Nonprofit tech assistance project NetSquared has opened the voting for their Mashup Challenge this week and it's a great place to discover a long list of interesting mashups being built to make the world a better place.
We've written about one participant here before, MoveSmart, and another really good one (SocialActions) reached out to us this week with a handy Sproutbuilder widget embedded below.
Only a masochist would brave the interface for voting on the best of all 120+ entrants, but if you register for an account and peruse the tag cloud of topics then you risk only the trouble of excessive rhetoric and insufficient summary bullet points in the project descriptions. (Sorry!) Top vote winners will travel to the NetSquared conference where they can receive financial and technical assistance to propel their projects forward. Logistics aside, the contest is a great place to check out a bunch of cool mashups.
Netsquared is a project of the larger organization Compumentor, where you'll also find related work being done at TechSoup.org. These are all great organizations (I used to work for NetSquared) that deserve the attention and support of the larger tech community.
Readers interested in nonprofit tech should also check out the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network, NTEN.org, whose national meetup is occurring this week in New Orleans. Both organizations represent large, vibrant and exciting communities of technologists and people who love them.
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While reading this article, and I was struck that it probably was relevant to a social networking site, HumanBook, which has over 250 million profiles of people, including you, your friends, classmates and relatives.
The HumanBook is a mutually managed people directory. People list their own real-life connections, and other connections they have awareness of, to create a lifelong network. The network houses the connections, and then the collaboratively updated address book nurtures them, assuring that they need never be lost. HumanBook is the tool that will allow you to cherish and sustain all of the connections of your whole life. So if you're interested, go to http://www.HumanBook.com and find your profile today!
Posted by: John | March 19, 2008 1:09 PMHi Marshall,
Thanks for blogging about the NetSquared Mashup Challenge and for including the sprout I built for "A Mashup of 29+ Social Action Platforms." I've been getting a lot of positive feedback about the initiative.
It's no easy feat to get 'competitor' sites to work together. In this case, 29+ social action platforms are being asked to move away from a "walled garden" approach to social change by embracing open standards for indexing and syndicating the content on their sites.
The mashup we're creating will result in an open API of all peer-to-peer social change campaigns. Any 3rd party developer will be able draw on the open API to create new web applications for identifying and supporting relevant campaigns.
It's important that tech savvy professionals vote in this contest. They are in the best position to see the value of a mashup and judge its potential to scale. If any of your readers get stuck in the voting process, they can get in touch with me by email. I'll do my best to respond as quickly as possible.
At the moment, I'm at the NTEN Conference in New Orleans, and can attest to the vibrant community that is nonprofit tech. I'm so immersed in this community, I sometimes forget that a for-profit tech community also exists! ;-)
Thanks again for posting about the mashup challenge. I'll mention the write up to people from Compumentor and TechSoup this evening.
All the best, Peter
Posted by: Peter Deitz | March 19, 2008 2:14 PMMarshall,
Thanks for writing about the ' NetSquared Mashup Challenge'
I have submitted a mashup named SocialHub - Dashboard for social change
Thought behind SocialHub:
If you think you do, when you do you should share because when you share you spread awareness and make people think. SocialHub is all about aggregating the latest and most popular content from various social change initiatives (platforms, websites, blogs) together and create a dashboard for social change.
SocialHub will act as a starting point for you and me who want to keep themselves updated about the latest and most popular content related to effecting positive social change. In addition this will also be of great value to social change initiatives to be showcased and build traction among its constituencies.
Would love to receive some feedback on it from readers. You can leave your feedback here.
Posted by: Akshay Surve | March 20, 2008 7:19 AMYour code for the anchor with text "a long list of interesting mashups" is wrong, you use attribute herf instead of href, so the link is not valid.
Posted by: rickdog | March 20, 2008 9:30 AM<a herf="http://www.netsquared.org/2008/conference/projects">a long list of interesting mashups being built to make the world a better place.