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This year’s NetSquared Conference will bring together a unique mix of people from the public and private sectors to develop and release Mashups designed to provide deeper insight into the social issues affecting communities around the globe.

Those "people" are you — members of the NetSquared universe working on behalf of communities everywhere and the technical experts who care about these issues.

If we’re successful, we’ll learn something about cross-sector collaboration, meet new and interesting people, and build a unique gallery of Mashups that citizens, schools, and community-based groups everywhere can learn from, replicate, and build upon.

For more about Mashups, see Wikipedia’s definition.

For a better sense of what we mean, let's take a look at a few of our favorite Mashups.

Go ahead, click on the examples below. Read the "about" pages to get a better sense of the project’s goal/mission, and how the site works. (Yes, this is kind of technical, but we’re going to help make sense of that. Enjoy!)

• Maplight.org, a winning NetSquared project from last year, displays the link between money and politics by bringing together information about campaign contributions and legislative votes.
• ChicagoCrimes.org is a browsable database of crimes in Chicago that lets users see information displayed on a map.
• ActiveTrails shows visitors a list of active hiking and biking trails across the United States. Users play a big role in supplying information.
• Tunisian Prison Map pulls from a variety of sources to locate the prisons on a map and links to videos and other information relating to the prisons.

Here's how this works:

On February 1, 2008, we opened the N2Y3 Mashup Project Submission process.

As Mashup Project Challenge Participants start coming in to the NetSquared community, we'll begin recruiting people who have day jobs as Product Managers, Business Analysts, and Engineers at some of the coolest technology companies in the world. (We know these people want to contribute to this work! They’ve already told us so.)

What does NetSquared promise N2Y3 Mashup Project Challenge Participants?

1. We’re going to meet you where you are.
2. You’re going to get as much out of this process as you’re able to give.
3. We’re committed to helping you mobilize and deploy resources appropriately. Our goal is to help you bring your Mashup vision to life.
4. This is going to be messy. With your commitment and vision, we think we can pull this off. But we also recognize that like all projects, there will be unexpected bumps along the road. We expect that, but we want to make sure you do too!
5. We believe that NetSquared’s role as convener of social-benefit innovators and the technical experts will help accelerate the conversations about "open data," "open standards," "data portability," and encourage people to re-imagine collaborative possibilities.
6. Ultimately, we believe this work will help accelerate the use of Web-based tools in the field of social innovation.
7. The $ point. Yes, there will be cash prizes for the best Mashup Projects. We’ve committed to distributing $100,000 to the finalists (more details below).

There are Three Parts to the Challenge:

Applications:

Individuals creating change are invited (and enabled) to tell the community what change they are trying to make, as well as the information and data sources they believe can be joined to help illustrate their mission’s point. For example, you might be trying to illustrate the correlation between childhood asthma rates and Superfund sites. Or you might be working on same-sex marriage legislation and are interested in illustrating the companies that provide health care coverage for same-sex partners mixed together with various kinds of family law legislation.

Recruiting and specification-building:

We will reach out to friendly collaborators who spend their days working with Web stuff to help translate your change into a Mashup project.

Mashup Development:

Finally, we’ll set teams off to the races to start building the Mashups.

Now, for the Key Dates:

02/01/08:

On February 1, the Mashup Project Submission process for the NetSquared Mashup Challenge opens. Nonprofits and other social-change agents will be expressing their visions of how data can be recombined to advance social missions. NetSquared’s team will make sure that everyone gets the appropriate help they need to define their vision in a way that will be accessible and attractive to technical volunteers.

03/14/08:

On March 14 at 5 PM, PST, the ability to publish a Project Submission will close.

03/17/08 - 03/21/08:

Voting for the Mashup Project Challenge. Like last year, registered NetSquared users will be able to vote for their favorite Projects.

03/27/08:

The top 20 Mashup Projects will be announced on March 27 at 9:00am Pacific Time and the winners will be invited to attend this year’s NetSquared conference in San Jose, CA, scheduled for 5/27 and 5/28. Each of the top 20 projects gets an allowance for travel (including airfare to and from the conference, along with a hotel room for two nights).

05/27/08 & 05/28/08:

At the conference, Project Teams will have an opportunity to display and discuss their Mashups and attendees will vote to select the top three. All 20 projects at the conference will receive a share of $100,000 in prize money. The share will be determined by voting at the conference. Of course, there will be more legalese regarding the prize and its allocation after we open the application process on February 1, 2008.

If you have thoughts or feedback, send us an email at net2@techsoup.org.

Start your engines. Hold on tightly. This is going to be fun!

The NetSquared Team

N2Y3 Winners

NetSquared is pleased to announce the top three N2Y3 Winners:

First Place ($25,000): Ushahidi: Mapping Reports of Post-Election Violence in Kenya

Second Place ($15,000): KnowMore.org Firefox Extension - Get Alerts of Corporate Abuses When You Visit Company/Brand/Product Websites

Third Place ($10,000): A Mashup of 29+ Social Action Platforms -- Social Actions

Each of the 18 additional Projects walked away with an equal share of the remaining prize money. Congratulations!