Right on the heels of my discussion of infrastructure for progressive entrepreneurs comes the NetSquared Mashup Challenge, a $100,000 contest seeking innovative mashups for social change. NetSquared is a project of TechSoup, the non-profit technology folks.
The Challenge is now in its third year, and it has an interesting structure. Applicants are only required to write out their ideas, without doing too much to prove that the ideas are implementation-ready. Those ideas are then voted on by NetSquared members, and the top twenty teams get an all-expenses-paid trip to San Jose for the NetSquared project, as well as a shot at a slice of $100,000 and collaborations with web experts capable of putting the ideas into practice. This fairly low barrier of entry has results - already there are about a dozen applicants. One project that caught my eye was the Social Actions project, which promises to "free peer-to-peer social change campaigns from the social action platforms on which they were created", apparently by allowing social network organizers to readily find out about other campaigns across the social network-o-sphere.
For more on NetSquared, check out the project's YouTube video:
I am thinking about submitting an application to the contest, although I haven't fully decided what to work on. One idea I have kicking around is a project to mashup corporate securities filings with state and federal labor relations records, in order to help labor organizers identify new opportunities for unionization. But that's just a thought, I haven't really worked on it.
At any rate, if you're in the mood to shoot for a slice of $100,000, feel free to use the comments to trade ideas and thoughts about mashups for good. It'll be great to see what kinds of ideas we can come up with!
