On the 12th of March, one day after the tragic earthquake and tsunami devastated Japan Ichi - Hiroyasu Ichikawa - the NetSquared Local organizer from Tokyo sent an e-mail to our NetSquared Local Organizer listserve asking for the best practices for mobilizing online communities in the time of a disaster. In the weeks that have followed, Ichi’s e-mail provoked a series of responses from all over the world. In this post, we hope to voice many of the tools, resources, and tactics that have been shared, in hopes of encouraging others around the world to get involved with the digital relief efforts.

We couldn't have picked a better time to join netsquared.org.  Within 24 hrs of signing up, we noticed the subject of this months Net2 Think Tank - Can User Generated Content Create Unique Community Opportunities?  One word - INDUBITABLY.

I would be remiss if I didn't take this opportunity to introduce our project to the Net2 Community.  www.socialchangenews.com is the internets' hub for news on social change that combines original user-created content (UCC) with the latest aggregated news on organizations, and individuals working to transform society.  Since this directly relates to our project, we look forward to sharing and learning as much as we can for the next few weeks.

For the last several months I've been involved in a project called RootsWire.  The project was initially started as a means to pull together content from the different blogs and web sites covering the Democratic Convention in Denver.  We are growing (at least conceptually) in scope to be an aggregation and cooperation site for bloggers and hyperlocal sites across the US.

Our intention is to build tools for sharing of content between sites in geographic areas, and to have local editors throughout the country who will build a human-edited daily digest of news generated by grassroots sites and organizations. 

The World Bank, Development Seed and World Resources Institute have developed a new open source aggregator, the BuzzMonitor.

BuzzMonitor was originally created for the World Bank to help it watch what was being said about it online:

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