It’s day 6 of our 7-day auction to raise funds for two of our favorite causes, Science Club for Girls and Technology Underwriting Greater Good. So hurry to eBay, because as of this writing you’ve only got about 20 hours left to bid on the amazing Lord of the Rings Online Collector’s Edition boxed set, autographed by the game’s developers at Westwood, MA-based Turbine.

I explained the whole back story to the auction last week. In a nutshell, Turbine gave Xconomy the autographed set back in July as a memento of our visit, and we decided (with Turbine’s blessing) to auction it off and donate the proceeds.

Lord of the Rings Online is Turbine’s award-winning massively multiplayer game world based on the famous J.R.R. Tolkien novels. The boxed set includes two Windows program discs, a Music & Art Collection bound volume including “The Music of Mines of Moria” soundtrack CD, a premium cloth map of the game world, a Middle Earth poster, the Collector’s Edition Starter Guide manual, a product key and three free 14-day buddy keys, a quick reference card, and—perhaps coolest of all—a gold-plated replica of the One Ring (evil powers not included).

Bid now—click here to visit the auction page. To whet your appetite, here are a few pictures of the set and its contents:

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Do you love fantasy role-playing games? Do you enjoy collecting one-of-a-kind autographed artifacts? Do you like supporting good causes? Then this is your lucky week. Through the generosity of the good folks at Turbine, the Westwood, MA-based publisher of online fantasy games, Xconomy has obtained an amazing Collector’s Edition boxed set of Turbine’s most popular game ever, Lord of the Rings Online: Mines of Moria. This version of the award-winning massively multiplayer game world—based, of course, on the famous J.R.R. Tolkien trilogy—is signed by the actual developers who created the game. And we’re auctioning it off on eBay, with 100 percent of the proceeds benefiting two of our favorite local non-profit groups.

Click here to see the auction listing at eBay. The auction begins today and will conclude at noon Eastern time on Tuesday, November 17. We hope this unique item brings a good price—because we’re going to donate half of the proceeds to Cambridge, MA-based Science Club for Girls and the other half to Boston-based Technology Underwriting Greater Good.

Here’s the back story about this remarkable item. I visited Turbine’s massive headquarters facility back in July, and shortly afterward wrote a big feature article about the company’s decision to make one of its other online properties, Dungeons & Dragons Online, free to play. As a memento of my visit, the team at Turbine offered me the aforementioned autographed boxed set. I explained that as journalists, we can’t accept gifts from sources—but that we’d love to take the set and sell it for charity. Turbine enthusiastically agreed. (But the game has been sitting around my office ever since; I guess, like Gollum, I couldn’t bear to part with “my precious.”)

Aside from the program discs for Lord of the Rings Online (which spare you a lengthy download), the Collector’s Edition contains a variety of extras guaranteed to appeal to any fan of the genre. What makes this copy special, of course, is that the box cover has been signed in metallic-silver magic marker by about 20 of the developers involved in creating the game (see the photo below). But the stuff inside the box is pretty cool too.

The neatest item, to my mind, is the CD with the soundtrack music from the game. But Tolkien fans will also appreciate items such as the gold-plated reproduction of the One Ring, complete with Black Speech inscription, which, as everyone knows, reads “One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.” (I tried it on, and for better or worse, I did not become invisible, see a fiery eye in the sky, or have delusions of ultimate power.)

Here’s the full rundown of the loot inside the Collector’s Edition:

• Two Windows program discs
• Music & Art Collection bound volume including “The Music of Mines of Moria” Soundtrack CD
• The aforementioned replica of the One Ring in velvet pouch
• Premium cloth map of the game world
• Middle Earth poster
• Collector’s Edition Starter Guide manual
• Product Key and three free 14-day Buddy Keys
• Quick Reference Card

Note that LOTRO is playable only from Windows PCs with broadband Internet connections, and that the game itself requires a subscription of $14.99 per month, separate from the cost of this Collector’s Edition.

A word about the two non-profit groups that will benefit from the auction: Science Club for Girls, founded in 1994, offers free after-school science literacy programs to K-12 girls in several cities around Massachusetts. Technology Underwriting Greater Good, founded this year by Jeff Fagnan and Dana Samuels of Atlas Venture and Hemant Taneja of General Catalyst Partners, promotes entrepreneurship and innovation programs for young people in New England. Bob profiled the organization last month.

They’re both great groups—so go and bid on the LOTRO Collector’s Edition now. You’ve only got until next Tuesday!

Here are a few photos of the Collector’s Edition. You can click on each photo to see a larger version.

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When we reported yesterday that the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard was set to receive a whopping endowment of $400 million from Los Angeles-based billionaire philanthropists Edythe and Eli Broad, we noted that it was rumored that the institute—originally structured as an administrative unit of MIT—was also set to become independent of both MIT and Harvard. The Broad alluded very briefly to such a change in its announcement about the donation this morning. And now we can fill in more details, based on an FAQ made available today to Broad staffers, about how the institute is revamping itself as a stand-alone nonprofit with an independent board of directors and other major organizational differences from its first incarnation. But while it will become a separate legal entity, “in terms of how our scientific research proceeds, the Broad Institute is NOT separating from either Harvard or MIT,” the FAQ emphasized.

The organizational restructuring marks a major milestone for what began as an experimental model of collaborative research among MIT, Harvard and Harvard-affiliated hospitals. The new endowment—which adds to the $200 million that the Broad couple already granted their namesake institute—means that the institute, which focuses on the role of genomics in medicine and the molecular underpinnings of diseases, has the financial wherewithal to operate permanently and independently while maintaining research partnerships with MIT, Harvard, and other institutions.

According to the FAQ, “the transition to a permanent status requires that the Broad Institute become a stand-alone non-profit organization with its own Board of Directors.” And such a transition has long been on the table, according to the document:

From the day we were founded in 2003 there has always been the possibility that this transition to a permanent institution would happen, and now it has happened sooner than anyone projected. The discretion surrounding the legal deliberations was necessary to ensure that this transition be worked out as completely as possible before it could be widely known in order to prevent any false or misleading information from appearing, and to ensure timely and appropriate national and international recognition for the incredible and unprecedented generosity of the gift from Eli and Edythe Broad.

The FAQ also spelled out the benefits of becoming a stand-alone nonprofit:

This new status of the Broad Institute establishes it as a unique, identifiable, and permanent part of the Boston/Cambridge biomedical landscape. It also allows us to chart an even more aggressive course, and to move even more nimbly in pursuit of new scientific opportunities.

With many of the details and changes in administrative structure and leadership still being worked out, the institute told employees that the full transition to an independent nonprofit would not likely be completed until July 2009.

The Broad downplayed the move toward independence in its official news announcement, which states that MIT and Harvard will continue “to help govern the institute.” But while the FAQ makes a brief mention of Harvard and MIT having formal roles in the Broad’s new governing structure, and says that some of the its new board members will be drawn from its partner institutions, it suggests that the institute plans to run its administrative operations largely on its own.

As for the brain trust of Harvard and MIT professors who are considered members at Broad, the FAQ says that they will maintain their faculty appointments with their respective universities. But the transition to “stand-alone” status does mean that staff members of the institute who are now considered employees of either Harvard or MIT will become employees of the newly independent institute.

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If you’re concerned about global warming, what breakfast cereal should you buy to support the company with the best record on greenhouse gas emissions? Soon, you might be able to make informed decisions on issues like that right in the supermarket aisle.

“All you’ll have to do is to take out your cell phone, scan the barcodes and you’ll get back a score, a rating, for the companies’ performance,” says Stéphane de Messières, executive director and founder of Citizens Market, an early stage non-profit organization based in Cambridge, MA.

The vision of Citizens Market is to create a platform where average consumers can share information on which companies are the most socially responsible. They’ll be able to write online reviews of companies and products and rate their performance, in the same way people contribute to consumer review sites like Yelp.

But instead of concentrating on value for the money in a limited sense, Citizens Market will focus on broader aspects of corporations’ behavior, like environmental performance, labor practices or political lobbying. The user community will also rate each other’s reviews, giving greater weight to those postings that are deemed the most reliable. The big idea is to enable consumers to put their money where their heart is, by supporting companies and products that are in line with their personal values and avoiding others. The information in the database will be reachable on the Web or, eventually, via a special cell phone interface customized for shopping.

For de Messières, the idea behind Citizens Market started several years ago with a pair of jeans.

“I wanted to buy a pair of blue jeans and searched for hours on the Internet and found a manufacturer in USA with a good record, with union-made jeans. I thought that ‘this was it’ and ordered a pair. But when they came, they were the ugliest pair of jeans I ever put on in my life, and in the end I sent them back.”

“I said to myself, it shouldn’t be that hard to shop responsibly,” de Messières says.

This summer, Citizens Market will launch a Web-only beta version of the service, with the mobile functionality to follow later. Up to now, the project has been totally driven by volunteers, including de Messières. The organization is now looking for a planning grant of roughly $60,000 to $80,000 get the service off the ground.

The big challenge for any initiative that relies on user-generated content, of course, is to build a real community. But there seems to be a lot of interest in the idea of a corporate social responsibility ratings site, at least judging from the backing that the Citizens Market already has received. The organization has recruited a board of advisers including several successful entrepreneurs and persons with ties to prestigious institutions like Oxfam America and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

The interest was also strong when Citizens Market put out an ad for volunteer web designers on Craigslist last November. One of those who responded to the ad was Vanessia Wu.

“There seems to be a large community around here of people with an interest in corporate social responsibility,” Wu tells Xconomy.”They are willing to work on this thing, because it can make a big difference.”

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