Another big week in Crowdsourcing--the House of Representatives passed a new package of bills including Rep. Patrick McHenry's original crowdfunding bill, while Crowdsourcing.org held our first live chat with Brightidea, where we spent over an hour in a fascinating discussion about Open Innovation.

Here's a few of the other important and interesting crowdsourcing developments from the week just past:

KOny 2012 

If you haven't heard yet, it seems like you soon will. A campaign called Kony 2012 is being led by the non-profit Invisible Children that works to bring awareness to the atrocities of the Lord's Resistance Army in Africa and its leader Joseph Kony. Mimicking an election campaign, Kony 2012 asks supporters to paper cities with posters and get out the word via social networks, in what may amount to the first-ever attempt to crowdsource a call for a military operation. The campaign centers around this slick, 30-minute viral video that's already been viewed over 64 million times in less than a week. 

Mobcaster funds first show

If you'd rather watch something a little lighter, Mobcaster, the combination crowdfunding platform and online video network, has just successfully funded the first season of its first show--an Australian comedy about a weatherman called, well... "The Weatherman." Plenty of other pitched shows are also looking for support.

ALternative funding consortium forms in UK

In the UK, the Next Generation Finance Consortium (NGFC) has been formed with the goal of creating a platform to connect entreprenuers with alternative sources of funding, including crowdfunding. Crowdcube and Peoplefund.it are among those involved.

New launches

Rounding out the crowd news, we heard about some new platform launches this week--Passerby, a crowdfunding site for films is looking for project submissions now for their planned April launch, and Petridish.org is a platform now in beta "that connects world renowned scientists with the broader public in order to raise awareness about their research and help raise funding directly from private donations. At our core, we have a highly engaging "crowdfunding" product, but also have a longer-term vision to be the way scientists broadly share their research with the world."

 - Eric Mack is a contributing editor for Crowdsourcing.org. He also currently contributes to CNET. In the past, his work has been featured by NPR, Wired, the New York Times and other outlets. You can contact him at eric.mack@crowdsourcing.org. Find him on Twitter and Google+. Also be sure to follow Crowdsourcing.org on Twitter.