June 14, 2007 | Read Time: 1 minute
To promote networking for social causes, NetSquared has handed out $100,000 in awards to 21 people and organizations that use the Web for charitable projects.
NetSquared — a project of TechSoup, which trains charities to use technology to further their missions — announced the award winners at an annual conference in San Jose, Calif.
Three top winners divided $50,000, and the 18 other finalists split the remaining money, $2,700 each. Each finalist also receives free consulting and technology help through NetSquared’s Innovation Support Network.
A Light on Money and Politics earned first prize and $25,000. The Berkeley, Calif., group tracks politicians’ votes and correlates their voting records with donations from special-interest groups. MAPLight plans to train nonprofit groups on how to use its data in advocacy campaigns.
Miro Open Source won second prize and $15,000. Miro is working to establish open, nonproprietary standards for video content on the Internet to ensure that Web videos remain as freely and easily accessible as other digital media, such as blogs.
The Freecycle Network, based in Phoenix, won third prize and $10,000. To combine social networking and environmentalism, Freecycle created a “global cyber curbside” that allows thousands of users to donate unwanted goods by listing them online to find people or groups who can use them rather than throwing them away.
Because social networking relies on groups of users with shared interests instead of central hubs and experts, NetSquared officials say they chose to mirror this approach by using an open voting process to determine winners.
More than 15,000 online voters winnowed the original 152 nominees to 21, and 300 attendees at the conference picked the three winners.
For more information: Go to http://www.netsquared.org/projects.
