NetSquared enables social benefit organizations to leverage the tools of the social web.

Congratulations to the N2Y3 Winners, in order: Ushahidi, KnowMore.org and Social Actions! Continue to show your support for all 21 Featured Projects. Watch conference sessions on Fora.tv's NetSquared Channel.

news

Change Broadcasting Channels

3
stars

What will change in the world because this Project happens?

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.

Your Mapper - Know Your Neighborhood

Featured Project
12
stars

What will change in the world because this Project happens?

Three major empowering things would be improved in the world if this project happens.

One: Empowering local public citizens to learn about their neighborhood and take action when they identify a need. Citizens can view interesting things happening around their home and office on a map, and get notified when new things happen.

Two: Empowering local people to collect information that is currently locked up in government databases, and use our toolset to load that data and make it geographically and visually accessible to the public.

Three: Empowering local websites, blogs, news organizations, and companies by allowing them to embed searchable, interactive maps on their site as a service to their site audience.

Your Mapper is an online news organization that empowers people to obtain and load information in their home town, and make it available to their neighbors. We provide the tools that make this happen.

People who load the data (called "Mappers") only have to decide on what data they want, contact their local government agency for it, and assemble it into a spreadsheet. Once the spreadsheet is ready we provide the tools to load it into Your Mapper, turn it into a public searchable map, and let the Mappers manage the data online and updates to the data.

People who look at the the online maps (called "Citizens") can type in any address in the United States, and see a list of all the maps available. They can subscribe to feeds and updates and downloads. Each map will have meta information provided by the Mappers, and Citizens can rate the quality of the data and map content, leave comments, flag inappropriate data, and save their favorite maps.

The community aspects and rating system ensures that the best maps bubble to the top of the site, and even allow Mappers in the same city to 'compete' to load the highest quality, most valuable information to for the Citizens.

Local websites and businesses (called "Community Sites") can choose which maps they might like to put on their own websites, choose the starting point, map size, and other options, and with a little cut & paste can have these maps on their site in no time.

Host

Cisco

Sponsors

  • Microsoft
  • Yahoo
  • Business Objects
  • Raincity Studios
  • Mozilla Foundation
  • Ready Talk
  • .
  • Adobe
  • Linden Lab
  • Network For Good
  • Wild Apricot
  • Stanford Social Innovation Review
  • L'Atelier North America
  • The Panelist
  • Good
  • Fora.tv
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