One of the greatest challenges in choosing a place to work is performing an accurate survey of what life is like inside the company.
Glassdoor.com alleviates that problem by letting its members view company reviews and salary charts submitted by current and former employees.
The site is free to use but does require new members to submit either a company review or salary information (which is kept anonymous) in order to view the same.
London based MySociety.org is a charitable project dedicated to improving civic life through simple and efficient websites. Guidelines for the organization are streamlined to the core triad of cheap scalability, tangible outputs, and high usability. Three full-time staff members guide MySociety projects, but a volunteer community of marketing, design, programming and fund-raising professionals help make quick iteration a reality. Below are some descriptions of current and past MySociety.org projects:
FixMyStreet is a portal allowing UK residents to report graffiti, potholes, litter, etc through a mapping/messaging platform. After submitting, FixMyStreet redirects the report to the proper officials.
PledgeBank is a collective action platform similar to (but less Robust) than ThePoint. The site allows users to promote altruistic campaigns reliant on group participation.
NotApathetic encourages citizens to voice reasons for not voting on a public forum. The project launched for the 2005 UK General Elections but a reincarnation might be beneficial for the upcoming 2008 U.S. Presidential Election.
Anyone interested in championing either FixMyStreet or NotApathetic with me in the U.S.? If so, please express your interest in the comment section.
WorldCat.org is the world’s largest network of library content and services. WorldCat libraries are dedicated to providing access to their resources on the Web, where most people start their search for information.
It lets you search the collections of libraries in your community and thousands more around the world. WorldCat grows every day thanks to the efforts of librarians and other information professionals.
The site allows you to:
Search many libraries at once for an item and then locate it in a library nearby
Find books, music, and videos that you can pick up at your library
Find research articles and digital books and audiobooks that can be directly viewed or downloaded
Quickly link to “Ask a Librarian” and other online services at your library
Create a personal profile that tells others about your interests
Build lists of library materials you can share with others
Post your review of an item, or contribute factual information about it such as historical context
Non-profits dedicated to preventing harmful activity via the Internet can now benefit from CDNetworks Net Plus program. Many non-profit educational groups utilize bandwidth intensive interactive media, resulting in bounced visitors due to long loading times. CDNetworks hopes to improve the performance of educational sites by offering free access to one-terabyte per month on the company’s content delivery network. The CDN enhances the transfer speed and quality of rich media as demonstrated in the diagram below.
The Net Plus program is an extension of the Global Public Service program already operating throughout Asia. Free infrastructure is apparently only available to non-governmental organizations.
Attention spans are increasingly shorter as a result of the accelerated technologies, market-driven economics, and multi-tasking common in our current civilization. Statements like win this election, sell this merchandise, or finish by this date are focused on the “now,” which is relegated to days, years and at most decades. A group of forward looking technologists - including Chris Anderson, Brian Eno, and Kevin Kelly - created The Long Now Foundation in response to the emphasis on near-term goals.
Rather than planning for “now” or “nowadays,” the foundation seeds thought processes for a span of 20,000 years labeled as “The Long Now.” The Long Now currently hosts a series of seminars aimed toward making long-term thinking automatic. Other projects include collecting linguistic data, ensuring conversion and protection of data formats, and also a clock monument dedicated to long term thinking.
A recent move by many universities is to have open courses and to make them available via the web. Two of the early adapters of this were UC Berkeley and MIT among others. This further expands the public access to these great universities intellectual riches which is the function of public universities.
These tools provide a great environment in which students and lifelong learners alike can discover, watch and share education.
Some of the more noted online courses are those of UC Berkley’s Professor Marian Diamond.
Chicago based company The Point is dedicated to organizing people to solve a problem. The Point is not unique in using the web to rally around activism or fundraising, but the company’s campaigns are differentiated by their reliance on the “tipping point” model. As popularized by author Malcolm Gladwell, the “tipping point” refers to the “levels at which momentum for change becomes unstoppable.” Apply this notion to The Point and members of campaigns are not required to take action until a critical mass of supporters is reached.
Crowdsourcing, a term coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 issue of Wired magazine, is a model of labor that has been fully embraced on the Internet over the past couple of years. Crowdsourcing takes tasks traditionally done by a single person or small groups of people, and farms them out to a global workforce. The large-scale committee approach is powerful because it leans on the concept of the “wisdom of crowds” (to a certain extent) which says basically that the more input, the better the output.
The term has become popular with business authors and journalists as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals. However, both the term and its underlying business models have attracted controversy and criticism.
Here is a look at some of the tools used to help you crowdsource.
The League of Technical Voters is a nonprofit 501(c)3, nonpartisan organization dedicated to motivating and assisting technical experts to improve lawmaking and governmental process.
Their goal is to involve more technical people in the political process, especially in relation to the use of technology by government.
We are in a position to provide a priceless resource to our country by helping to improve governmental policies and use of technical resources. We believe that many of the current problems have more to do with a lack of education than with partisan issues.
“How would you mashup the Network for Good donation processing service with other services to make it easier for nonprofits to raise money online? We’re working with Network for Good, the Case Foundation, and the NetSquared community to enhance the online donation process.
There are two categories to enter:
Build a mashup using Network for Good’s donation API, with a particular focus on enhancing the donor experience.
Build a mashup using Network for Good’s donation API,with a particular focus on improving or revolutionizing a nonprofit organization’s ability to fundraise.
Winners in the each category will be awarded a $10,000 prize by a panel of judges present at the N2Y3 Conference.
In addition, each winner will be granted a one-year license for the Network for Good API to be donated to an organization of their choice (if the winner is an organization, it can choose to donate the API to itself).”
London based MySociety.org is a charitable project dedicated to improving civic life through simple and efficient websites. Guidelines for the organization are streamlined to the core triad of cheap scalability, tangible outputs, and high usability. Three full-time staff members guide MySociety projects, but a volunteer community of marketing, design, programming and fund-raising professionals help make quick iteration a reality. Below are some descriptions of current and past MySociety.org projects:
Chicago based company The Point is dedicated to organizing people to solve a problem. The Point is not unique in using the web to rally around activism or fundraising, but the company’s campaigns are differentiated by their reliance on the “tipping point” model. As popularized by author 
“How would you mashup the Network for Good donation processing service with other services to make it easier for nonprofits to raise money online? We’re working with Network for Good, the Case Foundation, and the NetSquared community to enhance the online donation process.