I was honored to feature Samahope’s work to help women in need of medical care around the world in TechCrunch.

This Sunday, there’s a lot you can do in honor of the woman who raised you. There’s TheMomtract, a project out of the ad agency Mother New York to give your mother authority back over some part of your life. There are flowers and promises to let fewer of her calls go to voicemail.

But the San Francisco-based startup Samahope hopes that funds usually reserved for cross-state chocolate delivery might be used to finance medical treatments for women in need around the world. Its #HonorYourMom project is soliciting donations for medical treatments for women along with tweet-length anecdotes about participants’ own parents’ uniqueness. And while funding fistula repair surgery may not have been part of some users’ plans this year, the non-profit organization’s founders hope that providing safe birth kits in a mom’s name won’t take much convincing.

Samahope CEO Leila Janah is the founder of Samsource, a company that offers work opportunities on enterprise data projects to poor individuals around the world. Janah said that while she was on a State Department trip to Sierra Leone for women tech leaders recently, she quickly realized that Samasource was unlikely to work in a country with a 60 percent illiteracy rate. But she was also disturbed upon realizing that a systematic failure to provide basic medical care to many Sierra Leonean women had resulted in people like Dr. Darius Maggi, a Texas-based doctor in his 60s, spending their retirements fundraising for and performing surgeries for women who had undergone traumatic childbirths.

“I thought doctors should focus on providing medical care,” Janah said,”and tech entrepreneurs could be focused on creating tools to raise money for them.”

Samahope’s day-to-day work to provide medical treatments for disenfranchised women is being led by co-founder Shivani Garg Patel, a McKinsey and Microsoft alum. It is particularly focused on “last mile” populations in rural areas where care can be difficult, if not impossible, to find. (Maggi’s organization, the West Africa Fistula Foundation, has become one of its first beneficiaries.) Users can help pay for medical treatments in Sierra Leone, Zambia, Nepal, and Mexico. Like microfinance organization Kiva.org, partner organizations that work in those countries help connect funds with individuals in need, and users can similarly connect their Facebook profiles and PayPal accounts. Samahope says it uses charity researcher GiveWell among others to assess prospective partners and researches their budgets and effectiveness.

The World Health Organization estimates that two billion people worldwide have no ability to access basic surgical care. Much of the focus of Samahope-funded operations is on fixable conditions that can be treated with surgeries. Users can help pay for cleft palate and burn surgeries resulting from close proximity to open flames used for cooking.

Angel investors including Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, founder of the Silicon Valley Social Venture Fund, and Scott Banister, founder of Cisco-acquired IronPort Systems, have helped the organization raise $100K to date. Patel says that 100 patients’ procedures have been funded by 250 users to date with monthly donations growing an average of 60 percent this year. Since #HonorYourMom launched last week, they say that donations on the site have more than doubled.

The team has an ambitious goal of making scary-sounding surgeries philanthropically funded, but they’re not alone. Watsi, the first non-profit that Y Combinator welcomed to one of its famed accelerator program classes, operates in a similar space of funding operations for people in need. The Red Cross continues to be a popular resource for giving in cases of massive disaster-related medical needs (and one many individuals think of first). And the explosive growth of crowdfunding and donation sites, while enabling more options, may have created a sense of donor fatigue amongst people who are asked to give to different contacts’ causes daily.

When asked about the competition for dollars, Janah said that it provides validation that what they’re doing is valuable and viable. “Given the number of people who don’t have access to acute care, there is definitely room for multiple players in this space,” she said. “We should be competing to provide the best service. If you can provide access to health care, you can solve a lot of other problems. Our challenge is to show how powerful this investment in someone is.”

There is an also an employment story underlying the cause: by helping women in need get well, they can get back to work. In the future, the site may try to provide opportunities to fund education on the path to jobs in medical fields. Training women and enabling increased career opportunities creates a “ripple effect of opportunity” amongst their families and communities, according to Half the Sky, a women’s rights organization inspired by the work of The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn.

Samahope says it will plan to expand geographically based on places where its medical partners can deliver low-cost medical treatments with the highest impact. It has its eye on South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where more than two million women are thought to live with untreated obstetric fistula. Screenings for cancer and other detectable conditions are said to be fundable soon as well.

The book provided grateful laughs while I was in the middle of advanced Forrest Yoga teacher training last week. His keys to happiness may not be novel (“Meditate.”), but they are needed: “Become most real.”

On April 9 (tonight!) the advocacy organization SPUR will host a gathering of young urbanists to discuss directions for improving urban environments. Between Code for America’s expanding data work with cities and an increasing number of parklets sprinkled throughout SF, the conversation feels like a timely one. “Two poles” of design–non-professional contributions and those from traditional urban development sectors–will be considered during the program with California College of the Art’s Urban Lab. Public Architecture, Stamen Design and Design Observer will share their thinking, and I love how MKThink CEO and program panelist Miller conceives of what’s needed for this space: “To remain vital and relevant, we must not only think like architects, but analysts, cultural anthropologists, inventors, and community advocates as well.”

I had the good fortune of meeting and featuring this team that is focused on empowering designers and makers alike. Full story on TC.

Barriers to international manufacturing and high fuel costs have long made overseas production painful for small businesses. Now, an economic trend towards American manufacturing has created a timely entrance to the market for Maker’s Row. The startup, a finalist in last week’s Women 2.0 Pitch Competition, says it wants to become a go-to resource to create, well, anything.

Co-founders Matthew Burnett and Tanya Menendez launched Maker’s Row in November to act as a sort of Match.com with Kiva.org-like profiles for factories and facilities. The site enables recognized designers and amateurs alike to partner with manufactures that are searchable on the site by state to create a range of items, from handbags to sportswear. It charges manufacturers a subscription fee to post. Read the post in its entirety.

The online store, which “brings together well-designed jewelry, accessories, and home furnishings from around the world,” sources from 21 countries. It was launched eight months ago by Ali Price and Lydia Harter (whose combined names gave the company its moniker), two friends who met at Wake Forest before working at Kiva.org and Pottery Barn, respectively.

I’m especially struck by a colorblock clutch from Rags2Riches out of Manila, a blue agate ring from Joya in Cape Town, and a handblown olive glass pitcher out of Jordan. Any of which would be much appreciated this week o’ love, of course.

Where will February 14 find you this year? Dancing with your neighbors, friends, and co-workers, of course!

This 15th V-Day will be the largest ever: when women and men around the world dance, sing, and shout in defiance of violence against women. I’ll be at City Hall with thousands of other San Franciscans, DJs, and Mayor Lee between 4 to 6 PM–consider it if you’re local.

One Billion Rising was created to show our collective refusal of violence aimed at women and girls. Your stomping–your sharing, your hip-waving, your shouting–is part of a global call for a better reality for 50% of the world’s population (and the people who love them).

Survivors in the Congo will be celebrating. Artists will be sharing expressions they’ve created for the day. Filmmakers will be capturing the movement, the connections, the music. And activists and supporters of women everywhere will come together to demand an end to atrocities against women. And you? What can you do?

“On the 14th, even if you’re in a field dancing by yourself, you’re going to know you’re not alone. That’s something I hope we can carry forward as we resolve to protect ourselves and our sisters.” – Anne Hathaway in conversation with Eve Ensler

At Mozilla we’ve just launched a call for design submissions for new Open Badges and are seeking your creative prowess. This is part of a project to acknowledge public contributors’ work and create meaningful badges that can help them earn new career opportunities:

Attention visual designers! Are you interested in contributing to Mozilla, being part of an awesome worldwide community and having your work seen by a *lot* of people?

Our Web Development team relies on community volunteers for help with a variety of things and would like to create a series of badges to recognize these contributors for their work. Specifically, they need badges that could be earned by the following actions on Github.

* fork a site repo
* submit a pull request
* one pull request merged
* 10 pull requests merged
* 25 pull requests merged
* 50 pull requests merged
* 100 pull requests merged

These will be part of the Open Badges project – a wider network of badges that are interoperable, shareable and contain metadata so people can easily learn more about how they’re earned. The only catch is that we need someone to design them. Interested? Read on for more details.

With its first product for couples, the newly minted winner of the Women 2.0 PITCH NYC Startup Competition provides a custom multi-merchant online marketplace. Users can choose from and register for goods at brick-and-mortar stores, which have historically been excluded from the $19 billion annual domestic wedding registry market.

Read this post in its entirety on TC.

A few dozen people joined my colleagues Doug Belshaw, Sunny Lee (that’s her at right) and I to think about Designing Open Badges in the Wild and another 20 came together to give feedback on the user experience around earning and hosting badges. They are educators, designers, non-profit organizers, business folks, and people designing their own personal learning pathways. Among our caffeinated chats about skill sharing and badge creation, these themes especially resonated:

• Experimentation is important. None of us knows the shape that the badges ecosystem will take, but we’re building it together. It’s been fantastic to see community members’ contributions on our weekly Wednesday calls, but watching the question asking-and-answering happen in person is a completely other beauty. I do think there’s a sort of neat kismet that happens when a career educator talks to a startup founder and then break bread together while talking about what badges might become.

• Badges can be aspirational. In both of our focus groups we heard both badge issuers and earners talk about wanting to be able to share potential future badges that have not yet been earned. Might “enrolled” badges offer inspiration while learning? Could they take the form of low color or phantom badges that others can see and encourage someone to keep working towards?

• Show me the numbers. MozFesticipants are eager to see the number of people who have earned individual badges, in part to be able to determine those that may be of interest. (There is a major component here about self-initiated value that will no doubt be explored more as Open Badges expand beyond their current 30K issuances.) One participant suggested that badge issuers provide data on the number of issuances (via standardized sub-domains, a la thesanfranista.com/badges). Another said they would want to be able to opt in to see everyone else who has earned the same badges that they have and connect

• We’ve all got work to do. From the little things (like the description of “pushing” badges to the personal repository Backpack potentially needing rephrasing) to the big (making tens hundreds of thousands more Open Badges available), our work is cut out for all of us. I’m excited to see what the next year until MozFest will bring in terms of learning and earning.

We also explored the differences between Open Badges (community-created and earned) and Webmaker Badges (Mozilla-created, community-earned). We shared handouts for MozFest participant badges and were glad to see hundreds of festival-goers earn their first badges for creating on site. And Badge Bingo from our friends at Go Codery and 3D printed versions of badges by Tinkercad made for fabulous fun. Until next year.

I’m excited to share that I’ve joined the team at Mozilla Foundation this month as design and community lead on the organization’s Open Badges efforts. Say that you want prospective employers to know that you have design or programming skills (or are an amazing copywriter or coach to kid creators or…you get the idea). A resume doesn’t do justice to all you’re capable of, nor is it validated by organizations whose credentials you’ve earned. And in an age of anywhere, anytime learning, university degrees don’t adequately capture skills gained outside the classroom.

Like Girl or Boy Scout badges, Open Badges with metadata information coded in serve as digital and visual forms of recognition of skills and literacies. Mozilla Foundation has created the infrastructure that allows issuing organizations to offer their badges to the world via badge earners who meet their requirements. Badges can then be displayed on social network and job search sites, among other places, for discovery by people who might ask about or applaud earners’ efforts. Together, communities of earners, issuers, and displayers of these badges are helping develop a major system of skill sharing (which foundation colleagues Erin Knight, Carla Casilli, Sunny Lee, and Doug Belshaw have written about and discussed in depth).

I’ve long appreciated Mozilla’s focus on transparency and openness, largely because it stands in such stark contrast to my years working in advertising and marketing. (If being a vegetarian yoga instructor who promotes Slim Jim to 15-year-old boys doesn’t cause cognitive dissonance, I’m not sure what does.) The willingness to put an educational experiment into the world, ask for public feedback, and actually listen to it marks a step change–and one I couldn’t be more excited about.

I wrote about the goal of making Open Badges a global standard in education and skills recognition during Master’s research last year. I believe more than ever that traditional  institutions have much to offer the badges ecosystem, and Purdue’s leadership in this space is just one example. The variety of inquiries coming from educational, informal, and other peer-to-peer organizations–in addition to interested individuals–makes me think we’re just at the beginning of realizing badges’ potential. Young learners who are issuing one another badges based on new skills gained? That gets me pretty excited too. We’ll be talking about iterating upon these topics at MozFest (under the motto “less yack, more hack”) in London next month, and if you have something to say about them in the meantime, we’d love to hear from you on an upcoming Wednesday community call.