Tag Archive for 'book'

Great reads from around the web on January 5th

Published in roundup. 7 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

I come across so many great conversations, ideas, and resources all over the web every day. Here are some of the most interesting things I’ve found recently (as of January 5th). You can join the conversations in the comments, or click through to the original posts to find what others are saying.

To follow more of the things I find online, you can follow @amysampleward on Twitter (which is just a blog and resource feed), or find me on Delicious (for all kinds of bookmarks).

  • More Startups. More Jobs. – Here's a great conversation starting piece by Eric Ries: "Advanced countries are competing to attract the world’s best entrepreneurs — the US should too. Entrepreneurship is one of the most significant contributors to a nation’s prosperity. In an increasingly globalized economy, many of the advanced nations in the world are racing to attract the brightest entrepreneurial minds, regardless of their country of origin. The startups created by these highly skilled immigrants will generate most of the jobs and wealth in these countries in the future. This is a race we cannot afford to ignore."
  • 2009 In Social Media: A Cartoon Review – Rob Cottingham, from Social Signal, created a very fun video that recaps all the major contributions of social media to the world in 2009 – think you were on top of it all? Well, check out Rob's video and see what you missed!
  • Highlights from My Conversation with Tori Tuncan, Founder of Lend4Health – Zane Safrit – "Tori Tuncan, founder of Lend4Health, joined the show recently. Lend4Health is a non-profit organization that facilitates community-funded, interest-free micro-loans as a creative funding option for individuals and groups seeking optimal health. Currently, Lend4Health is facilitating loans for the "biomedical" treatment of children and adults with autism spectrum and related disorders. Tori shared the story of her journey to date with Lend4Health, helping children and their families who experience autism spectrum and related disorders." You can listen to the audio recording of the interview or read the transcript.
  • How Digitized Content Democratizes Knowledge – PC World – "If you follow the trend lines for book and magazine availability, pricing and the costs of distribution and digital storage, we'll soon find ourselves living in a world where literally millions of titles are available to just about everyone, just about all the time. How will that change human culture?" This very interesting post from PC World explores implications of the changing digital landscape – it's a great read!
  • Chief Reputation Officer: Whose Job Is It, Anyway? – Forbes.com – "n the 20th century, PR and marketing were separate but unequal career paths, and CMO was the highest-ranking and most-respected title to which one in those jobs could aspire. The standard career paths in these areas were relatively linear: As a lead communicator, you went to j-school, did a turn in journalism or an agency and then apprenticed under a "gray hair" boss until he retired. This is compared with the typical path of a chief marketing officer, who got his or her M.B.A. in marketing, hired agencies that made him or her look good, learned how to manage big budgets and award-winning creative and then got in the running for the corner office. Today that is changing because of the increasing importance of reputation management."
Published on January 5, 2010 by Amy Sample Ward. 7 Comments

Great reads from around the web on December 15th

Published in roundup. 15 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

I come across so many great conversations, ideas, and resources all over the web every day. Here are some of the most interesting things I’ve found recently (as of December 15th). You can join the conversations in the comments, or click through to the original posts to find what others are saying.

To follow more of the things I find online, you can follow @amysampleward on Twitter (which is just a blog and resource feed), or find me on Delicious (for all kinds of bookmarks).

  • FT.com / Weekend columnists / Tim Harford – Perhaps microfinance isn’t such a big deal after all – "Last December, I showed some unwitting prescience by worrying about a backlash against microfinance, the practice of providing small loans – or perhaps savings products or insurance – to poor people. I fretted that there was little compelling evidence that it worked. A year later, the evidence is arriving and the backlash has begun. The Boston Globe published an article in September, subtitled, “Billions of dollars and a Nobel Prize later, it looks like ‘microlending’ doesn’t actually do much to fight poverty.” " – I'm interested to hear what you all think about this issue, especially now during the 'giving season.'
  • Open Source Is Dead! Long Live Open Source! | NTEN: The Nonprofit Technology Network – "That's right, I said it. Promise to read the rest of this before you send me hate mail, though. What I mean is that open source, as we knew it, is dead. For the last decade, what we've been talking about when we say "open source" is "open code" — a set of zeroes and ones that we can configure to our heart's desire."
  • Net2 Think Tank Round-Up: Best of 2009 | NetSquared, an initiative of TechSoupGlobal.org – Check out the diverse submissions to the December Net2 Think Tank that simply asked for the best blog posts of 2009! I'm sure there are some resources, conversations and pointers in here that are new to everyone.
  • What Matters Now eBook – Get the ebook now for free! "We want to shake things up. More than seventy extraordinary authors and thinkers contributed to this ebook. It's designed to make you sit up and think, to change your new year's resolutions, to foster some difficult conversations with your team."
  • Orchestras and Social Media Survey: Key Findings and Full Report | Dutch Perspective by Marc van Bree – "In short, the survey found that social media activities, familiarity and usage seem to be widespread among orchestras. Managers find social media important and organizations are generally enthusiastic. However, the efforts are far from organized and strategic. It seems many orchestras are dipping their feet in the social media pool, but do not have the policies, budgets, and metrics in place to effectively use the tools at their disposal, even if they do recognize the need for checks and balances."
Published on December 15, 2009 by Amy Sample Ward. 15 Comments

Social by Social Book Giveaway: Winner

Published in socialbysocial. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Last week, I announced that I was going to give away a free hard copy of the Social by Social book.  To be in the drawing, interested readers just needed to leave a comment.  I put all the names in a bowl and drew one out!

The winner is: Kim!

Even if you didn’t win, you can still read the book for free:

Kim – So excited to get a book in your hands.  Hope that you will come back and give us some feedback, share ideas, and pose questions here that we can all discuss!

Published on October 28, 2009 by Amy Sample Ward. 0 Comments

Social by Social: Book Giveaway!

Published in socialbysocial. 36 Comments Tags: , , .

socialbysocial bookI just got my first copy of the Social by Social book I co-authored earlier this year with David Wilcox, Andy Gibson, and Nigel Courtney and Clive Holtham from Cass Business School.  That’s the book next to the SocialBySocial.com website where you can read the book for free or download the free PDF.  And I’m going to give it away!

About Social by Social:

“Social by Social is a practical guide to using new technologies to create social impact. It makes accessible the tools you need to engage a community, offer services, scale up activities and sustain projects. Whoever you are, it shows you how to take technology and turn it into real world benefits.

We want to help people in the public and third sectors do more good, by showing them the power of these technologies and how to access them. In the process, we hope we can also educate funders and policy workers about the huge shift of mindset and expectations needed to commission these projects successfully, to give the innovators more space to work.”

What people have already said about Social by Social:

“If you’re interested in using social media in your organization, and you should be, Social by Social is the real deal.”
- Craig Newmark, Founder of Craigslist

“Social by Social is a timely and invaluable contribution to the literature and contains some fundamentally important emergent lessons for anyone considering the use of social media to develop their ideas.”
- Tessy Britton, Social Spaces

“People who do the sort of stuff I do – supporting community activists in the use of social media – should get a copy and read around the subject a bit more.”
- Mark Walker, Sussex Community Internet Project

BOOK GIVEAWAY!

I’m going to give away this copy of the book and am pretty excited to do it! But, didn’t know how to choose from all the great readers and commenters here.  So, there’s got to be a catch. But I want the catch to be beneficial to all of us to further surface great examples, share knowledge, and surface organizations you may want to learn more about.

Details: The Social by Social handbook is all about great examples of how organizations and groups are leveraging social tools to wider their impact, better connect with their supporters, or more effectively provide services.  So, to be in the running for the giveaway, simply leave a comment here with your favorite example of an organization or social impact group using social technologies in their work. That’s it!  I’ll put all the names of commenters in a hat and just draw the lucky winner out.

Leave your comment by Monday the 26th (you have one week)!

(Full transparency: none of the co-authors get any money from book sales.  You can read the book for free online or download the PDF of the book for free as well at socialbysocial.com.)

Published on October 18, 2009 by Amy Sample Ward. 36 Comments

New on SSIR: The Power of Vision, Review of “The Pollyanna Principles”

Published in Uncategorized, issues and otherblogs. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

I have a new post up on the Stanford Social Innovation Review and this is a special post because it’s actually a book review.  Hildy Gottlieb, a colleague (but really growing into a friend) sent me a copy of her new book, The Pollyanna Principles.  I read it on the plane to and from N2Y4 (11 hours from London to San Francisco!) and have filled the edges of the pages with notes and ideas and questions.  You can find the review below, or on the SSIR Opinion Blog.

—–

Hildy Gottlieb’s new book The Pollyanna Principles is a handbook for starting a revolution in social benefit organization design and practice, but it isn’t the revolution. What’s the catch? Well, it is going to take everyone, whether you are part of an organization or receive services from one, whether you are a philanthropist or a volunteer, whether you work for a for-profit business or are a community member. For social benefit organizations to truly “work” we all need to be part of the design, the process, the success.

“When we assume we are separate, we build systems that reinforce that separateness.  When we assume we are interconnected and interdependent, we build systems that reinforce those connections.

The Six Pollyanna Principles

There are six core statements that represent The Pollyanna Principles and they include:

  1. We accomplish what we hold ourselves accountable for.
  2. Each and everyone of us is creating the future, every day, whether we do so consciously or not.
  3. Everyone and everything is interconnected and interdependent, whether we acknowledge that or not.
  4. “Being the change we want to see” means walking the talk of our values.
  5. Strength build upon our stengths, not our weaknesses.
  6. Individuals will go where systems lead them.

The Pollyanna Principles boil down to a similar premise I have blogged about before: we are creating organizations that

  1. are vested in the social issues they work towards ending in such a way that they require those issue to persist
  2. are built in a bubble
  3. are consistently missing opportunities to succeed by operating like a business (with competition) instead of as a living part of the community.

You can find previous blog posts (with great conversations in the comments) here, here and here.

Why I’m excited about The Pollyanna Principles

We have a huge opportunity before us to remodel our social benefit organization structure. There is so much talk both online and offline, from inside organizations and from outside, that “nonprofits are broken.” We’ve done step 1: admitted that we have a problem. Now, what?  Well, as Hildy explains, we need to start driving our work with our vision of how we want the world to be, instead of what the problems are before us. What does that mean? Well, imagine that your organization said you wanted to have a public education system in your state that provided opportunities for all students to learn, fair pay for both teachers and staff, opportunities for growth for students, teachers and staff, and an entry point for all students to enter the “real world” prepared. You can imagine that by operating under that vision (instead of focusing on drop-out rates, teacher pay scales, or job skill training) that partnerships with the community, new opportunities for learning exchanges and career paths, and much more start to take shape organically, naturally.

Collaboration is a huge focus of mine: Finding ways for organizations working in the same sector to share calls to action to amplify the impact, helping organizaitons understand where their work aligns to cross pollinate across their networks, and so forth. Reading the Pollyanna Principles was like finding a twin I had been separated from at birth!  But, that isn’t to say it’s the complete conversation. This is truly a great starting place from which we can all move the conversation forward.

There are still many questions I have and that I imagine all organizations, boards, volunteers, community members will have when they read the book. But I want to, am ready to, ask those questions and answer them as a community. Questions like:

  • How do we truly create community planning opportunities as funders that include all members of the community when the “community” of interested people is often limited to the grantee pool?
  • How do we begin to change the cultural view of nonprofits in society/by the community so that the public, those who use the services or are otherwise affected by nonprofits’ work can have a stake in the responsibility to create organizations making real change and all of the community is shaping its future?
  • How do we help organizations redefine their “community” to understand the entire ecosystem in which they operate?
  • And many more…

What’s Next
The Pollyanna Principles is about social benefit organizations, but it’s really about community. Community is the most important thing to me, and I truly believe that we can’t create any amount of change, any amount of real world impact, or any lasting effects without participation, ownership, and shared responsibility by community members in the work these organizations do. This means we have to have community members represented in building and implementing an organization’s work, as well as building grant programs from funders. We need to have those receiving the services and those delivering them in constant collaboration.  We need people in the community to expect organizations to succeed and take a stake in making sure they do.

So, what’s stopping us from doing this? Hildy says it’s the Culture of Can’t that we are all accustomed to operating within that holds us back.  Can we move to the Culture of Can? Are we ready? What are the Can’ts holding you or your organization back?

I’m ready to start: to start asking questions and coming up with answer, to think and share collaboratively, and to really focus on the vision we share for a better world and work towards that goal instead of focusing only on the problems – are you?  I’d love to hear your ideas!

You can learn more about The Pollyanna Principles at: http://pollyannaprinciples.org

Visit the Stanford Social Innovation Review opinion blog to join the conversation there, too!

Published on June 11, 2009 by Amy Sample Ward. 0 Comments

The 45 Social by Social Propositions

Published in resources, socialmedia and strategy. 25 Comments Tags: , , , .

Over the last few months, I’ve been collaborating with Andy Gibson and David Wilcox, and Clive Holtham and Nigel Courtney from Cass Business School, on a book about using new technologies for social benefit projects.  It’s going to be called Social by Social: a practical guide to using new technologies to deliver social impact and it should be published and distributed by NESTA next month.  I’ll be sure to post links to the book, online version, and so forth when it’s out!

The book is full of interviews, case studies, how-tos and more.  At the core of the book is a set of fundamental principles to follow to help make a social technology project successful. Below, you can find the 45 Social by Social Propositions.  We are sharing them with you now so we can hopefully get your feedback before publication.  Really looking forward to this conversation!  Let us know what you think by leaving comments below.

The 45 Social by Social Propositions

A set of principles and guidelines which we believe underpin the most successful ‘social by social’ projects.

  1. People want control. If you give them tools for taking more control of their lives, they will pay you back in attention, support and even hard cash.
  2. Empowerment is unconditional. Telling people what they can and can’t do with your platform is like an electricity company restricting what its power can be used for.
  3. People make technology work. Think about mindset, language and skills before you think about tools, features and screen designs.
  4. Know your limits. Technology can solve information problems, organise communities and publish behaviours, but they can’t deliver food or care for the sick.
  5. You can’t learn to fly by watching the pilot. If you want to understand new technologies, start using them. Dive in.
  6. Start at the top. Get the boss blogging or talking on YouTube.
  7. Don’t jump for the tool. Be clear on who your target audience are and what you will do for them. Choosing technology is the last thing you should do.
  8. Start small. It’s always better to build too little than too much. Beware of specifying costly systems until you are absolutely familiar with the tools and know how people would use them.
  9. Planning ahead is hard. Find cheap, easy ways to try your ideas out with real people in real situations before committing lots of resources.
  10. Expect the unexpected. Be prepared to develop tactically, evolving as you go, and learn to maximise possibilities.
  11. Give up on the illusion of control. In a networked world, organisations can no longer control what people think or say about their products and services. If you’re worried, get involved.
  12. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. The more you open things up, the less risk there is of damage to your reputation. And restricting access can severely reduce usage and innovation.
  13. Keep it messy. Design to support conversations, relationships, stories – not to organise documents. If everything’s neat and tidy, it’s because no-one’s there.
  14. In user-centred design, everyone is right. Evolve any tools and systems with the people who will use them, and respect their complaints. Bring them in and let them help you.
  15. Never assume, always ask. You can’t know what your community wants from you without asking and they are waiting for you to ask. Be specific, define the issue, problem or idea, and let the answers pour in. but be transparent about your next moves and highlight the answers that informed your next steps.
  16. Design for real people. Tailor your offering to the real skills and characteristics of your users, not how you’d like them to be.
  17. Keep it simple. Every time you add a feature to your toolset, you make the existing features harder to use.
  18. Don’t centralise, aggregate. Do you really need data centralisation? Well do you? Use lots of different, disconnected tools and then pull the content together into a central location.
  19. Be a pirate. Don’t make things yourself; make use of what others have already shared.
  20. Empty rooms are easier to redecorate. Be fast and loose with evolving your platform in the early stages, but be cautious of changing things once people start using them.
  21. Build it and they may well not come. Build relationships and they probably will.
  22. The world is a noisy place. Getting people’s attention means offering them something valuable.
  23. Go where people are. Experienced users have plenty of existing places already, and newcomers are difficult to recruit. Go to see them and say hello.
  24. Learn to listen before you start talking. Good conversations require good listeners more than good talkers. Learn how to say things that people want to hear.
  25. Be consistent. Whatever you say in public, remember you are talking to everyone, all the time, so stay true to your principles.
  26. You can’t force people to volunteer. Contributing content and spreading the word are voluntary activities, so learn how to create good invitations and actionable opportunities.
  27. Respect how people choose to communicate. Some will write, others take pictures or make movies. Most people will just listen and view, and maybe comment.
  28. Enthusiasts are more important than experts. Attitude beats ability when tools are cheap and easy.
  29. Be realistic about who will create content. It’s about the same proportion as put their hands up at question time.
  30. Put your energy where their energy is. Support the early adopters rather than chasing the sceptics, and they will become your evangelists.
  31. All energy is good energy. If people are taking the time to criticise you, they are engaged. Don’t waste that.
  32. Throw a good party. Make it fun and sociable as well as worthwhile to get more commitment.
  33. Be a good host. Make people comfortable and then get out of the way.
  34. Don’t forget the tables and chairs. If you want people to communicate or collaborate online, bring them together face-to-face too.
  35. Keep your powder dry. Set aside as much money for design, copy and user testing, and for marketing and community engagement, as you do for software and hardware.
  36. A marathon, not a sprint. Launching the service is just the beginning; the hard work starts once you have something for people to engage with.
  37. Content is king. Providing great content, whether it’s resources, information, connections or conversations, means new users will find you and others will stick with you. Give people the means to share this content too, freely and openly.
  38. Eat your own dogfood. If you aren’t using your own services, why would anyone else? And you can’t influence the community if you aren’t in it.
  39. Your users own the platform. If they feel own it, they will trust it, help sustain it, and find ways to use and improve the tools; if they aren’t interested, no amount of pushing will help.
  40. Let people solve their own problems. As the amount of work grows, so does the number of workers.
  41. Someone has to pay. Although many online tools are free, everything has costs of time if not money. If possible, make sure the money comes from the core purpose of the project.
  42. Don’t confuse money with value. Look at the other assets you have in your community, like skills, volunteers and goodwill, and put them to use in sustaining it.
  43. No-one knows anything. The only thing worth watching is what your users are actually doing.
  44. Failure is useful. If you want to know what works, look at what didn’t. Fail often, fail usefully.
  45. Say thank you in public. People don’t need to have something hand-written on headed paper to feel recognized. Use your tools to acknowledge the people who helped make them in a visible way.

These propositions are a starting point for a new conversation about using technology to improve the world we live in. So, would you sign up to them? We may be wrong. And that’s fine. Let us know your thoughts, share them with other people you think may be interested, and we’ll be putting them out more widely for discussion, additions and edits once we’ve figured out the right format. You can also add your links, articles and comments on the School of Everything Scrapbook for Social by Social too.

And stay tuned for announcements on the book launch, I’ll keep you posted here.

socialforsocialUpdate: Rob Allen offered this great visualization of the 45 Propositions.  I think it is a terrific way of noting the most important aspects of these guidelines.  Notice that “People” is huge; when working with social technologies to connect with and engage your supporters, members, donors and volunteers you have to remember: the tools, the messages, the actions are all based on the people.

Thanks, Rob!

Published on April 7, 2009 by Amy Sample Ward. 25 Comments