Hey Folks, 

NetSquared will be undergoing some scheduled maintenance over the weekend and access to the site may be limited at times. Not to worry, we’ll be back up and running strong by Monday morning for the launch of the 2008 USAID Development 2.0 Challenge.

See you then!

The NetSquared Team

It's time again for the Net2 ThinkTank!  Here's a question for everyone to think about, blog about, and discuss.  Thanks to Marie Deatherage for helping with it, too!

Topic:
What are the key questions nonprofit orgs should ask to help them determine how to prioritize social media training and experimentation as they do their technology and organization-strengthening planning?

Deadline:
Saturday, October 18th

How to contribute:

As I mentioned before, the NetSquared team has been hard at work building a shiny new submission form!  You can log in to check it out for yourself!

What's this all about?

The new submission form and other behind-the-scenes work is all in preparation for N2Y4 and Partner Challenges with USAID and the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center.  We are talking to a lot of other folks to bring you more and more challenges in the future as well.  We are pretty darn excited, and hope you are too!

A quick update from the NetSquared team!

There's been a lot of hard work taking place behind the scenes at NetSquared on a shiny new project submission form!  You'll be able to view and use this new form soon - sometime in early October.  So, if you were looking to submit a project, you just need to a wait a little longer and we'll be set!

Great news for everyone - Thanks!

Hello NetSquared. Joe, Eric, Christine, and I wanted you all to be among the first to know about the latest web application from Social Actions. This one is a biggy. It would never have come together without the support and connections we made at N2Y3.

Below is a excerpt from the launch announcement, called AdWords-Style Widget Recommends Related Ways to Take Action

Okay, time for an update to let you know what we've been doing at Ushahidi with the winnings from the NetSquared Challenge.

Ory and I are madly dashing around Kenya, meeting with local NGOs and users to determine what we need to build into Ushahidi's Engine (version 2). We helped sponsor the local Barcamp Nairobi, which was a huge hit and brought us even more developers.

After being farmcore all weekend, it's awesome to ease into geekcore with cross-over friends (just look for the tell-tale dirty fingernails). I just met Richard Roth who's been creating Farmer's Markets that have both farm stands and social service booths with wireless internet access and guidance so people can sign up for needed services. Richard also showed me the "Harvest Bucks" his group created--people can exchange their food stamps for the Harvest Bucks and use these at the individual farm stands.

Spread this activist meme: the re-awakening of community through urban farms and farmer's markets.

I happened to sit by Seth Horwitz, organizer of Philly Net Tuesday. As an Information Architect, I was happy to learn that Seth has a background in library and information science. We waxed poetic about name tags and how we liked ones that have personality and content. "Name Tags Are Metadata" Says Seth. Yes!

He pointed me to his blog post on name tags, and the tags people created at the IA Summit in Vancouver.
Maybe at next year's NetSquared conference...

My avatar, Biji Mornington, has been attending Nonprofits in SecondLife (NPSL) meetings at the Nonprofit Commons (NPC; http://nonprofitcommons.org/) on Friday mornings. So when Megan Keane (Penguin Asana in SL) asked me to live-blog this mixed-reality event, I said yes. A lot of the buzz at NPSL meetings of late has been about the launch of NPC's second island, Aloft, and plans for this morning's mixed reality launch event. Our panelists are physically here at the Netsquared Conference and virtually inworld at Aloft. Here in San Jose, CA we can see avatars gathering at Aloft, and at Aloft the avatars also see our panelists by video. Evonne Heyning (In Zenzo) introduced our panel: