You vote, right? But do you use Congresspedia, Wiki The Vote, the SuperDelegate Transparency Project, OpenSecrets.org, FedSpending.org, or PublicMarkup.org to be an informed voter? They are all projects whose creation was facilitated by the Sunlight Foundation to educate citizens and increase transparency in politics.

On March 28th, I talked on the phone with Ellen Miller, the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Sunlight Foundation, about their work. Ellen is also a NetSquared Advocate. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation. You can also listen to it on the little player below, or on the NetSquared Podcast.

Ellen Miller: The Sunlight Foundation is a two-year-old organization that is a combination of a grant-making, and operational institution that focuses on creating greater transparency for the work of Congress.

NetSquared recently received a $600,000 grant over three years from the Surdna Foundation, a long-time supporter of TechSoup. While at NTEN's 2008 Nonprofit Technology Conference in March, I sat down with Vince Stehle, the Program Officer for the Nonprofit Sector Initiative at the Surdna Foundation. We talked about philanthropy, nonprofit technology trends, and Surdna's support of NetSquared.

I remember [Beth Kanter] doing the first fund raiser over Twitter and thinking: we all talked about changing the world, but she's doing it right now, 140 or less characters at a time.

Dimitri Glazkov is a software engineer who's heavily involved in creating a better Web with code and function like Google Gears. Dimitri was kind enough to give us some time for an email ping pong interview.

There is no end of non-code related work to be done in most prominent open source projects.

Chris DiBona is the open source program manager at Google. This job includes running the Summer of Code program, and managing projects on Google Code. Prior to joining Google he was an editor at Slashdot, and co-founded Damage Studios. He also co-edited Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution and Open Sources 2.0

I believe that nonprofits have a real opportunity to use RSS to change the world. Take feeds seriously and you can get in on important conversations from a position of power through superior access to information.

 

" There are about 50 social networks, and they each have thousands of groups of individuals in these little private circles. It is not like you can send out a blast to everyone on the list and expect them to respond enthusiastically. You really have to do what Jacob Colker did, and go door-to-door--the equivalent of door-to-door online and get to know people, spend some time."

"If you look at nonprofits, I think the successful ones have a passionate core that want to hear what's going on, that want to see what's going on with video, that want to get regular updates, that want to comment, engage, and participate. Social media very much facilitates that in an easy and, as I said, affordable way, so it's a natural fit for what nonprofits are looking for." --Eric Mattson

Before the holidays, I interviewed Eric Mattson, the co-author of the recent study, Blogging for the Hearts of Donors, about social media usage by the 200 largest charities in the United States. You can listen to the interview on the NetSquared Podcast, or read the edited transcript below.

Eric Mattson: Hello, my name is Eric Mattson. I am a Marketing Consultant and social media scholar based in Seattle, Washington. Over the last 12 to 18 months I've been doing a series of research projects with my partner, Prof. Nora Barnes of the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth looking at social media adoption in various industries. For example, corporate adoption by looking at the Inc. 500, university adoption by looking at college admissions departments, and most recently, and part of the focus of this podcast, looking at adoption by some of the largest US charities and nonprofits to see: how familiar are they with social media, are they using social media, are they monitoring social media? Some of these fundamental, foundational questions that seems to still be out there, despite the fact that social media has become a fairly well known space with the advent of MySpace and Facebook and blogs and what not. That's a little bit about me and that's a little bit about the high level view of our research.

BB: Before you did the study, what did you expect to find, and then, what surprised you the most about what you did find?

"I think one of the most important things that we are hoping to do, and we hope that people will help us with, is just talking about the message of open video, talking to people about why it's so important that the way videos are distributed online be open, and where the future of media is headed. Do we want it to be something that has a lot of gatekeepers? Do we want more proprietary systems, more closed off systems? Or do we want to make something that's truly open, truly accessible?"

Nicholas Reville is the Co-founder and Executive Director of the Participatory Culture Foundation, the creators of the Miro Internet TV Platform. Miro was a Featured Project at the NetSquared Conference in May 2007, and the Second Place Winner of the NetSquared Innovator Award.

You can hear an audio interview with Nicholas on the NetSquared Podcast, and a transcript of the interview is posted below.

You can also listen to Miro's 5-minute pitch at the Conference.

Nicholas Reville: My name is Nicholas Reville. I'm one of the founders and the Executive Director of the Participatory Culture Foundation, and we make Miro, which is a desktop application for watching Internet TV, and playing and organizing videos. We're set up as a nonprofit because we think that open video online is crucially important to the future of our media.

Television has been, historically, a very non-democratic medium, something that's been controlled by a small number of people. It's really a one-way broadcast. As that moves online, we have a chance to change that, and make it something that's open to anybody. There are a lot of companies right now that are trying to put video online in a very closed, proprietary way. We're trying to build something open, something that works like the Internet itself, specifically for video, and that's what Miro is all about.

"When we began a couple of years ago, and were just sort of starting our outreach on Facebook, we found there were already dozens of Facebook groups around the issue and working on these issues. It was just about networking them, giving them resources, giving them support in the work they were doing."

"One organization over in Africa that we were assisting, they were so excited with the assistance that they actually went so far as to say, 'Your assistance has meant that our staff was able to provide more assistance to the children here, so that we weren't working on the technology. We were working with the kids that we intended to serve.'"

Grassroots.org's Toolbox was a Featured Project at the NetSquared Conference (N2Y2) in May 2007. You can be a Toolbox tester by emailing Grassroots' Executive Director, Angela Siefer at angela AT grassroots DOT org. For more information about Grassroots.org, listen to an interview with Angela on the NetSquared Podcast, hear their five-minute pitch at the NetSquared Conference, and read a transcript of the interview below.

Angela Siefer: My name is Angela Siefer. I'm the Executive Director of Grassroots.org. We are a national nonprofit; we serve a few nonprofits in the Canada region and a few internationally, but most of our clients are in the United States.

We focus upon the use of technology as a tool for social change.