One of the very best things about being a part of the growing world of start-up social ventures is reading about truly amazing projects and ideas. In the past few weeks, we've run across three that deserve special attention:

1. The folks at alldaybuffet (via Change.org's Social Entrepreneurship blog) tipped us to UnLocal, a very cool new non-profit out of New York. Recognizing the difficulty new immigrants have in building up social capital when they get to a new neighborhood, they're planning to create a map of all types of resource. Alldaybuffet explains:
   UnLocal’s goal is to put the city’s numerous resources for health care, education, legal services and job opportunities within reach of all New York City immigrants.  While social services for immigrants have existed in New York since the turn of the century, UnLocal’s brilliance lies in the  understanding and capitalizing on the increasing access to technology available to New York City’s immigrant communities.  With so many public schools, libraries, Internet cafes and other venues offering public access to computers,  the Internet is an increasingly utilized medium of communication and information gathering in even the most economically depressed communities.
2. Ethan Zukerman highlighted GroupsNearYou, a great project out of the UK that is seeking to  geotag every local group on YahooGroups. From Ethan's post:
   "... Tom's now trying to get people to classify Yahoo groups for him, specifically Tahoo groups that mention the term "residents" or "neighborhood". There are 45,000 of these groups, and Tom wants to know what geographies they address. That way, he can build a service where you send a text message containing your zip code to his servers, and they respond with information on online groups you could join that cover issues in your neighborhood or community."
   We're planning to feature this data set on MoveSmart.org, but in the meantime you should head over to groupsnearyou.com and lend a hand! (Thanks to Bec for the tip.)
3. Finally, our friends over at the Neighbors Project have created a wonderful map of Chicago's neighborhood associations (embedded below). If you have an association to add, make sure to let them know. This is another data set we'll feature on MoveSmart.org when we launch.