1BOG (1 Block Off the Grid) is an organization that promotes “solar power bulk purchasing for homes.” Started in San Francisco in 2008, it is a campaign designed to get people to make green home improvements together in large groups, thereby receiving bulk discount rates and lowering the cost of, say, installing solar panels for everyone in the group. It was recently acquired by Virgance, a not-for-profit company that “takes new activism ideas and uses the power of online social networks to scale each idea into a large-scale, citizen-powered global campaign to improve the world.”

Though just in the start-up phase, these two entities epitomize how internet based social-networking tools can be applied to businesses and ideas in order to reach a larger audience. The strategy works better with home owners (apartment dwellers would have to get their landlords on board for green improvements) but even so, the website is worth checking out. Perhaps the strategy Virgance and 1BOG employ could be used to allow other citizen-powered ideas to take off.

- Justin Manger