Aaron Pava and I are at the
NetSquared Conference, a gathering of social changemakers and geeks. This year the conference focuses on "mashups" for social good. Web mashups combine data and functionality from two distinct sources. Two iconic mashups include (
Oakland Crimespotting, which maps crime data to Google maps, and
Mapskrieg, which combines Craigslist apartment listings with Google maps.)
My buddy JD Leahy presented
The Rosetta Project--an awesome endeavor to preserve endangered languages. Their mashup is considered to be in the "hackable" phase because it already maps audio and data about these languages onto Google Earth. At the conference, passers-by gazed at the crystal ball of alphabets and the 3" disk archive of 14,000 pages of language documentation on 2500 languages.
We just heard two-minute intros of the featured mashups. Some themes: Transparency in government (congressional bills), transparency in corporate practices (
Know More, a Firefox add-on that indicates a companies environmental rating you when you're on the company's site). Recycling consumer goods (
Freecycle: community-based cyber-curbside). New Orleans restoration. And all things related to maps
(Green Map). I want to check out my local GreenMap group... obsess over map iconography, and invite people to participate in the
EcoCitizen Trading Card project.
This proved surprisingly difficult, as I couldn't find any link referencing the logistics of the conference. After clicking back and forth through 20 other links featured above the fold, I found it discretely hidden in a side bar labeled "Hot Spot."
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What I didn't realize until later was that the address didn't identify the building number (Cisco has 2 blocks of buidlings with the same general address). None of the the employees I asked in the parking lot had any idea where the "Vineyard Conference Center" was. Should I be looking for grape vines? 
