Whoops. There was an unintended consequence to my 'updating' my slate yesterday which is that Leo Romero has compiled a chart to list "experts'" (aka Net2 staff and advocates) choices,

http://www.netsquared.org/blog/leo-romero/how-experts-are-voting

so when I changed my list based on the last blizzard of entries on April 6, I inadvertently 'demoted' some great projects from Leo's chart.

I asked Jonathan, former of OSI, now of Internautconsulting.com, for his recommendations and he wrote back:

http://www.netsquared.org/projects/proposals/newstrust

http://www.netsquared.org/projects/proposals/light-money-and-politics-ma...

http://www.netsquared.org/projects/proposals/building-a-community-of-mod...

http://www.GenocideIntervention.net/

http://www.netsquared.org/projects/proposals/digital-divide-datas-projec...

On the day before nominations ended, I posted my ten choices of the time. Little did I know that 50 projects would come in on the last day. Also, I've been reading the arguments advanced in the various slate posts and been influenced thereby.

In an email, Siegfried Woldhek of Nabuur just wrote to me:

"What an interesting experiment this is turning out to be. Implicitly at least three new criteria were added to the official, sensible list.
- The size of the mailing list
- The activism of the inner circle

On behalf of the N2 team, thanks for this post, Partha:

http://www.netsquared.org/comment/reply/5074#comment-form

To introduce myself, I'm the founder (in 1987) and president of CompuMentor/TechSoup, the parent organization of NetSquared. That said, we're committed to an open, transparent process and my votes will count as much and no more than anyone else's. And *that* said, we are facing a nice problem, but a problem all the same, and this blog entry is an attempt to address it.

We're having a "heaven help us from getting what we wanted" experience and we're making some people unhappy.

We don't want people to be unhappy but we think we've acted in good faith and creatively Here is an attempt to be transparent about what has happened so people can understand the situation. And it's also an attempt to suggest a pathway toward a shared goal.

When we first started planning Net2, less than a year ago, we knew we were taking a big swing at a ball we couldn't really see. Our premise was very simple and pretty vague. We believed that unlike other tech fads, Web 2.0, or as we prefer to call it, the social web, was only going to get bigger and, even more importantly, represented a profound opportunity for nonprofits, NGOs and those committed to social change.

Net2 has a particular, personal resonance for me.

I started CompuMentor in 1987 after spending time on the Well, one of the first online communities. I met Howard Rheingold and John Coate there, and a bunch of other really smart people. Most importantly, at least from my standpoint, was that the Well seemed to me an inflection point, a new game in town, a "moment".  

It wasn't about the technology. For me, it's never about the technology. It was about social relations. You could talk to people in a different way; there was a different resonance to the conversation and because of that, different resources could be 'liberated' for social change. CompuMentor--which was based on the simple idea that we could create a viable structure for high level, in person technology volunteering at nonprofit sites--was an attempt to act on that idea.