» Interfaith Organizing
» Research Remix Contest
» New Collection of Education Research
» Webinars Are Weird
» Progress, Progress
» Recent Additions
Growing Religious Diversity in South Carolina: Implications for the Palmetto State
The Pluralism Project
Building Justice
Interfaith Worker Justice
Interreligious Movement Report
Council for a Parliament of the World's Religions
The Academics Athletics Trade-off: Universities and Intercollegiate Athletics
Center for College Affordability and Productivity
Defining "Noncommercial": A Study of How the Online Population Understands "Noncommercial Use"
Creative Commons
Free Trade in Health Care: The Gains from Globalized Medicare and Medicaid
Center for Economic and Policy Research
www.issuelab.org/enews
Issue 31 — October 12, 2009
It's not that any of us on staff is particularly religious but we've been wanting to do a CloseUp on the topic of Interfaith Organizing for some time now. The fact is that if you care about the sector it's impossible to ignore the role that faith-based organizations have played in the history of social organizing and in the delivery of many of our most basic social services. Not only are a large percentage of nonprofits fai th-based but a lot of folks working in the nonprofit sector are personally and professionally motivated by their faith.
So we wanted to know what happens when people of all kinds of different faiths (and non-faiths) come together to solve pressing social issues? (After all it's the places and spaces where people come together that interest IssueLab the most).
This month's special collection, while small, hints at some of the very big things that can happen when people of different faiths combine their power, networks, and resources. If you've ever been to a neighborhood meeting, dinner party (or for that matter an extended family gathering) you know that smoothing over centuries of religious conflicts and socially-constructed barriers is no easy task. Yet hundreds of organizations identify as Interfaith and engage in this kind of dialogue and joint action everyday.
We invite you, during this season when the calendar is packed with a diverse spread of religious holidays, to just take a few minutes to learn more about this work and about how people of different faiths are coming together to address the social issues we all have in common.
[ image provided under CC license by BROWSER ]
» Research Remix Contest
I can watch sleeping cats falling off TV's all day long. But wouldn't it be great if we could see more online videos that actually address social issues that matter and that do it using real facts to back up opinion?!
Well, hold on to your office chair because the time has come. In celebration of Open Access week (Oct 19-23) IssueLab is launching its Research Remix Contest. This unique video competition aims to engage working artists and digital media students with social issues while encouraging nonprofits to make their research more broadly available and usable through open licensing.
Contestants will be asked to remix facts or data from one of over 300 openly licensed research reports on IssueLab into a video or animation under three minutes in length. Winners will be selected after the December 31, 2009 deadline, and nonprofits will be able to use all submitted videos freely to support their causes. The judging panel include folks like Allison Fine, Michael Hoffman and Creative Commons' own Jane Park. Prizes include a Netbook, Flip Camera, and PSP games.
But we need your help to spread the word. So, please visit the contest page for more information, tweet about the contest, post it to your Facebook profile, or just send that friend (or kid!) of yours a flyer about the contest.
» New Collection of Education Research
With the help of IssueLab the Cambridge-based Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy has launched a new research library to provide open access to its collection of research on educational improvement.
The new library, available on the Rennie Center's website, not only makes the collection easier for site visitors to search and browse but also automatically makes all of the Rennie Center's research available to a broader audience through the IssueLab website and dissemination channels. This means that the many advocates, students, practitioners and policymakers who seek quality research on public education will now be able to access it more easily than ever before.
The collection includes 36 reports on topics ranging from special education to school choice and charters.
» Webinars Are Weird
Ok someone has to say it, webinars are just plain weird. You are either talking to a group of people you can't see or you are listening to a speaker you can't see while watching her/him click around on your screen. Yet, as weird as they are they have also become a terrific way to learn more about a topic without having to travel to a conference, browse hundreds of blog posts, or strike up a relationship with a subject expert.Luckily, if you missed any of IssueLab's recent webinars you can now watch them on slideshare. Attendance has been great and we have been able to share some valuable information about online dissemination. We have two more webinars coming up in the series - which are unfortunately already at maximum capacity - but fortunately will also be available for download.
So ignore the wierdness of it all, cue up the slides, imagine my voice drifting over your speakers and get some derned good information about how to build an audience for your research.
- Helping Nonprofits Rethink Dissemination
- Case Studies in Research Report Design
- October 22: How to Find Your Audience Online
- November 12: Making Your Research Usable Online
» Progress, Progress
As IssueLab comes up on its second year of operating as a nonprofit we have come to app reciate the value in monitoring progress towards our goals along the way.So here is some good news to share with all of you who care about providing broader and more open access to nonprofit research. As of last week more than 9300 other web pages link to IssueLab. This is of course in addition to all the links that nonprofits are building to the same research on their own web sites.
Together we are, step by step and link by link, getting this important body of work into more hands than ever before.
If you got this email because some clever and caring person forwarded it to you please consider subscribing to future issues yourself. It's easy, it's free, it's useful, and it's the right way to repay your friend's favor!
If instead you received this email by mistake or would like to be removed from future mailings, you can unsubscribe easily by clicking on the unsubscribe link in the footer of this email. We'll be sorry to see you go, but we respect your wishes!
IssueLab — bringing nonprofit research into focus
Add your research, subscribe to our mailing list, grab our newsfeed and stay on top of nonprofit research!
http://www.issuelab.org
IssueLab maintains all copyrights over written material included in this e-newsletter.