Last week, the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution to extend its peacekeeping mission in Darfur. The resolution passed overwhelmingly, with all countries in the council voting for it, except for the United States. A U.S. representative did not cast a vote, citing concerns about the wording of the resolution.

"The U.S. abstained in the vote because language added to the resolution would send the wrong message to Sudanese President Bashir and undermine efforts to bring him and others to justice," Alejandro Wolff said. "This council cannot ignore the terrible crimes that have occurred throughout the conflict in Darfur."

Thank you to all those who supported the Genocide Intervention Network's proposal for the NetSquared Mashup Challenge! We were honored to be nominated by the community as a 2008 Featured Project for our proposal to upgrade and extend the DarfurScores.org website:

The Genocide Intervention Network seeks to create a new website, modeled on our successful Darfur congressional scorecard, DarfurScores.org, tentatively named GenocideScores.org.

Our current plan for the site — which could change as we explore different options and hear feedback from our members — has four main components:

• Collecting together anti-genocide data, not only on Darfur but on each of our areas of concern. Instead of being limited to only legislative records, each state would list its status on other anti-genocide initiatives like Sudan divestment and genocide education.
• Provide clear illustrations of legislative status. Instead of just hearing about a bill when a member of Congress does (or doesn't) vote for it, we'll be tracking bills as they move through each chamber.
• Cross-index a bill's status with a member's location. When the latest bill on genocide prevention is up for a vote, anti-genocide activists whose members of Congress represent key votes on the legislation will be able to receive automatic alerts.
• Provide embeddable badges or widgets for activists to place on their profiles, blogs or websites. At a glance, both you and visitors to your website, blog or social networking profile will be able to see how your state and legislators are doing on the question of genocide. And when urgent action is needed, these badges will be automatically updated with a special link to take action.

Now, we want your feedback. If you have a chance, read through our proposal for DarfurScores.org and leave a comment — tell us what you like, what you think could be changed, what we're overlooking. Remember that this is all about our core mission: empowering individuals and communities with the tools to prevent and stop genocide. We hope this project will result in a valuable new tool, and we'd love to have your input!

—Ivan Boothe, Internet Strategy Coordinator for the Genocide Intervention Network

P.S. If you're interested in the work we're doing, follow us on Twitter!

No one likes to feel like they are being watched, especially if they are doing something wrong.

I attended NetSquared last year for its inaugural conference, and I wrote an introduction entitled Can Blogging Stop Genocide? If you're interested in all the details about who I am, how I got here and how it's connected to the project I'm proposing at this year's conference, check out that entry.

What I really want to focus on in this post is how to find ways to collaborate with other participants at the conference, rather than be swallowed up by the competition. But first, and quickly by way of an introduction, I'll say that the Genocide Intervention Network's mission is to:

empower individuals and communities with the tools to prevent and stop genocide.

Perhaps you can see that this fits pretty naturally with the spirit of "web 2.0" and social networking -- user-driven projects, user-generated content, network-centric advocacy, etc. As a result we've engaged in a number of such projects in the past, and happily share our experiences with other organizations.

While thousands of people board planes to visit family and friends during the holidays, Gabriel Stauring and Stacey Martino from Stop Genocide Now will be traveling to the Darfur/Chad border. Starting today, December 21st, they will share stories through daily blog entries and videos. You can see a video of stories they collected from refugees on the Darfur/Chad border during their last trip here.

As part of this awareness-raising campaign, they have issued a 14-Day Challenge. Every time you click on a day's video on the day it was posted, in the Action description, to the right of the video, there will be one word in bold. That word will remain bold for 24 hours. A new word will be bolded the next day. Viewers are asked to collect all 14 words from the 14 actions and send them to 14day@stopgenocidenow.org. If you get them all correct, you will receive an i-ACTivist e-Certificate. The first 100 participants to send the words (even if they have fewer than 14) will win a free "Humanity Before Politics" T-shirt.

You can watch the video from Day 1 here, which includes an interview with Ann Maymann, Senior Officer of the UN High Commission for Refugees. Today's action is to talk to at least five friends about the situation in Darfur and invite them to spread the word and participate.

Are you interested in changing the world by supporting the first-ever permanent anti-genocide constituency? Do you spend a lot of time online and know what an effective advocacy campaign looks like? Can you build a website from the ground up?

If any of the above appeals to you, we hope you will consider the Genocide Intervention Network's online anti-genocide organizer and web developer unpaid internship this fall at our office in Washington, D.C. GI-Net is committed to building the first permanent constituency dedicated to ending genocide. GI-Net empowers its members with the tools to prevent and stop genocide. Currently we are focused on ensuring protection for civilians in Darfur, Sudan.

On May 31, my favorite all-around blogger Jason Kottke wrote that "The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is exploring the use of satellite imagery to detect and prove human rights abuses."

First, I want to thank NetSquared for offering me and the Genocide Intervention Network the opportunity to attend this critical event. I had written out my introduction earlier this week, but due to a browser mishap lost nearly all of it and haven't had time to re-write it until now.

GI-Net is a nonprofit based in DC that is a little more than two years old. We began as a student group at Swarthmore College with an idea: to change the way the world responds to genocide. In her groundbreaking and Pulitzer Prize–winning book, “A Problem From Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, Samantha Power surveys the U.S. response to genocides in the twentieth century and discovers that, above all, the reason the United States so often failed to act, or to act too late or ineffectively, was simply because there was no political will. In essence, it was easier for presidents and members of Congress to do nothing while genocide was being perpetrated and apologize for it later, than risk political capital taking action.

As a result of our origins as a student group, we have a strong history in using online social networking and viral campaigns, and this continues even as we branch out into other constituencies. In our first year of existence, we raised a quarter-million dollars for peacekeepers in Darfur — the only NGO to raise money for protection rather than humanitarian aid — primarily through student networks, both actual and virtual. In my work for GI-Net, I am heavily influenced by Howard Rheingold, Christian Crumlish's The Power of Many, Marty Kearns and Network-Centric Advocacy and similar movements.

How can online activism build a movement that prevents and stops genocide? Read on...

I was scanning through the Net2 news aggregator today for Bay Area nonprofits using the social web (big thanks to Emily for tagging the SF Zoo podcast, the Rainforest Action Network blog,  the Sierra Club blog and the Electric Frontier Foundations's blog), and saw the link for a new blog, Bloggers for Darfur.

On April 30th, there will be a huge rally in Washington DC, and smaller gatherings in other cities, to raise awareness about the genocide in Darfur. Bloggers for Darfur is trying to raise awareness about Darfur, and organize online for people who can't attend the rallies.