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.