www.nabuur.com is a new concept in people-to-people global citizenship. The world is a global village and Nabuur facilitates contact among the neighbours.Nabuur builds virtual neighbourhoods around local communities in developing countries, to assist the latter to deal with their problems in their own terms. It links people in third world communities with their Neighbours on the internet. The locals say what they need, the virtual village helps them to find their future.

The characteristic features of NABUUR.COM are:

• Person to person contact, no bureaucracy between the local community and persons who assist
• The local community is in the lead. It is not thematic; they determine what needs to be done.
• It is not about giving money but about jointly working towards solutions
• It is transparent; the progress is visible to all
• Everyone can contribute, not just experts. What is needed is time, contacts, know-how, tools, manpower

After careful preparation NABUUR.COM is ready to expand. The basic tools, procedures and systems are in place. 75 local communities now take part. 200 local communities will be served by the end of 2006, 1000 by the end of 2007, many more after that.

Background.

There is no shortage of resources to assist Local Communities in their daily struggle. But, as William J. Clinton says, we do not have the systems to respond in a comprehensive way. Ngo’s, corporations and governments are all hierarchies and can therefore only deal with a limited number of projects. What is needed is something complementary, that can tap into the huge reservoir of resources in a self organizing way.

NABUUR.COM tries to create part of that structure, by combining the self organizing and time tested principle of neighbourship with the factor that makes the resources worldwide accessible, the Internet.

NABUUR.COM is a lab for democratized development assistance. It mobilizes world citizens. Not an amorphous anonymous mass, but as a collective of capable committed individuals ready for concrete individual tasks and responsibilities.

Nabuur is an old Dutch word for neighbour. Neighbours usually are not experts, funders or friends. But they do help each other in times of need by tapping into the resources out there. They organize themselves until the problem has been dealt with. That’s how it had worked for ages in a real communities, that’s how it can now work via the Internet. Today world citizens ARE neighbours in the Global Village .

Uppity Wisconsin is an attempt at building a collaborative on-line web presence to promote progressive ideas in Wisconsin Politics. This is a new site (based on the Drupal CMS). It uses a combination of incoming and outgoing RSS, Blogs, Video, and email for communications.

Uppity Wisconsin is currently looking for authors and contributors of all kinds. The current challenge is to find enough contributors to build a vibrant community.

Currently, patients waiting for an organ donation are placed on a national waiting list through the United Network for Organ Sharing. A computer system matches patients to donor organs according to objective criteria such as blood and tissue type, immune status, medical urgency and time spent on the waiting list. This ranking system determines which patients are offered available organs. This process is extremely important in anyone's organ search, but now MatchingDonors.com offers a way to enhance the search with a more active approach.

MatchingDonors.com main objective is to search the world to find potential live donors for people in need of organ transplants. Patient members of MatchingDonors.com provide a personal biography as well as pictures of their choice to display on the website, which will create an interest in them and their life story. When patients in need of an organ transplant place themselves into MatchingDonors.com database, their information will be promoted on the website. MatchingDonors.com advertises and promotes its Web site in many different ways through extensive public relations networking to increase potential donor's viewing the site.

The personal connection MatchingDonors.com provides is key to finding a potential live donor. According to the National Kidney Foundation, "Nearly one out of four (23.4%) of 1000 people queried told pollsters that they would be "likely" to consider donating a kidney or a portion of their liver or lung to help save the life of someone they did not know." Many people feel more comfortable considering offering a live donation to someone they may have a connection to or a common bond.

MatchingDonors.com is not an organ donor waiting list, and is not associated with any organ donor organization. It is a nonprofit venue where patients and potential donors can communicate and hopefully expedite a live donor agreeing to give a much-needed organ. MatchingDonors.com gives patients and potential donors the important communication tools to correspond with each other, but once the contact between the parties has been made, the road to transplant surgery is their own.

Hands On Bay Area Day is an event during which twelve-hundred volunteers at 51 community service projects across the Bay Area completed more than 7,000 hours of service valued at more than $120,000. This day is also the biggest fundraising event for Hands On Bay Area, when a large part of its budget is acquired through donations raised by volunteers. It is an organization that provides year-round service to the community.

Hands On Bay Area is a unique organization with a mission to mobilize communities to action. Many people find it difficult to volunteer for several reasons: trouble choosing what activity to do; the long-term commitment often required by organizations; and the number of hours organizations request weekly or monthly of volunteers. 

What HOBA does is eliminate these barriers by acting as a liaison between volunteers and organizations and coordinating projects that make it easy to volunteer and help organizations meet their needs. They use an interactive database and email to do so.

Each month HOBA offers hundreds of meaningful volunteer projects coordinated with over 300 agencies. Hands On Bay Area projects each have a project leader who acts as the contact person for volunteers and ensures events go smoothly at the site. People interested in volunteering sign up for a one-hour orientation with HOBA, at which they learn about HOBA and how to sign up for projects. They are given an account on the website, and after it's activated, they can peruse the calendar and sign themselves up for projects. The volunteers control how often they do a project and how many projects they complete. HOBA simply asks that volunteers try to complete two projects annually.

Hands On Bay Area offers a wide array of projects: promoting literacy, maintaining parks, providing meals at homeless shelters, mentoring children, socializing with senior citizens, and much more. Volunteers often develop friendships as the encounter each other on various projects. There is also a team activity, where groups of people can sign up to participate in a set number of projects that focus on an impact area; by doing this, they deepen their knowledge about the issue and develop community together.

"Earth Share of Washington is 66 leading environmental organizations that help to protect our environment and quality of life - locally, nationally and internationally. Earth Share of Washington partners with businesses and government agencies to encourage employees to give to the environment at work through payroll giving programs, volunteer projects and involvement in our annual Day in the Park."

This site makes it easy for someone (in Washinton) to locate opportunites to participate in efforts to protect the environment. By aggregating activities sponsored by 66 different organizations and presenting multiple paths to engagement the site makes it very easy for a user to locate an activity that fits their skills and abilities.

The Earth Share site is firmly focused on task and this echoes through the site. Navigation is easy and clear. Users can subscribe, via email, to a monthly newsletter or syndicate news content.

Monetray donations are handled through "Groundspring.org" , a third party donation processing site.

Dave Manelski, the group's Program Coordinator and Webmaster was recently interviewed for Net Squared.

  
 

"CivicSpace is a free open-source software platform for grassroots organizing and civic activity. It allows individuals and organizations to build online communities that communicate effectively, act collectively, and coordinate coherently with a network of other related organizations and communities."

 CivicSpace has built it's software on top of Drupal, which is an open source content management platform with very well developed categorization abilities and a broad array of modules available to enhance core services. What CivicSpace does is take that core framework and enhance it with some specific capabilites for grassroots organizing. By extending Drupal with a specific class of features the developers have provided an "out of the box" solution for grassroots organizations to deploy a useful and usable site within an hour or so.

Having said that....it helps to have a tech/web person and access to your server. Being a web person with open access to my servers , I cannot give any mileage variances for hosted installs of CivicSpace.  I do know that for me to fire up a new install of CivicSpace requires minimal time and effort with pretty immediate rewards.

CivicSpace incorporates blogging,forums, file storage,pools and surveys and a number of other features to spark the process of community egagement online. 

My first install of CivicSpace goes back a while and I've watched and upgraded over time, always with a positive improvement in features and stability. That, combined with the highly developed categorization tools build into the Drupal core, encourages me to believe that this software can facilitate online community building and sustain development both on and offline. 

Providing Internet access, website hostng, media development and training for partnering organizations and communities effected by the Hurricanes Rita and Katrina.

Coming Soon:

New Orleans Voices For Peace Mobile Media Lab

* Our goal is to assemble a Web 2.0 mutual empowerment mobile media labs which will provide technological access in the name of solidarity.

MISSION:
*With an understanding of culture, class and racial divides we strive to engage in mutual empowerment of residents, activists and grassroots organizations in the Gulf Coast region who have been left without a voice in the digital age. In short, to give voice to the voiceless.

*In order to create fusion in ideas and put those ideas to action the Mobile Media Lab will provide a common ground where organizations working from all over the spectrum can unite in order to bridge the disconnect often found between local organizations and our natural allies working on a national level.

*We will do this by providing free internet access and conducting multimedia training(s) in a mobile media lab where Gulf Coast residents and area organizations can create testimony to their continuous struggles and document progress made since the disaster. To properly address the clear connections between the disaster in New Orleans as a microcosm of the injustices created by Western Society, we will provide technological assistance and education to aid in the assembly of folk stories related to the tragedy of New Orleans. This project can be conducted both locally and throughout the diaspora.

PROJECT:
*Create a mobile news team to document events in NOLA, and around the country (demonstrations, disaster relief, educational tours, etc.). In addition, we will promote training with partnering organizations in media production.

*Provide an open source web portal to both socialize and focus the information of all participants. This will be conducted through the following hosts: http://www.neworleansvfp.org, http://neworleansnetwork.org http://www.commongroundrelief.org, http://www.ivawdeployed.org, and others.

*Create a mobile computer literacy lab to remove the technological hurdles to equal media access (including printing, fax, internet skills, social networking, & access/management of information that has been recorded).

POSSIBLE COLLABORATIVE EFFORTS:
*9th ward history project -mapping the history of the residents in the 9th Ward, documenting their survival, rescue, relocation and recovery through collaboration with residents, volunteers, universities, faith-based groups, and grassroots organizations.

PARTNERING ORGANIZATIONS:
United Peace Relief (http://www.unitedpeacerelief.org)
Common Ground Relief (http://www.commongroundrelief.org)
New Orleans Voices For Peace (http://www.neworleansvfp.org)

PASSED INTERNET ACCESS AND MOBILE MEDIA LAB PROJECTS:
Veterans For Peace, chapter 116, Internet access, IMPEACHMENT BUS
CAMP CASEY I, Internet access, Crawford, TX
Camp Covington, Internet access, Covington, LA
Common Ground Relief, Internet Access, New Orleans, LA
Emergency Communities, Internet access, Buras, LA
Four Directions Solidarity Network, Internet access, Dulac, LA
Camp Liberty, Internet Access, Slidell, LA

PROGRAM NEEDS:
*media equipment - imacs, audio/video equipment, satellite Internet, digital video and still cameras, digital videon projector, PA system.

TRANSPORTATION NEEDS:
*Bus - Retired school buses or entertainer tour buses.

FINANCIAL SUPPORT
Mobile Media Lab will generate operating capital and travel budgets through grants, contracting of production services, retail sales of concessions, tickets and soliciting donations.

More information (http://www.neworleansvfp.org/node/2269)

Contact: gordonsoderberg@mac.com
504 613-0174

This case study describes a unique mapping project now being undertaken by the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, an umbrella group for New York's more than 1,100 charitable soup kitchens and food pantries.

Most social service agencies exist in a culture of scarcity, unable to invest resources in anything beyond coping with immediate needs. This project, the first of its kind in the nation, demonstrates a complementary use of ArcGIS, ArcWeb Services, and the Google Maps API allowing such agencies to utilize online mapping systems in order to network, recruit volunteers, and see themselves as part of a larger movement.

Simultaneously, these maps serve as both a public disclosure of need and a gap analysis, encouraging targeted charity and volunteerism while sparking the political will to confront the size and complexity of the hunger problem.

Currently, this project is in the beginning stages - users may look up emergency feeding programs by zipcode, or see a map of the entire city. In the near future, static GIS maps highlighting specific neighborhoods and themes will be created, and layers consisting of various food access streams (farmers' markets, CSAs, community gardens) will be incorporated into the interactive mapping system.