Three nonprofit mashups worth knowing

Though the Valentine’s romance is behind us, our look at mashups continues. This week, I’d like to share a couple of mashups that are using the web to do advocacy jobs that otherwise wouldn’t get done.

• Ushahidi software for citizen journalism. Users submit reports by SMS, email or the web, and the results are shown on a Google map.

  Developed in Kenya, where the first version of Ushahidi was used to gather reports of post-election violence in the spring of 2008, the core team has gone on to turn Ushahidi into a reporting tool that can be used elsewhere. Since it’s debut in Kenya, the software has been used in South Africa, Congo and, most recently, to report on Israeli attacks in Gaza.

  Ushahidi won last year’s NetSquared N2Y3 Mashup Challenge

• Social Actions allows search and for causes hosted on more than 40 social action platforms. It also provides API access to these causes so that member platforms don’t have to.

  Recent years have seen an explosion of online communities that let folks organize to help particular issues. Social Actions provides a search engine for causes listed on Care2, GlobalGiving, change.org, Donor’s Choose, Kiva and many others.

  To make this work, project initiator Peter Deitz persuaded the platforms to provide RSS feeds of their actions -- which Social Actions indexes. And that, in turn, can potentially help anybody interested in using the net to help a particular cause -- wherever its supporters may be found.

  Social Actions won last year’s Donate Now Mashup Challenge

• MAPLight.org connects political donations and congressional votes. Through a series of maps and graphs, MAPLight allows browsing of political contributions by interest group, and also allows search of this information on bills currently before Congress.

  MAPLight won the NetSquared 2007 Innovation Awards. Since then, they’ve gone on to add California state legislature data, and they’re now working on New York and other states.

While these organizations are using the web in novel ways, these three are hardly the whole story. Heck, I’ve probably missed mentioning your mashup! Let us know about it in the comments.