Win a webby for Change Everything

Last day of voting...

As you probably know, our online community ChangeEverything, has
been nominated for the highly prestigious Webby Award in the social
networking category. It's a huge honour just to be nominated (cue
Academy Awards music), but even more so since it's nominated in the
same category as Facebook! As Buzz Bishop, Crave 95.3 'Afternoon Drive' host and 24hours Cyberbuzz columnist, wrote about us this morning (page 10 of today's 24hours), we're trying to 'win a major industry award and bring it home to Canada.'

Which is where you come in. If you'd like to help, there are two things that we'd really appreciate:

• First, please drop by the Webby Awards' People's Voice site, and vote for Change Everything in the social networking category (under "connections"). The site is at http://pv.webbyawards.com/ - it takes about two minutes or so all in. (And once you've registered
  to vote, you can leave a comment on
  Change Everything's entry page.)
• Second, you can encourage friends, family or coworkers to vote too.
  Whether it's on a blog, your Facebook profile, or just an email to
  friends, family and coworkers - let them know what a great chance this
  is to support an authentic,social-change-focused community (not to
  mention a home-grown Vancouver project!) - and one that's up against
  behemoths like Facebook.

Only a few months after it launched, Change Everything spawned a
city-wide donation of more than 70 bags of warm clothing during a
potentially lethal cold snap. It provided a forum that gained a
worldwide audience for one woman's story of living plastic-free for a
year -- a story that got spotlighted on the Guardian's website. And
it's grown into something very valuable: a thriving, vibrant community,
with a heavy emphasis on sustainability and social justice.

Change Everything keeps on astonishing me.

First, it was the amazing clothing drive for the homeless of Vancouver's downtown east side that self-organized on the site during a late 2006 cold snap.

Then it was the saga of EnviroWoman, a Change Everything member who decided to forego plastic for a year and blogged about it on the site. It made it to the big time, even garnering a mention on The Guardian's UK web site.

And now Change Everything is a finalist for the social networking Webby, one of the most prestigious Internet awards out there. Its competition: huge communities like Bebo and, oh yes, a little site you may have heard of named Facebook.

Exactly what is going on here? What puts a 3,000-member community into the same league as a 70-million-member behemoth like Facebook?

I've been talking about it with Alex. And here are five reasons we think Change Everything should win that Webby:

1. It's a community committed to social change. As someone who scours the Internet Movie Database obsessively, I'm the last person to complain that so much of the web is devoted to the trivial and inconsequential. But when a site weighs in with a substantive mission and becomes a real success, it encourages others to follow suit, pursuing real-world results – and for those of us convinced of the social web's potential as a tool for social change, that's powerful stuff.