Companies large and small are trying to cash in on the new eco-economy, showcasing their supposedly green initiatives at every turn.

But how much is green, and how much is one big greenwash?

Greenwashing is a practice of deceiving consumers about the environmental practices of a given company. It's all around us: oil companies making billboards about their one solar demonstration project, coal corporations claiming to be “clean” on television, bustop ads promising environmental enlightenment if only you buy the latest eco-widget.

Progressive and enviros alike have been grumbling about greenwashing for a while in their own narrow circles. It's time to expand that dialogue, harnessing the power of the mashup to catalyze powerful direct action where it counts: in the real world.

Here's how it works: you see a nauseatingly dishonest example of greenwashing near your office. You take a picture of it, and upload it on WeGreenwashYou.org. You plot the location of the billboard on a Google Map, and add a link or two to reports and articles verifying that the billboard is a blatant Greenwash.

And then the fun begins: the community of users gets the chance to Greenwash the Greenwashers.

After watching a quick video-tutorial about how to make simple, cheap paintballoons, the anti-greenwash army finds your billboard. They load up a couple of balloons with greenpaint, launch them from a distance: SPLAT! Job done, and the renegades escape safely under the cover of night.

They make a quick video of their billboard liberation (anonymity preserved by concealing their faces with—what else—green handkerchiefs) and upload their photo/video/text report. Another victory in the public space, another corporation held to a higher standard of honesty. And if the corporation disagrees, let them comment on the action and take part in a lively discussion about the true definition of “environmentally friendly.”

The public will thank you for saving our common visual space from deception. And who knows? Eventually corporations might think twice about greenwashing and might even start some real greening.

A global wealth mashup would help students and people from various countries understand and visualize the disparity in wealth among countries and cities around the world. Often, people recite statistics about the US being in the top X percent in terms of per capita wealth globally- (generally a figure around 1%) with most other countries lagging far behind. Hearing this statistic is compelling, but seeing it would be compelling in a very different way, and would allow for easier comparisons. For educational purposes, I'd love to see a mashup that takes per capita income by country and city (info available from many sources) and 'color codes' that on a Google map or Google earth map. A country view would show the average per capita income by country for comparison globally- (shades of green from darkest green as wealthiest to white for the poorest countries) and then users could zoom in to a country to see how wealth changes across a countries regions and by city. Users could also input 2 country or city pairs to compare two places to each other, adjusted in a specific currency. Why? I think seeing regions with vast swatches of white, and only pinpoints of green, would help people understand the disparity of wealth across regions better than a list of countries and numbers, which are often just listed alphabetically.

By some counts, there are more than 18,000 civil society nonprofits/NGOs registered in Lebanon, but only a fraction of them are actually operational. Information about where they’re working, their funders, their successes, and their grantees is often hard to find. The lack of organization of and access to this data not only reinforces rampant corruption but also makes it difficult for donors and volunteers to find partners to whom they are willing to contribute funds or time. In addition, there is a lot of overlap between NGOs. Our mashup would help identify areas of redundancy and neglect, render them visually, and become a call to action to distribute resources accordingly.

There is nothing like this in Lebanon, or perhaps the world? If we were able to realise our concept, it could become a model for other countries in similar circumstances and/or link into a global network.

What is the state of social and economic justice where you live? This project will inform people on several measures of social and economic justice in their area. It will help them to see that some problems they are having are part of a larger societal issues and to connect with others with similar or related problems. The social and economic justice indicators will include:

* Housing Affordability: income vs. rents/housing costs
* Health Care Accessibility: number of uninsureds/underinsureds
* Jobs: unemployment, trends in wages, unionization,
* Income Inequality: trends in share of total income received by the top earners, middle class, and lower income.
* Race, Gender, and Age disparities in the above.
* User-posted stories about issues they are facing in the communities or at work.

Hundreds of environmental organizations will be able to collaborate, add/see/utilize each other's posted environmental events from all over the world.

Work has already begun and well on its way, but we need a programmers to implement certain features.

We have found over 100 event calendars so far (and are still receiving an average of 1-2 per day) and contacted many of them. It is very difficult for an event planner to submit to so many calendars, as well as people looking for events needing to search many calendars. We aim to allow one submission which will spread to all calendars/social networks/websites/widgets to easily find events. All organizations will spend less time inputing events, approving events, and finding events.

Events will be spread virally across the internet to spread awareness of local events which showcase events, workshops, classes, film festivals, conferences, etc. Those events bring awareness to environmental efforts and education for protecting and enhancing nature and the environment around us.

This all includive calendar will also allow event registration, social networking around the events, carpooling to events, and a place to share photography/video of the events.

Thousands of communities will be able to access data and map resources in their neighborhoods quickly, easily and at no cost to them. Advocates and service providers will be able to use a high-quality, well-designed, reliable platform for uploading data of their choosing and mapping that data against a wide range of demographic data, area resources, and other variables. This project will also allow nonprofit and community advocates across the U.S. to share and learn from each other how they can better use the power of mapping to advocate for and inform change. Not least, communities will be spared countless hours of effort and scarce dollars trying to build such tools from scratch, enabling them to focus more on the important work of finding the right data locally and interacting with people and organizations in their communities. The goal of our project is to make the public functionality of HealthyCity.org, the mapping tool we developed to serve Los Angeles, available throughout the U.S., free of charge, to nonprofit and community organizations. We believe this can be done in a fairly cost-effective and sustainable way, and we are looking for good thinking on how best to do it.
Examples of how Healthy City has worked in Los Angeles include:
- Mapping of overcrowded, multi-track calendar schools, to support a proposal of $25 billion in school construction bonds approved by California voters
- Analysis of areas of highest need for preschool facilities in Los Angeles, leading to over $100 million commitment of funds to develop preschool space
- Mapping of violent crimes and analysis of prevalence of gang crime, to identify priority areas for the City of Los Angeles
- Mapping the mismatch between concentrations of homeless people and availability of shelter space
- Grants analysis for foundations, including determining the location of grantees, the dimensions of their service areas (with information gathered by survey), and the magnitude of grant dollars relative to target population in grantees’ service areas

The Genocide Intervention Network seeks to create a new website, modeled on our successful Darfur congressional scorecard, DarfurScores.org, tentatively named GenocideScores.org. This grows directly out of our mission, to empower individuals and communities with the tools to prevent and stop genocide.

Our current site tracks each legislator's record on bills relating to Darfur. Hillary Clinton's scorecard, for instance, tracks the senator's record of co-sponsoring and voting for most important bills on Darfur. Sam Brownback similarly scores high for his outspoken record on the issue.

The process of a bill moving through Congress, however, is somewhat obscure. Action alerts are posted when a bill is coming up for a vote, and e-mails are sent to members in important states and districts. Yet most visitors won't know at a glance where a particular bill is, or which states or districts are most important to passing the bill.

Moreover, two additional campaigns have achieved significant momentum: the Sudan Divestment Task Force and the Teach Against Genocide campaign. These measure success on the state level — "Which states have divested?" or "Which state legislatures have approved genocide education?" While visitors to these sites can view information for their particular state, the particular status and action needed in a given state is not always immediately apparent.

Don't other sites track legislation? Why create a new cause-specific site? It's true that other websites track bills as the move through Congress. The difference with GenocideScores.org would be two-fold: First, it would incorporate state-based campaigns as noted above. Second, and perhaps most importantly, it would be curated by our advocacy staff to ensure anti-genocide activists are provided with the most effective information and tools. General legislation-tracking sites will never — and are not designed to — support advocacy on a particular cause, but our staff will ensure that the alerts people get on a particular bill or campaign tell them exactly how they can have the most impact.

We have found 2 major problems that the Internet presents for both the western world and the 3 billion people living on less than $2/day (see http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Facts.asp):
1) Those without Internet have comparatively no information
2) Those with the Internet have information overload

What if we were to solve 2 problems at one time? What if we delivered information to people without Internet access via the quickly expanding 2 billion cellular phone users worldwide? And what if we did it all through keyword-filtering of RSS feeds of their favorite sites and information?

What if we created a partnership of CellAlert.net with non-profits that can apply to use a CellAlert Open API which allows them a completely customized mashup of their own design (within the CellAlert Open API rules)?

In short, we have so many mashup possibilities, we hope you'll want to mash CellAlert.net and FreeAlert.org with non-profit organizations anywhere they need to distribute urgent content to the 2 billion cell phones in the world. So why not go with the approach of an "API mashup"?

I am the co-founder and CEO of FreeAlert.org and of CellAlert.net. My applications are RSS search technologies that instantly notify subscribers 24 hours per day by cell phone and/or email of the items that the subscribers are seeking when the item appears in any RSS feed they search worldwide. The flagship application we started with is called FreeAlert.org. Since that time, we've expanded to include http://www.cellalert.net and expanding soon to http://www.Africalert.org, http://www.Asialert.org and http://www.Americasalert.org

FreeAlert.org is an RSS search technology that instantly notifies subscribers 24 hours per day by cell phone and/or email of the *free* items that they are seeking on Craigslist whenever the item appears in any Craigslist RSS feed they search worldwide.

We hope that one of our mashup ideas will be something that you will facilitate.

Currently we are focused on El Salvador, but we see tremendous potential for good purposes being served and facilitated by text alerts in developing nations worldwide!