Thank you to all those who supported the Genocide Intervention Network's proposal for the NetSquared Mashup Challenge! We were honored to be nominated by the community as a 2008 Featured Project for our proposal to upgrade and extend the DarfurScores.org website:

The Genocide Intervention Network seeks to create a new website, modeled on our successful Darfur congressional scorecard, DarfurScores.org, tentatively named GenocideScores.org.

Our current plan for the site — which could change as we explore different options and hear feedback from our members — has four main components:

• Collecting together anti-genocide data, not only on Darfur but on each of our areas of concern. Instead of being limited to only legislative records, each state would list its status on other anti-genocide initiatives like Sudan divestment and genocide education.
• Provide clear illustrations of legislative status. Instead of just hearing about a bill when a member of Congress does (or doesn't) vote for it, we'll be tracking bills as they move through each chamber.
• Cross-index a bill's status with a member's location. When the latest bill on genocide prevention is up for a vote, anti-genocide activists whose members of Congress represent key votes on the legislation will be able to receive automatic alerts.
• Provide embeddable badges or widgets for activists to place on their profiles, blogs or websites. At a glance, both you and visitors to your website, blog or social networking profile will be able to see how your state and legislators are doing on the question of genocide. And when urgent action is needed, these badges will be automatically updated with a special link to take action.

Now, we want your feedback. If you have a chance, read through our proposal for DarfurScores.org and leave a comment — tell us what you like, what you think could be changed, what we're overlooking. Remember that this is all about our core mission: empowering individuals and communities with the tools to prevent and stop genocide. We hope this project will result in a valuable new tool, and we'd love to have your input!

—Ivan Boothe, Internet Strategy Coordinator for the Genocide Intervention Network

P.S. If you're interested in the work we're doing, follow us on Twitter!

The text of my "speech" to the NetSquared 2007 Conference.

The people of Darfur are not destined to fight. The peoples of Rwanda, of Bosnia and Guatemala, of Cambodia and Armenia, the Jews of Europe were not a lost cause. Nor were they simply a natural disaster, to be met with blankets and gauze. Who would have suggested that the appropriate response to Auschwitz was bags of rice?

Yet that is our response to genocide. Humanitarian relief organizations are doing vital, breathtaking work — but it’s up to us, as members of the human race, to work to change the situations that necessitate that humanitarian relief. The pattern to date has been ad-hoc groups coming together around a particular conflict, creating some noise and holding some demonstrations, and then fading away just as quickly when the mass atrocities lessen.

The Genocide Intervention Network was established to give our members a more lasting voice, a more permanent effect on the situation — to create a permanent anti-genocide constituency, that makes political inaction in the face of mass atrocities all but unthinkable.

I attended NetSquared last year for its inaugural conference, and I wrote an introduction entitled Can Blogging Stop Genocide? If you're interested in all the details about who I am, how I got here and how it's connected to the project I'm proposing at this year's conference, check out that entry.

What I really want to focus on in this post is how to find ways to collaborate with other participants at the conference, rather than be swallowed up by the competition. But first, and quickly by way of an introduction, I'll say that the Genocide Intervention Network's mission is to:

empower individuals and communities with the tools to prevent and stop genocide.

Perhaps you can see that this fits pretty naturally with the spirit of "web 2.0" and social networking -- user-driven projects, user-generated content, network-centric advocacy, etc. As a result we've engaged in a number of such projects in the past, and happily share our experiences with other organizations.

As everyone has mentioned, picking just a few selections from the excellent proposals to nominate for the NetSquared Technology Innovation Fund is very hard, given the quality of the proposals — I can't imagine anyone will be voting for fewer than 10!

I helped to develop the Genocide Intervention Network's proposal — An Anti-Genocide Community: Building the Political Will to End Genocide — and thus one of my ten votes will be going to that project.

I had a few qualifications in building my list — criteria that encompass our own proposal:

• At least half of the projects I nominated would be located in the Global South, because of the large divide that already exists between technology in the Global North and the Global South — and NetSquared's position to help alter this.
• The projects I nominated would be grounded in community concerns or community initiatives. For me, that is broad enough to encompass a "community" of human rights workers or even, potentially, nonprofits. But I wanted to see a demonstrated need for the technology or service.
• Needless to say, the projects I nominated would be involved in innovative community-building and/or social networking. A number of projects seemed like very worthwhile charities but outside the scope of this particular conference/fund.