Google Maps, Open Source and Plotting Ongoing Research: Demonstrating Innovation

It is the perfect time to celebrate CGX 2.0’s birthday by talking about the tangible differences made by ICT-KM’s choice to shift away from proprietary technical architectures and move towards a more ample and sustainable technical landscape.  This technical landscape is epitomized by what is called Enterprise 2.0, “a system of web-based technologies...Read more here.

Josh Catone (@Catone) recently shared a post on Mashable entitled, How To Use the Web for Socially Responsible Shopping. In the post, Josh profiled nine sites that “offer information for the conscious consumer about the companies and products we buy every day.”

Josh did an excellent job highlighting and bringing together an array of awesome tools: Knowmore, GoodGuide, Crocodyl, ClimateCounts, Transnationale, Corporate Critic, Citizens Market, Do the Right Thing, and Source Map.

And then in the comments, the Mashable community shared more great resources: Tuggly, MadeinNations, Business & Human Rights, EthiScore, Vanno, GreenLighted, and Zumer.

As well, there are even more useful sites which feature green & sustainability ratings – like 3rdWhale & GenGreen (who announced a partnership last night) GreenAmerica, Bilumi, BadBuster, & SustainLane. The list definitely goes on!

The thing is, after you read the post – you're left wondering: “Who is bringing all this data together?”

Who's making it easy to search across these sites? Who's working on making sense of the data – to potentially create aggregate profiles or scores. Who's working on open standards and formats so sites can talk to each other? Who's facilitating an Open API (like the Social Actions API & WiserEarth API) – to spread this information where it can be most relevant online? Who's figuring out the business & collaboration models so open sharing can be more likely to happen?

Catone's post changes the game because it forces us to look at the green shopping sector as a whole and wonder how we can help take it to the next level.

What do you think? How can we support and leverage this exploding sector to ultimately empower millions of people to shop in ways that create a better environmental & social impact?

Excited for your thoughts!

Kiva announced yesterday, the official launch of the Kiva API and our new developer website, build.kiva.org. With the introduction of the Kiva API, we begin a new era of building Kiva.org. We're putting tools in the hands of developers worldwide to make it easier and more transparent than ever to fund entrepreneurs in the developing world. If you're a hacker, a hard core developer, or just curious, head over to the site now to help us build the next to check it out!

http://build.kiva.org/

This post is to everyone I met while representing Social Actions with Peter Deitz at N2Y3. So many of you were kind enough to show support for our project, and I’m writing to share our progress since N2Y3 and to invite you to become a part of what we’re building.

I hope you'll join all of the people contributing to our “$20,009 for 2009” campaign. I also hope you’ll join and subscribe to the Social Actions blog, spread the word about the Change the Web 2009 Challenge, share the reports and news we’re generating about the transformation of online philanthropy, give us your feedback on the search engine and API, and otherwise become an important part of the growing Social Actions community!

I spent some time last week helping out a group of folks to get a Firefox extension up and running for Knowmore.org. It was a great experience - a testament to the power of distributed volunteer software development as well as how Firefox as a platform can enable such groups to rapidly build and deploy world-changing tools. As officially announced on Knowmore.org today, the extension is live! For screenshots and details, check out the wiki page, and you can install it here (still sandboxed, login is required).

I'm writing this while I sit in the passenger seat of a giant, white cargo van careening up the East Coast on route 15, so if I seem a bit distracted in tone, that's probably why. I could wait the four hours until I'm safely in the confines of my computer chair, but I don't want to lose the ideas while they're there. Well, that and I'm sort of melodramatic...