As you might have already read in the NetSquared team authored posts (#RestartRomania), on the TechSoupGlobal.org site, or on the Personal Democracy Forum website, TechSoup Romania recently wrapped-up a successful web-based social justice challenge. My post appears as another in the Restart Romania series, and will focus on an important lesson learned: the international reach and local impact thing is actually pretty tricky. The Net2 team and TechSoup Romania teamed up for this case study, and we are already learning from the experience and starting to master the skill.

OpenIDEO is an online community platform where creative thinkers from all walks of life collaborate to solve social problems. This project from the newly created nonprofit arm of “design and innovation firm” IDEO leverages crowdsourced innovation, the design thinking of IDEO staff and the experience of mission-driven organizations to address critical social issues.

Originally posted on my blog at AmySampleWard.org - join the conversation and comment on the original post, too!

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Whether you are a technologist or a changemaker, an entrepreneur or innovator - from any country around the world - we're looking for your ideas! Social justice covers all sorts of issues, like human rights, equality, and livability; and we see web and mobile-based collaborative technologies offering tremendous opportunity to support social justice work. This is the last week to submit a Project idea to the FACT Social Justice Challenge - winners receive cash and support to build their tools!

Looking for a way for your community members to contribute information to an online collective database? Why not consider a wiki? A wiki is a website that allows multiple contributors to easily add, edit, and contribute content, images, web links, and more. Wikis are specifically designed for collaborative editing and are used as public websites, for personal note taking, in corporate intranets, and for knowledge management systems.

OpenKollab is developing infrastructure and processes to support its larger mission of Connecting Projects To Solve Massive Social Problems. In service of this larger end, we are developing the Ecosystem Pooled Fund initiative, the objective of which is to develop a model to provide financing to early stage social entrepreneurs (those that are developing projects that delivery both social value and financial return). As you likely know, there is a gap in the funding landscape that makes it very hard for social entrepreneurs to raise seed funds. The gap exists due to the fact that social ventures typically carry high risk but don't necessarily carry high enough financial return to offset this risk since they are not solely focused on financial return.

I recently had the opportunity to connect with Scott Anderson from ClientTrack, a software solution aimed at increasing the impact of social benefit organizations and their work by “integrating people, processes, and technology.”  You can learn more about Scott and the work ClientTrack is doing in the interview below.

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Scott Anderson is the Director of Communications for DSI, the developer of ClientTrack. He earned his PhD in Communications from the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to his PhD, he worked as a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in community health, adolescent residential treatment, and a faith-based organization.

I recently watched "Us Now", a one hour feature about how collaborative tools can help us make better decisions.

Interesting examples, many of them new

As [we hope] you all know, here at NetSquared we love our Community and want to deliver for you: whether it's creating spaces for the Community members to share ideas and updates (the Community Blog) or for collaborating on innovative Projects to some of the biggest social issues around the world (the Project Gallery).  We are always looking to engage you in our work with feedback and ideas, like the recent Redesign series where we opened up our plans for redesigning the website so you could contribute to the conversation

Web of Change is an upcoming gathering (Sep 23rd - 27th) that brings together the social change and technology community - on an intimate Island retreat in British Columbia - to share their world-class work, ideas, and inspiration with a powerful community of deeply committed peers.

The Web of Change team also just offered 10 Scholarship opportunities!

You can fill out the scholarship form for your chance to receive free tuition. Scholarship Applications are due by midnight PST, Thursday August 20th.