This represents the notes I took during a short presentation by Dan Newman and Sean Tanner of MAPLight.org yesterday.

MAPLight is a site designed to follow where money and politics meet and how money can affect legislation. It was developed in Drupal by Advomatic.

This post is based on my notes during a short presentation by the Ushahidi folks. It was one of the projects that caught my attention--it seems to me to have far reaching implications not only in regions that are experiencing unrest, but in any situation where crowdsourcing might have value.

Mr Metz gave a great talk on Cisco's marketing strategy. This is a quick overview from the notes I took during his presentation.

He started out by expressing that he was amazed by work that we're (the nonprofit community) doing. This was in reflection that he is just becoming aware of Web 2.0.

21 projects were selected as finalists to potentially share in $100,000 in funding.  The NetSquared participants will vote on the top three projects which will receive $25, $15, and $10K.  The guidelines are:

I arrived today mid-afternoon in San Jose. Tomorrow NetSquared begins and tonight was a lovely Meet and Greet evening. I was fortunate enough to start meeting up with the Nonprofit Commons folks over hors d’oeuvres at the Hotel. It was such a pleasure meeting the folks I've been working with over the last couple of years but haven't met face to face. The only familiar (in a RL sense) face was Beth Kanter, who I've been friends with for quite a few years.

On May 27 and 28th, the third NetSquared will take place in San Jose California. The idea behind NetSquared is to explore the use of the Web and emerging technologies to foster social change.

Our mission is to spur responsible adoption of social web tools by social benefit organizations. There's a whole new generation of online tools available – tools that make it easier than ever before to collaborate, share information and mobilize support. These tools include blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, podcasting, and more. Some people describe them as "Web 2.0"; we call them the social web, because their power comes from the relationships they enable.

I have been asked to present on Drupal as it relates to social change and the non-profit community. My background is heavily rooted in the non-profit world, having worked for various arts based non-profit companies. I also studied arts, technology, theatre, and non-profit management at Virginia Tech. My presentation will occur on the 27th between 4:45 and 5:45 pm.

REVVER is a video site similar to YouTube.  The company is quite a bit smaller than YouTube.  The number of videos on REVVER is much smaller than on YouTube.  While it is a little guy, REVVER is my preferred video site. 

Why? 

The small guy is more likely to try and work with content providers.  You can post messages to the forum on REVVER and get a response very quickly.  The REVVER staff are quite likely to email you directly if you have something you need/want to have resolved.

Posting to REVVER is very similar to posting to YouTube.

Today we had our weekly meeting with the Second Life Non Profit group.

Things are starting to come together with the group. The sim is going to be ready for non-profits to start moving in very soon. The group of non-profits is highly diverse as are the members. They range from arts non-profits, like the one I work for, to medical non-profits.

The meeting updated folks on

• The status of the NPSL Web site, which we are building in Drupal
• Solidified a few additional volunteer roles
• Updated the group on the sim.

CompuMentor is one of the primary organizers of the group and have done a pretty terrific job of herding the cats that are non-profit administrators.