The Case Foundation yesterday opened a summer application window for its "Make It Your Own" awards. A few months on from the controversial Net2 funding scrum, Case revisits similar philosophical ground with very different execution. To begin with, it's a multi-staged process of "managed democracy" -- you know, like we have in the political sphere, except with some democracy -- instead of the free-for-all registration-and-voting process that drew heat for Net2.

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Balloting for the NetSquared Innovation Fund has been completed and winners will apparently be named within hours. Let me state at the outset that I didn't feel I had sufficient knowledge of even a decently representative span of the projects and proposing organizations, nor time to acquire it, in order to cast a ballot in good faith -- only so many hours in a day, and all that. Since we're also neither a nominee nor a donor organization, there's no ox of ours being even remotely gored. The affair has stirred up a couple of potentially divisive-but-elucidating points of controversy. I was grateful to see David Geilhufe's commentary on the "high school popularity contest" nature of the voting on Monday. Having received a number of "vote for me" pitches from some of the organizations in question who obviously mass-mailed their e-mail lists -- and far from subverting the process, "get out the vote" was an explicit stage of the granting procedure -- I'd been a little troubled by the inherent conflict between "everyone votes" (and the concomitant promotional/member-building function for NetSquared) and the stated object of the fund to identify disruptive, innovative edge projects. Far be it from me to entrust for allocations of charitable capital my unalloyed faith to the inborn sagacity of fourth-generation descendants of robber barons. But we're dealing with the medium that spawned the verb "to Freep".

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Voting is open this week (only) on around 150 projects in the NetSquared Technology Innovation Fund project pool. Twenty of them will divvy up $100,000-plus in cash and services and take part in this year's NetSquared conference. Only thing required is to register with NetSquared (free), vote for at least five, and abide a few other simple rules. The full roster of projects gives an interesting glimpse at some ideas that could sprout into tomorrow's way of doing business online for nonprofits, and a few that could probably be cribbed today. I haven't had a time to digest the entire list, but there are at least three four from the DIA community I noticed (and if I missed any, please let me know and I'll add them):

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Got a tech-for-social-good project? It probably deserves to share a slice of a $100,000 pie, courtesy of TechSoup's NetSquared.

The NetSquared Featured Projects is a global competition that is open to both nonprofit and private sector submissions. We seek nominations of projects that can demonstrate the following attributes (though we understand that different projects will have different emphases and strengths):

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