Code, Camera, Action

I spent much of the week at the NetSquared N2Y4 conference in Silicon Valley. NetSquared brings together social entrepreneurs, whose tech projects compete for funds. Last year the projects were mashups. This year’s theme was mobile.

To see the sort of work the competition inspired, take a look at the 14 featured projects that made it to the finals, or see my notes about the projects that presented on Wednesday.

Want some cooperation with that competition?

But what best illustrates the spirit of cooperation that underlies the N2Y4 competition involves two projects that, as it happened, did not win big prizes at NetSquared.

• PublicStuff wants to be the craigslist of local government interaction. This is a big job. In part, the project team envisions itself as a replacement for 311 systems (where citizens report litter or building code violations), at least for smaller cities.
• SeeClickFix takes on one part of this: it allows people to report problems in neighborhoods (graffiti or litter, say). It lets folks watch a particular neighborhood, and can provide email notifications when problems are reported there.

PublicStuff is trying to solve a much bigger problem. At this point, they have a working demo. SeeClickFix in contrast, has already released a product, with a widget that enables it to be used elsewhere, and a preliminary API.

Hearing both teams pitch, I wondered about this overlap. It seemed a shame for two startup teams to spend their time building the same thing. So I asked Kam Lasater, SeeClickFix’s tech lead, about the overlaps. Had the teams been in touch?

They had been talking since early in the competition. And PublicStuff was most likely going to use SeeClickFix’s maps.

What if PublicStuff made their money connecting SeeClickFix’s maps with government help desks?

Fine by them, Kam said. “We don’t want to do content management.”

And that, in brief, is why NetSquared is my kind of competition. There were other examples:SMS agricultural and medical projects in different countries left NetSquared intending to collaborate across teams. Multiple projects used the same FrontLineSMS technology.

In the end, social problems are bigger than any one of us. It’s rewarding to support a competition that brings that sort of altruistic thinking out in its participants. I’m a fan of NetSquared.

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Here’s a quick summary of the projects presented at NetSquared N2Y4 this morning. The complete list ofFeatured Projects is on NetSquared’s site.

Cell Alert

Cell Alert: SMS information to developing countries.

• Pilot projects in Pakistan and El Salvador. Preparing to expand in Sudan, Gabon and Sri Lanka.
• Uses Frontline SMS as an SMS gateway.
• Information could be used for everything from security/crisis alerting to telework job opportunities.
• N2Y4 project description

See Click Fix

Community reporting of 311 information. Anyone can report a problem, a pothole, graffiti, etc. The problems appear on a map, for corroboration and response.

• Quite successful in initial cities.
• Partnerships with media, incorporated into NYTimes and other community reporting initiatives.
• Provide a widget, so can be incorporated elsewhere. API forthcoming (works now, working to document and stabilize).
• N2Y4 project description

VozMob

VozMob: Community journalism by cell phone.

An example: citizen journalist reporting by day laborers in the Los Angeles area.

Mobile Voices is an academic-community partnership to research and design a digital networking platform for low wage immigrants in LA to publish stories about their lives and their communities directly from their mobile phones.

• Send MMS messages to n2y4@vozmob.net. See the results online at http://vozmob.net. Both photos and audio go online.
• Runs on Drupal. Code is available: http://code.vozmob.net. Drupal modules that support this to be released.
• Funding from a number of foundations right now. $200,000 raised, 20k spent so far.
• N2Y4 project description

Handheld Human Rights

Bringing SMS-based human rights reporting to Burma.

• Working to share information among groups on the ground.
• Next steps: On the ground development of communities of practice this summer.
• Uses INSEAD and Ushahidi’s SMS to mapping software. Frontline SMS is the gateway.
• N2Y4 project page

AMIS

Using SMS to help farmers in Cameroon gain access to markets, get crop pricing information, etc. A market information service relies on middlemen to relay market conditions to participating farmers.

• N2Y4 project description

Public Stuff

Connects people to public services. A replacement for 311 systems. Differentiator: addresses needs of both governments and citizen users.

• Web and mobile platform.
• A pilot program in 3-4 cities in the next couple of months.
• Business model: licensing fee for local government agencies.
• Project is in incubation by Good Company Ventures in Philadelphia.
• N2Y4 project description

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@febbraro and I presented our work hosting Drupal on Amazon AWS at Drupalcon last night. Thanks to everybody who could make it. Slides below for download.

We talked about scaling challenges we face doing nonprofit campaigns for the Case Foundation. These are typically limited-time campaigns, with press releases or other promotion.

Our challenge has been supporting relatively high loads for a short time — without going broke. Amazon’s EC2 servers-on-demand have been great for this. Here’s how we use AWS, and architectural issues anyone will face hosting Drupal on the Amazon cloud.

Update: Alan Doucette was kind enough to post video of the talk. Thanks, Alan!

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At NTEN, the nonprofit tech conference, last year I met a developer who was really exited. One of the vendors on the floor was giving away Pentium 3 processors, and he had a box that could use an extra boost.

Me, I never touch hardware anymore. In fact, I don’t really know how many servers we’ve got — or where they are. Amazon knows. About six months ago we switched all our production servers to Amazon’s EC2 cloud infrastructure.

As for how we moved to Amazon — and why we did it — check out this set of slides:

• Drupal in the Cloud: Scaling with Drupal and Amazon Web Services.

http://www.slideshare.net/elstudio/drupal-in-the-cloud-scaling-with-aws-presentation?src=embed

Frank of Phase2 Technology and I put these together for today’s Northern Virginia Drupal Meetup. Thanks to everybody who came out for a listen.

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Tim O’Reilly’s keynote this morning at the Web 2.0 Expo NY was inspired and inspiring. To be in New York this week, with markets crazy and the Feds bailing out Wall Street icons — and talking web 2.0. That’s not an enviable spot. And Tim handled it by going to the heart — musing on what it means for the web to meet the world.

From an engineering perspective, that means sensors and opening up the data they capture. But O’Reilly also talked about lasting values:

• Follow your heart
• Work on the the problems that matter
• Create more value than you capture

Interestingly, he also plugged several innovative nonprofits as examples:

• InSTEDD
• Ushahiti
• Benetech
• Click Diagnostics – for profit
• 23 and Me – also for-profit, but using that profit to further knowledge of the genome

There’s a more detailed summary on Kris Jordan’s blog.

Video should be posted in a day or so on the Web 2.0 Expo site.

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I sent a letter to our CIO the other day asking for OpenID for the office. Strikes me that OpenID is one place where traditional interests of IT (ensuring users have access to what they need, compliance) jibe with those of Web 2.0 service users.

Anyway, I thought I’d share my letter because many of you may have need of the same arguments. I mention Active Directory by name because that’s what our IT folks know. Substitute LDAP if it makes you more comfortable.

Our office is going Web 2.0. We are all using a bunch of commercial web services out there, and we’ll be adding users to our internal ones soon.

Logins are a problem, of course. So is identity. We want folks to use their workplace name, email addresses, etc — they are representing the office in using these services. And it would be great if we didn’t have to remember 37 different passwords?

And it wouldn’t it be even better that, once someone leaves, we could turn off all of those identities — so that folks ex-employees can’t misrepresent themselves?

All of this can be done with OpenID.

OpenID is like Active Directory for the internet. It does single-sign-on for websites, in a way that keeps passwords secure. It also identifies people for these sites — giving the sites email addresses, names and so forth.

OpenID is a standard. And right now it’s the only way to do single sign-on that’s widely used.

Here’s some background reading

HOW TO DO OPENID

If we were to provide an OpenID for our employees, there are three ways to do it:

1. Use a 3-rd party provider like http://www.myopenid.com. Works great, but users have to be added manually and managed manually — independent of our usual processes for provisioning users.

2. Run an OpenID front-end to Active Directory like http://www.openid-ldap.org/. This means user management happens in one place. When somebody leaves, disabling of their Active Directory account shuts down their OpenId, too.

3. Use a non-dedicated service like AOL or Yahoo. Every AIM user already has an OpenID. For example, http://openid.aol.com/aimusername. Works, sort-of.AOL doesn’t know that business email addresses, so I have to type that manually. And that OpenID has AOL’s name on it, not ours.

Will let you know how the office debate goes. Meanwhile, does anyone have experience implementing an Active Directory to OpenID bridge? While option 2 seems to be the best way to go, we’d all feel better hearing from somebody who’s implemented it. Let us know in the comments.

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A friend’s client wanted to help Ghana. Microlending seemed to be a good way to do it. The client would collect money in the US, and fund small loans to farmers and entrepreneurs in Ghana. The web might even make the first half of this — collecting money and telling the stories of who was helped — easy.

My friend was all set to start writing code. That’s his business, after all.

But did code needed writing? I could think of lots of options for helping Ghana — and finding like-minded people — with sites already on the web.

• Kiva does micro-loans across the globe. They’ve gotten lots of press, and do a pretty good job of getting their projects’ stories back to donors.
• MicroPlace is eBay and Calvert’s entry into microfinance. This is organized like a mutual fund, with on-the-ground folks coordinating investments in a particular country. They are making loans in Ghana now.
• GlobalGiving does vet their projects, but there’s a standard process for that — so it may be that the client’s project could get registered with them, and use their fundraising infrastructure.
• Nabuur organizes volunteers, not loans, and provides a means of helping folks in Africa and Asia. Through Nabuur’s website, an accountant in the US might donate services to a farmer in Ghana. Nabuur has folks in-country vetting projects.

With so many opportunities for donors/lenders already, it would take a really good idea — and super marketing — to bring another microlending system to prominence in the US.

I’m not sure that’s what my friend’s client had in mind.

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