My goal is to have better music in communication. I want to end with the endless and impersonal hits of usual advertisements and propose high quality sounds and music for all the musical needs: software developpement, Tv and Radio ads, broadcasting, web sites, podcast...  I want to create customized music and sounds, in high quality, for the communication, marketing, media and multimedia world.

Givvy is a comprehensive online giving management system launching in early June. This is a real project with a dedicated team working without funding at this point.

Charitiable giving is personally and emotionally rewarding. By providing a framework and set of tools to improve the way we support our causes, Givvy users will feel more satisfied and successful with their giving.

Givvy is a system to enable donors to accomplish the following:

1. easily create and manage their giving plan
2. research over 1 million charities/nonprofits
3. execute their giving (donate thorugh Network for Good) and track donations made via other methods (mail, phone, etc.)
4. analyze their giving footprint - what types of charities, what geographic reach, how close their actual giving is to their plan, etc.

At Givvy we believe that better tools for giving can result in a better world.

This is a simple mashup using Network for Good’s donation API, with a particular focus on enhancing the donor experience with a virtualization of recent donations.

The NFG API mashed-up with a Google map would show all donations made to specific causes (by location) for a given time period over a US or World map.

This could be used on the homepage of Network for Good - to inspire others based on the action currently taking place.

The Nonprofits of the SF Bay and Silicon Valley become better networked and informed of like-minded people and groups they might not have been aware of, right in their area. Promote local organizations that really make a difference and how you can help.

It looks like green is the new black: eco-chic is everywhere. Companies large and small are trying to cash in on the new eco-economy, showcasing their supposedly green initiatives at every turn.

But how much is green, and how much is one big greenwash?

Greenwashing is a practice of deceiving consumers about the environmental practices of a given company. It's all around us: oil companies making billboards about their one solar demonstration project, coal corporations claiming to be “clean” on television, bustop ads promising environmental enlightenment if only you buy the latest eco-widget.

Progressive and enviros alike have been grumbling about greenwashing for a while in their own narrow circles. It's time to expand that dialogue, harnessing the power of the mashup to catalyze powerful direct action where it counts: in the real world.

Here's how it works: you see a nauseatingly dishonest example of greenwashing near your office. You take a picture of it, and upload it on WeGreenwashYou.org. You plot the location of the billboard on a Google Map, and add a link or two to reports and articles verifying that the billboard is a blatant Greenwash.

And then the fun begins: the community of users gets the chance to Greenwash the Greenwashers.

After watching a quick video-tutorial about how to make simple, cheap paintballoons, the anti-greenwash army finds your billboard. They load up a couple of balloons with greenpaint, launch them from a distance: SPLAT! Job done, and the renegades escape safely under the cover of night.

They make a quick video of their billboard liberation (anonymity preserved by concealing their faces with—what else—green handkerchiefs) and upload their photo/video/text report. Another victory in the public space, another corporation held to a higher standard of honesty. And if the corporation disagrees, let them comment on the action and take part in a lively discussion about the true definition of “environmentally friendly.”

The public will thank you for saving our common visual space from deception. And who knows? Eventually corporations might think twice about greenwashing and might even start some real greening.

Thousands of communities will be able to access data and map resources in their neighborhoods quickly, easily and at no cost to them. Advocates and service providers will be able to use a high-quality, well-designed, reliable platform for uploading data of their choosing and mapping that data against a wide range of demographic data, area resources, and other variables. This project will also allow nonprofit and community advocates across the U.S. to share and learn from each other how they can better use the power of mapping to advocate for and inform change. Not least, communities will be spared countless hours of effort and scarce dollars trying to build such tools from scratch, enabling them to focus more on the important work of finding the right data locally and interacting with people and organizations in their communities. The goal of our project is to make the public functionality of HealthyCity.org, the mapping tool we developed to serve Los Angeles, available throughout the U.S., free of charge, to nonprofit and community organizations. We believe this can be done in a fairly cost-effective and sustainable way, and we are looking for good thinking on how best to do it.
Examples of how Healthy City has worked in Los Angeles include:
- Mapping of overcrowded, multi-track calendar schools, to support a proposal of $25 billion in school construction bonds approved by California voters
- Analysis of areas of highest need for preschool facilities in Los Angeles, leading to over $100 million commitment of funds to develop preschool space
- Mapping of violent crimes and analysis of prevalence of gang crime, to identify priority areas for the City of Los Angeles
- Mapping the mismatch between concentrations of homeless people and availability of shelter space
- Grants analysis for foundations, including determining the location of grantees, the dimensions of their service areas (with information gathered by survey), and the magnitude of grant dollars relative to target population in grantees’ service areas

Travel destroys prejudice and expands tolerance. Travelers are pushed outside of their comfort zones and exposed to different ways of living. Local people get economic opportunities and a stage by which they can continue to develop and share their unique culture with others.

As the Internet provides more links directly between individuals, travelers can find more detailed information on places, but searching for this information is still time consuming. The latest Web 2.0 tools can help travelers find information down to the smallest street corner.

Why this matters:

As the world gets smaller, it seems everything is becoming the same. But if you dive a little deeper, every place is unique and has its own story to tell. Short of hiring a local guide, you might never find this out. Greater understanding of others and their view of the world is vital to achieving peace as the world becomes smaller.

For example, in the first few days after Hurricane Katrina, people from outside the New Orleans area were suggesting that New Orleans not be rebuilt. To the residents of New Orleans, this is unthinkable. The people of New Orleans can use the tools that Geogad provides to help others see beyond the current damage and to virtually tour the city that they love and are rebuilding.

Background:

1. People love to travel and to learn about new places. As vacations get shorter and free time disappears, people don't have time to research the local histories of the places that they visit.

2. Travelers have limited time and cannot always meet the scheduling constraints of organized tour group. These mass-marketed tours may waste a traveler's time with places that do not fit their interests.

3. Local people have a wealth knowledge about their homes and favorite places but are not easy for travelers to find.

What Geogad Mobile Tours will do:

1. Create a tool for travelers and local people to share information on a very detailed level on a location-by-location basis.

2. Let travelers share and rate information on individual tour stops that influenced them with others.

3. Build a community to share the local histories of places with the people across the world.

Bay Area repertory movie theaters are in trouble. (SF Chronicle, Audience Fading for Repertory Movie Theaters, Mick LaSalle, Monday, February 11, 2008). Programming that would have ensured a good turnout 20 years ago may not succeed in the era of NetFlix. Yet the true power of film is best appreciated onscreen and with other people.

There is an audience for repertory film that is not being reached. For the Art Deco Society of California website, I try to track films from the 1920s and '30s being shown in the San Francisco Bay Area. Our membership (700 paid; website/myspace/ecalendar unknown) will attend films of interest (and dress up for it!). It's hard to let our members know ahead of time because there is no single source for showing what's playing at independent theaters, let alone at film venues like the Mechanics Institute, Villa Montalvo, or the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum.

My dream is to create an online data repository for repertory film showings in the San Francisco Bay Area. Each organization showing films would upload their data to a common site that would then feed out streams (RSS, etc.) that could be easily picked up by sites like Yahoo movies. Films would be categorized by decade, genre (silent, precode, noir). Individuals could easily bring up what's playing in their area, or set up alerts for their special interests. The ADSC website could subscribe to an RSS feed for 1920s, '30s, and '40s. Other organizations might have similar needs.

Alchemlist will make donating (stuff) as easy as item, zip, search while creating and expanding community around donation. People will discover non-profits that exist in their own communities, perhaps right next door, that they never knew existed, become aware of their needs, and be inspired to take action to help meet those needs.

Non-profits (especially small non-profits) will receive increased donation of in-kind items and greater visibility that leads not only to donations but to more volunteers and monetary donations as well. The site will help raise awareness about all the non-profits working in our communities and their needs as well as the issues that they formed to address so that we can help ease the needs of our neighbors.

Alchemlist will help save landfill space (and closet space!) as people find homes for items they would have thrown in the trash or gathered dust in their home.

A greater sense of community and altruism will be fostered.

The Voices of Earth (VOE) website will connect internet users with bloggers from around the world. Bloggers will be able to register an account (they will provide the title, url, and feed information for their blog). They will also add their country location. They will not blog directly on VOE – rather, updates on their blog (whichever blogging service they use) will be reported on VOE, organized by region and country. Interested visitors who do not have a blog will also be able to register accounts in order to use certain special features of the site.Any internet user will be able to look for blogs to read, but additional features will be open only to registered users: each lobby will include a “chat” feature where people can communicate with others who are logged in. Additionally, users will be able to create profiles viewable by other registered users. A signature feature of the website will be the “Chat Shuffle,” a feature which will randomly pair an individual user with others from around the world. It will be possible to set parameters, such as a common language, or to simply roll the dice and see what happens. If the chat feature proves successful, then the site can run periodic scheduled group chats on cultural subjects bringing people together for targeted or more thematic discussions.The VOE regional and country pages will also offer visitors informational guides editable by registered users. These will include basic information such as population and country stats, which can be added by the webmaster, but also useful phrases, information about the culture, and recommendations for travelers added by locals. For example, as a user I might edit the USA page and write that in my city, Boston, a useful phrase is “it’s wicked cold!” I would also write that a summer visitor should go to the Harbor Islands, and recommend the North End for Italian food, and so on. Besides being a lively portal to the blogosphere, the website would thus provide useful travel tips.