IdeaScale is a hosted solution (it runs on their servers), but you can customize it with your own look-and-feel in the $99/month package. Their client list includes Xerox, RedHat, Microsoft, the Veterans Administration, and The White House. They provide a free, full-featured license for government agencies (local, state, and federal); there's no free license for non-profits "at this time."
Rob Pegoraro writes in the Washington Post about the new Bing/Facebook integration which, along with Google's social search looks like a new adventure in search and the social web.
It also contains a great take on boilerplate text:
(Disclaimer: I don't get paid by the word, which means the effort I spend writing the usual disclaimer about Post Co. chairman Don Graham being on Facebook's board of directors yields me zero financial benefit.)
This article by Tom Keyser in the Albany (NY) Times Union provides an interesting look behind the scenes at what goes into winning a Pepsi Refresh grant. Not only is it a learnable skill, but when a community learns the techniques, it can get behind a multitude of causes.
If you look at a map of grant winners, you see that the Capital Region compares favorably to New York City but far exceeds Boston, Hartford, Philadelphia and Baltimore. Take a look yourself at http://awesome.good.is/pepsirefreshmap.html.
Crowdsourcing is one of the most contentious topics in the world of charities today. The term was first used by Jeff Howe in a 2006 Wired magazine article, and it has become part of the digital/social conversation. (There's more at http://northcountryconsulting.com/crowdsourcing.)
