A day at the N2Y3 Conference

A few of us headed over to Cisco today to attend the annual Net Squared conference sponsored by Tech Soup.  I’ve blogged about Mozilla’s involvement with the Net Squared confernce a couple months back. Today, we got to see a number of very interesting projects that are using web technology to provide deeper insight into the social issues affecting communities around the globe.

Some of the projects I met:

• Maplight.org – brings together campaign contributions and how legislators vote, providing an unprecedented window into the connections between money and politics.
• reframe it.com – a web browser plug in that creates a space for comments in the right hand margin beside any web page.
• OpenCongress – brings together official government data with news coverage, blog posts, comments, and more to give you the real story behind what’s happening in Congress.
• HealthyCity.org – improves the ability of low-income, underserved children, adolescents, and their families to access services and advocate for critical resources in their communities.
• The Genocide Intervention Network – empowers individuals and communities with the tools to prevent and stop genocide.

All of the organizations participating can be found here.

I also ran into Nick Reville and Holmes Wilson of the Miro Project.  Remember Miro and the Participatory Culture Foundaiton?  Mozilla helped them out with a grant last year.  These guys have brought Miro a long way, but could still use some help.  I offered to Nick to try to help with some fundraising and scaling challenges.  If you want to help out, please let me know.

In my opinion, getting “off-campus” and going to conferences like these is worthwhile for a lot of reasons.  For one, it’s always great to meet people who are doing really high-impact work like the organizations listed above.  And, in almost every case, these organizations have or are hoping to use Mozilla to created addons for their constituents that relate directly to their work.

Finally, going to a conference like this reinforces that hybrid organizations like Mozilla (and by “hybrid”, I mean that we have the a non-profit parent Mozilla Foundation and a for-profit subsidiary Corporation) are faced with a lot of non-traditional challenges.  Somewhere down the line, a few of us at Mozilla are hoping to do something meaningful in order to get to the bottom of a few of these core challenges.  We’d like to examine how Mozilla can take what it has learned about scaling and help other organizations do the same.  Perhaps a scaling/marketing challenge?  We’re just starting with the idea, but more to follow in the coming weeks.