(via ReadWriteWeb)

You can enter a cause, start a cause or support a cause.  America’s Giving Challenge started Oct 7 and runs through Nov 6 — so there is still time. From their about page:

America’s Giving Challenge, also referred to as the “Giving Challenge” or just the “Challenge,” is a 30-day national competition that encourages people to leverage their personal networks and online social media to help win cash awards that will total $245,500 on behalf of their favorite nonprofit. Participants in America’s Giving Challenge will compete for daily and overall cash awards based on the number of donations generated for a cause, not dollars raised. Awards will be given to the nonprofit beneficiaries of the causes that garner the highest number of unique daily donations* between 3:00 p.m. EDT October 7, 2009, and 2:59pm EST on November 6, 2009.

I also just found out that the W. K. Kellogg Foundation has contributed an additional $75,000 to the pool.  This mean there is more opportunity to win funding, get visibility, and engage with a wide-ranging community of supporters.  The Case Foundation has done a great job of pulling together supporting information. I was lucky enough to be one of their Giving Gurus over the summer.  You can find a metric ton of good information from Allison Fine, Beth Kanter, Geoff Livingston, Katya Andresen, Holly Ross, Sarah Koch, and Susan Gordon.

You can also follow the action on Twitter via #AGC.

To recap:  Last year, Allison Fine and I asked people to tell us ways to contribute without breaking into their bank accounts.  Folks twitter and blogged their responses and we put the results on TheGiveList.org.

And we’d like to do it again this year.  You can help in two ways:

1. Give us your GiveList ideas.  Just use the tag givelist in tweet or blog post and we’ll find it.
2. Tell us what GiveList v2 looks like.  Should we do what neddotcom and ntenhross suggested and ask folks to tell the stories or show the pictures of their contributions in action? Sort of a Gave List? Is there something that could connect with the efforts of projects like The Extraordinaries?  Or….?

Time to get giving.

So, I asked.    And I started thinking: Why do I think it’s so important for my pal to tweet?  Is it just because I like Twitter and I want her to like it too?  Is it because I like anything new and shiny?  Am I seduced by the stories of social change via twitter?

@maryvale‘s answer pushed my own thinking farther.  She said, “Twitter’s openness distinguishes it from the others you mentioned. She can connect with thousands at a time, and it’s easy to engage.”

Twitter is more open.  Sure, as my pal pointed out, it’s self-referential and insular. Really, what social network isn’t?  But email, Facebook, and text messaging all depend on people knowing each other.  They create, to borrow from Clay Shirky, bonding capital.  They are tools to help you get to know the same people at a deeper level.  Twitter helps you create bonding capital, sure.  But even more it is about bridging capital. It is a way to get to know other people — people you didn’t go to college with, don’t work with.  People who don’t share the same taste in music or have kids in the same play group.  And that, combined with the easy casual connections, are big part of what is attractive to me.  That is, in fact, why I love Twitter.

Of course, that very thing, the press of people and tweets, that makes my friend, and others, so skeptical.  Okay, she tells me. I’ll try it. As an experiment.  But I can ignore people right?  I don’t want the yadda, yadda, yadda.

Now here’s the big thing about Twitter: You don’t actually have to pay attention.  At least, you don’t have to pay the attention to everyone, not all the time.  As Dave Winer writes, “Park yourself on the riverbank and watch the news flow by. If you miss something, not to worry, if it’s important some new story will refer to it.”

I think it more like wading into a river. You get in. You stretch your arms out.  You know a lot about the river. You know how fast the water is moving. What temperature it is.  You know all of that, even though you don’t feel every molecule.  You know it just because you are in the river and you are letting it flow by.

But, probably, that isn’t practical enough.  More practically, a politician can subscribe to some others doing work in the same area.  Politicians like @gavinnewsom, @barbaraboxer, @askgeorge, and @schwarzenegger. Find more in Politicians who get Twitter…and some who don’t.

So, sign up for those people.  And then spend some time on the Twitter home page using the search box.  Put in things related to interests — political or not and save them.  Come back and check on them. But don’t worry about reading it all. It’s a river.

And then engage.  A bit at a time.  This will provide the basics to get your started.

To the skeptic part?  Don’t expect it to be all meaningful and directed.  Spammers will friend you. Block them. Ignore them. Whatever you want to do.  Don’t think that you will get thousands of followers in a few days.  And don’t think that it is going to make a change today. But know that it is a good way to meet new people, participate in a variety of conversations, and bring those new people into your network.

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1. Nonprofits must provide internet access — through shared broadband and computers or other devices — to their constituency.  This doesn’t need to be different from the work they do every day. In fact, it shouldn’t. It should augment it.
2. Access isn’t enough — training also needs to be provided.  I’m not talking about “here’s how to use Word” or “html will get you a job.”  I’m talking about digital literacy and training so your constituency can contribute their voice and stories to the conversation that is, increasingly, happening online.
3. Provide a wealth of context.  Lots of people are access data over the internet.  They are mashing it up with tools like DataMasher or sharing it with applications like This We Know.  The insights that you gain day-to-day in your work on the ground is what provides the connective tissue between all these different chunks of data or tweets of info.  You have to be contributing to that conversation so that people have context and can get insight out of the information that’s available to them.

Here’s the deck that I used in this talk.  Honestly, it’s the first time that I’ve given this particular talk and I can see some ways to clarify and improve it. If you’ve any suggestions, let me know.