Do You Want To Do Good?

I’ve dragged my brother, Mel and Yee Hou to form a team with me to compete in the Maxis Cyberlinq 2007 competition, which is of course, sponsored by Maxis.

It might seem like it is the type of project that some enthusiastic school teacher is kidnapping all of you to participate in, as matured individuals, I believe it is a good opportunity for us to utilize the skills that we now have and try to make a change for the less fortunate among us.

Our team has a very corny name – Team Maxmobile – but it serves the purpose of its cause. We have decided to highlight the plight of mobility challenged individuals via blog updates, petitions, Mobiility Disability Training programme and lots more strategies that we have yet to cook up. We’ll get there. We’ve got our blog up already, but no links to it as of now as we’re a little embarrassed by the bareness of it all. Let us tweak it a little bit more first.

Here’s a sneak peak if you must. 🙂

I like it because it look neat.:) But it’s still very bare.

Mel and I will be in charge of dealing with contacts since she knows a few and I know a few(Lots of thanks to Peter and his time! And later on, more contacts from him.) Yee Hou will be handling the visual side of things (beautifying the blog, snapping photos during our ‘events'(hopefully there will be some) and getting the right images to go alongside our blog posts.) My brother Mervyn will be looking up on what’s the situation like overseas so that we can compare it with the local situation. Hopefully this will stimulate less caring transport companies to open their eyes and hearts to the needs of the physically disabled members of our society.

In Peter’s words, the term that they’ve always been going on about is “inclusion”. They don’t want to be treated as special individuals, they just want to be one of us. To blend with the crowd.

This is a good cause to highlight since not many people are aware about the needs of these individuals. We didn’t want to take on old folks home and orphanages because those topics are kind of cliche(but of course I sympathize with them. My mum packs my still wearable old clothes and school bags to give to these homes from time to time). We nearly wanted to use turtles as our cause but too bad, my sole turtle savior person, Pelf is currently away in Chiang Mai. Coincidentally, she’s also highlighting the plight of disabled people in her blogathon. Do support her cause!

You see, there are so many other causes to support, be it human or animals. If you’ve been meaning to do your part for your society, I say this competition will be just the right opportunity to launch your noble ideas.

You’ll need to form a team of 4-8 and you will need an advisor. There are four categories: Cyberkids School, Primary School, Secondary School, Institute Of Higher Learning and Registered Community Centre.
What you must do is to come up with a proposal and put it up on a blog from a free blog provider site like blogspot or wordpress. If you must know, proposals include a title, objectives, strategies, budget, timeline, ethics and conclusion.

You will have to register your team using the online registration page provided on the blog.

The theme is ““What can you do for the Country? Begin with your own Community.” ”

I know this might sound very advertorial-ish, but hey, I’m taking part in it too. I hope this will lead to something.

Selected proposals will be selected by the panel of judges and 10 finalists from each category will be allocated RM1000 to implement their project(so yeah, you must decide how you’re supposed to use your RM1000. It was a tough cookie that one. I’m still scratching my head.).

The dead line for proposals(which should be put up on the free blogs) is on the 2nd of August.

So if you get selected, the duration of the contest will be from (i presume 3rd August) to 30 September 2007. But this is subjected to change, so you will have to find out these details if you’re interested.

Somewhere in November, the winners will be announced.

These are the prizes:

Main Prize each category of participation (5):
1st prize: RM6000 & Certificate of Participation
2nd prize: RM4000 & Certificate of Participation
3rd prize: RM2000 & Certificate of Participation

Special Award:
Best Blogger: RM1000
Best Application of Technology: RM1000

So it’s up to you how you wanna do it, really. I still believe that it’s a good opportunity to make a change for a cause that you’ve been supporting all this while. At least with that RM1000(assuming your proposal gets selected), you can do so much more.

If there are any school teachers with big ambitions to boost your school’s name or clubs like Interact or Leo in high schools looking to take on a project(Here’s a shout out to all Community Service Directors out there!), do participate!

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