Building community in your area? Check out the newly-launched Community Organizers Handbook! Everything you need to start and grow a NetSquared Local group or any other community-powered program.
NetSquared is an initiative ofTechSoup
NetSquared enables social benefit organizations to leverage the tools of the social web.
Politics
The Texas Observer Citizen Networking
Challenges Entered:
Watch-Dogging the Texas Legislature with IObserve
In early 2010, The Texas Observer made a giant leap - transforming a static, 90s era website into a dynamic multimedia site with citizen op-eds, lively dialogue, aggregated content, video and audio produced by the Observer and, most significantly, a social networking feature where Observer subscribers can develop profiles (or import them from Facebook), interact with writers, suggest stories, and write personal blogs. Our traffic has doubled since the launch - we have 50,000 visitors per month.
Location
The Texas Observer
307 W. 7th Street
Austin, TX 78705United States
30° 17' 32.7264" N, 97° 44' 18.816" W
See map: Google Maps
Expanding Worldview
Challenges Entered:
Expanding People's View on World Issues
On the Twitter account our goal is to present little known facts (ex: the formation of America including the addition of the phrases of "In God We Trust" and "One Nation Under God" in 1954/1956 during the Red Scare of the McCarthy era and against the wishes of the founding fathers). We have news updates from Human Rights organizations, Major News providers and Environmental Agencies.
Our website is constantly updating and has articles relating to Human Rights issues such as Equal Rights for Women, Online (and off) Stalking and Harassment, Donations for National disasters, Links and information on organization where you can receive help or volunteer, etc.
Location
Place of Business
Oklahoma City, OK
United States
See map: Google Maps
Beyond the Bite
Challenges Entered:
Beyond the Bite provides "actionable intelligence" about what members of Congress are doing and saying in a manner that is palatable not just to the hardcore activists who use most watchdog sites already, but to the casual audience to which most of us belong.
Location
Sharon, PA
United States
See map: Google Maps
VoteRightNow
Challenges Entered:
People with interact with a smallish widget on any website or cell phone that asks them a voter-relevant question, like who do you want to be President of the United States: Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, or John McCain?" Or it could say "Should local city mayor X stay in office?". All votes are instantly tallied and a current, up to date vote count is made visible on the screen overlayed with a map of all voter locations. Finally, The mashup will include a sidebar for advertising. That's how it gets paid for and is part of the business model for long term improvements and sustainability. And we need it to be sustainable so we can do things like translate the tool into multiple languages and ultimately host a site where global, up-to-the-minute voting becomes centralized and easily searchable.
Location
Washington, DC
United States
See map: Google Maps
Ask Your Lawmaker: Connecting Local Communities to their Lawmakers
Challenges Entered:
Ask Your Lawmaker draws its information from three primary sources: user-generated questions and comments; lawmaker responses to user questions; and CNC exclusive news reporting as informed by users of AYL widgets. Because widgets are customizable by state and issue, CNC reporters have a better understanding of local concerns and issues. The plan is to team with government transparency sites like Maplight.org and Open Congress, bloggers and issue-based sites and social networks such as Care2.com to provide AYL users with raw data necessary to inform questions and evaluate answers towards active and effective citizen engagement. We want to build APIs that link to supporting information from other sources, encourage collaboration and allow sites and blogs to build on the answers via partnerships with citizen journalists site such as Helium.com. where API would allow debate around lawmaker answers to continue and translate talk into action. We want AYL users to create and collaborate on news stories or follow-up on original CNC coverage by mashing up audio of lawmaker responses with supporting or contradictory data provided by partner sites, bloggers and public radio stations and first hand experience based on user comments.
EPA Superfund Mashup: Exposing Environmental Hazards In Your Area
Challenges Entered:
Online, users with interact with photos, videos, public posts and detailed EPA data.Offline, people will be encouraged to document cleanup (or lack of clean up) activities and human stories of how living in such an area effects their lives. They can send tagged data to flickr, youtube, and post stories on blogs that will then be parsed to the correct Superfund site, making documentation collaborative, public and dynamic.
Location
Berkeley, CA
United States
See map: Google Maps
MAPLight.org: Mapping Money and Politics
Challenges Entered:
You can choose from a range of current issues, legislators and interest groups. You can compare them at the national, state, or local level, across time or against each other.
You can interact with campaign contributions to the politicians who represent you in Congress and, eventually, in your state and for your town. Does your elected official represent your interests? Our maps showing bases of support--both in your area and outside of it--help answer that question.
Location
Berkeley, CA
United States
See map: Google Maps
Ushahidi: Mapping Reports of Post-Election Violence in Kenya
Challenges Entered:
Ushahidi consists of citizen-provided data - reports of violence from the ground in Kenya via mobile phones (SMS), email and the website form. We geocode this data using the Google Maps API.What we're looking to do is add additional functionality, including more specific points on the map of Kenya for each incident, meaning additional map overlays. We would also like to create a "heat map" that shows which areas are in deeper conflict at a specific time. Some thought has been given to marrying this idea up with the current timeline feature. Lastly, we would like to add a seperate data point, "news". This presents a great opportunity to link news stories with citizen reported violence, YouTube videos and Flickr images to give a wholistic viewpoint on any one report. Ideas surrounding how to handle duplication of content, better geocoding, map overlays and how to best integrate other APIs are greatly appreciated!
What else have you done in this area of work?
Ory Okolloh is the co-founder of www.mzalendo.com (a website that keeps an eye on the Kenyan Parliament). She is a graduate of Harvard Law School and is best known for her blog coverage of the Kenyan election and post-election fallout on KenyanPundit.com.
Erik Hersman is the founder of www.afrigadget.com, and WhiteAfrican.com, where he analyzes and talks about developments in the web and mobile space and how they affect Africa.
Location
Nairobi
Kenya
ARMSFLOW.org
Challenges Entered:
ARMSFLOW includes 14,619 arms transactions (each is a sum of 1 year's exports) and 228 government entities. The governments of origin and destination are geocoded using Yahoo's Geocoding API. The data was used with permission from the SIPRI Arms Transfers Database in Stockholm.
Location
New York, NY
United States
See map: Google Maps
Subscribe
NetSquared Newsletters:
>>Subscribe to NetSquared News and other email updates.
NetSquared Community Blog:
>> Subscribe to the Community Blog RSS feed.
>> Subscribe to the Community Blog comments RSS feed.
