Change the Web Challenge now open for submissions

Yesterday the Social Actions’ Change Web Challenge started. The challenge is about building innovative tools to help people to find and share opportunities to take action on the websites, blogs, and social networks that we all visit everyday.

The Web Challenge builds on the success of online competitions such as NetSquared’s Mashup Challenge, Advanta’s Ideablob Competition, Ashoka’s Open Sourcing Solutions, The Knight News Challenge, The Case Foundation’s Giving Challenges and The American Express Card Members Competition. 

Participants will build web applications that draw on Social Actions’ open database of 40,000+ actions people can take across a range of issues. Social Actions aggregates opportunities to make a difference from over 30 online platforms, including VolunteerMatch, Kiva.org, DonorsChoose.org, Care2 and Change.org. 

After the submissions have been received, community members and an expert panel of judges will vote for the top three applications. The developers behind the winning submissions will share $10,000 in prize money. There will be two rounds of vetting: the first by Social Actions community members, and the second by an expert panel of judges including professionals and thought-leaders working at the intersection of technology and social change.

Developers will have eight weeks to submit their applications and receive feedback. The first round of vetting will run for two weeks. The expert panel will respond to the community’s vote and publicly submit its recommendations during a two week review process. The winners will be announced at the end of the twelve weeks. 

Schedule
Social Actions’ Change the Web Challenge will run for twelve weeks. Winners will be announced at the Nonprofit Technology Conference in San Francisco on April 26, 27, and 28th.

Change the Web Challenge website
Follow the challenge on Twitter

For a better sense let’s take a look at a few of the web apps already powered by Social Actions:

• ‘Related Ways to Take Action’ WordPress Plugin: A plugin you can add to any WordPress.org blog that identifies the keywords of each blog posts and then displays related ways to take action.
• Twitter Action Pack: A directory of 30+ Twitter accounts that automatically post actions on the issues you care about.
• Firefox Ubiquity Command: A Firefox mashup that lets you highlight any phrase as your browse the web and find related ways to take action.

About Social Actions
Social Actions is a nonprofit initiative committed to making it easier for people to find and share opportunities to make a difference. A search engine on SocialActions.com helps users find ways to take action for the causes they care about from over 40 action sources including Kiva, DonorsChoose.org, Change.org, Nabuur.org, DemocracyinAction, GlobalGiving, Idealist.org, SixDegrees, VolunteerMatch, and Care2. Social Actions creates incentives such as the Change the Web Challenge to encourage the distribution of their open API to websites, blogs, and mobile devices.

Osocio is proud to announce being one of the media sponsors. Stay tuned for more news about the challenge.

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