I just wanted to share a link with you from the Fourth Web for
Development Conference (UN-Habitat) that was held in Nairobi at the of
2007. 
(http://www.unhabitat.org/categories.asp?catid=546) so if you are
interested take a look!  On the right-hand side if the page there is a
menu and if you go to "Workshop Summaries and Presentations" you will
be happy at youth!

Looking forward to the show! Last year I tried the Net2 experience through virtual means, which proved as expected much less satisfactory that seeing everyone face to face.

I am now independently consulting full time (since November) with Leland Design, working on projects ranging from violence prevention, to lung health, senior housing and nonprofit management.

My recent technology interest is to discover the application(s) that make basic map rendering of data super easy for nontechnical users. Google is great, and the mashups have been exciting and widespread, but the solutions yet have still proven difficult for the average joe with a data export in their hands to manage.

To the dozens of supporters who have found us here, thank you! To our hardcore advisors and leaders who have come here to vote, thank you also. This process has been an amazing journey for the Amoration/ManorMeta team; as this project has gone underground for the last few months we haven't been out there talking about the detail development work happening behind the scenes at AMO Studio. Thanks for keeping us in the spotlight and helping us to find new partners, supporters and friends from Japan to Israel!

Probably one of the last institutions to embrace the web are churches. While the larger congregations aren't jumping on the bandwagon yet, several independent Christian churches are. I spoke to a local pastor who stated that their web presence has brought in several new members to the flock. Could this be the wave of the future?  Time will tell.

-Charles, webmaster for this Las Vegas homes website.

"Amazing things will happen, if you just ask," said Pim Techamuanvivit, aka Chez Pim, the creator of Menu for Hope, and a speaker at last night's Net Tuesday in San Francisco. It was by asking that she got food bloggers and other food lovers to donate raffle prizes to Menu for Hope like tea with Harold McGee, coffee with Thomas Keller, and dinner with Eric Asimov. And it is working. As of this writing (5:15 PM PST) the Menu for Hope campaign has been up for about 3 days and has already sold $12,510.00 in raffle tickets to benefit the UN World Food Programme. Techamuanvivit attributes the campaign's success to, "Community with a capital C." Most of the people who donate and bid on the prizes are part of the food blogging community.

Matt Flannery also started Kiva by asking his community for help. He and his wife emailed their wedding guests and asked them to fund seven entrepreneurs in Africa. Kiva, "grew in concentric networks of community," Flannery said. They are presently providing $20,000 a day in loans to aspiring businessmen and women who are working their way out of poverty.

The audience had more questions than we had time for: Have you ever had prizes not be delivered? How do you prevent fraud? How do guarantee that the entrepreneurs are reputable? Both speakers explained different ways that they protect their donors, but in the end their answers were the same. Trust. Kiva chooses their lenders through recommendations from highly regarded microfinance institutions (MFIs). Techamuanvivit "knows" all of the people who donate prizes through the food blogging community. Neither project can 100% guarantee that all of their loans will be paid back, or that all of the prizes promised will be delivered, but so far their track records are good. Kiva has had a 0% default rate on their loans and Menu for Hope only had one prize not be delivered because of a shipping problem--you are not allowed to ship salt to Italy. "I guess they have enough salt in Italy," said Pim smiling.

This week's episode of This Week in NetSquared News is up on the Net2 podcast.  For the past month, we've been uploading audio recordings from the NetSquared Conference sessions onto the NetSquared podcast channel.  To help you decide if you want to download an hour-long conference session, I'll be including clips from some of the sessions each week in This Week in NetSquared News.  This week, I've included a 5-minute clip from the Gender and the Social Web panel.

An announcement was posted on the New York City Young Nonprofit Professionals Network yesterday about an Internet provider called May First/People Link.  Here's their mission from the web site:

We are an organization of progressive people who use the Internet. We have joined together to improve our access to it, enhance its function as a tool for mass communication and organizing, develop new technologies and uses for it, and help social justice movements use it effectively to communicate with each other and with the world.

They also have some interesting news on their front page about a program in Venezuela to train 400,000 people in open source software and the 7th Annual Organizers' Collaborative Grassroots Use of Technology Conference  happening at UMass Boston this Saturday.

So says a study by the Nielsen Norman group, which I wrote about in my blog, studio 501c.

 Check out this totally cool new site, Code for a Cause.  Looks like folks can participate in two ways, by listing themselves as a developer willing to donate their services to a project, or as a project in need of developers.