those are great, thierry! a wonderful illustration style with the "cleanness" that the computer can bring. and a great message, too: "Abre los ojos!" I look forward to seeing more - congratulations!!

Glad I stumbled upon this! I LOVE the sentiment expressed...

and here's a good place to start:

http://www.omidyar.net/group/com munity-general/news/1804

Thierry, I saw your introduction on Omidyar.net and visited your site. The illustrations are great and your commitment to helping others is wonderful. I'm a Commissioner for the Illinois Commission on Volunteerism and Community Service and the leader of a Chicago non profit with two names (Cabrini Connections, http://www.cabriniconnections.net ) and (Tutor/Mentor Connection, http://www.tutormentorconnection .org)

In my http://tutormentor.blogspot.com you can see efforts by me to create illustrations that communicate more clearly than words. In the Tutor/Mentor Institute section of http://www.tutormentorconnection .org you can find short pdf essays, with more of these charts and maps.

I would love to find a way to connect with you and your network, to enlist your illustrators in helping us create a daily message frequency that gets the attention of more people throughout the world and points them to places in local communities where they can be a volunteer, leaders and/or donor in support of various social causes.

I'm organizing a blog exchange for May, leading into a conference I'll host in Chicago during May 17 and 18. You can read about the blog exchange at http://www.tutormentorexchange.n et/Partner/CC/Conference/May2005 /current.asp

My hope is that you'd write about tutoring/mentoring, using some of your illustrations to motivate people to connect.

Thank you all for your feedback. I really appreciate it It would be very helpful and awesome if you could copy and paste it into my blog comments to incite other people to do so as well...

Thank you Lars for your nice words. I will notify you when we publish other interesting illustration for this community.

Michele, there is nothing I can do from Europe, but I hope that the cartoons will incite further people who can help to do so, that's the goal. If you want to use the cartoon for that, go ahead.

Daniel, I checked you sites and like very much your goal and approach. We are going in a very similar direction, we just use different and complementary ways.

I am not sure, we can produce daily illustration for you. It is actually very hard to get illustrators to work on such topics because they are swamped with professional and personal projects. However, I am willing to help you by planning to write and illustrate with my friend a couple of notes that would speak about the topics you would like to address.

The cartoon that we have done today is I believe in the spirit you are looking for. So please let me know what kind of specific messages you would like to see and we will start working on them.

You should explain a little bit more the concept of blog exchange because I am not sure I get it.

Theirry, I posted a comment at http://www.nosvies.com/2007/03/2 9/helping-others-inspires-you-to -do-more/#comment-8 that illustrates what I have in mind for a tutor/mentor blog exchange.

Excellent thank you. Let's start to work on this next week !

A fine presentation indeed. A valid approach to getting

things in motion. A conceptual tour de force. a work of

fortuitous genius; by all means, let us keep this going!

Thierry,

How wonderful. Not sure if you know who Ruby Butterfly is, however she is a well known young person who prevented a forest in the US from being cut down by building a fort and camping in an old growth redwood tree.

Daniel and others,

As Daniel knows, I'm keen on the idea of swapping links to stimulate community activism. I also note that we both use a DotNetNuke framework, which has an internal banner management tool.

I was just asking on another thread, whether there might be a free exchange for community purpose sites. My intention being to mix part revenue generation with free promotion.

for example, I promote an unknown childrens charity on http://www.p-ced.com

If there isn't, then could we create one?

Jeff

Thank you Julie for the reference, do you know her and have her contact information ?

Julie Caldwell said:

Thierry,

How wonderful. Not sure if you know who Ruby Butterfly is, however she is a well known young person who prevented a forest in the US from being cut down by building a fort and camping in an old growth redwood tree.

Thank you Martin for the very kind words, really appreciate it. It is not always easy to create those illustration to express what we really would like. So it is good to hear what people think about them and let them us them tk

Martín Rizzi * Mexico said:

A fine presentation indeed. A valid approach to getting

things in motion. A conceptual tour de force. a work of

fortuitous genius; by all means, let us keep this going!

Jeff,

I added a link to the P-CED site in my library. How does the banner make money for the host site, or the charity?

One way to link businesses and non profits is to encourage them to use such banners to point to individual charities, or to directories/hubs that list many related charities.

On my http://tutormentor.blogspot.com blog I posted a graphic today showing the various competencies and focus areas that will be represended in the May Tutor/Mentor Conferences. All of these organizations need to be funded, and be avilable in many different neighborhoods.

Ideally businesses who care about workforce development, diversity, and innovation might put links on their site to organizations represented on such a chart.

If someone were mapping environmental networks, or health care networks, they could create a similar graphis, and be using the web banners to draw volunteers and donors to programs in their networks.

Thierry,

Can you create an image that might convey the "who's in your network" concept and which I could use in my blog, or blog exchange, in early May?

Others might be able to use the same image to draw people together for their own network. In fact, this might work for each of us who exchange blogs in May and at different times each year.

Please, Describe the person who is being addressed by these cartoons. Thank you.

The Life Student said:

Thank you Martin for the very kind words, really appreciate it. It is not always easy to create those illustration to express what we really would like. So it is good to hear what people think about them and let them us them tk

Martín Rizzi * Mexico said:

A fine presentation indeed. A valid approach to getting

things in motion. A conceptual tour de force. a work of

fortuitous genius; by all means, let us keep this going!

Daniel Thanks,

A banner of the kind I illustrated would not yeild any revenue, being a gesture between a profit for purpose business which seeks no donations and a nonprofit which does. It could be mixed in rotation with revenue generating banners for commercial products.

It would be an achievement if we were to get every business, church, hospital, or gov. agency with a web site to put a rotation of 24 banners on their sites, which would change evertime someone clicks the home page.

If you go to http://www.socialmeter.com/index .html and enter your web site, you'll get a report showing how many places link to your site.

Thus, we would expect to see this number grow each year for charities that were being featured by various profit for purpose business sites.

That would translate to a better understanding of what the charity does, and a growth of resources for that charity.

This is an image I used with my blog today to illustrate the idea I was writing about. You can see this at http://tutormentor.blogspot.com/ 2007/04/recipe-for-success-whos- in-your-kitchen.html

At the bottom of the blog message is a list of lables. So if you click on "maps" you'll find previous blog messages which have visual images.

Thus, if people who can write a great story can connect with people who will illustrate the story, sort of like editorial cartoons, their collaboration can create a more effective communication to readers than each one might do if they were just drawing on their own talent.

If you think of this as a three-way partnership, any illustrator, writer and blogger can pick any one from the Omidyar introductions list who is doing social benefit work some place in the world, and use their talent to create communications messages that draw volunteers and donors to this organization.

Imagine if we could unleash the talent of kids in high school and college to take this role.

This was my first try at putting an image into a discussion. If someone can help me make it show up, I'd appreciate it!

Daniel,

Just follow the instruction here http://www.omidyar.net/group/hel p/ws/Picture%20Display%20How-to/

I was able to post the image by pointing to a place on my own web site where it resides.

My goal is to find volunteers like Thierry who will create visual images like these that illustrate the messages we're trying to communicate as a shared goal of increasing the number of people and businesses involved in supporting social benefit organizations.

This is the image on my http://tutormentor.blogspot.com blog this week. It illustrates the Tutor/Mentor Connection's role as network builder.

If you view the speaker, agenda and attendee list at http://www.tutormentorconference .org you can see an example of how this brings a variety of different organizations together at the same place and time.

At http://tutormentor.blogspot.com/ 2007/05/volunteers-tutormentor-l eaders-donors.html you can link to bloggers, like Steve Habib Rose, and Phil Cubeta, who I have also met over the past 14 years through this process of network building.

If you have a blog, I encourage you to write an article about this networking, and illustrate the article with a cartoon or graphic. Try to show how your blog, and the other work you do is connecting people together around causes you care about, or how it is joining me in drawing people together to help disadvantaged kids.

Ok we did it !

I posted the original "helping others" cartoon that you can see above. Dan Bassil (among others) provided feedback and told me he was organizing the tutor mentor conference in May.

We realized we have convergent views and goals and we decided to collaborate. Nosvies would provide a cartoon to help mentoring organizations recruit mentors.

You can watch it here: www.nosvies.com and get more information about the conference at tutormentorconference.org

Use the cartoon for your own organization and put your logo on it. We just ask to keep the copyright and put a link back to the www.nosvies.com site. I can even help to add your logo, just send me a message

Great stuff Dan ! I hope that you will share some of the feedback from the conference for the benefits of everybody here.

Thank you Thierry for responding to my invitation of March 29th. I passed out copies of the cartoon to 180 or more people last week and posted it at http://tutormentor.blogspot.com/ 2007/05/creative-networking-to-h elp-mobilize.html

If you and others who are looking for ways to network and help each other will visit the links at http://tutormentor.blogspot.com/ 2007/05/volunteers-tutormentor-l eaders-donors.html you'll see that three other people that I met at Omidyar in the past six months also took part in the blog exchange. They are Steve Habib Rose, Phil Cubeta and Paul DePierna. In addtion, Ted Ernst came to my office to help me set up a networking page on About Us.

I hope you'll all join me again over the Summer and in early August shen we are ramping up volunteer efforts to help kids living in poverty connect with tutors/mentors.

While this may seem focused on Chicago, it can be focused by anyone on any community in the world where kids need help and where people are creating programs that engage volunteers as tutors, mentors and change agents.

If any of you know of volunteer based tutor/mentor programs operating in the Chicago region, or Northern Indiana, Rockford, Illinois, or even Milwaukee, I encourage you to help those programs build web sites or blogs, and then link those sites to the Program Links section at http://www.tutormentorconnection .org/FindaProgram/ChicagoAreaPro gramLinks/tabid/561/Default.aspx

Thierry, I'll look forward to working with you on the next illustration. Thank you for your help.

We did another one for the Net² project. Check it out on www.nosvies.com

Life is what happens when making plans?

great cartoon

namaskar