How many times have you had a brainstorm on how to improve your local community? What about that dangerous intersection that needs more warning lights? Or an idea that could help your city become a magnet for fill-in-the-blank activities? Head to MindMixer, a platform that is helping organizations communicate more effectively with their communities.

One of the biggest roadblocks to implementing local community ideas is finding resources in city government or local organizations who might be able to help. More importantly, how can you involve like-minded individuals in the discussion?

MindMixer = A New Type Of Civic Engagement Platform

A new type of civic engagement platform - like MindMixer - can help. MindMixer is in essence a “virtual town hall,” a community forum where constituents can meet to discuss issues and share ideas. (Here’s an overview of how MindMixer works.)

Without time and location constraints, citizens can conveniently share ideas while managers gain community insights. According to the 2012 CivicPlus Digital Citizen Engagement survey, 40% of citizens want to provide input on municipal government.

From Los Angeles To Calgary

MindMixer COO Nathan Preheim tells me that the company has attracted more than 300 communities, including San Francisco and Los Angeles, plus its first Canadian client, the city of Calgary. Among civic, education and healthcare organizations that are using the service to engage their communities, the governor of Colorado is using it to better engage his entire state.

Here are a few examples of how municipals governments are using MindMixer:

Orlando, FL: When residents were asked how much more they would be willing to pay to have half of their food sourced from local farms, 36% of respondents said they would pay 10% more, and 22% said they'd pay 5% more. While the response rate was low, it shows the potential of civic engagement as the use of these platforms increases.

Boulder, CO: InspireBoulder held a Reusable Bag Design Competition on the MindMixer site. The winning design is set to be used on 30,000 reusable grocery bags to be distributed by the city.

Park City, UT: One resident’s idea to implement a community composting program became a reality when Park City’s Environmental Sustainability Manager approved the concept, which is similar to an ordinance passed by the city of San Francisco.

MindMixer Buys VoterTide

MindMixer recently acquired VoterTide, a social media intelligence company that specializes in activating audiences who follow hot topics for political campaigns, non-profits and special-interest groups. Preheim says the company’s thinking was, “How can we use social media to help our clients better engage topics?”

All existing clients will have access to Votertide audiences. Going forward, adds Preheim, “We are in the process of building an application framework, called Community Insights.”

Given the current pressure to shrink governments, the populace will have to take more active roles in the governance of their communities. Platforms like MindMixer could make it easier for people to take on and succees in those new roles.

If you tuned into the Presidential debates this past Fall you may have caught the one moderated by CNN personality Candy Crowley. Remarkably, it was the first presidential debate moderated by a female in 20 years. Wonder how that dry spell ended? Because of a petition created at Change.org.

Debate organizers were influenced by three Montclair, N.J. high school students, who, inspired by a civics class, were able to sign up more than 180,000 supporters for their online petition.

30 Million Signatures

One of the biggest challenges of finding innovative new ways of doing things is monetization, and that's where Change.org shines. The company has in effect become a marketing machine for mostly non-profit organizations. It has also boosted its beneficial standing by becoming a certified B Corp.

Change.org is designed to make creating petitions easy, and features selected petitions on its home page.

Future Changes

The way Change.org works is simple. Anyone can start a petition for free, but qualified organizations can send sponsored petitions to specific Change.org members by paying a premium. “Every package is custom built for each sponsor,” Dulski says, adding that “we have people in house who know how to make petitions stronger.”

The future for sponsored Change.org petitioners seems bright. Dulski promises that the company is “going to develop a great analytics platform for sponsors, so we’re able to better reach the kind of people who are passionate about their causes.”

One recent victory had 200,000 Gatorade consumers using Change.org to demand the removal of the controversial ingredient BVO from its product bottles. Gatorade removed the ingredient, scoring a victory for the 15-year-old Mississippi teenager who started the petition.

International Action

While most of its biggest victories have been in the U.S., Change.org has become a global phenomenon. “We have staff in 18 countries,” notes Dulski. A perfect example of that global power was the petition calling for Malala Yyousafzai, the Pakistani girl shot for advocating female education, to be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. This petition, posted by Tarek Fatah of Toronto, has gained more than 287,000 supporters.

With influence comes power that translates into more galvanizing events - and that, in turn, attracts even more users. Do you have an innovation that could use the gravy train of a complementary business? Can you leverage the Time Compression Ubertrend to create a service that helps consumers save time? I’m ready to file my petition to help America become more innovative.

The recent political conventions underscored a few disconcerting trends. Our political leadership is not only out of touch with reality but also tends to distort the truth. How can social-media-based innovations address these challenges?

Given that social media excel at connecting people with society’s leaders, there is no question social entrepreneurs can play a major role in the country’s future. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted in his company’s S-1 IPO filing that he viewed Facebook as a tool that could “bring a more honest and transparent dialogue around government that could lead to more direct empowerment of people.”

While Zuckerberg believes that social media can more bring accountability to the political process and offer solutions to some of our biggest problems, how is this vision being realized? A number of startups are approaching the social engagement process in different ways. 

Clicktivism

Founded in 2006 by two Stanford University undergrads, Change.org aims to overcome microcosmic challenges. The company lets citizens create online petitions. Its most famous win was “forcing” Bank of America to rescind its planned monthly $5 banking fee, a petition started by a 22-year-old nanny Molly Katchpole.

Demonstrating the budding interest in online activism, often dubbed “clicktivism,” Change.org has signed up 17 million members and is adding 2-3 million clicktivists each month, according to Change.org Communications Manager Charlotte Hill.

In August, Change.org helped three high-school students succeed: in getting a woman, CNN’s Candy Crowley, to moderate the presidential debates, something that hadn’t occurred since 1992. (Look here for other Change.org victories

Hill tells me that Change.org generates revenue by accepting advertisements from non-profits, basically “sponsored petitions.” The formula may be working because the company already has grown to 150 employees.

Civic Engagement

POPVOX was born to address the problem of too much information. Founder and CEO Marci Harris worked as a legislative assistant in Washington and discovered that congressional staffers were drowning in too much noise, so the idea to create an online sentiment platform was born.

POPVOX automates the process of constituent communications with their political representatives. The online platform makes it easy for citizens to follow proposed legislation and express support or opposition, which is then sent with a personalized note to involved representatives.

Harris tells me that POPVOX relies on a freemium model. Politicians are welcome to place a free widget on their site but if they need analytics, the company is more than happy to oblige for a monthly subscription fee.

POPVOX users are not required to be citizens or even registered voters. So users can keep civic logins separate from their Facebook or Twitter login. This feature lets members rely on anonymous screen names yet communicate with Congress using their real name.

Voter Engagement

Votizen takes a different approach. It spent a lot of money and time digitizing voter registration records for 200 million Americans. It took two years to capture the data, which was supplied by local registrars on floppy disks, magnetic tape and even spreadsheets.

The resulting 1TB database was used to create a social-media-driven service that lets members discover who their social media connections like - or to find like-minded individuals. Votizen has raised $2.25 million from the likes of Napster co-founder Sean Parker and angel investor Ron Conway in addition to Twitter celebrity Ashton Kutcher.

Votizen believes politicians and activists will pay to reach its members, selectable by affinity or geography. The service says it has so far attracted 1,549,231 members. Votizen co-founder and CEO David Binetti says the goal of the service is to reduce the role of money in politics by making “the size of a person’s network more important than the size of their wallet.”

Clearly, social entrepreneurs have heeded the call to help reshape America’s political landscape, whether through clicktivism and heightened civic or voter engagement. I plan to look at the other challenge, realtime transparency and fact-checking, in an upcoming post.

Soldier on America and do contribute your ideas to our Social Revolution ideation engine.

Combine their penchant for creating social change with their innate entrepreneurial inclinations, and it you might expect a wave of Gen Y-owned non-profits to launch in the next few years. That might still happen, but the latest research suggests that non-profits may not actually be the best way to drive social change.

Much has been made of Gen Y’s dedication to social change. A study from Walden University and Harris Interactive, released last year showed an astounding 81% of Millennials had “donated money, goods or services” to promote positive social change. The “Social Change Impact Report” also indicated that “70% of Gen Y adults have educated others about a cause or issue, and 68% have participated in volunteer work or service.”

This apparent desire to change the world has carried over into Gen Y’s career plans as well. Steve King and Carolyn Ockels of Emergent Research make the preliminary argument citing among other studies a Pew Research report that says 22% of Gen Yers believe “having a job/career that benefits society is ‘one of the most important things in their lives.’” Just 14% of adults over age 35 believe that.

So bring on the non-profits, right?

Not so fast

For Profits Can Do More Good

It turns out that starting a non-profit might not be the best way to change the world. Geri Stengel, the founder and president of Ventureneer, a company that helps educate socially-responsible small business owners and social entrepreneurs, says there are several options startup entrepreneurs should consider before launching an organization dedicated to social change.

She suggests your “first choice when starting a company to create a social impact should be a for-profit business,” because she says, the “revenue streams are more reliable, and there are more dollars available (both debt and equity) for starting and growing.”

Hal Shelton, a small business mentor who sits on the board of directors of The SCORE Association, agrees that starting a nonprofit is not your best choice. “True, one of the few advantages of starting a nonprofit,” he says, “is that you’re eligible to receive grant money. And contributions to your nonprofit are tax-deductible for donors.” But non-profit founders still have to aggressively raise those funds.

Non-Profits Are Harder To Start, Sustain

Shelton adds that it’s a bit more cumbersome to start a non-profit. You have to establish a formal board. Paid employees (including founders) are generally not eligible to sit on that board, which could limiting your independence. In addition, he says, every state has different not-for-profit regulations, so entrepreneurs need to check with their state regulators before they even get started.

Stengel says there are better options that allow you to launch a for-profit business, yet still enable you to effect social change. One way is to create a B Corporation (an option I wrote about several months ago in ReadWriteweb). Or you could become a L3C, or “low-profit” corporation. The state of Vermont, the first state to enact this type of company, explains that an L3C is “a cross between a non-profit organization and a for-profit corporation. The entity is designated as low-profit with charitable or educational goals.” So far only a handful of states have passed L3C legislation, though other states are considering introducing it.

4 Good Ideas

Both Shelton and Stengel suggest starting a for-profit company, and then use the profits to establish a foundation to do your good works. Or, Stengel suggests, you can implement these ideas:

• Give a percentage of profits [or revenues]to an existing non-profit that supports causes important to you.

• Match employee donations to non-profits of their choice.

• Source ethical suppliers.

• Minimize harm to the environment.

If you still insist on starting a non-profit, Stengel says “make sure you know where your long-term reliable revenue streams are going to come from.” She advises founders to “Look at comparable non-profits to determine how they generate money. Does the government pay them fees for service? Does their money come from foundations or individuals? If individuals, are they small donors or major donors? Or do they generate revenue from cause marketing or licensing?”

The key is that entrepreneurs can still effect social change whether they operate a for-profit or non-profit business. As Stengel says, your company can “make a social impact by using an innovative approach to solving a social or environmental problem, and using business discipline to ensure your business thrives, so you can develop sustainable solutions for the problem.”

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

Inventor Nikola Tesla may finally get the recognition he deserves if cartoonist Matthew Inman has his way. In a bid to buy the land on which Tesla’s former Shoreham, New York laboratory sits, the creator of The Oatmeal has launched an IndieGoGo fundraising campaign to come up with $850,000 in 45 days.

Inman’s efforts seem likely to be successful: in less than 48 hours, the fundraiser has already pulled in more half a million dollars!

Welcome to Wardenclyffe

The $850K goal is half of the $1.6 million needed to buy the land on which Tesla’s Wardenclyffe laboratory sits. A non-profit is seeking to purchase the land, which still has the old laboratory as well as the foundation for an experimental tower Tesla built to attempt to deliver wireless energy. The State of New York will provide a matching $850,000 grant, if the non-profit can come up with the rest.

The money raised in Operation Let’s Build a Goddamn Tesla Museum will go towards the land itself… Inman’s launch of the Operation details that there will still need to be money raised to actually put together a museum once the land is purchased. So Inman has also called for corporate sponsorship for the project, such as J.P. Morgan, whose founder supported Tesla during his lifetime; Tesla Motors (obviously); and as atonement for Thomas Edison’s alleged crimes against Tesla, from General Electric - the company Edison founded.

“The Internet will love you forever, I promise,” Inman wrote to GE.

Big Name Donors

Beyond the strong success of the general fundraising campaign, Inman is getting some of the big-name love he seeks. Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk didn’t put company money into the project, but did pledge some of his own cash to the cause. Publisher Tim O'Reilly and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales have also made the call for donations.

There is still an “if” here. Another purchaser is interested in buying the land and converting it to retail/commercial use. Inman outlined that his effort could still be outbid.

Tesla is a particular cause for Inman, who made the case for “Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived” in his typically cutting style earlier this year. That particular cartoon stirred up some controversy, particularly with its raw criticism of Edison, who got a lot of the credit that Inman and many others feel should have gone to Tesla.

“…The only thing Edison truly pioneered was douchebaggery,” Inman’s stated in the comic.

Inman's Earlier Tesla Dust-Up

Inman’s passion on the topic of Tesla is almost legendary in the geek community. Forbes social media editor Alex Knapp took exception to Inman’s original Tesla comic and was blasted by Inman for his troubles.

Inman’s gift for fundraising is also legendary. When he accused the site FunnyJunk.com of stealing content from The Oatmeal site in 2011, he was threatened with a defamation lawsuit by FunnyJunk lawyer Charles Carreon unless Inman paid the owners $20,000 in damages. Incensed, Inman’s response was unique: he would raise $20,000 in donations, take a photo of the money raised, and mail the attorney for FunnyJunk that photo along with a drawing of Carreon’s mom seducing a Kodiak bear. The money would be donated to the National Wildlife Foundation and the American Cancer Society.

This led to Carreon personally suing Inman, the National Wildlife Foundation and the American Cancer Society (a suit that would later be dropped). And the fundraiser? That would raise a staggering $211,223.04, which Inman photographed, as promised.

Given Inman’s enthusiasm for Tesla, and the past responsiveness of his fan base for his causes, Inman may indeed get the Goddamn Tesla Museum project on track: land, museum and all.

Tesla picture by Napoleon Sarony (1821-1896) [GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0 or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Editor's note: Black Girls Code has reached its goal, but you still have until midnight to support the Summer of Code campaign. San Francisco-based Black Girls Code is within a few thousand dollars of funding a campaign that will teach programming to more than 300 kids from underrepresented areas around the U.S. over the next three months.

Black Girls Code is "dedicated to teaching girls... from underrepresented communities about computer programming and digital technology." The nonprofit is using the momentum from a sold-out June workshop at DeVry University in Oakland, California, to hold workshops in various cities across the United States - Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco and St. Louis, to be exact - in 90 days. 

Classes range from "Build a Webpage in a Day," to Ruby on Rails tutorials. 

When retelling how she got her start in computer programming, BGC founder Kimberly Bryant wrote of "feeling culturally isolated."   

"Much has changed since my college days, but there’s still a dearth of African-American women in science, technology, engineering and math professions, an absence that cannot be explained by, say, a lack of interest in these fields. Lack of access and lack of exposure to STEM topics are the likelier culprits," wrote Bryant on the About page of Black Girls Code. 

"By launching Black Girls Code, I hope to provide young and pre-teen girls of color opportunities to learn in-demand skills at a time when they are naturally thinking about what they want to be when they grow up." 

At press time, Black Girls Code had raised $12,477 out of their goal of $18,500, with only 33 hours left to go. Some of the funding will go to the creation of a "mobile computer lab" encompassing 15-20 laptops, "which will allow Black Girls Code to take their workshops to students in their communities and schools."

Developers and NGOs worried that Google's proprietary, for-profit platform operates at odds with the World Bank's mission of alleviating poverty. The bank addressed those concerns yesterday, taking a clear stance in support of open data and explaining the limits of its relationship with Google.

The World Bank is a gatekeeper giving developing countries access to first-world capital for alleviating poverty. It's a tricky role to play. The bank has a track record of using open data initiatives to support its programs, though. That allows regular citizens, especially developers, to have an impact on the World Bank's work at the grassroots level.

That's why it was so perplexing when the World Bank partnered with Google to gain access to its closed Map Maker data. Map Maker allows anyone to suggest edits to Google Maps that can become official if approved by Google moderators.

The partnership is meant to provide better location data for relief workers in disaster scenarios. There are open-source efforts to solve this problem, like Ushahidi, but the World Bank went with Google instead.

Google Map Maker is highly visible, easy to use, and working on it comes with the prestigious possibility of being published to the official Google Maps. Access to that much map data must have seemed worth the price of closing off the platform.

Given the World Bank's open history, the implications were troubling. Nathaniel Heller, co-founder of the pro-transparency NGO Global Integrity, met with the World Bank's open data team last month to discuss the partnership. His post about the meeting outlines the concerns about the public-private partnership in exquisite detail, but he also found that the World Bank team saw the problem, too:

"One, it is clear that our friends and colleagues at the Bank a) understand the seriousness of the concerns expressed by a number of groups and individuals in the past month, and b) are taking concrete steps to address those concerns. I applaud that. What's also clear to me: the legal and data ownership implications of a platform like Google Map Maker got mixed up in the rush by the Bank to try and promote greater public access to existing Google Map Maker data."

The Bank's Open Stance

Yesterday's post on the World Bank's Inside the Web blog makes a few things clear. The World Bank's "single goal of this joint project is to provide UN agencies and governments faster access to Map Maker data for humanitarian, development and disaster preparedness efforts."

The World Bank just wants as many data sources as it can possibly get. These data are for helping people in emergencies, so the more sources there are, the better.

But the bank takes another step to make clear that this partnership is limited and doesn't affect its open data initiatives. "[O]ur agreement does not extend to supporting new citizen mapping activities or data creation through the Google Map Maker platform." All the applications supported by the program will be built on the open platforms, not on Google's data.

It's hard to argue with the World Bank wanting access to as much location data as it can get to help in emergency situations. It's a relief to see the organization clearly state that the applications it wants to support will come from the open-source community.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock

Photo 2 via Google LatLong

Access to these data will help governments, NGOs, researchers and individuals plan without waiting for the changes to be approved and added to the official maps. World Bank partner organizations, such as government and U.N. agencies, can contact World Bank offices to request access to the data. Kenya, South Sudan, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Zambia, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Moldova, Mozambique, Nepal and Haiti will pilot the project.

Google's New Gatekeeper

This partnership could improve response time and effectiveness in crises in underserved areas of the world. It's just a shame that Google has decided to compete with Ushahidi and other open-source efforts to solve this problem. Access to Google Map Maker data is privileged, and Google has chosen the mother of all elite gatekeepers, the World Bank, to facilitate this program.

The World Bank has supported much-needed online mapping efforts, such as the April 2011 project in South Sudan that enabled Google to put the new country on the map. It has also financially backed apps supporting economic development in a worldwide contest for software developers. In partnership with academic institutions, the World Bank has also backed a Web-based knowledge platform for urban development.

These are all great efforts, but they establish a familiar pattern for the World Bank. In Web technology, just as in global economic development, the World Bank has positioned itself as an unavoidable, privileged gatekeeper, and this time Google helped.

No More Open Source

We've reached out to Ushahidi for comment on the news, and we'll update with the response. While Ushahidi's non-profit, open-source efforts carry on, Google is closing off access to its mapping platform upon which great works of software were once built. Having realized the enormous value of Google Maps as a resource, Google decided to start charging for API access last year.

That's Google's commercial prerogative, but its proprietary efforts are now in competition with the open-source community. Today's partnership with the World Bank is a clearer example than the murky history of access to the Google Maps API. Google Map Maker is a moderated Google program, and Google has selected the World Bank as an arbiter of its data.

Last December, Google overhauled Map Maker's editing tools to make it easier for any Google Maps user to add new data.

What do you think? Is the World Bank a good choice for Google as a partner? Share your thoughts in the comments.

There's value in all that stuff. Los Angeles-based startup KarmaGoat is working on capturing it, and then giving you 900 ways to give it away to charity. Sell your excess stuff online and donate the proceeds to the cause of your choice. It's just an experiment for now, friends exchanging things with one another. But lots of folks are buying a new phone every year. What do they do with the old ones? If KarmaGoat can scale up, all those phones could be re-sold as a swarm of little mini-fundraisers for any of almost 1,000 causes (so far).

Who Needs All This Stuff?

Homes are full of excess stuff. Not everybody has excess stuff, of course. Not everybody has homes. But an economy driven by consumption generates, in the aggregate, lots of discarded stuff. Clothes, plates, CDs, books we'll never read again, loose leaf paper, the wrong brand of something or other we bought by accident at the grocery store. All of this has resale value. We could just re-sell it ourselves and keep the money. But that would take work. Sometimes, it's worth it. iPhones re-sell for lots of money. Other times, it's too much trouble. In that case, it's a sunk cost. But that's wasteful, and consumers could put this waste to use.

For RWW readers, gadgets are an easy example. We probably have more gadgets than the average bear, and even old gadgets are worth something. Not just in raw materials, recyclable things, spare parts. We have phones that would work. Somebody might need that restore disk. Classic iPods are the best. I'm sure somebody would pay good money for some of that. But it's just sitting there, right? It's no loss to you. It might only fetch $9.88, anyway. Why not donate the proceeds to a good cause?

Building Karma

When KarmaGoat is ready, it could help us do that on a grand scale.

"KarmaGoat is an online marketplace where you transform your stuff into the stuff people really need in the world," says founder and CEO Jonathan Lehmann, "like drinkable water, medical kits, school supplies, or a goat." The Heifer Project - which donates livestock to people in poverty, providing them a living, breathing economic lifeline - is one of KarmaGoat's founding partners, hence the name. KarmaGoat lists almost a thousand causes to which sellers can donate their proceeds, and users can submit their own.

Meeting, Buying, Selling, Giving

Sellers list items on KarmaGoat with a photo, description, location and price, as well as their chosen charity. The KarmaGoat marketplace operates on what Lehmann calls a "meet-and-buy system." It's a two-step purchasing process. On an item page, the button under the price says 'Meet & Buy.' Clicking prompts the buyer to enter credit card information, but the card isn't charged right away. Instead, the buyer receives a password - "like, 'sillyrabbit,'" Lehmann suggests - and then arranges to meet with the seller. If the item meets the buyer's expectations, the buyer gives the password to the seller, who then enters it on KarmaGoat to complete the transaction.

Users are protected from fraud, and payments go straight to the seller's chosen charity. KarmaGoat keeps 15% of the transaction for itself. It's a for-profit enterprise. But 85% of a transaction made possible by KarmaGoat goes to the charity of the seller's choice. Proceeds are paid to charities in one check on the 15th of every month.

Once the company gets out of startup mode, KarmaGoat plans to draw up legal arrangements to make sellers' donations tax deductible, but the necessary legal expertise is out of reach for now. KarmaGoat says that's its "utmost priority" for the next phase.

KarmaGoat accepts payments from all major credit cards using Authorize.net, a company owned by Visa. "We're using all the industry-standard security measures to keep our users' information secure," says James Chung, head of technology and product. Chung worked for mobile retailer LetsTalk.com for six years, and he brings that experience with online payments and security to KarmaGoat.

The service connects to Facebook's Open Graph to pull profile pictures and info, as well as to share the social activity of buying and selling old stuff with friends. Hawking a used Xbox for charity on Facebook is also a great way to promote one's cause of choice. On the KarmaGoat side, the Shop Now page lets users filter for items their friends are selling, as well as by category, cause, price and location. On the MyKarmaGoat page, users can view their friends on KarmaGoat and browse their causes.

"The idea was to make this an experience among friends and other well intentioned, like-minded individuals," Lehmann says.

The site lists over 900 causes, and it allows users to submit more for the KarmaGoat team to add. People affiliated with the organizations can also control the content on their KarmaGoat cause pages. The Causes page offers browsing by category and features a menu of the causes added by community members. It also displays 12 featured charities chosen by the team, including KarmaGoat's three founding partner organizations.

Meet The Partners

In addition to the Heifer Project, KarmaGoat has two other founding partners. One is the United Way of Greater LA, which fights poverty in the Los Angeles area. It hosts an annual event called HomeWalk, which LA Lakers star Kobe Bryant is helping to sponsor this year. KarmaGoat and the United Way of LA are exploring the possibility of a drop-off donation system - as an alternative to meeting and selling - to support certain kinds of causes.

The other founding partner is the Somaly Mam Foundation, which fights human trafficking and sexual slavery. Somaly Mam and KarmaGoat recently teamed up for a fundraiser in Los Angeles, and they're working together on KarmaGoat's first celebrity campaign, which is yet to be confirmed.

The idea is to get celebrities to sell their regular old stuff on KarmaGoat for charity at a fixed price - rather than the typical practice of selling their collectibles at auction. This isn't intended as a primary source of fundraising, but rather as an inspiration to get everyone to sell their stuff to benefit the same organization.

With these key partners, KarmaGoat is brainstorming and getting some marketing advice. It's also reaching out to their existing donors to encourage them to use KarmaGoat to support the causes they care about.

Reaching Into Closets, Not Wallets

KarmaGoat's focus for now is developing the best practices for a local, in-person marketplace before expanding. There's no formal process in place for shipping items and the refund hassles that might be involved, but that's because the team is focused on building a good user experience and culture in a close-knit market first.

KarmaGoat was founded on the UCLA campus, and university populations are its first target market. The site launched in beta on May 19, and UCLA students are its testers. Anyone anywhere can use the site now, but the active community of buyers and sellers is at UCLA, and that's where the team is developing the service and its features for now.

"College students are passionate about causes," says Chung. "They might not have cash to donate, but they have stuff. Instead of reaching into their pockets, into their wallets, they can reach under their beds or into their closets to find stuff to donate and raise money."

Students on campus are also a concentrated population. Lehmann adds that close proximity enables students to easily meet up and exchange the textbooks, furniture, gadgets and other stuff they're already used to buying and selling all the time. The tight-knit campus environment helps KarmaGoat build a culture around donating excess stuff this way.

Once KarmaGoat, along with its initial partners and student testers, figures out the model that can have the most impact, it plans to expand its marketing message to "be everywhere." It can be used by anyone already, but the company is focused on developing local marketplaces to figure out how best to expand its formal presence.

Burning Man Values

KarmaGoat was inspired by the gifting culture of Burning Man, which is a playground for a large and growing portion of Web workers. The desert festival is built upon ten core principles that serve as guidelines there, and the principles of gifting and decommodification underlie KarmaGoat's values.

"Burning Man is a theater that can represent many experiences in your life," Lehmann says, "and one of the great wealths for me of the Burning Man experience is when you're able to reproduce [its values] outside in the real world. I've always like giving gifts and getting gifts, but before Burning Man, I never gave a gift to a stranger. This is something I discovered there."

"KarmaGoat hopefully will be this experience adapted to our existing online world," Lehmann says.

Where's My Goat?

KarmaGoat has a knack for social media, and the team uses Facebook and Tumblr to spread its message. There's a great photo album on the KarmaGoat Facebook page called "Where's My Goat" that shows off the KarmaGoat SillyBandz all around the world. The KarmaGoat Tumblr shares new causes, beautiful photos, general nonprofit news and more. The goat also tweets as @karmagoat (baaaaaa).

Be sure to follow KarmaGoat and stay tuned. This is the kind of Web startup that can change things on and offline. High technology is churning through our stuff every day. New devices replace old ones, or they replace dozens of paper books we don't have to lug to our next apartment. CDs are becoming vintage. There's all kinds of stuff we could give away that's still valuable to someone. And donating old stuff to charity through KarmaGoat does give something in return: the gift of having less stuff.

Burning Man photo credit: Josh Adler

ZURB says the donations of time and effort for this event exceed $30,000 each time, and that the first three events have raised over $100,000 for their partners. ZURB has found that the collaboration benefits both parties, even if it sounds "crazy:"

"This event gives the ZURB team a chance to help a nonprofit get unstuck by giving back in the best way we know how - by helping them solve problems through our time and effort. We get to stretch and grow while sharing our unique skill set for designing things for people."

Many nonprofits, especially small ones, have a lot on their plate, and building a great Web portal often takes a back seat to more immediate concerns, even though a website might be vital. It's great of ZURB to offer their creative and technical services as a donation.

Check out this video from last year's event in partnership with Resource Area For Teaching (RAFT):

In order to speed up its search process, CoverCake is constantly running possible search permutations on its data and then vetting the results with humans. The clean dataset is then available to users with the analytics already done. Even the raw data is accessible, not just the processed charts. If you want to see 10,000 Facebook comments about a specific book, CoverCake likely already has them.

This makes CoverCake's data set valuable to anyone interested in the market for books. Boopsie, a mobile book discovery app for libraries, has already integrated CoverCake's data using its API. The new analytics tools now allow users to find or track books using CoverCake's own website.

We've been covering some experiments in publishing lately, and Web technology has enabled rapid innovation in this quintessential pre-Web industry. CoverCake's interface and data science could help bring more precision to a new way of publishing.

The company's business focus, says Business Development Director Todd Gibson, is "primarily on publishers and authors," who derive the most direct benefits from this intelligence. The only way for the rapidly shifting industry to get smarter, he says, "is for them to figure out what people really like, outside of sales figures." The byproduct of that also happens to be an interesting book discovery tool for consumers.

The consumer appeal of these analytics tools is not as obvious as it is for a social service like Goodreads, which helps users discover new books through recommendations from their own social networks, as well as some original content like book lists and interviews. CoverCake lets readers see what books are popular now, as well as who's talking about them, but it's up to the user to filter the data to find what he or she is looking for. But for authors and publishers, CoverCake has an advantage over other enterprise analytics tools, because it's focused on the market that matters to them. Its dataset has limitations, but those can be an asset.

CoverCake's book discovery capabilities can be accessed through its free iOS app. The Android app offers more features, letting users filter by genre and see what books are trending in online conversations. Future versions will include analytics capabilities. The company is also working on an algorithm to separate out conversations about different editions and formats, enabling users to distinguish between print and e-books, for example.

The U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) seized the domains as a way to fight piracy on the Internet as part of its "Operation in Our Sites" campaign. The EFF joins Mozilla in fighting government domain seizures after Mozilla defied the Department of Homeland Security over Firefox extension MafiaaFire in early May.

Puerto 80 filed a brief in the Second District of New York on June 13 to petition for the return of its sites. Rojadirecta allegedly hosted pirated streams of sports content, leading to the domain seizure. In its brief, Puerto 80 denies that to be the case.

"The Rojadirecta site does not host copyrighted videos or streams of sporting events, and the government does not allege that it does. It indexes links to streams of sporting events that can already be found on the Internet," the brief stated.

Rojadirecta.com and Rojadirecta.org were bought by Puerto 80 from GoDaddy.com and hosted by Verisign, both U.S. companies. The company is claiming hardship with an "entire halt to all traffic to the subject domain names." Puerto 80 claims that the "seizure constitutes an unlawful prior restraint on speech, in violation of Puerto 80's First Amendment rights, and Puerto 80 will continue to suffer deprivation of its First Amendment rights if the property is not immediately returned."

Puerto 80: We Link and Discuss, That Does Not Make Us Criminals

Essentially, Rojadirecta claims that it was just linking to the content that the U.S. government thinks is pirated. The company does not host the streams. Puerto 80 says that its primary function as a website is to host discussion forums and link to said content, which it says does not mean it is committing copyright infringement.

"This misguided intellectual property enforcement effort is causing serious collateral damage to free speech rights," said EFF intellectual property director Corynne McSherry in a release. "These domain seizures should cease unless and until the government can fix the First Amendment flaws inherent in the program."

ICE has seized 125 domains since it started "Operation in Our Sites," according to the EFF. Some of those sites are undoubtedly destinations that pirate content. The EFF protests that government actions of "unilateral seizure of domain names without a court ruling." If this were in the physical world, as opposed to the digital world, it would be the equivalent of the government shutting down a retail store without a court order because it believed the store was a location for drug trafficking.

On May 14, a group of 75 Silicon Valley technologists, computer science students and others met at Stanford for a Cloud to Street hackathon designed to create tools Egyptian activists have requested.

According to the post on Stanford's d.school blog, participants "included computer programmers, web designers and social scientists both from Stanford and Silicon Valley, as well as a number of Egyptian activists that joined in via videoconference" and two who attended in person.

This hackathon resulted in three workable prototypes.

"In addition to the constitutional crowdsourcing platform, the Hackathon produced a web platform to allow interested citizens to train themselves to monitor the September 2011 Parliamentary elections. The third was an interactive tool to inform Egyptian citizens about candidates for that election, and once they are elected, to inform Parliamentarians of their concerns and rate them on their efforts to delivers."

One of the attending activists, Ahmed Salah, reminded participants that the two qualities any successful tool created for democracy activists in Egypt need to be have are, they must be "free (since most activists are unemployed) and they need to be secure (to prevent people like him from being thrown in prison)."

According to We are all Khaled Said, Cloud to Street hopes to organize a second hackathon in the coming month, this one to be held in Cairo.

"Newspapers, for the first time, will be able to request that feeds of nonprofit materials be delivered directly into their content management systems through AP's Webfeeds software. The project will begin testing with nonprofit organizations in California and will use Internet delivery feeds that have been put in place at newspapers over the past year."

The move is occasioned by the increase in public service journalism by foundations and other non-profits, which have made up in part for a beleaguered for-profit journalism sector. This is an outgrowth of an earlier project that used several nonprofits to provide content on specific issues such as campaign financing through an AP website.

Partners on that undertaking included ProPublica, the Investigative Reporting Workshop, the Center for Public Integrity and the Center for Investigative Reporting. Joining these established partners will be the Maynard Institute.

This project is for organizations that provide journalism free of charge. AP already has the APT system in place for the distribution of non-profit journalism content that for which its providers charge.

According to the Nieman Journalism Lab, the pilot project was not all that successful, as AP partners did not pick up a lot of the content. A lot of this problem may have been technical. AP has transitioned from its traditional satellite "wire" to its Web-based AP Exchange. But to find stories there, editors needed to search for them, not likely to be a common event for anyone who's spent time in a newsroom.

This iteration, however, will be using the AP Webfeeds tool, which will bring streams of stories to the user based on keywords and other criteria. This should make the process of reviewing stories for possible inclusion a lot easier and overcome what was essentially a technical-traffic obstacle.

Printing press photo by Carol Guillaume

So imagine if you could have access to data about what over 165,000 teachers in over 43,000 public schools said some of their most important classroom needs were. Imagine if you had the data about over 300,000 classroom projects that have inspired some $80,000,000 in charitable giving.

That would give you a richer picture of what was happening in the American school system. It could highlight what teachers say they need for their classrooms. It could highlight what donors wanted to support.

So here you go then, because that's just what DonorsChoose.org is doing. The charitable giving website is releasing its data as part of a contest, aptly titled Hacking Education.

A Kickstarter for Education

For those unfamiliar with the site: think Kickstarter for education. Teachers pitch their classroom projects, and if they get enough donor support, they get the funding. By "classroom projects," I don't mean "we're taking a field trip to Barcelona." I mean "we need books for a special needs class." "We need historical maps." "We need a computer."

Hacking Education Data

So DonorsChoose.org is looking for developers to build either apps with its API or perform analysis on the datasets. The former is important as, despite the impact the organization has had, the team remains small. "There's only so much we can do," says Oliver Hurst-Hiller, DonorChoose.org's CTO, who says the organization would like to improve its UI and have a mobile app.

But the API and data are open to any number of projects as part of this hackathon. And the data is fascinating. It will include grade level and geodata, type of school (public or charter), and poverty level, for example. It will include information about the resources teachers are requesting - the amounts and prices for musical instruments, cameras, iPods, calculators, and the like. It will also include - all anonymized, I should add - the text from teachers' essays.

But it isn't just information about what teachers need help funding. It's what donors are interested in supporting. Again, the data is anonymized, but there is information about donation sizes, topics, and preferences. And the data also includes search logs, so you can see for example, that most donors who go to the site search for projects related to Autism.

This is interesting and important stuff.

You Win, We All Win

Hurst-Hiller admits that it's somewhat self-serving for DonorsChoose.org to run a hackathon to have developers work on its platform and data. But in the end, he says, the efforts will help more classrooms and could encourage others to build similar marketplaces in support of other social endeavors.

Oh and if altruism and Audrey's appreciation aren't enough here: the prizes! These include a trophy, handed to you by Stephen Colbert (along with tickets for you and a couple of friends to watch a taping of his show), an Xbox 360, your data analytics turned into an infographic by Column 5, and much more. You can read the full details of the content here.

Until now, Google's Crisis Response team provided Person Search sites on an ad hoc basis, including sites for the earthquake in Haiti and New Zealand, and the latest in Japan. Red Helmets hopes to make its comprehensive site an enduring, permanent global feature of rescue response.

A Comprehensive Platform for the Missing

The alpha version has launched around the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. Although people have been leaping forward to use social media to find lost loved ones and companies and groups have lent a hand, a permanent, optimized site specifically devoted to missing persons recovery in crisis situations is missing. This tool is designed to provide that and to promote it to both governmental groups, non-governmental charity organizations and people at large.

Among the functions that are receiving a baptism by fire in the midst of the current crisis in Japan are the following.

• Missing person profile with information including photo, civil status, last known
• home address, physical description
• Research a missing person by keyword or browsing by profile elements
• Post pictures and videos.
• Geographic localization of the victim on maps automatically integrated to the missing people's profile
• Ability to bring feeds together around a disappearance
• One-click broadcast of found person
• Facebook and Twitter integration

The service has elements of a platform, a search engine and a social network, as Sarah Aizenman, Red Helmets' communications manager, told us.

"Missing.net is a social collaborative network where you can upload lots of content to help the research between the declaration (of a missing person) and finding them. We want definitely to allow to all the potential witness to bring their contributions to find a missing people. As an NGO, we identified the humanitarian needs and we understood that they wanted to use a common tool to share and exchange data easily and quickly. With Missing.net, I hope that we will fulfill their expectations."

Missing.net can be used in French, English, Chinese, Russian, Arabic and Spanish so far.

A History of Crisis Communications

Red Helmets, chaired by former French Secretary of State for Victims Rights, Nicole Guedj, has a history of crisis communications and of collaboration. They created Emergesat, a telecommunications container of telecommunications designed to enable rescue teams to communicate in crisis areas when the traditional communication network has been destroyed.

The container, developed in partnership with CNES and Thales Space, has been deployed with the United Nations High Commission on Refugees to refugee camps in Darfur and to Haiti after the earthquake.

In conjunction with the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Institute for Urban Research, the Urbanization Knowledge Platform will link policy makers, academics, the Bank and other groups struggling to address the rapid increase in the size and importance of cities around the world.

Urbanization Knowledge Platform

The Knowledge Platform seeks to use online communications to make rapid exchange of information in the urbanization field available more quickly and leverage the power of conversation to solve policy questions. According to the Penn Institute the site will be shaped around a series of "knowledge exchanges."

"Topics for each knowledge exchange will center on the four core themes of Economic Development, Social Inclusion and Mobility, Environmental Sustainability, and Governance and will be proposed by members. These knowledge exchanges, and subsequent discussion and networking, will be conducted via cutting edge technology and online audio-visual meeting tools."

That technology includes fora, real-time conversation, live online meetings and presentations. Elements of the platform are currently being rolled out, with regional launches in June and the official debut in July.

Who's On Board?

Already signed on, in addition to the Bank and Penn, are the Kinsey Global Institute, the Cities Alliance, the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, MIT's Deptartment of Urban Studies and Planning and the Brookings Institution. Talks are also being held with Harvard, Cisco, the African Centre for Cities, the Global Development Network, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and a host of think-tanks around the world.

The Penn Institute, devoted to the study of cities and their dynamics, is partnering with the World Bank's Urban Sector, the bank agency responsible for developing its urban development policy. The World Bank, co-owned by 187 member countries, is a union of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the International Development Association, with a mission to "advanc(e) the vision of inclusive and sustainable globalization" and reduce global poverty.

Criticism and Participation

The Bank has seen its share of criticism. This includes philosophical objections to its "free market reform policies" and practical objections to their implementation, which some have said is too quick and too jarring to native economies. The way it is governed has also come under scrutiny. It is said to be run more often than not by representatives from highly industrialized economies to the exclusion of those from developing ones.

Given this criticism, the Knowledge Platform might be a great deal more valuable were the citizens effected by the Bank's decisions able to watch, listen and even join in these discussions. Whether provision has been made for that is uncertain. We have asked the question and will update if we receive an answer.

World Bank building photo from Wikimedia Commons | protest photo from Radio Nederland Wereldomroep

To enter, make a digital video that answers the question, "Why do you want to help Worldreader bring 'Books to All' to the developing world?" Viewers will vote to determine who wins the opportunity to work with the group in Africa.

The contest is being administered by the Spanish travel company eDreams in a "special white label integration via Facebook," according to Worldreader Director of Communications Susan Moody-Prieto.

Upload your video to the eDreams Facebook page for consideration. The deadline is March 30 and the winner will be the person who submits the video with the most public votes by the end of April 1. The winner will be announced on April 4.

The winner will have a chance to work with Worldreader on their Ghana program and have everything paid for. Moody-Prieto outlines the trip.

"(The winner) will be flown down to Ghana, met by someone on our team, spend a day touring Accra, then they'll head out to the schools where we have the e-readers and help Worldreader with reading exercises with the students and help out teachers. They'll do that for a couple of days, and then we'll be following up with some of the students who we filmed last time, going with them into their homes again and talking to their parents about how they are using the e-readers in the family."

Don't expect a luxury safari, however, she warns.

"It ain't 5 star luxury living. When someone asked me about the hotel's thread count, I said...um, 5? But it's the real deal: volunteering in the middle of no-where with this amazing technology that is going to change the lives of these students and eventually all of Africa and the developing world."

It's easy to feel helpless after such a devastating natural disaster, but social media tools have been usefully deployed over the past week. Last Tuesday we looked at how the Web mobilized straight after the quake. In this post we look at 3 specific ways that social media has stepped up to the plate, since then.

UC Student Volunteer Army

The UC Student Volunteer Army is a self-organized workforce, said to be 10,000 strong, that has been helping Christchurch people deal with the aftermath. Activities have ranged from shoveling silt, to assisting with welfare, to "visiting the hardest hit areas and providing hand-to-hand information and support."

The group was founded on September 4 last year, after the first Christchurch earthquake, by university student Sam Johnson. Its Facebook Page has been the main rallying point.

The group uses a service called GeoOP to host online forms, for people to either volunteer or ask for help. GeoOp is a web-based solution for groups to organize their mobile workers and workflow. GeoOp, a local New Zealand company, explained on its website how the UC army is using its product:

"After being approached by GeoOP to use the system at no cost, Sam and his team were able to enter in all the jobs, dispatch via SMS and update jobs, take photos and notes in the field with iPhone 4's donated by Apple and data cards donated by Vodafone, 2Degrees and Telecom."

Telling The Story via Social Media: Storify

Twitter has been a key tool in disseminating news to the world, as well as being a way for people (New Zealanders in particular) to reach out and express their feelings. While there are Twitter hashtags like #eqnz to follow, the amount of information that flows through Twitter can be overwhelming. This is where a service like Storify (our review) helps, as it filters and organizes information from Twitter and other social media platforms like Flickr.

Local New Zealand newspaper the NZ Herald has been running a Storify page, giving its readers a curated, real-time flow of news and updates. NZ Herald embedded the Storify stream in its website, under the headline "Christchurch earthquake - what they're saying." The headline is a little misleading, because the stream includes content from NZ Herald's own Twitter account. Nevertheless, Storify is a handy way to track this important story via social media sources.

Hat-tip Social Media NZ for the initial coverage of Storify.

Local NZ Web Startups Help Out

A local business community is always among the most passionate about helping out when disaster strikes. The New Zealand startup community is no exception and has pitched in with various efforts. There have been two main methods of helping:

1) Direct use of their platform or software.

Examples include GeoOp (noted above) and New Zealand's largest web service TradeMe setting up a support website to organize accommodation, transport and more. While some of these aren't social media per se, they often make use of social media tools.

2) Soliciting donations.

The widget you see to your right, from Givealittle, enables you to donate money directly to the Red Cross.

As well as donations, local businesses need our support. To that end, a blog has been set up to encourage people to buy from Christchurch businesses.

These are just some of the ways that social media has been deployed in the Christchurch earthquake response. Whether it's enabled people to help direct, as with the UC Student Volunteer Army and TradeMe, or has simply helped disseminate news and donation appeals, social media has done its bit once again in the face of tough times.

What Are the Deals and Where Can You Find Them?

Starbucks is offering Deals' users free coffee, Mazda is offering 20% off an MX5, and the department store Debenham, sushi chain Yo!Sushi, mobile operator O2, retailer Argos, theme park operator Alton Towers and clothing brand Benetton are also participating with free products and specials. In Benetton's case, each check in will lead to a £2/€2 charitable donation to Architecture for Humanity, though not a discount on items purchased.

Only the Starbucks' deal is live as of today; the other brands will roll out their offers during the next few weeks. Additional companies may also choose to sign up for Facebook Deals for free, and Facebook says it doesn't take a cut of the revenue earned from their promotions.

Facebook Deals is arriving in the U.K., Germany, Italy, France and Spain today, with other European countries to be added "soon."

How Popular is Facebook Deals?

Facebook did not reveal any specific numbers regarding how many businesses and customers were checking into Places Deals so far, only saying that "millions" of people used the service - this is according to Emily White, Facebook's director of local, as reported by The Wall St. Journal. White noted that over 50% of participating merchants had renewed their deals in the U.S., however.

Last November, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg went on record to talk about Facebook Places' popularity. While he, too, wouldn't provide hard numbers, he said that Places' mobile app on iPhone was "multiples larger than any other location service. You can extrapolate from there."