Center for Global Engagement

HELP PEACE BUILDING EFFORTS IN NORTHERN UGANDA IN JUST FIVE MINUTES.

http://web.mac.com/nlwhittemore/Site/about.html

Northern Uganda is an incredible place. The efforts of community based organizations in a region that has suffered more than 20 years of civil war serve as an inspiration for all of us who seek peace and justice for a better world. Today, the country is on the verge of peace but faces a new challenge: who will support the incredible efforts of community-led organizations when the big NGOs move on to the next crisis?

Concerned global citizens! Help the Center for Global Engagement at Northwestern University launch an exciting new project that will use digital mapping tools to better coordinate American support and philanthropy for civil society in northern Uganda. The project is called assetmap.org/uganda and has the goal of aggregating information about where projects happen, what they focus on, and who’s involved so that all of us concerned with supporting community-led efforts to rebuild northern Ugandan civil society can better share best practices, direct support, and collaborate for greater impact. To read more, click here.

To help go here:
http://www.netsquared.org/user/register

Then you can go here to vote:
http://www.netsquared.org/2008/conference/projects/assetmap-org-uganda

American citizens (and indeed, people from around the world) have a unique opportunity to support norther Ugandan civil society’s transition from war to peace. Amazing organizations and projects led by average people have begun to do just that. But to fully realize our opportunity, we need collaboration. For collaboration, we need shared information. Providing that information is what assetmap.org/uganda is all about.

We’ve posted a project submission online in the Netsquared Mashable competition, and I’m asking you to register for Netsquared and vote for us. If our project, assetmap.org/uganda, is in the top 20 in terms of user voting, we’ll be invited to the national conference in May, where a panel will award more than $100,000 in prizes.

Netsquared is an initiative designed to help people use digital tools to further social change goals. I believe our project has a unique potential to improve coordination and collaboration among the sizeable expat community who run or support community development and human rights projects in northern Uganda. We hope to facilitate this collaboration by designing a tool that:

* maps project locations so you know who’s working where
* tags information about the specific issues projects and organizations seek to address
* links tagged and mapped projects to the facebook and LinkedIn profiles of participating donors or volunteers

This could be the basis for volunteer collaborations, best practice sharing, grant award competitions, and much much more, but to aggregate our impact, we need to aggregate our data.