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Jul 11, 04:53 am: Pay close attention to NTEN's We are Media

NTEN‘s We are Media is a fabulous — fabulous! — community media project facilitated by the indefatigable Beth Kanter. It’s build, week by week, by, well, by you and anyone else who wants to participate. It can be as easy as collecting (just use the tag wearemedia) or as indepth as jumping into the wiki with both typing hands to help shape the information.

This is great, not just to see the end result, but see a community building a lasting resource.

(quick disclaimer: I’m in the Advisory Group)

Marnie Webb  |  Comment [1]

Jun 17, 01:30 pm: What is the value we give our communities?

I spent yesterday (and am spending today and tomorrow) at Supernova 2008. You can find my unfiltered notes on the npbrain wiki (a little experiment in its own right).

Yesterday’s series of talks seemed to add up to how transactions are processed on the web. And I don’t mean processed in the credit card vendor sense but processed in the how to do we describe value and make sure that we (people connecting and moving around via the Internet and the grace of our mobile careers) give it and receive it and how to companies (the people who have set up shop on the internet) attach something financial to that value — whether through advertising, targeted pitches, friend recommendations, or by giving us something (a piece of hardware, say) that will meet the needs that they are confident we have.

There was some argument, mostly headed by Esther Dyson, that asked whether or not that transaction was really everything that happens on the web. Her central point: people are on the internet, using mobile phones for reasons that transcend a quid pro quo kind of transaction.

I don’t know what I think, honestly. I think mainly people engage in a behavior because it has a value for them. Because they think they are “buying” something with their time, attention, actions and dollars. But that doesn’t always means that the results of the transaction are immediate, like they are at the grocery store (I give you some money; you let me leave with food — very neat and clear). In fact, it seems to me figuring out what the transaction is, over time, is a huge part of the debate of the Internet and mobile services.

Clay Shirky set the stage well by talking about two things necessary for a community to take collective action:

  • density: you need to have enough people to make the collective action work (two people can’t raise a barn, for example)
  • continuity: you have to have faith that the same people will be there later when you need them
He asked what we can do to design for that kind of collective action. How can we make it easy for people to group together and show common intent? You can see examples of this, in very lightweight ways, via almost every social application on the planet. He pointed to three examples: The Virtual Company Project, Community Interest Companies, and Meetup Alliances.

It’s all a good combination and, taken together, is one that’s important for social benefit organizations to have. How are we providing value to the people who support us? It can’t just be the thank you notes that we send for donations. How are we providing value for signing up for our newsletter, passing along an outreach message, providing volunteer support and giving donations? Thank you isn’t enough. Are we making our key supporters stars? Do we make sure to get people good timely information about our cause? Do we give people a venue to come together and meet others? And, in that value, are we creating a community that is dense enough and long-last enough to come together for collective actions that build rather than just protest?

Marnie Webb  |  Comment

Mar 25, 02:58 pm: UN-GAID Session: ICT Entrepreneurs

In front of the room:

Notes:


  • David Kirkpatrick: Bias toward entrepreneurship and that for-profit can be the leading driver for change all over the world.
  • Kirkpatrick: Idea that there is tremendous power in for-profit models in the most unlikely places.
  • Glenn Strachan: encourager of entrepreneurship. use schools to anchor wireless in Macedonia. price of Internet fell from $200 (US) to $20 (US) which lead 30% increase in service in homes. required UN $ and revamping Macedonia regulatory laws.
  • (My thought: libraries could be used to do the same thing)
  • Emdad Khan: computer represents 15% of the telephone penetration. Right now, neither of the two devices — computers or PDAs — can close the digital divide. So trying to use phone and voice to do that.
  • (My thought: works like 511 traffic if you’ve got that in area. Seems like it would be good for getting targeted info but would not allow you to get the benefits of serendipity and finding others or info that you don’t know you want. But maybe those two things are a luxury.)
  • Kristin Peterson: Inveneo is a nonprofit social enterprise — get ICT out to the people who need it most. Typically, people in remote and rural areas. They create solutions that are specific to those populations. In the area of education, health care and I’m just not typing fast enough. They create hardware and software. How do you create ICT in punishing environments — lack of power, novice administrators for example. ICT solutions are not enough. Also need to have human structure to that building up an ecosystem of local entrepreneurs in the communities in which they work. Those people do the installation and support for the organizations they serve. This brings the support closer to the end client and creates access cost-effective access to technology. Currently operate in 10 counties — all in Africa.
  • Amjad Umar: GEZA — Global Enterprise Zone for All. If you are going to change long range model, you must work with entrepreneurs. Access is not enough. They need to know how to start biz over the internet, how to run their biz, excel and compete in this ever changing global marketplace. Developed a yellow pages of resources and it is ranked. Consolidate existing content and make it available in an integrated fashion.
  • David Liu: represents a private internet company in China to provide financial information to investors in China. Put together news, data, prices and send to investors via email. Says they use web 1.0 – one way models. That’s how they started. Kept building to help this. Then opened their platform for anyone to contribute to to provide financial information. Has been a very successful strategy: they have 220K users. They have created an investor-centric community so that everyone can contribute their experiences. Key point is to learn to share with others.
  • Glenn Strachan: everything is different now because of using and spreading access. Build it and they will come. Really.

Signing off a little early to get ready for my session.

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Marnie Webb  |  Comment

Mar 25, 02:03 pm: UN-GAID: United Nations Meets Web 2.0 and ICT Entrepreneurs - Notes from the opening

A mix of observations and snippets of quotes. Context and spelling may both be lacking.

  • Internet lowers the threshold to start a business
  • ICT can allow entrepreneurs to flourish improving the economy overall
  • Investment, partnerships required to build robust platforms
  • ICT must be spread in the community facilitates national security, law and order
  • I think the speaker from Ghana just said their e-govt initiative supported by 13M US $.
  • Building a fiber optic backbone in Ghana
  • Cannot explain term “emerging markets” but would say “changing geo-global markets”.
  • “Never seen so much fast and dramatic change in the economic world order as seen today.”
  • “To get things we have partners. For fun, we go to friends.”
  • Biz speaker calling for GAID to translate into action and turn the good will into bottom line results

Related links:

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Marnie Webb  |  Comment

Mar 23, 03:01 am: A big shout of thanks

To NTEN and Beth Kanter for the kind words.

It’s nice to feel like the work that you do makes a difference to folks and I’m very appreciative of the fact that NTEN recognized that by giving me this year’s NTEN award.

And congrats also to Vince Stehle, for his lifetime achievement award, and Beth Kanter for her people’s choice award.

Marnie Webb  |  Comment

Mar 20, 02:11 pm: David Pogue at NTC

Find out more about David Pogue

What are the interesting technologies:

  1. VOIP. And a whole lot about Grand Central. And Google’s cell services.
  2. Voice to Text. Spinvox, Callwave. These are services that transcribe your messages as text and email them to you.
  3. Ala carte video. OnDemand video – regular shows that you watch when you want – not recorded and not pay-per-view. Things will get video to your TV.
  4. Web 2.0. (What’s that kid?) Puts on the human face. Creating a structure. Share and get info from people who don’t know each other. Ability to make loans to others. Microloans. Find and follow simmering issues. Copy right challenges are very real in this sharing world. Why? Content does not stay where you put it.

Overall:

  • A lot of demo of the technology, which is gee whiz and is good, but what’s the take away here for social benefit organizations (faster response times and convenience, sure, but what else)?
  • Funny guy.
  • So how could this be used in a disaster? Pass out phones to people — equipped w/ the grand central numbers that are linked to lines that can’t be accessed (like land lines in home and office) and then an ability to transcribe the messages so that you can pick them up in a variety of places — helping prolong the battery life of the mobile device (and potentially even forwarding to other people easily).
  • The ala carte video certainly allow for targeted to TV channels which could be an interesting thing. But, for the love of god, the idea of watching a nonprofit channel makes my teeth hurt just a little bit.
  • And web 2.0 can help tie together these bits so that you can find people/information/conversations.

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Marnie Webb  |  Comment

Mar 17, 05:19 pm: Looking forward to...

  • NTC in New Orleans. Getting there Tuesday night.
  • Easter Sunday in Washington DC. There for some meetings on Monday and, despite missing my family, I’m going to enjoy spending some time in the city and actually getting to see things.
  • United Nations Meets Web 2.0 in NYC. First time I’ve been there and I’m going to be too busy to actually see anything.
  • Getting home after 10 days away. I’ll miss both of ‘em.

If you want to get ahold of my feel free to you the regular contact methods or direct message me on twitter

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Marnie Webb  |  Comment

Oct 5, 04:40 pm: Online Community Summit: Corporate Social Good Initiatives (Notes)

(live blogging with all the attendant misspellings, mistakes and missed contexts)

Corporate Social Good Initiatives:

Meg Garlinghouse: Yahoo! for Good

  • Yahoo! for Good was to enable to people to connect to whatever cause they wanted too
  • As a corporation, Yahoo! is interested in the environment/green
  • At 9/11, realized how much they could leverage community to help w/ cuases (donate now button on front page)
  • Uniquely positioned to connect people to causes (don’t have a lot of ability to write checks to nonprofits — evaluating nonprofits is not their competency)
  • Philanthropy is integrated into everything they do; not separate
  • Y! and Green — built 18seconds.org, Yahoo! Green
  • Nonprofits can use Y! Answers to get their questions into the public consciousness and to get the intelligence of their communities
  • Some nonprofits interested in “friendraising” not “fundraising” and able to take advantage of Y!‘s social messaging tools

Erin Bush: AIM for Good

  • works in messaging and social media
  • AIM for Good launched sept 14
  • Being a corporation should not stop them from contributing the social good. The real question is how. The decided to use their online audience to foster participation w/in that audience. They also have an ability to target demographics. Buddy list and AIM client a powerful tool.
  • How does this balance against the multiple corporate obligations?
  • AIM for Good Mission: provide a unique network hub for cuases, issues, environmental awareness, disaster relief, and support to help the AIm community participate and engage, that may also serve as a communications vehicle in the evnt of a major catastrophe. 3 pillars: awareness, action, partnerships
  • They have a way to point people to appropriate resources (particularly in the event of a disaster).
  • They have an ability to react quickly
  • use widgets powered by Network for Good
  • portability of taking causes to other social networks
  • hard to define ad strategy (very stringent)
  • when ads not sold run PSAs

(informal addition) Hong Qu: YouTube

  • announce YouTube nonprofit program, help to connect organizations to donors and supporters
  • eligible nonprofits have the right tax status
  • application process
  • benefits: donate button next to every video, nonprofit profile page can be linked to any specified landing page, some of the videos will be chosen to be promoted in other parts of the site, to users.
  • (from room) tremendous potential to spread word quickly

Discussion from the room:

  • Q. Will AOL make information that appears on non-AOL sites available? A. Yes! No more garden wall.
  • Q. People almost never know about the kinds of services that the companies are offering? Seems like a huge opportunity to get the word out. A. (Y!): consumer site so most of their programs directed to consumers. (AOL): Wide reach but need to make sure that the issue is appropriately relevant.
  • Q. If I’m a nonprofit, I need to go to a lot of different places to get people interested in their mission? Is there a way to innovate around microformats? Nonprofits posting and any way for these folks to pull that in? How are we going to make this work across all the different spaces? A. (Y!) Commitment to the open standards. (from the room) Integration via APIs and tool kits but it is also about integration into process. The tension is about capacity to manage all the different possibilities. About being able to manage the staff capacity. Using the bigger communities to tag and make photos available. (Y!)Looking at how to use passionate users to help with this problem rather than using the staff time. Give supporters an ability to make micropresence.
  • Q: What is Google doing to vet the nonprofits to make sure they are who they say they are? How are they going to scale? A. Every application needs to be human verified to get volunteers to make sure that it is real. (from AOL) Partnership with Network for Good who does that for them. (from Y!) They trust their community because they don’t have a nonprofit program but try to make it possible their users to act on the issues they care about by providing them good information.
  • Q. For Google, how is a nonprofit selected to be on the front of YouTube? A. The video doesn’t appear — a thumbnail. Not sure about the criteria. But do know that is rotated among many nonprofits. Donation comes through Google checkout.
  • Q. Where are the various CSR efforts being aggregated? A. The challenge is that the companies effort is attached to the consumer not the nonprofit. (Y and AOL): Partner with nonprofits on consumer facing campaigns.

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Oct 5, 04:37 pm: Online Community Summit: Holding Power Accountable (Notes)

(live blogging with all the attendant misspellings, mistakes and missed contexts)

Holding Power Accountable: Transparency, Data, and Community
Presenters: Dave Witzel, Forum One + Andy Krackov, Lucile Packard Foundaiton for Chidlren’s Health

Dave Witzel:

  • dissemination tends to mean I’ve got a report, I wish someone would read it.
  • Transparency enables negative feedback before or duing a decision or action (should also include positive feedback)
  • Good evidence that transparency is an impactful thing: Uganda Schools (1995 only 24% went to schools; published the $ that were supposed to go and that increased to 85%). getting right information to the right people so that change can be made. The hard part is figuring out the right information, the right people, so that the change can be made.
  • EyesOnDarfur — asking the community to be witnesses
  • Fact Checker
  • Earmark Watch: getting mashed up w/ campaign financing data (provided but needs to be leveraged); comes from the Sunlight Foundation
  • Wikileaks: trying to gather leaked documents (archival + promotion combined w/ anonymity)
  • Wikipedia: design a system w/ inherent transparancy. Systems need to be self-revealing
  • Pleeble: trying to give consumers a voice; has to do w/ value for $, acknowledging good behavior to promote good behavior
    [building systems that include transparency and transparency is really about setting up feedback loops by giving people enough information to create robust feedback loops; nonprofits can take advantage of the transparency of others as well as provide it for others; they can be a vehicle for transparency against the will of others]

Andy Krackov:

  • kidsdata.org: “we’ve got your numbers” providing data re: kids at a variey of levels (regional, demographic, topic); new version; expanding the reach of the data
  • how can community be used around the concept of data — raise awareness, achieve social change
  • offers data on 250 seperate indicators (wealth of data at a very local levels)
  • hope to inform advocacy work, grant proposals, strategic planning
  • how can you hold organizations accountable through data?
    [the chronicle watch is another way thtis is happening — stating the problem and the time before solution]
  • return visitors is an important metric
  • how does the combine w/ offline strategies (media strategies ie issue briefs)
  • offering the data is one way communication, also need to find ways for people to share + leverage the data
  • npos focused on social change may be working on a very small local level; they don’t have enough to be able to draw the audience to create a community
  • this begs the question: should they be building their own community, attaching to other communities
    [I’m almost always going to say that it should be attached to other communities]
  • worried that providing some services would taint the foundations reputation as a neutral purveyor of information
  • offer sharing opportunities: create .pdf fact sheet, print, email as well as utilizing higher tech services like Dig, del.icio.us
  • Q: what about places where there is not internet access (even exist in the bay area)? Related: what about other languages?
  • outreach into the community, going to the library
    [seems like there is more and more need for people to have access to these tools]
  • build a separate blog and is another place to hold organizations accountable (highlight some of the facts by writing about it as well as bring in experts from the community w/ the opinion supported by kids data)
  • blog can work even w/o a big community (it isn’t like going to the discussion forum that only has one or two posts)
  • swivel: a community focused on nothing but data; program of official sources for data and allows people to provide an automatic stream of data to this global website; allows a small group to comment on data to a larger website and makes the local data available to a variety of others
  • worried very much about achieving critical mass before deciding to open up the site to others
  • create fact sheet or issue briefs but would be great if it was annotatable in some way (something wiki like)
    [would be create if the fact sheet provided a way for someone to personalize so that a group could present under their own brand and be able to use it even more like a tool — not quite annotated but maybe something that allowed a kind of co-branding or things that could be easily dumped into a .ppt + then some numbers about how it could be used]

Open Discussion from the Room:

  • Q: do people need to play nice w/ data sites like swivel? How do they compare w/ other data sharing (photo, video) sites? A: Issue is that it is hard to get at the data and not necessarily best practices around whether to build own site to host data or to do it via these larger sites (like swivel). Juries out about which is going to get the data in front of more people. Data in the social sphere is a public good. People may have a variety of resources they can bring to the site. Do we really want to have a for-profit entity managing the public good.
  • Comment. How does copyright play a part in this? Some of the information sources are copyrighted?
  • Q. Why is there a concern about a for profit holding the data? A. Going to a part where we have a lot of social assets that exist on the web. Data is a good example of that. Who controls it? Copyright? And then a last mile problem w/ data. There are big datasets but to make it actionable that needs to be hooked into a local need. Local level data is what people want. Where they live and work. And that’s a big challenge. In terms of accountability, there is also an issue about data integrity (the measurements are often differnet as you cross regional boundaries)
  • Q. Sounds like what is happen is primarily descriptive? What about the next step in looking for causal relationships? Correlate/cross-reference data sets. A. Swivel is doing that in the backgrand; running regressions in the background looking for correlations. [pluses/minues w/ making it this available because requires some knowledge to ensure that it is a causal relationship and not just a coincidence]
  • Q. A third level of integration. Something that provided keys to the places where the elements is being used elsewhere. Something that they don’t want to do becuase of the quality of analysis? A. No. That’s something that they’d be comfortable w/ in different places.
  • Q. How does privacy work w/ regard to data? A. That becomes an issue when you are looking at very small data sets. May make a decision not to publish data because the small set exposes the specific individuals.
    [missed a couple of questions]

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Apr 6, 08:27 pm: Presenter tips

Years ago, I did some standup comedy. It had nothing to do with nonprofits or with technology and everything to do with being a writer and living in Los Angeles, CA.

At that time, I learned — because I was told and because comedy audiences aren’t as kind as conference attendees — to stand up. Don’t sit down. Don’t stay in one place. Stand up and involve your body in the presentation. If you want to project to the room, it isn’t just about speaking loud or using a microphone. It’s about using your body to project your attitude, which had better be enthusiastic.

Stand up and move and imagine that you are trying to keep the attention of a five year old. You have to gesture. You have to change their voice. You have to keep them from looking off at the bird that’s tweeting outside the window.

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