I could see this working really well if you did it with opposing charities, e.g. RNC vs. DNC. The charities wouldn't even need to endorse it, necessarily. Could be huge.
Learn to code -- that's what I did. It doesn't take much to get to the point where you can implement your ideas.
If there's one thing I believe in, it's not waiting for other people to help you or cut you a break -- just learn what you need to learn to make it happen.
I love Axure for prototyping. I'm a mac user and it's windows only, and it's the only reason I have VMWare installed. Once you get it set up properly, the fact that it's running in windows doesn't even get in the way.
We have a public chatroom in our campfire account that we use for this purpose.
Also, I heard that you can now embed gTalk widgets in webpages, allowing gTalk to be used for that purpose. I don't know the details or if that's true at all.
* Use a thesaurus
* Read lots about the problem you're solving. You may find obscure (but cool) academic terms that apply to your space.
* Buy theburdenofdestiny.com from me for a MILLLION DOLLARS
It took us months to think of a domain name we really liked. We thought we'd have to settle for something we hated. But we didn't -- we thought of something, and we love it.
twenty thousand-ish. Finding a domain was painful. First we wanted tipit.com, but we couldn't even get the squatter that owns it to respond. Then we wanted hotpotato.com (god I'm so glad that didn't work out) -- the dude wanted like $80,000.
Luckily, once we thought of thepoint, not only did it become our favorite, the guy that owned it was cool and reasonable and not in the business of making a buck off of domains.