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!

The Genocide Intervention Network, a N2Y2 Featured Project, is one of 12 nonprofit nominees in the Peace Primary produced by the Ploughshares Fund.

It's quite a clever contest. September 1-October 31, 2007 you can vote for the organization, or organizations, you care about the most with your dollars. Each dollar you donate through the Peace Primary site counts as a vote for that organization. They get to keep 100% of the donation and you get to write it off on your taxes. Whichever organization gets the most votes wins $100,000 from the Ploughshares Fund to put towards amplifying their message during the 2008 election.

The other nominees are American Friends Service Committee, The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, Citizens for Global Solutions, Faithful Security, Global Green USA, National Religious Campaign Against Torture, Peace Demands Action
Refugees International, True Majority, Union of Concerned Scientists and Women's Action for New Directions

Hi, Evonne Heyning here liveblogging from the Social Impact room at N2Y2.  

Second Track of the Social Impact Section Panel

Micah Sifry, Personal Democracy Forum

Diana Scearce, Monitor Institute

Alexandra Samuel, Social Signal

 

Projects Presenting

Genocide Intervention Network: to build out the idea (or brand) of the anti-genocide movement. Give people the idea and space to come together for resources. Content available to everyone regardless of organizational affiliation, use these tools to speak with your own voice: GINet facilitates this dialogue.

Ivan Boothe, Genocide Intervention Network

I voted today.

When evaluating projects, I considered the six net2 attributes and also tried to imagine how, if implemented, they would affect the lives of Africans - and in particular the struggles of African civil society organizations to serve the needs of their communities. The projects I chose seemed to me to offer the most revolutionary impact across Africa (and indeed across the world) in part because they make creative use of Web 2.0 to leverage their impact.

Pleased to see today that a small collaboration effort started two weeks ago, entered the news section of a government website today. We had a simple DotNetNuke framework up within a day, linked with other campaigning groups and gathered public domain material to create:  

http://www.holodomor.org.uk/ 

With the following response a few hours ago: 

http://www.kmu.gov.ua/control/en/publish/news_article?art_id=71671146&ca...

More relevant to our efforts was something that took nearly a year, raising awareness of childcare conditions for the disabled, a week ago we saw it bear fruit.   

Well I'm glad I found Net2 yesterday, right up my street as we say, as that's where we're coming from. A selection of other projects on the go which I haven't submitted here.

First, there's the campaign to raise awareness of the Holodomor, or Famine-Genocide in Ukraine, the aim being to leverage public support and encourage MEPs to sign up to a UN declaration.  

http://www.holodomor.org.uk/   

Then there's the current day issue of HIV/AIDS awareness and a collaboration with others using the medium of music to spread the message:

http://lena-ivanova.com.thecoolserver.com/

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.

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 came across Never Again this weekend while writing a post for BlogHer and thought I'd write it up as a Net2inAction case study 'cause they are using almost every social web tool available:

A wiki that anyone can join to share ideas, progress, and perspectives about Never Again.

A blog

Tagging and social bookmarking (they are using the tag neveragain)

Wiki webchats