Net Tuesdays are a chance for social changemakers interested in the social web to come together offline to share success stories, learn about projects and tools, and collaborate. View up-coming Net Tuesday events:
Douala, Cameroon
Washington, DC
Montreal, QC
Find out if there is a Net Tuesday in your city, or start your own!
NetSquared is an initiative ofTechSoup
NetSquared enables social benefit organizations to leverage the tools of the social web.
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Screen Scraping Tools for SEC's EDGAR Database
Update: Continuing my theme of working backwards and getting things done faster than if I had done them the "right way" here is a tool developed by Joshua Tauberer that exposes the entire SEC EDGAR database in the way we need it exposed, and outputs RDF. Now it is a matter of linking to this output and creating a visualization. One more step!
HungerMaps
Voting Summary (Elevator Pitch):
35.1 mil Americans face hunger and food insecurity. HungerMaps fuses new visualization and collaborative technology with the wisdom of advocates, transforming local data into a national portrait of needs and resources as the basis for direct action.
Using Community Walk to Visualize Our Case Studies
The Net Squared in Action section of this site is an inspiring set of profiles written about non-profit inovators and their work with new web tools. One of those case studies is a mapping tool called Community Walk, a tool that uses Google Maps to alow users to create their own maps of any community of interest or other set of geographic locations. I thought it would only make sense to use Community Walk in some way regarding the list of groups profiled in the Net Squared case studies.
Mapping A Community Of Practice
Interviewee: Steve Hargadon
Site discussed: http://www.refurbishedcomputers.us/
Service Used: http://frappr.com
Steve Hargadon is a commercial computer refurbisher based in Sacramento, California. He sells computers to public schools in need of affordable resources and has worked in the past with Net Squared's parent organization, CompuMentor.
Some time ago Steve visited Canada and learned that the Canadian government's computer refurbishment program has supplied public schools across the country with about 25 % of their computers in use. He found this quite inspirational, but was frustrated that there was insufficient infrastructure in the United States to donate such a large quantity of computers. He believes that not enough networking has been done.
New Mapping Tools Open a World of Possibilities
Good visualizations of data probably light up entirely different synapses in the brain than almost anything else. I have long wondered just how truly useful they are, though. Over the past few weeks, I've been convinced that online maps in particular are a very important development.
GoogleMaps is a powerful new tool that people all around the world are utilizing for a wide variety of projects. The system is highly functional, integrates data and imagery beautifully and is very nice to look at at the same time. It is also very welcoming for people who want to manipulate maps to visualize their data.
