Categories: developers

An Invitation to Create Firefox Extensions for Good Causes

The following is a guest post from Joe Solomon, Director of Social Actions’ Change the Web Challenge.


Today we are launching Social Actions’ Change the Web Challenge – a contest to build new web apps that help people make a difference on the millions of websites we visit everyday. There will also be $10,000 in prizes. We are extremely excited to be partnering with Mozilla on this project!

Over at Social Actions we’ve created an open database of 60,000+ actions from 40+ sites– including GlobalGiving, Change.org, DonorsChoose.org, Kiva.org, Nabuur, TakingITGlobal, Idealist.org, and VolunteerMatch.

What the Change the Web Challenge is about is getting these actions out there – by helping people find and share actions on the websites, blogs and social networks that we all visit everyday.

What makes Mozilla and Firefox add-ons in particular such a powerful platform for social change is that you can change the way people browse the web. You can add an intimate and direct layer of social change to the browsing experience. You can, with so many different possibilities, help people make a difference on any website.

For example, Marnie Webb created an Ubiquity command that lets you highlight any phrase on any site and find related ways to take action from Social Actions’ 40+ action sources.

Our community members have also imagined (read: not built) an extension that replaces ads with actions (a la AddArt), to another extension that would alert you to relevant actions as you browse the web (possibly like Collactive), to a browser-based feed reader with the latest actions categorized by cause (by re-skinning ObamaFox).

We hope you’ll join us in envisioning and building new Firefox extensions that combine the aggregated actions of Social Actions with the powerful reach and impact of Mozilla Firefox.

You can find out more about the Change the Web Challenge, including how to submit your project here.

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One comment on “An Invitation to Create Firefox Extensions for Good Causes”

  1. Eric Jung wrote on

    I fine idea, and I hope to contribute. There are some rather interesting entries in the Social Action database:

    http://socialactions.net/jy4

    “I’m trying to raise $8,000.00 so I can attend Cosmetology school.”