I am Nathan Koeshall, Program Officer for the Balkan Trust for Democracy, a project of the German Marshall Fund of teh United States.  I am responsible for BTD's grantmaking in Albania, Kosovo and Macedonia.  I am based in Belgrade, Serbia.

Do you want to bring your fundraising and communications to new heights using new media? Learn from Obama's team the secret of his success in fundraising, organizing, and controlling his message.  At Personal Democracy Forum 2009 hear from the cutting edge speakers how to maximize your resources with technology.

Personal Democracy Forum 2009

On June 29th and 30th in New York City, more than 1000 opinion makers, non-profits, technologists and journalists will come together to network and discuss how technology is changing non-profits, advocacy, and civic life.

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Hi. I just submitted a proposal to the USAID Development 2.0 Challenge called "Social Networking to Improve Advice on Development Priorities to Incoming Administration".  USAID rightly champions the principles of good governance as fundamental conditions for successful development - principles of transparency, participation of stakeholders in decision making, and access to information, for example.  I want your help to turn the spotlight back on USAID and give it the chance to bask in some governance goodness.  I think that social networking tools could help heighten the dialogue on priorities for foreign assistance in the US.

mySociety, a nonprofit organization based in the UK that runs most of the best-known democracy and transparency websites in the UK, celebrates five years of working, building, and developing for the common good this month!

Who's mySociety?

A community of volunteers and (paid) open source coders with two missions:

With elections and politics consuming news programs and conversations around the world right now, the Democracy Video Challenge asks you to make a short video to finish the sentence, "Democracy is..."

The N2Y2 sessions have begun; this is Evonne Heyning blogging live from San Jose for NetSquared Innovation spotlights. I will be liveblogging from the detail sessions later today but first, an intro on why this gathering is unique.

The future of organizing networks and activist media will be redefined by many of these 21 innovating social ventures presenting here at N2Y2. Here are a few of the culture-shifting approaches that these groups are pioneering:

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Democratizing the Media (a subject close to our hearts at Link TV) by  Dan Gillmor, Center for Citizen Media.  Dan puts a PowerPoint up on the screen and takes us through citizen journalism.  He tells us that CJ is the result of ubiquitous networks, lots of tools, and the fact that today, anybody can be a publisher.The hallmark of Democratized media is that it is a conversation, something most journalists are not good at.  There are new rules for this kind of media.

1.  Secrets emerge…get over it.

2.  What is “true” is about trust as well as accuracy.