Today, at the NetSquared N2Y4 Conference, The Nonprofit Commons faciltated the Health Panel Expo - an online event in Second Life to showcase recent developments in health care research, and to connect efforts in fighting disease and creating a cooperative and supportive environment for patients and their providers.

Read a great summary of the event on the Anita Borg Institute blog by BJ Wishinsky!

My name is BJ Wishinsky (avatar name Biji Mornington), and I'm the Communities Program Manager at the nonprofit Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology. I had so much fun live-blogging the mixed reality at last year's NetSquared conference that I volunteered to do it again today. There are Health Panels all day today in Second Life, celebrating the launch of the new inworld Health Commons. The 11:15 panel on Mobile Health Information is mixed reality: Second Life and Real Life (here at Cisco's Vineyard Conference Center in San Jose, CA).

 [originally posted on NonprofitCommons.org by gooddogzbeth]

The Health Panel Expo planning is coming together and the event is right around the corner! Here are the details!

PRESS RELEASE

I vowed to post something from my heart about the Health Panel Expo to the two "hall monitors" when they asked..... so here I am, showing up, giving the love. One long run-on sentance at a time. <3 

HopePhones, a new campaign, launched today that enables anyone to provide health services to those in the developing world – by donating your old cell phones!

It could be there's a lot nonprofits can learn from open-source projects!

Open source projects are amazing models for mass collaboration. Many an open source project bring together crazy amounts of developers, often from around the world, and together these developers collaborate to solve problems and build open software solutions that we all benefit from. Contributors are more members than volunteers and everyone takes on different roles that make a difference.

So what can nonprofits & social change organizations learn from the world of open source development that could help them engage their members on a deeper level and create a bigger impact?

One summer a few years ago, Dara O’Rourke was doing what he’d done dozens of times before: putting sunscreen on his five-year old daughter Minju before she went outside to play in the summer sun. The thought occurred to Dara, "I wonder what’s really in this stuff?" So, being a Professor at the University of California-Berkeley, Dara researched the sunscreen. What he found was surprising and disturbing: the sunscreen he’d been putting on Minju for years had a toxic ingredient.

IntraHealth International recently released OPEN Remix to raise funds and awareness for a new initiative created to address critical health issues in Africa by putting the latest open source software technologies directly in the hands of health workers.

Learn more and visit IntraHealth OPEN

The mission of the Community Tool Box is to promote community health and development by connecting people, ideas, and resources.  Our vision is of people—locally and globally—taking action together to change conditions that affect their lives.  The purpose of the Community Tool Box is to build capacity for this work—to make it easier for people to bring  about change and improvement in their communities.

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/f49b798beafb70833c4ff053b33ea6fe.htmAFRICA: Tell us more – Children call for sex education 11 Dec 2008 23:43:25 GMT Source: IRINReuters and AlertNet are not responsible for the content of this article or for any external internet sites. The views expressed are the author's alone. DAKAR, 11 December 2008 (IRIN) - Children in sub-Saharan Africa want to know more about sex and how to protect themselves from HIV, but taboos surrounding children's sexuality can mean life-saving information is kept from them, according to an international NGO.