Why No Outrage about Facebook’s Privacy Settings?

Have you ever been sure that something was going to happen, a movie was going to be a big hit, a diet was going to be the next big fad, people were going to march in the streets, and they it wasn’t and they didn’t? That’s how I feel about the recent changes to Facebook’s privacy settings.

When they were announced a few months ago – to an opt-out system for your data rather than an opt-in one – I expected a huge outpouring of outrage and protest. Three years ago, Facebook users protested so loudly about the Beacon advertising system that Facebook reversed course. And yet, in a huge reversal of default settings there’s hardly a murmer. Why?

What’s really worrisome is that rather than a user and citizen revolt, we have Senators, politicians!, threatening legislation to protect user privacy on social networks. What could be worse for our networked world than politicians fooling around with privacy settings.

Boing Boing has a great post on the timeline of Facebook’s privacy policies. In short, they have gone from here in 2005:

No personal information that you submit to Thefacebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings.

To here in 2010:

When you connect with an application or website it will have access to General Information about you. The term General Information includes your and your friends’ names, profile pictures, gender, user IDs, connections, and any content shared using the Everyone privacy setting. … The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to “everyone.” … Because it takes two to connect, your privacy settings only control who can see the connection on your profile page. If you are uncomfortable with the connection being publicly available, you should consider removing (or not making) the connection.

It’s the default setting that is the operative phrase here – we’ve gone from private to public for the benefit, really, of Facebook not users.

So, where’s the outrage? Are we numb to the concerns about privacy? Have we just reconciled ourselves to the fact that the only way to keep sites like Facebook free for end users is to sell their data? Really, I don’t know, would love to hear what others have to say.

Relevance = Accountability

I had the great honor to keynote the LEAD Summit sponsored by HandsOn Network last week in DC. My talk focused on the need for stand-alone nonprofits to work as networks, not just with them, to take down their walls, lost control of their message and messengers, and build relationships with the people and organizations in their network. In other words, I gave an overview of The Networked Nonprofit!

After I spoke, Rich Harwood moderated a panel discussion with me and Executive Producer for This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Ian Cameron.

During our discussion, Rich said that my talk reminded him of a phrase, “Relevant = Accountability.” He expanded on the idea here on his blog.

Rich defines relevance this way. “[Relevance] goes to the heart of whether people in communities and in our larger society view what we’re doing as important, meaningful and useful.”

Relevance is revealed through accountability, Rich writes. Accountability comes from understanding the communities within which we work, achieving results, we are authentic in our work (Rich gives a shout out to Maya Enista of Mobilze.org here and I will as well!), and finally focused on people not just processes, tools, fundraising, etc.

I had never considered tying relevance to accountability before, it’s a really fascinating idea. Rich is grounding organizations in their communities and work as proof of their relevance, which is great. This notion also highlights the importance of social media because it is the gravitational force pulling what Beth and I call Fortress organizations out from behind their high walls and wide moats as well as forcing the outsider inside. The next few years will be dangerous, I think, for organizations that refuse to recognize, much less appreciate, the connection that Rich is making between how authentic and effective they are and how relevant they are in their ecosystem. Fortresses beware!

Budrus: Nonviolent Citizen Protest on the West Bank

I had the thrilling opportunity to attend the premier last week of Budrus, a documentary film directed by Julia Bacha and produced by Ronit Avni the brillant founder of Just Vision.

Budrus is the story of Ayed Morrar, a lifelong resident of a West Bank village, Budrus ,and Palestinian activist, and his efforts, along with those of his 15 year old daughter, to stop the construction of the separation barrier the Israeli government planned to erect that would bisect their town. The wall would have run through the village cemetery and would have cut off the villagers from the olive trees. Ayed organized peaceful protests by the villagers over a ten month period. I won’t tell you the ending, you’ll have to watch it for yourself!

Here is the trailer:

By way of disclosure, I was a founding board member of Just Vision and my husband, Scott Freiman, was the sound editor of this film.

But that isn’t why I loved this film. It is an amazing, moving, human story about what individuals anyway in the world can do to protect their homes and their families. And it actually gives you hope about the possibility of peace in the Middle East when citizens say enough is enough. But don’t just take my word for it, here are reviews from the Washington Post and the New York Jewish Week.

Check the list of screenings here and try to see this film. It will leave you moved, enlightened and hopeful.

Oh, and we also got to meet Queen Noor, who presented Ayad, Julia and Ronit the King Hussein Leadership Prize!

Donations as a Measure of Civic Engagement

I saw a tweet this morning from Allison Jones from a presentation the amazing Kim Klein was giving in Detroit. The tweet read, “Kim Klein: more people donate $$ than vote or volunteer via @new_org”

I began to wonder whether we’ve been missing an opportunity to use donations as a measure of civic engagement. On land volunteerism and voting are traditional measures of local civic engagement. They are proxy’s for local social capital and stickiness. Here is a typical article on the connection between voting and local social capital and a blog post on volunteerism and social capital. But you won’t find articles or posts on donations and social capital.

The assumption is that writing a check is too passive to be considered engagement. In the same way that some folks think that clicking to raise awareness of an issue, such as clicking to support breast cancer, is too small, light, passive to be considered by some to be true participation.

I reject both of these arguments. I think any time someone does something for a cause, no matter how light, it is an opening and an opportunity for developing a stronger relationship with them.

Beth has illustrated this relationship in a diagram called The Ladder of Engagement:

The more interesting question than whether or not donations equal engagement is how nonprofits are being successful stepping people up this ladder of engagement. We wrestle with this a bit in our book The Networked Nonprofit. More to come on this in the weeks and months ahead!

One First Step for EDs

One of the biggest shifts on the social media lanscape this year are traditional organizations inching their way into social media use outside of a crisis. To date there have largely been two kinds of organizations that drank the social media Kool Aid – those born connected like charity:water and those forced to change quickly and dramatically because of a crisis (usually in funding or confidence) like the American Red Cross after Hurricane Katrina.

But now organizations are beginning to change because the tipping point of data and conventional wisdom has become such that working in old, proprietary ways is no longer sustainable. I have talked to a few very large national nonprofits over the past few months who shared with me that their direct mail donor bases are half or less of what they were five years ago. That’s scary. Of course, the recession added to the impetus because continuing to press the old direct mail button wasn’t working so well the last two years.

And yet, it’s also the emergence of the Millennials, and the closing of the digital divide spurred by inexpensive, easy-to-use social media that is forcing organizations to change. And as organizations have begun to embrace social media one thing has become very clear – without the support of senior leadership, organizations can test drive social media, but they won’t be successful in the long term. Senior leadership needs to try out the tools, engage, participate and understand the rythyms and power of social media in order to turn their organizations inside/out.

Charlene Li posed this question last week on Twitter: “What One Thing Should Leaders Do To Prep for Social Media?” Let’s modify this for a nonprofit perspective: “What First Step Can Nonprofit Executive Directors Take to Begin to Embrace Social Media?”

Remember, there is no one right way for become more connected and social, every organization, every person, will create their own pathway and journey. But, there are some first steps that have worked for leaders that were previously entrenched in proprietary behavior (like me!)

A first step could be:

• Identifying a young person to spend one hour a week to mentor you in the hands-on use of social media.
• Choose one channel, Facebook, Twitter, a blog, and spending enough time to master just that one thing.
• Take a class in social media
• Read and comment on a few blogs

What other first steps would you recommend to an Executive Director?

Bra Recyclers Redefining Bosom Buddy

My friend Rochelle Leftkowitz just sent me a terrific new recycling program that totally redefines the concept of Bosom Buddy. It’s the Bra Recyclers!  Here’s the description  of the program:

What is the The Bra Recyclers® all about?

• We are a textile recycling company, specializing in recycling bras and providing deserving women in our communities who are facing challenges with a basic lingerie staple.
• We are creating awareness about delaying the number of re-usable textiles, such as bras that are unnecessarily being sent to landfills and could be used for women and girls in our communities who are experiencing challenges in their lives
• We are using simple encouragements to develop, blossom, and renew positive attitudes and self-esteem.

Now, c’mon girlfriends, I know that you have those red and purple little bras in the back of your drawer that you bought on sale at  Victoria’s Secret that one time — and never wore. I know I do!  Time to put them to good use!

Unveiling the Networked Nonprofit

Last Friday, Beth and I unveiled the framework and a few themes from The Networked Nonprofit at NTC. It was our first presentation together about the book, actually it was our first presentation together, actually it was only the second time we met in person!

The session was very exciting. We had people crammed into every corner, on the floor. We even had Deborah Drysdale and June Holley up on the dais!  We also had a remote audience watching the presentation on ReadyTalk.

Beth of course beat me to the blogging punch with reflections of her own about the session. Katya and Sokunthea also posted their thoughts. So, I thought I’d add mine to the mix also.

First, I have to admit to being nervous presenting with Beth. This is Beth Kanter, after all, the queen of experiential learning and participatory process. Beth was naturally very generous in shaping the presentation so that we both presented parts we were comfortable with and had some fun back and forths, too.

Second, I appreciate learning more from Beth about what it means to leveling the playing field for these kinds of presentations. She has a great role model for moving away from the “sage on stage” syndrome that I have been known to practice, and to model a conversation throughout a presentation. It’s not just Q&A the last 30 seconds, it’s an ongoing, unfolding conversation and we’re the guides and facilitators. It is in keeping with the principles that power social media and are woven throughout our book.

Third, I really loved what advice that participants were giving to one another. Here’s what we’re doing, they said,or here’s what we tried that didn’t work. Or wouldn’t it be great if we had fewer meetings a whole lot of people said! It was really energizing and everyone in the room – and even the folks who were virtual – could feel it.

I’m looking forward to doing a lot more of these sessions with Beth!

NTC Reflections

I’m at the National Technology Conference in Atlanta sponsored by NTEN and boy is it big! I haven’t been able to absorb the breadth of sessions because there are so many, but just wanted to share a few reflections from the folks I’ve been talking to here.

First, the size and breadth of attendees is amazing. I know it’s been changing over the past few years, but it is astonishing to see so many non techies at what used to be strictly a techie conference. This is a credit to the NTEN staff, particularly Holly Ross’ effort to open up the field to program and communications folks. Of course, there are plenty of geeks here, it’s hard to walk down a hallway and not hear words like SEO and Google Analytics, however, the attendance by nonprofit execs here impresses me as evidence of the value that they are placing on social media and its importance to meeting their mission.

Second, I am impressed with how much everyone is learning about how to implement social media efforts. It is impossible to listen to, say, Wendy Harman or Danielle Brigida and not be blown away by how much they know, how much they’re learning and how much they’re willing to share. The generosity of all of the doers here is heart warming and astonishing. We are in the throes of an amazing learning curve, all together, and it is astonishing and and revelatory, and a bit overwhelming, too.

And, finally, today will be the very first time that Beth and I are presenting on our new book, The Networked Nonprofit! We’ve got a fun presentation planned and it’s really exciting to be unveiling key concepts from the book at last!

Social Good: Taking Down the Walls of Cultural Institutions

This month’s Social Good podcast is called “How Cultural Groups Can Use Social Media.” My guests are Nina Simon, blogger for Museum 2.0 and Rob Stein, Chief Information Officer of the Indianapolis Art Museum, discussing ways that cultural institutiosn can use social media.That sounds a bit stuffy, really, the podcast is about taking down the walls between institutions and participants.

There were two particular reasons why I wanted to talk to Nina and Rob.  Nina just published a terrific book on the blurring of the lines between cultural institutions and what was formerly called the audience. Her book is called The Participatory Museum. It’s a really smart, fun, well written book. I strongly urge you to give it a read.  You can download it right from Nina’s site or buy it – I’ve done both! Nina’s been in the trenches doing this work for a while and she brings both common sense and idealism to how social media can  remake the relationship between institutions and visitors. As she writes, “By designing explicit opportunities for interpersonal dialogue, cultural institutions can distinguish themselves as desirable real-world venues for discussion about important issues related to the content presented. The growth of social Web technologies in the mid-2000s transformed participation from something limited and infrequent to something possible anytime, for anyone, anywhere. We entered what MIT researcher Henry Jenkins calls a “convergence culture” in which regular people—not just artists or academics—appropriate cultural artifacts for their own derivative works and discussions.”

Rob works for the Indianapolis Museum of Art that has done a wonderful job of creating myriad ways for visitors to discuss the institution and the art work on line. In particular, Beth and I used their online dashboard in our chapter on transparency in the Networked Nonprofit. I love this dashboard not just because of the data that it shows at first glance, but, more importantly, because you can click on any of the data points and see the trends – the good and the bad.

I hope you’ll take a listen to the podcast and hear from Nina and Rob have to say about ways to infuse institutions with social-ness.