I came away from last year's netsquared conference with the mashup bug; I wanted to see mashups for human rights. But one of the practical lessons i learned was that you need to expose structured data to seed a mashup, and that wasn't going to be easy at my work.

Just recently I've been mulling over the contrast between the neat way sites like Edgeio and Eventful pull together event listings, and the pretty random way that info about cyberdissidents gets scattered across the blogosphere. As I understand it, the event sites use microformats so I'm proposing the development of a Prisoner of Conscience Microformat.

I'd be interested in any feedback, especially on the geek aspect (will it work?). But, as the original post says, "The whole point of this somewhat geeky exercise is something very non-technical; to make it easier to construct online communities around prisoners of conscience, and to have ways of visualising and connecting that stir peoples' affinity and will to act".