Last post of the day and of the month, since I am going back home tomorrow and won’t have Internet access (gasp! horror!) from our Tuscan retreat…

In May 2007, over 300 participants gathered to discuss the 21 Projects that had been selected by the NetSquared community as having the greatest potential to leverage the social web to create social change.

This was a real talent contest between several innovative ideas, from Kabissa’s proposal to strengthen Web 2.0 applications across the African continent through their network of over 950 local organisations, to Yankana’s idea to help non profits located in developing countries adopt and benefit from social web tools, without advanced technical skills, financial resources for infrastructure or english language knowledge.

Only 3 made it to the final stage:

• MAPLight.org, a project aiming to illuminate the connection between money and politics, connecting campaign contributions and votes for U.S. Congress, while providing groundbreaking transparency so that bloggers, journalists, and citizens can hold legislators accountable.
• Miro, an open source, open standards video. Their pitch: “We are to Google, AOL and YouTube what public television is to the big networks. We are a nonprofit, fully open source and open standards, dedicated to creating the next Firefox of web video.”
• Freecycle.org, an initiative that has empowered globally local social networking, with the purpose of creating a gift economy/community: “The magic: it’s easier to give something away than throw it away & keeps it out of landfills; a cyber-curbside; a digital segue from commodity to community“.

Although these are all really good projects, it’s a shame that none seems to address directly the needs of communities in developing countries, which some of the other proposed projects did.

Via the Charity Blog I came across the Village, an online massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) that immerses the player into the role of an entrepreneur building companies to bring prosperity to the villages of the Third World.

Inspired by the logic of Kiva - the micro-credit organisation that allows people to select projects they want to fund through an online database of micro-entrepreneurs - the Village aims to bring the real world of social entrepreneurship and the virtual world of online gaming closer together.

This is a good idea, but still doesn’t answer the question that has been bugging me for the last 6 months: could these two worlds - the real and the virtual - be brought even closer together, and integrated with the increasing universe of mapping tools that are being developed for non-profit organisations and NGOs?

Via the excellent Social Source Commons, a “place to share lists of software tools that you already use, gain knowledge and support, and discover new tools“, I came across this cool list of GIS tools, which have been used by NGOs and non-profits to map their activities online.

For those of you interested in showing on a map what you are doing and how you are doing it. Incidentally, NetSquared is also looking into this technology to understand how non-profits could benefit from adopting them, while OpenAid warns about relying on online mapping tools which are out of date and can hamper rather than aid a relief effort.

Ethan Zuckerman, in his infinite creativity, has just purchased the site http://icanhasprotest.com/. The idea came from an exchange with commenters on an excellent blog-post about the connection between cute cats and web censorship - i.e. how Web 2.0 online tools have been used by social activists, something Ethan has spoken at length about in the past.

The call’s out about what to do with this site. Here’s an idea: how about using it to collect - in a wiki format - all those examples of successful protests, campaigns, rallies, mass-mobilisations, and so on, which have been possible thanks to Web 2.0 tools? This way, social activists will have a one-stop shop where to get ideas on how to adopt these technologies and give feedback when they have not worked…

If you have better ideas, get in touch with Ethan…

Via the PSD Blog, here’s a story about how Google Earth has come to the aid of a Brazilian Amazon tribe fighting for its rights against loggers and miners:

[…] “The Amazon rain forest and its indigenous peoples are disappearing rapidly, which has serious consequences both locally and globally,” said Google Earth spokeswoman Megan Quinn. “This project can raise global awareness of the Surui people’s struggle to preserve their land and culture by reaching more than 200 million Google Earth users around the world.” This is not the first time Google Earth has helped environmental or humanitarian causes. Last year, the Mountain View company joined with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to map out destroyed villages in Darfur, with the Jane Goodall Institute to follow chimpanzees in Tanzania, and with the U.N. Environment Program to illustrate 100 areas around the world that have been severely deforested.

In the case of the Amazon, Almir says improved satellite images would not only keep tabs on loggers and miners but would also help strengthen Surui culture by cataloging medicinal plants, hunting grounds, ancestral cemeteries and sacred sites. […]

Read the full article here.

Partially via the excellent blog of Dan McQuillan, Internet.Artizans, partially just hopping from other sources I had, I keep on unearthing what appears to be a never-ending thread of discussion, blogs, networks, events and activities that are sizzling beneath the surface of the UK/European NGO sector.

There are hundreds of Web 2.0 and FOSS applications out there, which NGOs are making use of, and given the enormous amount of information one can unearth, it is not surprising for many poorly-staffed and under-resourced organisations continue to be overwhelmed by the speed of technological change. Yet one thing is certain: those who are passionate about Web 2.0, and have the time, resources, and dare-I-say age to undersand its potential, see it as the key to the future success of the NGO sector.

Below, I am trying to put together a list which - like the others I have started in the last few days - will try to offer an overview of the most common Open Source and Web 2.0 tools applications which are being used (or could be used) by NGOs to pursue their missions and promote social change (with the exclusion of blogs, which I am covering separately). Open Source software in particular appears to have experienced a boom in recent months, and NGOs are set to be among the first ones to benefit from this creative wave.

The post will be updated as I come across more initaitives. I’ll eventually create a separate list in the blogroll.

• CitizenSpeak is a free email advocacy service for grassroots organizations. Inspired by MoveOn email campaigns, CitizenSpeak provides the same e-advocacy capability at the community level in English and Spanish.
• Drupal is an open source content management platform. Equipped with a powerful blend of features, Drupal supports a variety of websites ranging from personal weblogs to large community-driven websites. Amongst others, it has been adopted by Greenpeace.
• CiviCRM is the first open source and freely downloadable constituent relationship management solution. CiviCRM is web-based, open source, internationalized, and designed specifically to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups (both of these two applications have been adopted by Amnesty UK).
• Psiphon is a human rights software project developed by the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies that allows citizens in uncensored countries to provide unfettered access to the Net through their home computers to friends and family members who live behind firewalls of states that censor.

Here I will try to list different ways in which YouTube has been used by international NGOs to showcase their work, promote their campaigns and get more people involved in international development and social justice issues.

• CAFOD TV has a very interesting page, with - amongst others - videos on its work in Uganda, Unearth Justice trailers from Honduras and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and footage on Darfur;
• One World TV posted a number of videos, including Walking on Water and Gem Slaves: Tanzanite’s child labour (I and II);
• Oxfam GB has mostly promotional/campaigning videos, for example this one about a recent visit by Bollywood start Amitabh Bachchan to an Oxfam second-hand shop.

More to follow soon…

Last post of the day, I promise.

Via Juan’s awe-inspiring blog, I came across this video, which offers a brilliant visualisation of Mexico City’s formal and informal expansion through photographic and digital media:

The video is a close relation to the Tate Modern’s current exhibition on Global Cities, which also sports an excellent film on the growth and future of urban conglomerates, and seems lifted straight out of one of Saskia Sassen’s excellent books. I came across this cool video showing a time-lapse of the installation of the exhibition. Check it out:

On the savory topic of Web 2.0 as a social-change and political participation tool, café babel - the infamous online magazine for Europhiles and their chums - has just launched Babelblogs, a unique multilingual blogging platform in Europe.

Apparently:

• Babelblogs are European: a unique European platform for blogging.
• Babelblogs are multilingual: select your language and have your blog translated by other babelians
• Babelblogs connect Europeans : we want to get Europeans together!

I am not entirely sure of how the system works, but it does look promising…

This video, posted on YouTube a few months ago, earned Amnesty International the Silver Lion at the Cannes Film Festival 2007. It is absolutely amazing:

[via Lentatiblog, on which I will probably write a post soon]