"Last week, we put together Sunlight.Live, a site that helped thousands of people follow the White House's health care summit, alongside real-time data on the members of Congress who were in the crowd," explains Gabriela Schneider, Communications Director at Sunlight Foundation. "I think there may be a lot of translatable material - even for issues far outside politics, or events that aren't live - as implementation process and necessary technology would (or could) be the same for a large number of other uses."

For the second year, Change.org is hosting it's Big Ideas for Change in America competion. The competition provides the ability for members of the public to propose innovative ideas and for other members of the public to vote on which ideas they like the best. The 10 most popular ideas will be presented to relevant members of the Obama Administration, and Change.org has vowed to mobilize its community to support the winning ideas.

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

We are so excited to be a part of the NetSquared community. It’s refreshing to have a online venue that supports and encourages socially conscious ideas. We are one of the 15 groups that will be presenting at the N2Y4 conference next week, and we wanted to take a moment to introduce our initiative on the blog along with outlining how you can help support our cause! 

Today I googled "fear of user generated content" after a conversation with a co-worker about creating an artist registry online with social networking features. This co-worker is funded by the government and therefore has a fear deep in her heart of losing funding because of one person who decides to post something inappropriate. Can anybody suggest some examples of government funded organizations sanctioning user generated content? Can anybody help me sooth her troubled mind?

This post is based on a proposal I created for MAPLight.org in early April '08. The mockups are also dated to that time.

Firefox extensions have a huge, largely untapped potential for social change. By changing the way we interact with the web, a browser extension can highlight issues, expose relationships, and raise awareness as people browse the web. More specifically, a Firefox extension could help illuminate the connection between money and politics when and where that connection is often most needed -- when people search for and visit legislators' websites.

I geek out the future of content licensing with Mike Linksvayer, VP of Creative Commons. We talk about why governments probably should avoid using licenses altogether and why social benefit organizations need to open their thinking as they open and share more of their content.

“Institutional Hack” is a delicious, contradictory new phrase for me. Paul Miller (of the School of Everything and from time to the think tank Demos) used it earlier today in this post on his personal blog.

At first you might think an Institutional Hack is one of those cynical folk, the type who’s skill, energy and expertise is focussed on working the politics of their organisation principally for personal gain.Not so. Paul’s idea is the opposite.

It seems one of my efforts has attracted some diplomatic interest, as I learned last week when a collaboration to raise signatures for a petition to recognise the famine-genocide period of Ukraine hit their government news site.

Today I learned that their embassy is sending over a cultural attache. Not to me fortunately to my collaborator who's Ukrainian.

Now he might even notice the Net2 button. Well if it was still there he might,  now it's just a line of text, something about collaborating.

Pleased to see today that a small collaboration effort started two weeks ago, entered the news section of a government website today. We had a simple DotNetNuke framework up within a day, linked with other campaigning groups and gathered public domain material to create:  

http://www.holodomor.org.uk/ 

With the following response a few hours ago: 

http://www.kmu.gov.ua/control/en/publish/news_article?art_id=71671146&ca...

More relevant to our efforts was something that took nearly a year, raising awareness of childcare conditions for the disabled, a week ago we saw it bear fruit.