VoteRightNow is about changing the way our democracy works, right now! It's simple but elegant, really. Viral voting will sweep the land as the voters refuse to wait out time consuming and overpriced campaigns. THE PEOPLE will instead opt to instantly elect a candidate with a basic online or mobile phone button/code that asks them to answer one easy question: "Who do you want to be elected...candidate X,Y, or Z?" When political office holders are not coming through, instant recall buttons can similarly allow any and all voters to virtually throw the bum out with another press of the button and the instant tallying of local, regional, national, or international results. The more people that participate on VoteRightNow, the more powerful and accurate a tool it becomes. And the more powerful it becomes, the less usefull long, drawn out election campaign cycles and expensive formal voting become. VoteRightNow saves everyone time and money, and helps to foster greater democratic participation in the process.

How many Americans can interview their U.S. Senator or Representative? With Capitol News Connection’s Ask Your Lawmaker website (www.askyourlawmaker.org) and customizable widgets anyone with an Internet connection can keep their lawmaker accountable. Pioneering a new social journalism, CNC is mashing up traditional shoe-leather reporting with social networking to empower users to ask questions of elected representatives, vote on other user’s questions, listen to audio of a lawmaker’s response, discuss and share the results. Ask Your Lawmaker (AYL) is utilizing the interactivity, customizability and viral nature of Web 2.0 to connect citizens to their Congressional lawmakers and shine a light of transparency on the political process. It is our experience that asking questions other media avoid can help change policy.

Teaming with news staff at local public radio stations and an active citizenry, CNC plans to extend the AYL service to cover state and municipal governments. This includes further customization of the AYL website and widgets so that they allow users to choose between national, state and municipal views, and enable local citizens to get and upload lawmaker or local candidate answers. CNC also intends to create a hyper-personal version that displays a citizen’s own questions and answers. Users can harness a Drupal-powered website, embeddable Flash widgets customizable by state and issue, Google maps and other APIs – in addition to CNC and its 200+ partner stations’ accredited access and editorial experience to create original news stories that build on user dialogue and lawmaker responses. User-created content will be featured on Ask Your Lawmaker, www.cncnews.org and myriad other blogs and sites, as well as broadcast on local public radio stations nationwide. Utilizing new widgets, AYL users will be able to share, discuss and promote the questions they asked of lawmakers as well as the content they created based on those answers on social networks like MySpace and Facebook, and via SMS on cell-phones.

The aim is to build user communities that exist on the local, regional and national level are linked to each other via social networking sites and Ask Your Lawmaker. By publishing and tracking individual and group questions for lawmakers, coupled with the ability to create and publish new content based on those responses, Ask Your Lawmaker is a living example of how local voices can truly set the news and legislative agendas.

A Superfund site is an uncontrolled or abandoned place where hazardous waste is located, possibly affecting local ecosystems or people. Sites are listed on the National Priorities List (NPL) upon completion of Hazard Ranking System (HRS) screening, public solicitation of comments about the proposed site, and after all comments have been addressed.

For many years, I lived in a very large Superfund site area without knowing and I'm sure many are in the same situation. This is because the EPA's pollution information is buried in the files on the web that are not easily human readable. Even the information provided by the EPA is only cursory, naming possible hazards and whether is has yet been deemed "clean."

The "EPA Superfund Mashup: Exposing Environmental Hazards In Your Area" Project will make the 200+ Superfund Site's information visually available and human readable. It will promote engagement and accountability in private and public cleanup efforts and encourage those who live and work in those areas to document cleanup efforts and the human effect of large scale air, water, and soil pollution.

Politicians raise millions of dollars to fund their campaigns, and they often pay back campaign contributors with special access and favorable laws. While many people know this, they are do not know how much our money-dominated system affects them and the issues they care about.

Mapping Money and Politics is a “mashup“ showing campaign contributions on a map. It provides unprecedented transparency, providing an informative and appealing way to compare candidates and track special-interest giving.

Watch the video tour of Mapping Money and Politics

With this groundbreaking project, anyone can create, view, and share maps of contributions from the oil industry, labor unions, or any other interest influencing government. You can compare candidates, to see who has the most local support and whose financial support comes from out-of-state. You can even display income, ethnic, and other demographic information along with campaign contributions, to better understand what neighborhoods and populations have a greater or lesser stake in our democracy.

Mapping Money and Politics lets you zoom from a map of the whole U.S. down to your local neighborhood. We aim to illuminate the connection between special-interest campaign dollars and your own state, town, and neighborhood.

Looking at the country through the lens of campaign contributions helps you see the distorted terrain our legislators work in. It’s no wonder they can’t take straight action on the serious problems facing our country.

Mapping Money and Politics is a visual mash-up--it’s better to see it than read about it. Watch our 3-minute project tour now.

Ushahidi was initially set up to mainly document incidents of violence, looting etc. during the post-election crisis in Kenya. Over time the website began document peace efforts and ways to help.

The impetus behind the website was a belief that the number of deaths being reported by the government, police, and media is grossly underreported. We also were of the view that we don't have a true picture of what is really happened/is happening- reports that all have us have heard from family and friends in affected areas suggests that things are were worse than what we have heard in the media. Beyond trying to present are fuller picture of what happened based on citizen reported information, we also want to create an archive of events that occured after the election results were announced.

Once we are done with the mapping of incidents, we also hope that we can begin to put names and faces to the people who have lost their lives and create a memorial of sorts.

What’s the point of all this you might ask?

Well, Kenyans have demonstrated their capacity for selective amnesia time and time again. When this crisis comes to an end, we don’t want what happened to be swept under the rug in the name of “moving forward” - for us to truly move forward, the full story of what happened needs to be told - Ushahidiis our small way of contributing to that.

Ushahidi will change in the world in the following ways:

1. There will be more awareness about incidents of violence of looting in post-election Kenya, these incidents may not have neccessarily been covered by mainstream media. There will also be a visual timeline of the events post Dec 27, allowing people to track points of escalation and cooling down.
2. More information about efforts to promote peace by Kenyan citizens on the ground and information on how people can help.
3. There will be a digital archive or "memorial" of sorts for the events that have happened in Kenya so that we can never forget.
4. There will be a documentation of information that can be used in any future peace and reconciliation efforts.
5. There will be an opportunity of the hitherto unnamed and unseen victims of the violence to tell their stories.
6. There will be a model that can be replicated in other future crisis events.

ARMSFLOW is a data visualization which displays arms transactions globally between 1950 and 2006. ARMSFLOW provides a context for historical and contemporary geopolitical events by allowing visitors to see the international flow of weaponry, sorted by year, country, and direction of sale.