“The World is Always Changing” sings a Pike Place Market busker in Seattle, on the market’s 100th birthday in 2007.

This is a test of displaying video on BrianGlanz.net while it is marked as “private” in my flickr stream.

My first reaction was: we should be counting dead and injured people, not only dead and injured Americans.

The point of increasing our perception of war in this simple, everyday way is to make it more real. A spike in media attention for this sign and for the war will remind many of the war in Iraq, making it a little bit more real. For those who pass by Ron Richardson’s sign often, the small but repeated reminder makes the war still more real. The sign does not let them forget the war, and for that Richardson is to be commended. Richardson is a retired history teacher who himself served in the military; we are grateful for his shared wisdom.

Yet we also must not forget: Americans are not the only people being killed and injured in Iraq. Many thousands of innocent people have died, whether innocent Iraqis who are nobody’s enemy, innocent Americans who were not there to fight, or anyone from anywhere caught in the crossfire. Many innocent people have been killed by our enemies, but many innocent people have died due to mistakes made and crimes committed by Americans, too.

Even if we counted both American and innocent casualties, though, we would still not make real the whole human tragedy of war. Those who we call our enemies are not less human than we are. Our enemies, too, should be counted. Consider:

1) Who are America’s enemies in Iraq?

2) Who among our enemies is so threatening that we need to kill them, and who could we instead arrest and prosecute, or negotiate with politically, financially, or otherwise?

In much of the fighting, the answers to these simple questions have been unclear.

Tens of thousands are dead and hundreds of thousands are injured — those are the human numbers, not the American numbers. Exact numbers are controversial and even the Pentagon will avoid releasing their opinion on what the exact numbers are, but we cannot let details obscure the scale of this tragedy. Popular American media and Ron Richardson’s sign have recently featured the number 4,000 — but the real number is much larger, and more terrible.

The reasons for so much killing and injuring, like the scale of it all, are also easy to forget and important to repeat: Americans are being killed and injured because we are fighting a war that we started. Most Americans now think we should never have started this war. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Saddam Hussein posed no threat to us. It was out of our own fear, and our inability to collect or properly interpret what they call “intelligence,” that we began this war.

It should be soul-shaking to reflect on this and any war. Counting American casualties does make war a little more real, but counting only American casualties is a lie of omission. We must not pretend that only Americans suffer when America fights a war.

If humankind was mindful of the reality of war, there would be no more war. Counting only American casualties is less than the whole truth of the horror and the history we are making. To keep it real, we must know the whole human tragedy of war.

While modernizing the efforts of volunteers and staff, the Foundation has created online tools of possible interest to other non-profits, including:

(1) Online forms used by grant recipients to submit annual reports. The forms include requests for human interest stories from the recipients, which have come in handy later.

(2) A means of raising funds online. At last glance, there was a big button to click for donations from the foundation’s Web site.

(3) A volunteering log. Volunteers perform many tasks for Haas Foundation, especially media related. Volunteers are not only working locally, and often they are working online. The foundation receives credit for every hour volunteered, so a log helps with tracking and also managing volunteered work, especially when it is performed asynchronously.

Haas does not always create their internal tools from scratch. One recent publication was a great example of coordinating their original online tools, other readily available online tools, and volunteer efforts. Volunteers used Lulu to publish a collection of success stories, which grant recipients had entered into the online annual report form. The finished publication was volunteer-edited and sent as a thank-you to donors of a certain amount.

The Haas Foundation is modernizing these efforts quickly but does not yet have all the answers. Michele expressed their general need for coordinating a variety of online tools for volunteers. They also want a better way volunteers can connect to form a community online. The Foundation has have used Microsoft SharePoint, but SharePoint has been difficult to maintain over time, “from a usability standpoint” as they reported.

The presentation session at Seattle Net Tuesday which originated this report was brief. Our immediate group did not have an opportunity to discuss potential solutions. My instincts tend toward a private wiki like PBwiki to make collaborative working and intranet connectivity front and center. Community building can be on the side of a PBwiki, either linking to and from it and social networking sites or integrating their widgets into it. It is also possible that a custom social network like Ning would be a better glue for Haas Foundation volunteers.

The Haas Foundation would be happy to hear more suggestions. Tell them Michele Fugiel and Seattle Net Tuesday sent you!

This article was written based on a presentation by and follow-up with Volunteer Michele Fugiel at Seattle Net Tuesday in 2007.

Saul & Dayee G. Haas Foundation photo credit Mel Hazen, 2007

Try Noonhat “to take lunch to the next level,” as creator Brian Dorsey has said. The site matches you randomly with people for lunch, on a day and within an area you and they have pre-selected. This is not a dating service; you are encouraged to go to lunch with more than one other person. With its randomness, Noonhat is purely about tossing the social salad. It is what Dorsey calls “an anti-niche technology.”

To Seattle Net Tuesday and all those interested in non-profit technology, Noonhat represents what one person is capable of:

(1) in his or her spare time,

(2) using free, open source tools, and

(3) with a bit of help from the Seattle community.

Dorsey spends $15 per month on hosting, and Noonhat has no other cost except his time. Noonhat is free to its users. Brian Dorsey works full time as a software developer, but not on Noonhat! He spent what he calls “50 software guy hours” to build Noonhat from its beginning to being featured in mainstream media and industry leading conferences, including Seattle’s KING 5 TV News and Gnomedex 2007.

Clearly there are great possibilities for building with free, existing software, and the opportunities for starting something new in Seattle are promising, too. Dorsey’s other essential message for starting a new venture was: be willing to do things before you’re entirely ready. His Noonhat home page went public before there was automation for matching people to lunches. Even though he had to manually perform matches in the early going, by opening the site early on, he proved the concept. Ultimately the Noonhat process was improved through a trial by fire that forced Dorsey to be practical.

Especially let a practical, timely opportunity lead you into taking the next step when the time is right, even if that is before you feel ready. Brian Dorsey and Noonhat were voted from a small Ignite Seattle event into presenting a few days later at Gnomedex, an internationally attended social technology conference. Within that one week, visits to the Noonhat site went from dozens per day to more than 1,000 per day. Dorsey took advantage of the Gnomedex spotlight to launch Noonhat nationally — not that he was ready for that, either!

Dorsey also mentioned that in the span of its first few days of mainstream exposure, large companies had approached him regarding use of Noonhat internally by their employees. Take one opportunity, and look for others to open. Not only KING 5 TV News and other network news, but the Seattle Times, the Seattle P-I, and other print media gave Noonhat increasing attention. If Noonhat had waited to launch until everything was perfect, or if it had missed its opportunity to shine, who can say the spotlight would have come again?

Noonhat is a liberating way to meet new people. To paraphrase Dorsey’s words: in a time of increasing professional specialization, narrowing and shrinking social networks, and pick-your-perspective media sources, this is social networking turned inside out and with no strings attached. If you’d hesitate to meet someone new alone, just bring a friend or two along to guarantee a good time, but with a twist.

In other words, give it a try at Noonhat.com. Pick your location, date, and cheers!

In 1990, Carl Sagan presented to the world the most distant image yet taken of ourselves, from 4 billion miles. The image was of a pale blue dot, suspended in a sun beam.

The original adaptation of Pale Blue Dot featured on the front page of YouTube in June 2007, and was a finalist at the Portobello Film Festival in London 2007, and at the Concorto Film Festival in Italy 2007.

Here is their site from the National Geographic Society.