The impression most New Orleanians have of Central City is that of a war zone inhabited by degenerates looking to prey upon innocent victims and each other. I-Witness Central City is a storymapping project that aids residents in reclaiming their history and their neighborhood through personal stories accessible online and via a cell-phone walking tour.

I-Witness Central City grew out of an earlier oral history program known as the I-10 Witness Project (www.i10witness.org). I-10 Witness emerged immediately following Hurricane Katrina as a means of giving those affected the opportunity to record their experiences and give their perspectives a place in the larger conversation about what happened here and how to move forward.

The stories that make up I-Witness Central City are organized not by topic but rather by location. There are two ways for listeners to access these stories. They can find them via video markers on a Google map or they can walk around Central City and look for our signs indicating that a story happened where they’re standing. A person can call up the number and hear the storyteller’s own voice setting the scene.

Some of the stories we’ve collected happened recently; some happened long ago. Kids growing up in Central City today might never know about the jazz funeral that the Free Southern Theatre held for itself in 1980 or who painted the murals of civil rights workers under the overpass. Others might hear a more personal tale of a resident finding love for the first time or a child confronting the neighborhood bully. Our project helps the neighborhood learn about itself and offers outsiders a whole new way of perceiving this much-maligned area of New Orleans.

People are becoming more socially responsible, and want to be up-to-date with news about social change and impact. Plus, they are self organizing in online and real world communities to work together and bring change.

CBC (Change Broadcasting Channels) allows users to select channels of social change, and receive instant news about these channels on a mobile phone through SMS or twitter. Every channel has a community of subsribers that use the community tools to promote and share big stories and events. create momentum to find solutions to problems and trigger change.

Today there are a few barriers to getting instant access to socially relevant news:

· Relevant news needs to be obtained from sites dedicated to socially responsibility.

· Most of these sites have information from blogs and RSS feeds. Very few if any, have information from global news wires.

· These sites by nature offer a pull-based model, rather than an alert-based one where the user is notified of any news of interest as it happens.

· The user does not have much flexibility in choosing the news they want to track.

The idea of Change Broadcasting Channel is to create channels of news about issues of social change, and the endpoint for these channels is your mobile phone. Twitter serves basic phones with only SMS functionality. Flurry serves phones with a data plan.

A user can subscribe to an existing channel or create their own, based on a set of keywords.

Each channel has a community which is the group of subscribers to the channel. And this community gets triggers (the SMSes/twitters from a river of news) that create momentum, driving them to address their cause.

CBC will also integrate with http://www.groundreport.com to bring real user-reporting on channels mixed with mainstream media news from Daylife.

Change Broadcasting Channels will change the world by instantly informing socially active individuals of news of their interest, eliminating any delay in action. These users are part of communities where they actively use the modern tools to bring out the most relevant stories and issues and cultivate a discussion to find solutions.

Since 1995, Green Map System has engaged communities worldwide in charting a sustainable future. Now, we’re taking the next step by merging local knowledge and our freshly updated iconography with a Google Map mashup to create an open interactive Green Mapmaking website that will inclusively help people worldwide quickly share their own selection of sustainability sites, pathways and resources online. The resulting interactive Green Maps will be viewable from our own and many other websites, starting in mid-2008. With open commentary, green ratings, multimedia elements, 'impacts index', mobile access, on-site markers and more, everyone will be able to get involved.

My Green Map (working name) will give a powerful voice to thousands and ensure that an enormous diversity of successful sustainability activities and critical issues are shared with the broadest audience possible. It will merge the booming ‘local first’ and green development movements with social networking and interactive mapping. It will draw from a rich data source: thousands of green living, nature, social and cultural resources already charted on 335 published Green Maps, used by millions both near home and while traveling.

Our network of 450 locally-led map projects in 50 countries will be the first to add sites to My Green Map. Each of their mashups will be linked to profiles and the locally-designed Green Maps already viewable at GreenMap.org. Once technical and financial barriers to participation have been overcome, we intend to phase in public mapmaking and behavior change assessment, mobile formats, thematic worldviews, and more. Thus, the N2Y3 Mashup Challenge can play a key role in promoting inclusive participation in sustainable community development around the world.