June #4Change Chat: Local Community Organizing

This post is reposted from the #4Change blog.

I love community organizing. It’s true! It’s something that I am energized by, passionate about, and take so much pleasure in helping others do well, too. I’ve had experience organizing communities offline in local communities, and organizing community online – but the kind of organizing that inspires me the most is combining online and offline. Social media tools work because they are powered by people, and people are social. And when we get connected, and can connect our networks with other networks, we get even more social and have huge potential to make great things happen.  My work with NetSquared and with Social by Social has helped shape so many of my beliefs about community organizing and has offered the opportunity to meet so many others doing it well.

Lots of organizations, campaigns, and even individuals are now using social media tools to organize online and offline – bringing local communities together in new and powerful ways.

This month’s #4Change chat takes on the topic of using social media tools for community organizing – and I hope you’ll join us!

Details:

Date: June 10th
Time: 2 pm PST, 5 pm EST, 10 pm UK
Location: Twitter! #4Change
Topic: Community Organizing

June #4Change Chat Questions:

To keep the two-hour chat on topic, I’ll be helping guide conversation by using some of the questions below to drive us to share ideas, examples and resources. If you want to take a peak at where we may go in the conversation, review the questions below.

1. What kind of communities do you currently work with and what kinds of social media tools do they use?
2. What’s the point in using “global” tools (social media) for local organizing?
3. What strategies are important to keep in mind when using social media in local organizing?
4. What tools have you or your communities found useful for growing or organizing, hosting or distributing?
5. What tools have been most unsuccessful?
6. What are the online community organizing best practices from your experience?
7. What roles are important in online community organizing?
8. What are your favorite examples or case studies where this is really working?
9. What metrics are valuable in measuring success of social media tools for organizing?

You can also suggest questions or topic areas to be included by leaving a comment on this post!

How to Participate

1. If you want to contribute to the conversation, you’ll need to have a twitter account (it’s free).
2. To follow the conversation (whether you are planning to contribute or not), use http://search.twitter.com or another application to search on Twitter for #4Change
3. Jump in to the conversation by adding #4Change to your Twitter message
4. Feeling brave? Check out TweetChat – it’s a great application that integrates with your Twitter account and makes chats more fun! You can turn it off after the chat.

Conversations and Presentations

For some recent thoughts and best practices on community building, check out:

• How our tools define “Community”
• Sustainable Community Building
• Return on Engagement for your Community
• Bringing Community Organizing into Online Campaigns
• Building Stronger Online Communities without Losing Your Sanity
• Crowdsourcing: Community vs Crowd
• Online Community Building: Gardening vs Landscaping

New to #4Change? Learn More:

To learn more about #4Change monthly twitter chat go to the #4Change Blog, read about #4Change and search twitter for #4Change. To participate just join in twitter conversation from anywhere in the world.