Everywhere I turn I see people working on socially minded technology projects. 

I first saw the energy lifting in New Haven last year when Matt Kelley(Change.org blogger), Ben Berkowitz (SeeClickFix.com Founder), Jarad Duval (Author of Next Generation Democracy: What the Open Source Revolution Means for Power, Politics, and Change), and myself got together for beers to talk about how we could get more people to embrace the public benefits of changing technology. We hoped that by pooling the brains of the nerds of New Haven we would discover oportunties to work together for positive social change. We decieded that the place to start would be just providing a place for those with the technical skills and interest to explore ideas and innovation without focusing directly tasking out action. We called our group "Social Change and Technology". Our gatherings where and still are informal conversations over pizza and beer. 

While working with others to organize this group, I have been introduced to a surprising number of people working on ideas that will create a positive change in our community. 

Our group's primary focus was conversations but we are already seeing how those conversation can lead to inspiring action. During Social Media Week (a week of social media focused events) we held a conversation on the subject of open source technology. As part of the presentation I showed how you can run Ubuntu (a Linix based operating system) right from a USB drive. This ignited an idea and lots of excitement. Some of the people in the room decided get together again and see if they could actually use that technology to bring new life to older computers that could be donated. From that group the ComputerHaven effort was born. 

ComputerHaven is just one example of the many activies that are being organized by different groups of people across New Haven. Just yesterday I attended a very exiting meeting of an organically organized group of people interested in making good things happen in New Haven. The group formed in the wake of New Haven Social Media Week and has leadership bubbling up from the ranks but is still largely loosely organized using tools like twitter. You can check out the conversation now by checking out the twitter hash tag#swForce. This group has stepped up to champion involvment in several efforts accross New Haven these include ComputerHaven, DrumHaven, CivicHaven and TreeHaven amoung others. 

Many of the people involved in these groups got to know each other through an effort titled GoogleHaven. GoogleHaven, was a citizen lead campaign of people in the private, nonprofit and public spheres to attract the attention of Google and encurage them to put their experimental new super fast brodband service in New Haven.  Google had a short timeframe in which they were looking for community feedback. With urgency present during its formation this group was driven to action early in its life and still maintains a healthy bias for action. 

In addition to all of these efforts New Haven has several online startups and experiments. SeeClickFix.com, ripple100.com and GiftFlow.org, just to name a few, add energy to the growing momentum of around technology and social change in New Haven. 

All of the above mentioned groups have different but overlapping participants. As I see it all these efforts are developing a growing network of civicly enguaged people working together under many different banners. Although connected through different groups all are focused on how we can used technology to make New Haven better. I am happy to see that the optimism I felt during our first "technology and Social Change" meetup is shared by so many others.