Through October 31, 2011 you can apply or nominate  for the Antonio Pizzigati Prize. The challenge annually awards open source software developers. The 10,000 USD prize is founded by The Florence and Frances Family Fund of Tides Foundation and honors the brief life Tony Pizzigati, an early advocate of open source computing.

Just after the Nonprofit Technology Conference in Washington another great event for all of the nonprofits and social justice activistsis is coming up on March the 20th. Penguin Day is designed to let nonprofits and social justice activists learn about free and open source software that can support their work and potentially save them money, including tools for web publishing, fundraising, blogging, and campaigning. Some sessions are already planned, but the organizers strongly encourage participants to request a session topic. Penguin Day DC 2011 is organized by Aspiration, PICnet, NOSI and CiviCRM.

This post is cross-posted from the TechSoup blog. You can read the original post and any comments here.

Who can help? Has this been done before? What is the best route? How can this project be sustainable? Crowdsourcing is being used to help find the answers to these and many other questions. According to Wikipedia, "crowdsourcing is the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to an undefined, large group of people or community (a crowd), through an open call." Organizations are crowdfunding, crowd voting, crowdsourcing jobs, and even crowdsourcing films (see Life in a Day). Presentations illustrating its use have also been made available at this year's CrowdConf2010.

Thank you everyone who voted for Kabissa Connections on Netsquared to get us into the final 15 and thank you judges who selected us to be among the 5 winning organizations to receive a $5,000 cash prize. I also would like to congratulate the other 4 winners, in particular Agricultural Marketing Information Services in Cameroon and Integrated Electonic Peace Building Project in Kenya which are both very innovative and powerful projects deserving of recognition and support. 

In a nutshell, Kabissa Connections will address trust concerns by providing a platform revealing the connections that organizations have with networks, international organizations, supporters and service providers. We will do this for organizations working in Africa while collaborating with others on open source tools, standards and approaches that can be replicated in other regions.

I am very excited to receive this recognition for an idea that has been brewing for years and which it appears we will now have the opportunity to implement. We will have more news soon over at kabissa.org on next steps and opportunities to get involved, so please be sure to join Kabissa and subscribe to our monthly member newsletter.

In the meantime, please help make it happen by making a donation to Kabissa. Thanks!  

Crossposted from http://kabissa.org/news/kabissa-wins-netsquared-fact-social-justice-challenge

CrowdVoice.org is a user-powered service that tracks voices of protest from around the world by crowdsourcing information. The platform is open source and can be repurposed for any other cause. Here (and embedded below) is a short video demonstrating its usage and potential.

We would really appreciate it if you can take a few moments and vote for our project at the FACT Social Justice Challenge! http://netsquared.org/projects/crowdvoice

You can find us listed on the first page here: http://netsquared.org/projectgallery

This webinar will cover specific open source tools (some of which you may not have heard of before!) that work well for libraries and the benefits and challenges associated with their use. Meadville Public Library uses open source software on 90% of their public access computers.

Besides my role with NetSquared globally, I also organize a monthly NetSquared event locally, in Cambridge, UK. The July Net2Camb event was led by Will Hall, a PHP web developer and open source enthusiast. He discussed the options, benefits, and risks associated with using open source content management systems for SMEs, charities and NGOs.

Will has kindly written a wrap-up of the event to share with you, and included his presentation slides for your reference:

Google Maps, Open Source and Plotting Ongoing Research: Demonstrating Innovation

It is the perfect time to celebrate CGX 2.0’s birthday by talking about the tangible differences made by ICT-KM’s choice to shift away from proprietary technical architectures and move towards a more ample and sustainable technical landscape.  This technical landscape is epitomized by what is called Enterprise 2.0, “a system of web-based technologies...Read more here.

Wikispaces is looking for translators - interested in helping out?  Wikispaces wants to offer the wiki platform in additional languages and needs the help of others who have strong written fluency in English and the additional language of choice.  This is not a paid-for opportunity, but one that will greatly impact the community of Wikispaces users.

Desired languages include: