Deep Currents

This is my latest Monitoring and Scanning Report to the leadership of the Packard Foundation on behalf of the Monitor Institute as part of the “Philanthropy and Networks Exploration” (PNE), a series of projects exploring how our rapidly-developing understanding of networks can be put to innovative use in philanthropy. The reports alternate between collections of relevant links and brief overviews of related topics.

Networked Activism

Using Tech to Track the Torch (New York Times, 4/10/08)

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/10/using-tech-to-track-the-torch/

This article describes how SMS, email, social networking and web-distributed information were put to work by the protestors who showed up for the San Francisco leg of the Olympic torch relay. When city officials diverted the torch to an alternate route, protestor organizers sent out scouts who tracked its course and notified the leaders by text message every few minutes. Worried that one of the torchbearers would be in on such a plan, officials required all participants in the relay to hand over their cellphones beforehand. The new route was still an effective dodge, but text messaging played a prominent role as it has in many other mass rallies in recent years.

We Can Solve It – Al Gore’s Climate Change Communication Strategy

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/007946.html

Al Gore’s latest communication effort (http://www.wecansolveit.org/) is seen as “a dream campaign plan from 1989: heavy on expensive TV ads, media consultants, and the like, and extremely short on funding for items that could push much broader grass roots outreach” The concern is that the effort isn’t reaching out to co-create a climate response but is instead pushing a relatively unexciting set of solutions that fail to inspire and may even be off the mark.

Social Innovation Camp: speed-startups for social impact (net², 4/8/08)

http://www.netsquared.org/blog/dan-mcquillan/social-innovation-camp-speed-startups-social-impact

This blog post recaps Social Innovation Camp, a weekend-long workshop that brought together social change activists with hackers and technologists for an intense session of rapid project-prototyping. The event itself was an exercise in the use and creation of social networks, leveraging experience and ideas from a variety of areas for the purpose of innovation. The event was also an example of how social media is being used today to enrich group interaction: not only is there a blog post following up, but one person was blogging throughout the event, participants posted several YouTube videos, and the organizers used a site called BackNetwork to provide real-time bulletin boards. Might be something here of relevance for the O’N’E offering.

• Social Innovation Camp: http://www.sicamp.org/ Check out the website to learn about some of the proposed projects, like “Rate Your Prison” – an effort to open up access to information about the traditionally closed prison system and improve the experience of visitors.

Networked Philanthropy

Petition to philanthropists: liberate educational content (Citizendium Blog, 3/24/08)

http://blog.citizendium.org/2008/03/24/a-plea-to-liberate-educational-content/

Philanthropists should be funding online educational content to be distributed for free, now that networked communications makes the task easy and cheap, argues Larry Sanger in this blog-posted call to arms. Sanger is the co-founder of Wikipedia and editor-in-chief of Citizendium, a wiki-encyclopedia that aims at “credibility, not just quantity” through the use of expert guidance and real names. He argues: “Back in 1960, if a billionaire wanted to give the best possible textbook to every child in the world, that would have been too costly even for the richest billionaire. But no longer. Even those with small fortunes can provide a textbook (etc.) to everyone with Internet access–hundreds of millions of children. Philanthropists, you could do this.” The comments to his post suggest that while the cost of creating and distributing content may have declined there are numerous impediments to its consumption: cultural diversity, historical bias, and regulatory barriers (by country and by state) to name a few,

• Citizendium: http://wwww.citizendium.org/

Prospecting (new fundraising blog started on 3/31/08)

http://www.philanthropy.com/news/prospecting

The Chronicle of Philanthropy and The Chronicle of Higher Education are joining the blogosphere. Prospecting, a new blog dedicated to nonprofit fundraising will feature contributions from journalists from both publications and follow fund-raising trends and techniques that are working for nonprofit organizations in the United States and around the world.

Tool-Specific Developments

Congressional hearing: “Online Virtual Worlds: Applications and Avatars in a User-Generated Medium” (Beth’s Blog, 4/2/08)

http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2008/04/susan-tenby-tec.html

Congress held a hearing recently on virtual worlds, where Susan Tenby of TechSoup described to legislators how virtual worlds are offering grass-roots groups low-cost ways of organizing, raising money and advocating for causes, speaking based on her experience building TechSoup’s Nonprofit Commons, a virtual community of practice for nonprofits in Second Life. The medium “combines interactive tools with the richness of broadcasting,” she said, allowing for “mixed reality events, feeding live audio and video both directions.” While many of the reporters covering the event were clearly skeptical of the practical benefits of virtual worlds, the legislators’ attitude was generally curious and open to the technology’s promise, as in the case of a representative from Palo Alto who commented, “It may seem peculiar, but not long ago social networking was seen as outside the mainstream.”

• Video of the hearing, which in time will be accompanied by the transcript: http://energycommerce.house.gov/cmte_mtgs/110-ti-hrg.040108.VirtualWorlds.shtml
• TechSoup, which aggregates ideas for the use of new technology in nonprofits: http://www.techsoup.org/

Written: April 12th, 2008