Yesterday at MashupCamp2008 in Mountain View, Thingfo won Elfenworks “Best Social Justice Mashup”.  The contest entry was the SocialSite app, which we used to create a Poverty Awareness badge and a new info page to go along with it, and hopefully help it spread.  Here’s the widget, which links to a page where you can get the embed code and put some poverty awareness on your own blog or website…  or of course, you can sign up to make your own custom, people-powered badge.

Regardless of awards and prizes, let me say that Mashup Camp 2008 was a blast.  Only late last week, my friend Yobie Benjamin from TrueCarbon.org pinged me, “You should go to mashupcamp”.   Turns out, that was great advice.  Mashup camp was a really cool event.  Hands-on, very well run but also maintains a lot of spontaneity and self-organization.  Since this was a pretty geeky developer event, it was easy to talk to people (yes, you can talk to geeks, kids!) learn, and see a lot of cool technologies, hacks, and programming wizards in action.  As usual at these events, it’s all about the people.   Met a bunch of cool hackers, technologists, and activists.  The solutions providers were really helpful — Mozenda, IBM, WetPaint and Calais were very hands-on and I’m looking forward to doing some integrations with their technologies.   It is simply amazing how powerful the web is becoming as a platform.  Speaking of web-as-platform, the camp also featured an excellent keynote speech by Tim O’Reilly (slides here) and a great talk on webhooks by Jeff Lindsay.

Now, about the mashup contest, which was decided after two rounds of SpeedGeeking.  I decided to focus my entry for Elfenworks Foundation, which is a non-profit organization with

a primarily domestic focus until the USA is the embodiment of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights set forth by the United Nations in 1948.

For this contest, Elfenworks wanted us to build mashups that would raise awareness for poverty in America, and to orient the app to have a “ripple effect”, or what a lot of internet folks would call a “viral” element.  “Ripple” sounds a bit more non-profit than “viral”, eh?

Pictured below are Elfenworks CEO Lauren Speeth and CTO John Watkins, with a giant awards check behind them.  (photo by  mveldhuizen on Flickr):

What I wanted to do with the Poverty Awareness widget, was give the organizations and bloggers in that space a tool they could use to find and share poverty-related content (and the people creating that content), and also help those organizations and individuals tap into the web2.0 world without any programming.  I was up till about 4:00 am the night before the competition fixing bugs, putting a “no-ads for non-profits” switch in place, putting together an “info” page for the badges to promote their spread, and trying to squeeze in a few extra hacks that didn’t quite make it out in time.

The final day of the camp was great. Here I am demo’ing the app during SpeedGeeking (photo by  KentBrew on Flickr):

All in all, it was an honor to win the Elfenworks “Best Social Justice Mashup” award and I’m excited about the cool people and ideas flowing around the conference.  Looking forward to more mashups next year and spreading some social awareness!

The picture that my mom would want to see.

Update: here’s a mashupcamp widget made with SocialSite — includes Twitters, Blog posts, Inbound blogs pointing at MashupCamp, Delicious bookmarks, and YouTube videos.