Last month, Joe Solomon shared on the NetSquared Blog what he hopes is our reflection on 2011 a year from now, focused on a year full of empowering and harnessing organizers. I wanted to take a few minutes today to share my 3 Goals for 2011 – I’d love to hear what others you’d add to the list!

How can we build a better sector? 3 Goals for 2011

For me, for you, for all of our organizations; and for the sake of this world we are trying to improve!

Please note, and this is key, that these are goals for the people operating in this space. As much as we love technology, it isn’t anything without people creating it, using it, changing it, and evolving it.

Find and talk to others using the same tools

We can learn a whole lot from each other. Seriously.

Coming together to talk about tools with others who use them can also mean a louder, more unified voice in requesting changes to those tools. When one organization says they want the software or platform to work differently, it’s a nice feautre request email that may even get a “thank you for the input” message in response. But when hundreds or more organizations can all say they want a change, the message is so much louder!

Share failure and success

This isn’t a new idea. Many people have talked about how we need to, and many have even shared how they have failed, and how they’ve succeeded. But I hope we can go deeper both in what we share and how we listen. When we are talking to others about our work, our projects, campaigns or tools, what if we shared more of the “why we did it” and “how we made it happen” instead of which tools, and which messages? What if we moved from sharing which tools, tactics or campaigns were “fails” or success to a focus on sharing which strategies worked or didn’t work.

Put questions before answers

Instead of leading with answers, let’s start focusing on the questions we can ask each other, ask of funders, ask of our communities, ask of ourselves. There’s great opportunity to learn and collaborate when we approach conversations with the lens of discovering what really worked, what is really possible, and where our impact is needed. And then if we keep a mission-critical focus, wow: Big things are possible!

What do you think about those goals? What are the goals you have for funneling your frustrations into real action?

For Mother’s Day, Epic Change wants to help Mama Lucy realize another dream – to build a home on campus where in-need children will live. Towards that end, Epic Change has created an online collaborative art project to honor moms across the globe called To Mama With Love. The call-to-action is to create a “heartspace” for a mom you love consisting of words, photos and video.

As Stacey Monk, the founder and CEO of Epic Change, explains:

With www.ToMamaWithLove.org, we hope to build this home out of the love we share for moms across the globe.  Just imagine.
According to the LA Times, this year Americans alone will spend $14.6 billion on Mother’s Day.  Imagine if the gifts we gave made the world a better place for children & mamas everywhere.

Here’s mine:

Happy Mother’s Day, mom! (For more love to my mom, check out my Ada Lovelace Day post, too!)

What I Like:

The elements of this campaign that I like are the same ones that Epic Change always gets right:

1. Time sensitive: Mother’s Day is this Sunday in the US and this campaign creates an easy to understand timeline for participation + real impact
2. Real Impact: The changes and impact are always real, visible, and important, and Stacey and all those involved do a great, consistent job of sharing the stories of the kids (and Mama Lucy) benefiting.
3. From the Heart: Just like Tweetsgiving, and everything that Mama Lucy is doing in Tanzania, the To Mama with Love campaign is all from the heart. It’s honest and simple and creates great ways for people to share love and passion for each other (opposed to all those campaigns built on fear or anger).
4. Real People: Just like the element of real impact, this campaign and Tweetsgiving both succeed because they are created by, benefit, and involve real people, being themselves.  At the end of the day, we are humans. We don’t need to pretend we aren’t.

How You Can Share:

• Visit http://www.tomamawithlove.org/ to see the heartspaces already popping up on the map from around the world
• Use #tomamawithlove in Twitter
• Create a heartspace and share your story! (You can see the one Stacey made here.)
• Join the streaming conversation! You can connect with others via voice or video on Friday – find out more here!

Thanks so much, Mama Lucy, for all the hard work and dedication you have devoted to the kids and community.  And thank you, to my mom, for all your love!

From the newest member of the #4Change team, ChristinasWorld: In the wake of South by Southwest in Austin, and in anticipation of some exciting social media and social change gatherings coming up on the 2010 events calendar, we thought it could be useful to explore How Social Media Can Enhance Events as the topic for the March #4change chat.

I’m excited! Not only is this a topic that I personally want to learn more about, but it’s going to be my first time as part of the #4change collective to co-host a chat, together with Tom Dawkins (@tomjd). #Gratitude in advance for your patience, as I find the right groove!
Some pre-chat food for thought:

My new Mac’s thesaurus offers several alternative terms we could use instead of enhance:

enhance (verb) increase, add to, intensify, heighten, magnify, amplify, inflate, strengthen, build up, supplement, augment, boost, raise, lift, elevate, exalt; improve, enrich, complement.

Most of us would probably agree that social media indeed can enhance offline events, but does it always? For whom? The thesaurus also tells me the antonym to enhance is diminish. Can social media also diminish offline events?

There are so many tools we can use to try and enhance offline events. What we hope to explore in Thursday’s chat is how.

#4Change March Chat Questions:

1. What’s the potential benefit of using social media to cover events? For whom?
2. What makes a good events coverage strategy?
3. Are there examples of specific events that really did the social media piece well?
4. Which Social Media tools are best suited for covering live events?
5. How does online reporting affect the experience of participants at an event.
6. Is it possible to imagine online participants actually engaging in offline events remotely through social media, or will there always be a disconnect?
7. How can the continuation of conversations held at live events best be continued online? Is it realistic or unrealistic to expect that they will?

Join the Twitter chat:

If you want to contribute to the conversation, you’ll need to have a twitter account (it’s free).

• 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
• Jump in to the conversation by adding #4Change to your Twitter message
• 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.
• Please introduce yourself in 1 tweet at the start or when you join in

Details

Date: March, 18th 2010
When: 2 – 4 pm US Pacific Time, 5 – 7 pm US Eastern Time, 9 pm – 11 pm London, UK (Late!)
Where: Twitter (search for #4Change)
Topic: How Social Media Can Enhance Events

Context for the event from Rory Cellan-Jones:  Prevailing ethos of the web has been libertarian, optimistic about the potential of the internet to be a medium of free expression and break down barriers.  That ethos continued until the last three years or so with issues in Burma, Iran, and China.  We’ve seen potential for those unsympathetic to the cause to use the technology too – a bit of an arms race created.  Technology is amoral – it doesn’t care. In Iran we’ve seen it used to get out information and resist censorship but have also seen it used by the government to alter a mobile phone system and monitoring calls.

Tweets and highlights from this event on Twitter at #AITech

Panelists include:

• Susan Pointer, Google’s Director of Public Policy & Government Relations
• Andrew Keen (via video), author of Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is killing our culture
• Kevin Anderson, blogs editor of the Guardian
• Annabelle Sreberny, Professor of Global Media and Communication, School of Oriental and African Studies (with special interest in Iran, bloggers & social media)
• Rory Cellan-Jones, Technology Correspondent for the BBC, is chairing.

Susan Pointer: declaring an interest as a passionate advocate of the potential of internet technology. When it comes to the potential to underpin human rights, for me the question is not technology good for human rights but is the access to information, the ability to connect with people online, to use online tools to mobilize offline activities, to question wisdom, and shine a light of transparency – it’s a useful tool for promoting and underpinning human rights. So, the answer is yes as a tool. The access to information drives knowledge. The technology itself is not intrinsically good -at Google we are advocates for free expression on the internet and free access for all; the technology istelf is and should be a neutral platform for this. it does not itself dictate who does the communicating or how we assess the communications. Nor does it require that we leave our human faculties at the on switch – the internet democratizes the channels.  Rather than ask if the tool is perfect or not, we should work together to make it a perfect tool, keep the internet platform healthy.

Andrew Keen: I would never argue that technology is against human rights. When it comes to the internet, you can of course find lots of examples where twitter or facebook or email have been used by governments or corporations or regimes. But, the tools of the digital revolution are used by those against the regime but are equally used by those in the regimes.  Because of the natural of the internet, where traditional intermediaries have been done away with, it’s increasingly easy for regimes to use this supposed democratized media for their own.  I haven’t seen that much proof that internet has changed [post the Obama election]. Changes come through people and culture and not through technology. I’m not arguing that it is bad, but the internet isn’t necessarily good for human rights.

Annabelle Sreberny: Communication technologies have been good for human rights since we created the alphabet. These are tools that can perhaps accelerate the speed of information and the number of people involved, but it’s always had the potential for change. Politics is communications by another name. Communication technologies have always been used for political change, especially with Iran. 1905-1911, people were publishing in exile, printing and sharing over the boarder, etc. in Tehran. 1975 revolution used leaflets and cassette tapes helped mobilize and push the revolution. Youtube and facebook are just the new tools for political change. Western audiences came to know Iran through the 2009 election, the internet had been the place where you could find politics happening inside Iran when in person it was very hard there.  For example, the internet was important because it was difficult to organize offline. Given the difficulties of face to face politics and public space control, many of the people 30 and under stay home where they can be online and be free. They are inventing it for themselves. One thing that internet technologies can do is the bringing together across boundaries – so, the diaspora are slowly invited back into politics. Which causes a lot of Iranian politics to take place outside of the country.  This is politics – we need the good and the bad; the cyber army, the 10,000 bloggers claimed to be trained by the national guard, etc.  In Iran the regime hasn’t yet shown itself to be as savvy as the green movement.

Kevin Anderson: I think in terms of human rights and damage of censorship the internet has been a net good.  Without social media, we wouldn’t have been able to provide the kind of information that was available. It would have been a blackout of information but suddenly there’s a way to get it out. The Guardian had an injunction to gather all the names of the people who were killed and detained and that’s something that would have never been possible without the internet. I think what we are learning is that increasing the freedom of information isn’t all that’s needed to free those living under extremist regimes.  People point to Obama but it was actually a perfect marriage of the internet and traditional pounding on doors. The internet can be problematic – some of the debates can become quite divisive online instead of cohesion. I think underlying slacktivism isn’t enough – you can’t just turn your profile green.  Just as the Guardian used crowdsourcing to get the names of those detained, the government is using crowdsourcing too. Security is going to be increasingly one of the things that internet activists have to learn. Today, a China official said the internet is a new battlefield without gun powder. The incident with Google in China has made aware the increasing militarization of the internet – targeted attacks against corporations and activists and that’s the most worrying development.  These are sophisticated attacks and as the regimes become more sophisticated in espionage methods, people engaged in human rights will have to live in a new threat environment.

Questions:

Isn’t there plenty of evidence that technology is actually bringing information to societies in a way that was not possible 20 or 30 years ago?  Isn’t accelerating the process by which people can take on governments?

Andrew Keen: The wall in Berlin was open by accident by a guard, so you could argue that the internet is a distribution of knowledge so that would have never happened. The internet is actually a really effective tool for maintaining regimes.  So, this organization of knowledge could actually be a good thing for demoralizing government.  The more knowledge there is in the world, the easier it is to spy or look into the knowledge.  Let’s not delude ourselves that the opposition are Luddites.

We always thought of the internet as a free space with free spirits, anarchic, but it’s actually becoming dominated by a few corporate players, like Google. It has said a lot about it’s commitment to freedom of expression and so on, but it’s first duty is to it’s shareholders just like any other corporation.  Given that, how profound is Google’s commitment ever going to be to human rights?

Susan Pointer: First, Google’s size – we live or die by the trust users have in our services. We have no contract, tie-in, etc. – most all of our services are free.  Those users are free to choose whether to use our services or elsewhere. We retain their loyalty by providing services they want to use and having protections in place that they trust. It’s very different than your traditional model. Without a doubt, every user is important to our business but every user has the choice. Do we want to keep you? Of course, so we have to keep innovating, providing exciting services and that’s what drives. We support an open and competitive environment that is based on user buy in. In terms of our commitment to online freedom of expression, from the beginning our motto has been to do no evil – it means we are committed to providing as much access as possible.

Even in China?

Susan Pointer: We took the decision as a very complex – google.cn  It was not an alternative to the normal site. We found that there were users in China couldn’t access the .com site so it was created to give them access.

There was no commercial imperative behind that?

Susan Pointer: It was absolutely based on what would provide the most access to our users there. What that means  is that in order to set up the .cn site we had to be compliant with Chinese law. Which meant self censorship of the results. We would do that, we would not provide access to the .com site so you could still get results there, and on the .cn site we would provide a message when censorship was happening so the user would see when results were being withheld. In light of our investigations of attacks on the human rights activists, we have taken the point that we are no longer comfortable self censoring results and are pursing how we can provide results without censorship with China which could mean we have to discontinue use there.

Historically, people have used all kinds of methods to fight for human rights. Is there evidence that these tools are making the fight easier?

Annabelle Sreberny: The arguments would have to focus on the speed and the numbers of people involved. It’s about scale. They work like memes, the speed people react and join in.

Slacktivist term, is there not a danger that 20 or 30 years ago there was far more intensity because easy technology wasn’t there. You had to get face to face with people.

Kevin Anderson: I think it’s a bit of both. The idea that social media completely transplants face to face – one of the difficulties is that it isn’t an either or. I think there are people who say “yes, there are people who have said I’ve changed my avatar green…” One of the things with Dean’s campaign initially was that they had huge amounts of online activism but had problems turning that into real life work. It can be broad but shallow. The power of the Obama campaign was translating online activity to real world impact. Translating a click into someone on the streets is the step it takes.

People have seen technologies for a force for good and bad – in Iran you have to say that there was a unique set of circumstances. Before the election you had a population that had migrated to the internet, a government who had let them have that space. After the election that space exploded and the government was slow to catch up. But now they are catching up, with the cyber army and beyond. The question is how can we make it a force for good?

You use the term slacktivism about people in the west – the point that needs to be made is that internet lets people participate in the activism without the fear, true there is the other side of the coin…

Kevin Anderson: The point I’m making is that politics is communications but it is also a number of other actions, especially when you are dealing with regimes that have been successful at staying in power. You have to use all the tools of politics to make that change. While freedom of communications is key, there are a number of other steps. As regimes get more sophisticated, like we see China exporting some of it’s internet controlling tools elsewhere (like Iran), the methods have to get more sophisticated. If you show support you are lazy – no. But there has to be a number of people taking actions in the real world, too.

Annabelle Sreberny: Mousy solidarity – how easy it is to click on a petition, and so on.  Why the sense of solidarity? Because we don’t ave politics like this – it feels good to be part of it. We feel like we can participate.

Our attention span is ever shorter, time is relative.

Kevin Anderson: If it’s going to be that transient 24-hour news cycle, that sustained action is key. Once the novelty wears off, breaking through the media cycle is difficult. In Iran, it’s quite clear, this is a long sustained struggle and isn’t something that’s going to happen quickly. You had more democratic and open societies with the Velvet and the Orange revolutions. With the Chinese, the point they made was that we have to control information otherwise there will be chaos.

Susan Pointer: It was the immediacy that played the role in creating interest in Iran. Had that information come out weeks later it would have been restricted to academics and others pouring over the information. It’s important to sustain that information and interest. The discussion about membership of an organization and what it means to be active: lots of people would have joined a group or gone to a meeting without contributing. The power of showing numbers online can be more powerful than showing up online. We need to look at how membership and participation are defined. Where does the pressure come from on an international exposure. How we defend the nature of the internet: it makes institutions and governments nervous. We need to be as vigilant in our spaces as internationally to keep it without gatekeepers and screeners. That’s what will keep it a source of immediacy.

The deision making process by Google – with Iran it can seem clear. What kind of process does Google go through to make those decisions?

Susan Pointer: Once we created google.cn we had to meet compliance. In general terms, I spend a lot of my time with issues where access to our services are restricted and we work to fix it. The open access to our services – it shouldn’t matter where in the world you are, you should be able to access services.

Is the speed and scale of internet communications a bug as well as a feature?

Kevin Anderson: My experience online is largely positive. The places where i see the most animosity is news sites. And that’s not the internet to me.

There’s debate between those who say you should be able to say/do anything and those that say other people’s human rights are at risk in that situation.

Kevin Anderson: I can only speak for myself but I wouldn’t say anything online that I wouldn’t say face to face. It’s said that it is still so new we haven’t created social mores for it. I remember when the AOL newbies came on and we thought they were ruining the internet… if you are saying things you think would turn you red if you were saying them outloud, then you probably shouldn’t say them.

Climate change and climate gate – what are the social media implications?

Kevin Anderson: as a journalist, yes, we want to present all sides but do we present all sides as if they are valid? At the Guardian our editorial decision is very different than at the BBC. We can take a stand. I believe strongly in objectivity but it can be a difficult thing in fractious debates like this. It might be a bit beyond this debate.

If corporations are immoral – one of the reasons we expect corporations to be moral is because Google wears morals on the sleeve, etc. Where does the openness of information infringe on human rights (like Google Buzz – there was no consent for followers, etc.)?

Susan Pointer: mission, people, leadership and so on decide who a company is. I chose Google because I felt that it made good decisions. It’s easy to disassociate ourselves though. One thing I would say from our perspective is we follow through from the way we communicate, some would argue we are too open but I think that’s part of the process to engage with users. Buzz is one where we thought we had the controls in place but the options that were there could have been better with visibility – and we responded immediately.  We do have the ongoing discussion with our users. Privacy comes down to individuals having choice, transparency and control. Transparency in the human rights space is interesting – we want the option to be anonymous but we also want to know who is saying something.

Google’s business depends on knowing more and more about users – behavioral advertising. Isn’t that going to be difficult to walk that line? You have to make bigger profits and that lies in knowing more about your users.

Susan Pointer: Majority of our advertising is contextual – the search you made and the content on the page. We hold IP addresses, and not users. You can also opt out permanently of being associated with certain things. In settings, users can have the option to opt out, or opt in to certain things.

Annabelle Sreberny: So much of the content from Iran was user generated content sent to the media – what’s happened to that? Why should we be working for free for large media? Facebook is increasingly hard to excavate. People put content online that they want to share but you can’t get to it. What happens to the content we are putting up there?

Do you think access to technology will be acknowledge as a basic human right like water and shelter? Is it trivializing human rights by associating the internet with it?

Kevin Anderson: Yes. Technology – internet is about communications. We already have universal access provisions for things like telephones. Technology infuses my life. What we are seeing now is not that people don’t have access but choose not to have it. Why do people exclude themselves and what are the resasons? Especially in a technologically advanced country, that becomes a bigger issue.

Susan Pointer: When we are talking about technology we are taking it from the point that you have access to it. We have to consider the fact that in many places of the world people still don’t have access. We aren’t just talking about changing governments but giving citizens access to information at all.

Should Amnesty be fighting for the right to access the internet?

Annabelle Sreberny: Article 19 – the fundamental mission. THe right to community is all about access. Thinking about the right to communicate opens up many interesting issues.

Is there any indication that Amnesty is doing better now with technology?

Amnesty Rep: You can argue yes. If you look at Amnesty’s history, 49 years ago people wrote letters to get people out of prison. Once we had fax machines, we started having urgent actions to send a fax. Now we coax people to send emails. Technology gives us new ways to do things.

I would imagine a letter or a bag of letters 20 years ago was possibly more effective than a million emails today.

Amnesty Rep: It explains why we’ve never given up on letters. To some extent you can delete your inbox really quickly than you can get rid of a bag of letters. But it also means we can get information quickly and from everywhere quickly.

What technology means for people who are experiencing a crisis who don’t have access – don’t make it onto twitter, don’t make the news cycle?  Like Sri Lanka where pictures weren’t getting out.

Annabelle Sreberny: There were also huge demonstrations elsewhere pulling in the diaspora.  They play a role in alerting the media in other places. We can fall into the trap that one technology takes over from all others. Other technologies are still around. With the diaspora, you just need to get enough people to pay attention that they can spur the media.

—–

What’s your favorite example of technology helping people create positive change in the world? I think there are too many to count, really.  For example, simply review the hundreds of ideas listed in NetSquared‘s Project Gallery and you’ll quickly see that people from around the world are hard at work leveraging all kinds of technologies to create positive change for communities tackling many different issues.

One example that I’ve blogged about before is the annual project from EpicChange: Tweetsgiving.  During the US Thanksgiving holiday, Tweetsgiving asked people around the world to use Twitter to share something they were grateful for and include the link to the Tweetsgiving site (where people could donate to help build a library, classroom and more for the benefiting school in Tanzania).  This year, the Tweetsgiving campaign also asked people to gather in person, offline and have gratitude parties, where people could also donate in person to the project.  You can see the numbers (from tweets, to dollars, to videos and more) on the EpicChange blog here.

Enter the Contest

As part of HP’s Create Change initiative, they want to initiate a dialogue on how technology and individuals create social change – and to do that, they have partnered with bloggers like me that think we know a few folks with ideas on that subject! (Looking at all of you readers, hint hint!)

HP is giving away a new computer and printer bundle to the winner selected in the contest – and we all have the added bonus of learning about ways others have leveraged technology and finding case studies that can help us in our work.  I’m really looking forward to hearing about the projects you find inspiring!

To participate in the contest, follow these easy steps:

1. Answer the same question that I discussed above:

What’s your favorite example of technology helping people create positive change in the world?

2.  Provide your answer in the comments below (if you’d like to blog your answer on your own site, simply leave a comment here with a link to your site to be sure it’s included)

3. You have until February 28th to submit a response to the question

On March 1, I will select a winner at random (all commenters who answer the question will be put into a hat and I’ll draw one at random).  The winner will be announced here in an update at the bottom of the blog post that day.

So, get your submission in and be in the running for a new computer and printer!

(To find out more about HP’s Create Change initiative, visit their website or Facebook page.)

UPDATE: Winner Announced

As promised, I took all those who commented on this post and chose one at random. Actually, I wrote everyone’s name on a slip of paper, put them in a measuring cup, and my husband chose the winner at random. I even took a picture!

So, congratulations to Ryan Long!  You’ve won the contest for a new computer and printer bundle from HP, and will be connected to process your winnings.  Thanks again for sharing your favorite example of technology for social impact: LiveMocha.com, a website where people can learn and teach languages from around the world.

Thanks to all those who submitting comments with your favorite examples of technology for change! I’ve learned about more projects and seen some of my favorites mentioned. I hope you all find more organizations or tools to use, learn from or support, too!

Over the last week, technology has played an unprecedented role in bringing aid to and saving lives in Haiti. Over $22 million has been raised by the American Red Cross via text message (about a fifth of total Haiti-related giving to the organization so far). And then there’s the role that Facebook and Twitter are playing.

Those social media tools, along with dozens of others, have been used to help family and friends locate one another, to direct food, clothing and medical support to specific locations, and to help direct rescue workers to individuals alive and trapped under rubble.

That’s social media for social good, and that’s exactly what NTEN and NetSquared want to highlight with Beth Kanter this spring at SXSWi.

Of course, we don’t just want to talk about Haiti — we want to highlight some amazing work from around the sector, while also building a nice little library of case studies we can all learn from. So, we invite you to share your social media for social good story. We’ll choose three to highlight in our session, and we’ll share all the stories we can on our sites and at We Are Media.

Submit your Social Media for Social Good story today!

Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Topic: social reporting

Description: David Wilcox and I lead the social reporting and social media training at the ESGT, including video.

Related Links:

• Conference information

Location: Twitter

Topic: How can we better leverage social media for less talk and more action?

Description: I was the guest on The Feast’s twitter chat leading up to The All Day Buffet conference in New York around social changemakers and opportunities for collaboration and technology.

Related Links:

• Blog post

The Five Stages of Early Adopter Behavior include:

1. Discovery, QA and Spreading the Word
2. Promotion and Collaboration
3. Mainstream Use and Engagement
4. Sense of Entitlement, Nitpicking and Reduced Use
5. Migration to Something New, Call to Move Followers

You can read the full descriptions of the 5 Stages here.

I like to read insightful posts like this because I REALLY love to think about how tech-centric insights and trends may apply to behavior generally.  If these are trends that have emerged from a set of people who happen to all adopt social technologiy tools ahead of the mainstream and they share enough things in common to produce a set of general trends and characteristics, it isn’t a stretch to think that those behaviors or insights may be applied elsewhere – whether it’s online or not.

Do you think these Five Stages of Early Adopter Beahvior of social technology can be applied to social change adoption?

Are social entrepreneurs and changemakers possibly following these trends in their birth of innovations and campaigns, promotion to colleagues and networks, public engagement, further promotion and partnerships, and then handing over of the project to start the process again…?

I would love to hear what you think about this and am looking forward to a lively discussion in the comments!