A. Fine Blog

Sometimes social media tools can be easily trivialized by observers as gidgets and widgets used by kids to pass the time secretly during class. Here’s a story from Egypt of how Twitter helped save a jailed journalist sent to me by the always useful folks at Politics Online via the Washington Post:

“Twitter Post Rescues Jailed Journalist in Egypt

James Karl Buck was bailed out of jail by a ‘tweet’ post on Twitter, a social networking site. The message “arr ested” was seen by Buck’s friends and bloggers in Egypt and the United States via the Internet.

Buck, a journalism graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, was in Egypt for a school research project, ironically focused on bloggers and journalists who use tools like Twitter to keep in step with news, when Egyptian authorities arrested him. The authorities claimed that Buck may have been inciting a riot; although, Buck was merely photographing a labor rally near a textile mill in Mahalla, Egypt.

Buck reached Twitter through his cell phone, allowing him to make the post without being detected by authorities. Twitter allows its users to post 140 character or less messages, providing a place on the Web for people to be constantly updated in brief, to- the-point blogposts.

Thanks to the ‘tweet’ relaying his arrest, Buck was able to reach his friends via the Web, who contacted the U.S. Embassy and UC Berkeley, eventually sending a lawyer to bail him out of jail.

Buck says keeping in contact with the rest of the world via the Web and his Twitter posts kept him sane, curbed the fear that he would, “fall into a black whole” and potentially saved his life. Buck said that he “came to realize how important a tool like Twitter is.”

If you couldn’t find a place for another social networking site in your connection overloaded life, this story is a great example of how Twitter is a valuable resource. Tweet posts come in pretty handy in emergency situations, from connecting people online after minor earthquakes in the California to proving its worth internationally by rescuing Buck.”

This great opportunity just in from my friend, Margaret Egan:

Dear colleagues,

Forrester folks Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff are offering a free webinar  — their new book is a useful and important resource in demystifying social networking and Web 2.0

“Groundswell: A Framework For Using Web 2.0 For Business Advantage”

WHEN:          Friday, May 9th at 8am PT / 11am ET / 5pm CET.

REGISTER:    http://blogs.forrester.com/charleneli/

I had a wonderful opportunity yesterday as the keynote speaker at the Nonprofit Summit organized by the Georgia Center for Nonprofits to share thoughts on connected activism and the Social Citizens (beta) paper.

After my talk, the Q&A focused, as it naturally does with nonprofit professionals, on how to use the stuff.  Do I need a blog, which web browser should I be using, how much should I spend on a new computer?  I understand these questions, coming up to speed in the Connected Age can feel very overwhelming for those of us who came of age last century (doesn’t that sound old!) but we did have a moment of truth together.  Here’s how it went:

Questioner:  Do I really need to know about all this stuff?

Me (looking fabulous in a new suit by the way!): If we don’t figure out how to
incorporate Millennials into our nonprofit organizations, they’re just
going to start their own causes, overnight, using free tools.”

It was nice to see 500 heads nodding in unison.  Even if we don’t know exactly what to do about it yet, it was affirming for me to see the general consensus in the room, and probably in the larger nonprofit sector as a whole, that the Millennials have figured out how to self-organize very quickly and inexpensively and nonprofit organizations need their help to stay relevant.  It was nice moment, even if a bit angst filled.

Change.org is hiring part-time bloggers in specific issue areas.  Here’s the announcement:

Hiring Bloggers for Change.org!

Want to blog on an issue you are passionate about for an audience of hundreds of thousands of activists and nonprofit leaders?

Want to create the premier online space for your issue and become a leading voice for social action?

Change.org is launching a social action blog network this summer and is currently hiring a team of blogger/editors to help create a movement for change around the major causes of our time.

Positions are part-time and paid.

Each blogger will lead an online community focusing on a different social, political, or environmental issue, maintain a daily blog covering news and offering commentary, convene leading nonprofits and activists working on the issue, and help people translate their interests and passions into concrete action.

Change.org’s blog network will include dozens of communities around issues, including:

Global Warming
Human Rights
Universal Health Care
Poverty
Human Trafficking
Homelessness
Gay Rights
Global Health
Women’s Rights
Public Education
War in Iraq
Global Hunger
Animal Rights
Fair Trade
Racism
Peace in the Middle East
Promoting Democracy
Immigrant Rights
Microfinance
Darfur
Prison Reform
Disaster Relief
Humanitarian Relief
Autism Cure
Cancer
Domestic Abuse
Mental Health
Rights of the Disabled
Sustainable Agriculture

For more information and to apply, go to www.change.org/bloggers

If you can’t stand those phony electronic calls from candidates and their supporters around election time, register at StopPoliticalCalls.org.  It’s modeled on the amazingly successful National Do Not Call Registry that has enabled Americans to eat dinner without being interrupted by telemarketers.

There will be a lot going on in Pennsylvania tomorrow with the death match between Obama and Clinton coming down to the wire. A huge turnout and lots of new voters are expected which is always worrisome in large states like PA with lots of different municipalities (the Pittsburgh area has the largest number of unique municipalities in one county, Alleghany, in the country) all with their own machinery and rules. There will be a lot of commentary on who voted for whom, but there is another, smaller story worth watching, and that is what happens to the machinery tomorrow.

The folks at Why Tuesday have been provided a heads up that several Pennsylvania counties are using Sequoia Voting Systems electronic voting machine. These are the same machines that failed dramatically in the New Jersey primary on Super Tuesday in February. The vulnerabilities of these machines have been well publicized by computer science professors Ed Felton and Andrew Appel at Princeton. Appel bought five used Sequoia machines last year at a government auction to explore their guts. Wired Magazine has an account of what Appel learned once he had thoroughly explored the Sequoia machines:

Appel says he opened the machines with a key that came with them, and was able to easily access the machines’ motherboards and memory chips to swap them out. But even without the key, a student of his was able to pick the lock in seven seconds. He says that even seals wouldn’t thwart a hacker because they’re easily counterfeited, and many counties fail to use and track them properly — as evidenced by recent reports out of Cuyahoga County, Ohio.

But none of this is really news, is it? We’ve come to expect human error coupled with crummy machines on Election Day. But, here’s the real story for tomorrow, Voter Story.

I’ve been watching voter hotline efforts mature and scale over the past few years. The idea behind Voter Story is that rather than rely on news reports or even blogs about what’s happening on Election Day at the polls, voters can call comment using a form on Voter Story (on its website or through its widgets that are freely distributed). Partners groups working to public Voter Story include VoterAction, Committee of Seventy, NAACP Voter Fund and the National Lawyers Committee for Election Protection.

Rob Stuart, the brains behind Voter Story, also told me that he is working with the League of Women Voters of PA to get the word out about Voter Story.

Voter Story is important on two levels. Local voter assistance organizations will be using the data in real time to pinpoint problems across the state and make state officials aware of them as well as help individuals access the ballot. After the election, geeks like me will be able to use the data to get a broader, data-based picture of what the problems areas were across the state.

We can hope that tomorrow’s vote runs smoothly across Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, there are systemic reasons why that won’t happen. Let’s read about the story as it unfolds in real time at Voter Story.

Lance Bennet and his team at the University of Washington have launched the Puget Sound Off in Seattle in partnership with the City of Seattle, YMCA, .  (Full disclosure, I am an adviser on the project.)

Lance and his team want to leverage the natural interest that young people have in connecting through online social networks with the need that the rest of us have for young people to become engaged in their communities, develop a collective voice for action and advocacy.  The effort serves teens 13-18 years old and teaches them how to use social media tools like blogging and polling, and just plain social skills like facilitation in the process of identifying issues and organizing around them.

I’m looking forward to watching this project unfold and learning from it.

As part of the Net2ThinkTank, Britt Bravo has asked for posts responding to this question, “How can nonprofits and NGOs succeed in the online attention economy?” Herewith is my data free, not-so-humble opinion!

Britt also supplied helpful overviews of the attention economy here. The bottom line here is that people have lots and lots of choices of places to go online, information to pay attention to, stuff to buy. Those companies who can keep consumers attention longer will be more successful In selling them stuff — whatever the stuff is, eyeballs on ads, or books or used cars. The intended outcomes for causes in the attention economy are, as Britt states on her blog, “the opportunity to make a difference in the world through the channels and services their organization provides (information, donation, membership, volunteering, advocacy, media creation etc.).” So, the fundamental premise here is that each one of us has limited time and attention (some of us more than others!) and the online world has become a blur and bevy of information and causes, and some causes and sites and companies are going to win that attention and others are going to lose it.

Certainly one truism of the Connected Age is the tension it creates within organizations between the need to become more transparent, open, and connected with volunteers and donors who have lots of choices and the need to continue to raise money in tried ways to make payroll. In particular, of concern to nonprofit organizations (or at least what should be of concern) is the fact that younger donors are more likely to support causes over a period of time, but less likely to be institutionally loyal. So, where does this leave organizations dependent on individuals who are being pushed and pulled across the web to raise friends and funds?

“Branding” of organizations is where these tensions intersect. By it’s very definition branding is at odds with fthe ree movement of donors and supporters. Organizations want to define themselves as so compelling and unique that donors will be moved to donate only to their institution for a particular cause, whether it’s breast cancer or conservation or climate change, and to stay with them over time. I think that this way of thinking is sorely out of step with the online, networked world and will continue to keep organizations in silos, viewing other organizations as competitors rather than partners.

For organizations that are ready to think about themselves as part of an ecosystem of institutions all working towards one common end – or even across causes as a green economy requires — the attention economy is a wonderful opportunity to create an attention ecosystem that informs and activates constituets across organizations. For those who continue to think in old century ways, the attention economy is another nai in their coffin. These organizations are like the broadcast TV networks that still believe that they can hold onto viewers as if those viewers don’t own remote controls.

I would love to see organizations coordinating their efforts in such a way that constituents are encouraged to participate throughout the entire network reading blogs, posting comments, joining meet-ups, reading government reports across organizational lines but still within the cause ecosystem. This is the promise of a network-centric approach for social change – but only for those organizations that realize that they don’t control or own their constituents.

Power has already shifted to the edges, nonprofits need to catch up to their supporters.

I am working with the folks at the Personal Democracy Forum (PDF) on an anthology that will be released at the PDF conference in New York on June 23rd and 24th (if you haven’t signed up yet, do so quickly, it’s the best conference of the year in my completely biased opinion!)

For the anthology we have asked an amazing array of creative thinkers to answer the following question:

When the Framers met in Philadelphia in 1787, they bravely conjured a new form of self-government. But they couldn’t have imagined a mass society with instantaneous, many-to-many communications or many of the other innovations of modernity. So, replacing that quill pen with a mouse, imagine that you have to power to redesign American democracy for the Internet Age. What would you do?

And now we’re asking you, dear readers, bloggers, thinkers, activists, couch potatoes, to answer the same question.  The winning essay(s) will get a free pass to the conference (or a refund if you’ve already registered).  You can read more about the contest here at PDF.

Send us your ideas of how to make our democracy stronger, better, more inclusive and participatory, more 21st century and less 20th century!