Klango Player is free accessible community and multimedia center for blind and vision impaired computer users. Our goal is to make the Klango Player available in the languages of the world. Do you speak any of those languages? Afrikaans, Bosnian, Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin), Croatian, Czech, Dutch, Esperanto, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese. Join Us and learn more at http://klango.net

Our team is poised to create the first open-source geo-targeted community news wire network called Project: TellYourTown. During this endeavor we will build a network of 20 geo-targeted community newswire sites and create the software so anyone can create a community newswire for their town, village, or neighborhood. This software will be open source and available as a free download on a site called TellYourTown.org. The first “tell” site, www.TellToledo.com, is being built for proof of concept and to learn how grassroot news development improves a community. A TellYourTown web site allows anyone in a geo-community to post news/information into the news database and have it distributed to the media, and more importantly -directly to the public. Think of this as a community driven news and information wire that citizens can contribute to and also subscribe to for instant "personalized and individualized” news content that is generated by their peers. Hence the project name: “TellYourTown”. Newspapers, Radio and TV use to be the cement that held communities & information together, but not any longer. We feel that “Ground Up Publishing” is a new era in bringing communities closer together, by creating free flowing information directly between the people…especially as publishing networks go hyper-local, eventually down to the neighborhood level. With this free flow, we experience an empowered and enriched sense of community. In short, the TellYourTown project is an effort to create geo-targeted news networks that allow for the immediate release of personalized news that is created by members of the community in which it serves. It combines elements of geo-local, personalized news, and citizen journalism.

WindyCitizen.com applies collective intelligence, or crowd-power, to the problem of identifying what's newsworthy and interesting in Chicago. For decades the public has ceded this job to small pockets of editors. With today's online collaboration tools, this needn't continue. In 5 months I’ve built the first iteration of the site and gathered 34 Chicago bloggers to anchor it. This fall we roll out the social news piece. The service is structured as a social, local news service backed up by a vast blog network of local experts in Chicago. It gives people in Chicago a central place where they can share, discuss and vote up interesting local links. The best stuff surfaces, creating a crowd-powered front page. Using this approach, visitors get their news from a wider array of sources as well as an at-a-glance look at what's hot in their city. You can visit at http://www.windycitizen.com. I am applying for funding so we can bring on a full-time developer, a designer and an editor to oversee the blog network. This will let us scale better and provide a more useful service.

Our project is to develop, launch and market a world-wide, location based, user contributed Web2.0 publishing medium. 4grabs.org is a novel way people can find neighborhood news anywhere by proximity, whether they want to center their search in Boston MA, the rural areas surrounding Rockford, IL or Kenya Africa. 4grabs lets you center your search right in the middle of your own neighborhood. At 4grabs you can freely post and search for jobs and people looking for work, neighborhood news and alerts, discussions about political and cultural issues that affect your community, items for sale or freely shared with your neighbors or let people know who makes the best burritos on the block. ...information for the people, by the people. There's an obvious underlying credo here about localization, recycling, micro-economics and saving gas. When you find solutions according to proximity -- the nearest resource, job, worker or bicycle -- you obviously don't have to drive as far to get what you want as you would when searching on some of the other regionally-based sites. It's created to be freely accessible to anyone with a computer or PDA. We are dedicated to helping you conduct efficient, location-centric searches and believe it is a technology that not only saves you time, but builds community while helping us all reduce waste in our lives.

Imagine a space where the virtual and physical communities of Amman, Jordan could join forces; a community center where everyone could meet to discuss politics, art, religion, anything. A place where conversations start online and continue over a cup of coffee; where an argument presented over tea, would be re-articulated in a blog post. 7iber, based in Amman, Jordan has been hosting a conversation on our website, www.7iber.com. We have fostered an active and dynamic community built around the site. For example, we published an article written by a group of young skaters who thought they were being misunderstood. They wrote a piece, produced a short video, and stood back to let the world respond. They were shocked with the response; we were thrilled. We’ve seen a community develop around the website we created. It has exceeded our wildest expectations, surprised us, made us cry, but mostly importantly gave us the energy to continue. Now we hope to introduce our two communities to each other. We envision a community center, where poets can share their poems, artists their art work, filmmakers their films and everyday people can share their thoughts and feelings. We hope this space will be a testament to the hope we hold for the future of Jordan. We hope to liberate the discussion from the digital realms and bring it back to the people and in doing so, demonstrate to a generation of tech-empowered citizens that it is possible to become engaged in a process of change.

Major points of our project: 1. Create opportunities for co-producers to be involved with local food production 2. Address concerns regarding availability of nutritious, local and organic food for low-income individuals and families in Boulder County, Colorado. 3. Use technology to allow co-producers to be connected with the farm even when they are not there. 4. Use technology to share agricultural and food processing practices around the globe. 5. Build community through the development of a technology based co-working space on the farm. 6. Integrate old-style farm principles with new technology.

College football in the SEC and Big 12 is centered in small towns. (Austin and Nashville are the largest, with nothing over 750,000.) There is also great history with these universities - some established in the 1700s. For college football fans, this would be a way to learn about: Local bars and restaurants Places to stay Local historic sites / places of interest Traffic in and out Tailgates (where, who sponsored, open to all, closed), for visiting teams where those spots are available, and how friendly they might be.

The Americans with Disabilities Act requires accommodations to be made for persons with disabilities. The Act applies to internet sites operated by businesses as well as non-profit and government agencies [Section 508]. The purpose of this project is to assure that low income blind and visually impaired residents in Wisconsin have access to community services from non-profit organizations, government agencies and other important community services that are currently available to others on the internet. Our objectives are: to develop a set of written guidelines for adapting websites for the visually impaired and disseminating these; to provide training for webmasters on how to make the most effective changes to their current websites, and to raise awareness among other businesses and service sector agencies about the need for accomodations. Betsy Gruber, Director of Technology at Wisconsin Council of the Blind and Visually Impaired is the instructor. The class is taught over the internet using Talking Communities software that is provided to each student on the internet.

In many of Africa’s 53 countries, community radio stations are playing an essential role in keeping people together. As foreign subsidies dry up, many stations are migrating to become community media centres, so as to become less dependent on subsidies from government or foreign donors. They anticipated the credit crunch some time back. The authors of this project seek funding to build the second stage of an existing Media Lab in Porto Novo, Benin, which is already training and researching into new ways forward. Started by the Association of Media Professionals in Benin, the lab is developing new programme formats, designing revenue generating services and looking at alliances between mobile phone companies and local broadcasters (such as providing SMS services in local languages). We need funding to extend research - as well as the development of new programme formats. Core funding is already in place - we need a "magnifying glass effect" to enhance our effectiveness. In areas where connectivity in improving we are looking to Moodle, Wiki and Blogs as solutions for the community to share experiences with others in the region. Isolated communities will radicalise, those kept in touch have a chance of thriving. The lab is committed to an OpenSource approach to solutions, where practical. We have been testing Linux based production software alongside programs found in many radio stations across Africa, including iTunes or playout software designed for DJ's in Europe. We can see the adoption of open-source is not a problem - it is the technical support that presents a serious challenge. We can supply more background - and details of the finances already researched - upon request.

Allgodspeople.com is a community-building project based on a journalistic/informational foundation. The focus is Christian community in the Madison, Wisconsin, area. Typically a Christian community is defined as those who gather together in one particular house of worship. In the words of the New Testament this is referred to as the Body of Christ. Each person is part of the body and has an important role to play to keep the body alive and active. By using the internet, we believe that the Body of Christ, with each person playing an important role, can also describe the Christian community in a city and surrounding area. We are putting our model to the test in Madison and Dane County, Wisconsin. Our first goal is to create traffic for our website by offering fresh daily news stories of particular interest to the local Christian community, either news about personalities or developments in that community that's not available from other news outlets or else links to news stories that may be of particular interest to those readers. Thus far 80 to 90 percent of our stories have been of the latter variety, because we lack resources to pay stringers to write local stories. With the website then as a resource for the community we want to report on what individuals and congregations are doing to make the Madison community a better place to live. It's not that churches haven't been doing this type of thing in the past but today the needs seem greater and many evangelical churches which used to focus mostly on personal salvation are now focusing more widely on serving the community. Our final goal is to sell advertising to support the website and also raise money for ministries that are focused on addressing unmet needs in the Madison area.

America’s Waterway has a goal of unifying the Mississippi River to build community-based, whole-river approaches to water quality, community development and cultural identity. Our goal rests on maximizing social networking and other Internet tools on behalf of the Mississippi in the same way political candidates and companies have built on-line communities for themselves. America’s Waterway expects this will result in the creation of a constituency that can take action to address the River’s issues as an entire system, rather than one problem and one location at a time. In phase one, the case for America’s Waterway is made. Enewsletters in the form of blogs are being distributed, the River-Tube function of the Web site will be initiated in 2009, and we have begun to build the community by soliciting content from people along the River. A second phase, scheduled for late 2009/early 2010, will focus on building the community. We will engage those residing on and interested in the River, in a national dialogue via telecommunication and on-the-ground facilitation. Using community foundations in 10 locations, we will ignite people’s awareness and solicit their input to collectively prioritize content and issues for the Web site. A third phase – developed simultaneously – will be a vibrant and open access Web site that maximizes engagement, allowing a Mississippi River community to evolve and take hold. Its structure will be open access and conducive to all forms of social networking at the same time it provides resources for groups and individuals who want to learn about the issues and the River.