I'll be away from the keyboard August 11 through 19 - up near Lake Tahoe with family. See you then.

I'm down in San Jose in day 2 of the second year of Net2 - and yesterday I got to moderate a session of feedback for four of the 21 projects that are being showcased this year.

Some of the members here gave ideas about the feedback I could provide the groups in this thread. Thank you.

And here's a cool discussion by some of the other members attending.

Rather than confuse that thread, I thought I'd branch off in a new conversation here. Please join in.

Last week I got a chance to preview – The Devil Came on Horseback – a feature documentary about the genocide in Darfur.

Here’s blurb - “THE DEVIL CAME ON HORSEBACK will expose the violence and tragedy of the genocide in Darfur as seen through the eyes of a lone American witness. Using thousands of uncompromising and exclusive photographs taken by former US Marine Captain Brian Steidle during his role as a military observer with the African Union, THE DEVIL CAME ON HORSEBACK leads you through the tragic impact of an Arab government bent on destroying its black African citizens.”

It’s a very powerful and well-made film. It would be so easy to really screw up a documentary dealing with genocide. This is why it works so well:

In many fictional character-driven plots, the hero faces a dilemma, a call to action, resists it at first and later makes a heroic choice. For Brian the choice was not whether or not to go to Sudan. He was compelled by the financial reward. Brian’s challenge came after he returned to the US: He had the photos and the first hand account but going public with the story would cut him off from the possibility of similar contract work. The State Department also urged him not to rock the diplomatic boat – not to mount a campaign to expose the genocide that he witnessed first hand.

Brian is not a slick speaker which is good. He comes across as an ordinary Jimmy Steward kind of character -- reluctantly drawn into a complicated, evil plot. But he really does find his voice when speaking at a rally in Washington last spring. It’s really fun to see someone who you feel like you know getting nervous about addressing the crowd. Then he did such a great job that it sent chills down my back.

It sounds like the filmmakers are planning a theatrical release and a grassroots organizing campaign in conjunction. I’m not sure how well the film will do commercially since you’d expect many will lean toward lighter entertainment when facing the choice at the multiplex or the channel changer. Perhaps Al Gore paved the way for some success. Like “An Inconvenient Truth” the filmmakers have made a smart choice to focus on a character. Brian works well as a vehicle for audience members to imagine themselves on the same journey. Hopefully the promotion of the film can focus on this angle, and attract a wide audience.

Keep your eyes open for a chance to see it later this year.

In the mean time – you can take a look at the anti-genocide organizing going on here at omidyar.net.

(Check here for version with pictures.)

I live in San Francisco and drive a couple of miles to the 22nd Street train station to ride to Redwood City. It's the first stop going south out of SF. The train is great but really underused. Sometimes there are only a couple of other people in the front car.

Parking at the downtown station costs about $10 a day. Parking here is free.

Some of the people at work tell me they decided to take the train but drive by and can't find a parking space so they just hop on 280 and drive the 30 miles to work.

Actually there are always parking spaces but unless you get there really early then they are often sketchy. The station is built underneath 280 which is great in the rain but makes the area seem scarier after dark. My car has never been broken into but you can occasionally see the broken glass created by other break-ins.

What we need is some secure parking. I think many would be willing to pay for it. There are three people in my company of 30 who say they would take the train from here if there were secure parking. Lots of youngish people do get on the train here, lots of laptops, Yahoo! backpacks. My brother-in-law at eBay boards here a couple of times a week. I'm pretty sure that the popularity of this station started with the rise of Silicion Valley and it's easy to imagine that the same people who moved into the Mission, Potrero, and Noe Valley because it was the Valley side of SF are the same people taking the train from here.

I think that the authorities who are in charge of such things as parking and security and cleaning out around stations haven't really noticed how popular the station is. It could be much more popular.

One of the guys at work who boards here suggests that a multi-level lot be built over the bus depot next door. There is also a huge nearly vacant parking lot nearby at a company called Trayer that would work well.

Anyway, my sense is there are hundreds of people driving to the Valley who would switch to the train if we could figure out how to provide the parking for them. That translates into a quite a few tons of carbon that doesn't go into the air.

Link here for picts and links.

Thomas Kriese and I were at the Online Community Summit on Oct 5 and 6 where about 75 professionals gather in very cute Sonoma to swap stories of online communities .

I was very lucky to have Perla Ni riding shotgun on the rainy trip up. Perla was founder and former publisher of the Stanford Social Innovation Review among many other famous things. She was also one of the presenters at the non-profit pre-conference Thursday morning.

She feels that most non-profit websites aren’t emotionally engaging – offering stock photos and cold information and a “donate here” button. She offers a cure: make it possible for the people that the group serves to put up content on the site – either text, video or podcasts. She showed a very cool Canadian site - homelessnation.org - that puts up new videos portraits of homeless made by volunteers. It turns out that most homeless people have very interesting stories to tell. New videos appear each week and Perla returns regularly to see what's new.

Of course nonprofits might fear losing control of the message. But direct communication gives the site an authenticity that should more than make up for any uneasiness. And it makes it possible for visitors to feel like they are in contact with the real people who they would like to help.

Perla has also software that allows non-profits transform their websites via the collection and display of user created content. She passed on the chance to toot her own horn in her presentation.

She is also the CEO of a nonprofit called GreatNonprofits – taking advantage of the grassroots democratization of the web to aggregate and share information about nonprofits.

I was thinking about how to encourage citizens of the United States to feel more of a connection with people around the world.

I’ve always loved maps.

I’d like to see a map of the United States morphed into the shape of Africa so that each state was overlaid onto outlines of the African countries. And vice versa – how do the countries of African fit over the states of the US.

Animations of these would make cool videos for YouTube.

And further – how about a data base so that:

According to Wikipedia, there are 61 territories in Africa so it would be interesting to see how these match up with the 50 states in the US. Which is most similar in population, type of industry, geography, etc. That way if I lived in, say, Oklahoma, I could see what countries had the most in common with my state.

And take it even further – what towns have the most in common with the town I live in.

And further – within a given country – show a profile of someone who has a similar place in society in terms of sex, age, class, education, line of work, etc.

Does anyone know if anything like this is out there? Or who might be interested in creating such items? And what groups would be interested in using them and help publicize them?

...global warming and the war in Iraq....It kind of works in an odd way --

New Neil Young Video "After The Garden" Visits "An Inconvenient Truth"

http://atrios.blogspot.com/2006_07_16_atrios_archive.html#115357519261067569

or

http://www.neilyoung.com/lwwtoday/lwwvideos/afterthegarden_qt.html

Now in San Jose at NetSquared. I'm going to put this info up in a quick and rough form to try to avoid falling behind.

Susan Megy and I went to ForumOne's Online Community Camp yesterday and it was very cool. Fort Mason in San Francisco is a wonderful place on the bay and I don't get over there often enough. A beautiful day.

Of course Omidyar Network was one of the sponsors so it had to be great.

Thanks to Jim Cashel a wonderful guy who organized the Camp.

There a total of nine sessions over three timeslots. My first one was:

I wanted to share the wonderful news that I've been contacted via omidyar.net PM by someone in the Ivory Coast (that's near Nigeria, right?) It's rather complicated, involving an assasination, orphans and a large trust fund. I can't tell you more because they ask that I keep it confidential but I stand to clear well over a million US$ by helping these people out.

It looks like from the low feedback that my friend has contacted other people here who have taken his PM the wrong way.

Seriously, I love getting this because I just read a bizarre New Yorker artcle about the most unlikely American getting sucked into a Nigeria scam and now serving time in prison. He was repeatly ripped off and still hopes that the promised money will come through.