So we launched Bloggers Without Borders the other day and a lot of people have been asking questions, and rightly so. I've been taking notes and was planning on making a big post about it but it seems Jonas has beaten me to it. Rather than paraphrase him, I'm just going to quote a huge chunk of what he wrote here:

To explain a few things about BwoB, I have to go all the way back.

The concept was never, to just be a collector for donations. Aside from the trust and credibility problem (more about that in a second), there’s also the fact that money isn’t all. BwoB wanted to be more, and was designed to be more. The code behind it has about 400 lines of donations management and circa 14,000 lines of anti-censorship and anonymity routines for a future setup, which should allow writers in oppressive countries (and the US, in some cases, sigh) to communicate and publish freely.

When the catastrophe in South Asia struck, we talked about it for a while, then someone said “hey, Jonas, your BwoB code, it can handle donations, right?”. It did. But it wasn’t ready. Fact is, we wanted to have the site live in February, announce it to a larger audience in March, and have some participants on it by June. Well, that all changed.

One of the issues with donations we handle is trust. Obviously, so. As an American, I can be held accountable (and I hope someone would, if I ever thought to do something as vile as that) for mishandling the money. Moreso, we have peer review, a handful of eyes, and internal cross-checking to make sure every cent we receive goes back out and not into a new pair of sneakers. Still, how would one communicate that? The obvious answer is - weblogs. Bloggers are an inquisitive people. On the slightest sign of irregularities, this site and our names would be all over the ‘net at the speed of Technorati (seven minutes, I am told). That’s where we stand, today.

That's an important point - the donations for the Tsunami Outreach is a last minute addition to a foundation we're building for something else. The power behind this is not what we're doing with it, it's what other people might be able to do it it. It's a tool. Anyone can set up an account, and anyone can use it. We'll be explaining that more as it's developed, but the Tsunami Outreach is a very small, very timely feature of a much larger idea.