Great reads from around the web on September 23rd

I come across so many great conversations, ideas, and resources all over the web every day. Here are some of the most interesting things I’ve found recently (as of September 23rd). You can join the conversations in the comments, or click through to the original posts to find what others are saying.

To follow more of the things I find online, you can follow @amysampleward on Twitter (which is just a blog and resource feed), or find me on Delicious (for all kinds of bookmarks).

• Reflecting on “Make It Your Own” « A. Fine Blog – “The Case Foundation has just released an evaluation of their innovative “Make It Your Own” program. The assessment was conducted by Peter Levine, Peter Deitz and Cynthia Gibson. One would be hardpressed to find more knowledgeable, thoughtful folks on civic engagement and social media. The Make It Your Own program was a grant program in 2007 created by the Case Foundation to promote “citizen centered” approaches to local community building. With nearly 5,000 applicants and more than 15,000 voters. It was one of the first efforts, perhaps even the first, to use online voting as a way to crowdsource grantmaking.”
• NYC Startup CatchAFire.org Launches Site To Match Skilled Volunteers And Charities – “Catchafire.org, a service to find and match volunteers with professional skills and charitable organizations in need of their help, will open its website to the public today after about a year in private beta testing.”
• Broadband for everyone » ext337 – “The Broadband Commission for Digital Development is, as ArsTechnica puts it, the world’s broadband plan… I’ve been thinking for a while that nonprofits, ngos and community-based organizations should be online hubs for their communities. If we are looking for pictures of our communities — the digital education needed and accessed, the policies that need to be addressed, the services being offered — then we need to include the views of all members of our communities.”
• Net2 Think Tank Round-Up: Finding Volunteers Online | NetSquared, an initiative of TechSoupGlobal.org – Looking for ways to recruit volunteers online? Check out the Net2 Think Tank for ideas! “For this month’s Net2 Think Tank, we asked you to share your tools, tactics, and best practices for promoting your volunteer opportunities online. There are many tools and resources available – so finding the ones that work best for your audience, and finding the ways that you can use them effectively can be a task. Below is a list of networks, tools, and best practices that will help steer you in the right direction.”
• Citizen-Centered Solutions: Lessons in Leveraging Public Participation from the Make It Your Own Awards | Case Foundation – As Case’s director of communications, Allyson Burns, explains, the report “takes a look at public participation / grantmaking programs and in particular the lessons learned from our Make it Your Own Awards. When we launched MIYO, our aim was to introduce the concept of citizen-centered philanthropy. The program challenged people from all walks of life to discuss what matters most, decide what kind of community they want, and take action together, all while being completely immersed in the grantmaking process.”