Earlier this week, conn+ipedia had its public launch. It is a wiki designed for those working for the common good as a place to share knowledge and connect around People, Places and Things. It's a new kind of wiki, built on Wagn, that combines wiki with database functionality. Here are some links to get you started:

Read some of my thoughts on what I learned from the development process of connec+ipedia!

Read some reasons why I think connec+ipedia will change how you think of a wiki!

You vote, right? But do you use Congresspedia, Wiki The Vote, the SuperDelegate Transparency Project, OpenSecrets.org, FedSpending.org, or PublicMarkup.org to be an informed voter? They are all projects whose creation was facilitated by the Sunlight Foundation to educate citizens and increase transparency in politics.

On March 28th, I talked on the phone with Ellen Miller, the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Sunlight Foundation, about their work. Ellen is also a NetSquared Advocate. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation. You can also listen to it on the little player below, or on the NetSquared Podcast.

Ellen Miller: The Sunlight Foundation is a two-year-old organization that is a combination of a grant-making, and operational institution that focuses on creating greater transparency for the work of Congress.

Thanks to Tantek Çelik for setting up a wiki for us at http://NetSquared.pbwiki.com. I have posted partial chat transcripts there on the N2Y2 page. Here's day 1 and day 2.

I made these transcripts by just copying the log whenever I remembered, so there are some gaps especially at the beginning. Please fill in any bits if you also saved it.

The working draft of redesign for Selearninggames home page received 50 unique visitors over the past 24 hours.   My stats don't tell if some of the visits are coming from the Net2 community.  If they are -- I want to make sure you all know --

YOUR FEEDBACK, comments, edits -- to the working draft would be SO very WELCOME. 

The working draft aims to incorporate two redesign themes emerging from the redesign team: "story" plus "question/answer" mechanism.

I was very interested to see so many projects to date have listed WIKI (4) and BLOG (9) as tools they are using .

I was also disappointed that many of us are not describing the way we plan to USE the wiki and blog tools to accomplish our social purpose. 

Because the wiki and blog are the primary tools for the design phase of my own project - I was really looking forward to learning more about how each of us is using similar tools to serve our different project goals.

I made a few individual comments. But then I thought - heck -  post a general comment -- appeal -- let's figure out a way to tell each other more about how we use the tools

Last week, I wrote about a request I got from Idealist.org to help them prepare a "How to Wiki" guide - to help hosts who are organizing groups around the world, in support of their "Imagine a Better World" initiative (see Britt's interview with Ami Dar about this campaign here).