WiserEarth (World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility) was a Featured Project at the 2nd NetSquared Conference (N2Y2).

They have recently opened up membership to their directory and networking platform to include, "business or government that are creating lasting change in the environmental and social justice fields."

Flickr photo credit: Advice by Laughlin Elkind.

As a representative of one of the N2Y3 featured projects (the KnowMore.org Firefox Extension), I thought it would be helpful to e-mail all of the N2Y2 featured projects and ask them for their best piece of advice for this year's featured projects. WOW! Over the last few days, I got some AMAZING responses from 11 of last year's featured projects – including last year's top three prize winners! They're both practical and inspiring and definitely worth checking out - even if you're not a N2Y3 featured project! 

The first place winner of the NetSquared Innovation Award, MAPLight.org, is looking for a Social Networking Intern. Here's the blurb from Idealist.org:

Last night, N2Y2 Featured Project, TakingITGlobal, received the Microsoft Education Award at the Tech Museum Awards in San Jose, CA. The Canadian-based organization is an online community that connects youth to find inspiration, access information, get involved, and take action in their local and global communities.

They were one of five recipients of $50,000 cash prizes. The other winners were:

"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.

"I think as of 2005, the majority of new Internet users every month, people who have never used the Internet before, no longer speak English as a first language. So there's a huge need for non-English content. We now have our site in 12 languages, and we're working on about 15 others to really meet that demand for further bringing together people with a diversity of language skills."

Michael Furdyk of TakingITGlobal is the 14th interview in our series of chats with the 21 Featured Projects from the 2nd NetSquared Conference (N2Y2).

You can hear an audio recording of the interview on the NetSquared Podcast and hear TakingITGlobal's 5-minute pitch at the Conference, here.

Michael Furdyk: I'm Michael Furdyk, the Director of Technology and Co-founder of TakingITGlobal. We are one of the first social networks for social good and social change focused specifically on engaging young people in important global and social issues and trying to get them to network across cultures and across languages to make a positive difference in their communities, in their countries, and in the world using technology.

In our last N2Y2 Featured Project Profile of the week, we talked with Jim Slama of FamilyFarmed.org. You can listen to the audio recording of the interview, and FamilyFarmed.org's 5-minute pitch at the NetSquared Conference on the NetSquared Podcast.

JS: My name is Jim Slama. I'm the President of Sustain and the Founder of our FamilyFarmed.org project. FamilyFarmed.org connects local and organic farmers with both consumers and trade buyers. We do that in a number of ways, one is through our website, which has profiles and stories and pictures of farmers from states throughout the Midwest as well as Ontario, Canada.

We also have the FamilyFarmed.org Expo, which is both a consumer and a trade show. It's really all about introducing people to these farmers, and artisanal food producers, and helping them connect with them, learn what they do and what they grow, and really building that direct relationship with these producers.

Last month I interviewed Siegfried Woldhek, the founder and CEO of NABUUR for the NetSquared Podcast. NABUUR was one of the Featured Projects at the NetSquared Conference in May 2007. You can read a transcript of the interview below, and hear NABUUR's 5-minute pitch at the Conference here.

Siegfried Woldhek: Hi, I'm Siegfried Woldhek, and I'm the founder and CEO of NABUUR. NABUUR is an old Dutch word that means "neighbor." And it's chosen, that name, because we can now act as neighbors in the global village and help each other out, as neighbors do if they live together in a physical place.

NABUUR makes it possible for villages all around the world to get direct help from people that live elsewhere, far away or nearby, to solve local problems through the Internet. And the strange thing is, the wonderful thing is, that it actually works.