Event details

Date:
May 27 and 28, 2008 (just after Memorial Day)

Location:
Cisco Systems' Vineyard Conference Center, San Jose, California. Cisco Systems has been the generous host for the previous two NetSquared conferences.

Theme:
The NetSquared Mashup Challenge Mashups typically combine two or more publicly available sources of data, presented in a format that is both visually compelling and easy to navigate. The result often has a greater impact than raw data or abstract analysis, prompting action or heightened understanding of an issue (see Wikipedia's mashup entry for a more complete definition). In anticipation of this year's conference, NetSquared will be seeking ideas for social change projects that are driven by a novel way to find and share data. We will offer tools to match these project concepts and motivated developers who will help conceive and build the resulting mashup. By facilitating this partnership between the ideas generated by social benefit organizations with the skills of the developer community, NetSquared's goal is to accelerate social innovation.

Timeline:
From February 1, 2008 - March 14, 2008, applications for the NetSquared Mashup Challenge can be submitted. NetSquared will work to ensure that participants get the help they need to submit a mashup, and will encourage involvement of interested communities and individuals.

On March 14, 2008, end of day, the application process will be closed. Throughout the week of March 17,2008, the NetSquared community will be asked to vote for their favorite five to ten mashups.

On March 24, 2008, the top 20 mashups will be announced and the winners will be invited to attend this year's event in San Jose, CA. On May 27 and 28, 2008 at the conference, project teams will have an opportunity to display and discuss their mashups, and attendees will vote to select the top three.

Each of the top twenty projects will be given an allowance for travel (including airfare to and from the conference along with a hotel room for two nights). The top twenty projects will receive a share of $100,000 in prize money. The share will be determined by voting at the event.

Community involvement
As with the previous conferences, N2Y3 will emphasize participation from all members of the NetSquared Community. The community is collaborating year-round via many platforms, such as the NetSquared Web site (www.netsquared.org) and the monthly Net Tuesday meetups in nine cities around the world http://www.netsquared.org/tags/net-tuesday.

Sponsorships and financial contributions have helped increase the impact of past NetSquared Conferences. In 2008, the Mashup Challenge offers a unique opportunity for technology companies to involve their employees and developer networks in this cause.

About NetSquared (www.netsquared.org)
NetSquared's mission is to spur responsible adoption of social Web tools by social benefit organizations. Nonprofits and NGOs thrive on relationships, which means the social Web holds tremendous potential to transform their effectiveness and impact. The first NetSquared conference concentrated sharing stories of best and worst practices, taking deep dives into a variety of tools and technologies. NetSquared Year 2 helped actual Social Web projects get started. 21 Social Web projects were selected by the NetSquared online community to attend to conference and compete for the biggest shares of the NetSquared $100,000 Innovation Fund.

The NetSquared conference is produced by the nonprofit technology Web resource TechSoup (www.techsoup.org), which offers a wealth of information on products, applications, best practices, online forums, and ideas on nonprofit tech topics from networking to open source and Web 2.0. It also gives its 400,000 unique monthly visitors access to the TechSoup Stock (www.techsoup.org/stock) service, which offers hundreds of hardware and software products donated by leading providers such as Microsoft, Cisco, Symantec, Intuit, and Adobe, as well as certified refurbished computers. Since its inception in January 2002, the service has distributed more than 2.7 million products to nonprofits in North America, Europe, and Africa, at a retail value of over $770 million.