All Blog Posts Tagged 'socialactions' - Social Actions

Creating a Network to Nurture Social Entrepreneurs and 3BL Businesses: Notes from 2009 Net Impact Conference session

2009-11-17T15:48:44.000Z

This past Friday I had the great pleasure of participating in a panel discussion at the 2009 Net Impact Conference:

Creating a Network to Nurture Social Entrepreneurs and Triple Bottom Line Businesses

What would happen if ordinary people could seamlessly contribute to the work of social entrepreneurs? Silicon Valley has a sophisticated structure designed to identify and develop young creative people with innovative ideas. In the social sector, this structure is in its infancy. Join a panel of leaders from Ashoka, Social Actions, StartingBloc, AllDayBuffet, and PURE as they explore connections and next steps in the evolution of a similarly sophisticated structure for social entrepreneurialism.

Jane Hexter moderated the panel, which included Jerri Chou, Ryan Fix, Lennon Flowers, and Adriana Pentz. It was a fantastically rich presentation. Unfortunately, technical glitches precluded us from recording or videotaping the session, so I thought it might be helpful to post the notes I prepared in advance of the session.

There's a wonderfully informative wiki page, developed in advance of the session, that contains a wealth of suggested resources. It's been viewed several hundred times already, and everyone is invited to add content. You'll find contact information for all of the panelists there, as well as hyperlinks for anything mentioned below that's hyperlink-able.

Notes

Introduce yourself, your motivation for this work, and your intentions for this session

My name is Christine Egger. I work with a group called Social Actions. We create the kinds of online infrastructure we’ll be talking about today.

One of our projects is especially relevant: the Social Entrepreneur API

-- First open cross-organizational database of information about social entrepreneurs who have won fellowships and awards from various funders.

-- Right now, pulling from the Skoll Foundation, Draper Richards, PopTech, Civic Ventures, the Schwab Foundation, and ideablob.

-- The API (shorthand for “open, aggregated dataset”) allows you to search across all of these programs by funder, keyword, location, cause area, population served, and a variety of other factors.

-- We launched during September’s Social Capital Markets conference in San Francisco, and look forward to adding Ashoka, TED, Echoing Green and other funders over time.

Social Actions has also built an API for philanthropic actions – volunteering, donating, etc. – collecting them from online platforms like Change.org and GlobalGiving, GiveIndia, Greater Good South Africa, idealist. Anyone can build a search engine, iPhone app or other kind of app to sort, filter, and distribute these actions across the web.

Over time, these projects will weave together, and we’ll see common datasets for people, actions, organizations, entire movements that will make it easier to find and connect to what’s going on around us.

My personal motivation for this work: Life is short. It is WAY too short to not be doing what feels incredibly important to you., whether or not it comes easily to you. And I remember as a kid wondering why every single grown-up wasn’t working to make the world better than they found it, and I want to be able to look any child in the eyes and tell them that’s what I’m working on, every day.

My intention for today’s session is to introduce you to the projects we’re working on, participate in describing the context of resources it resides in and contributes to, and help you come away more informed, empowered, and prepared to co-create and benefit from that system.

What does success look like? What would be possible if a support structure for social and triple bottom line entrepreneurs existed?

-- People of all kinds are seamlessly finding and contributing to the work of social entrepreneurs.

-- The entrepreneurs themselves are easily finding peers and connecting, creating, collaborating around their shared missions

-- The entire context within which you operate is aligned towards your success.

-- YOUR organization is equally aligned to maximize on all that this support structure is making available to you.

-- You’re open, collaborative, and engaged, and you are seeing a net gain across the board for actively plugging into the infrastructure we’ll be describing

-- The infrastructure reflects distinctions across a range of characteristics: age, stage of organization, issue area, regions, theory of change, intended impact, industry, etc.

-- It contains funders, media, education programs, open data, and applications (see Jill Finlayson’s illustration).

What currently exists both virtually and physically to link them to resources that they need to develop their organizations?

Virtually:

-- See the ton of links on the wiki – competitions, funders, etc. etc. -- Including of the organizations participating in the Social Entrepreneur API

-- Social Edge – phenomenal wealth of blogs, discussions, links to educational programs all on, for, by social entrepreneurs. This is where, as a social entrepreneur, you can find peers grappling with all angles of the work you’re doing.

-- Twitter lists and handles and hashtag conversations -- #socent alone is a really great stream

-- Increasing amounts of open and linked data – NY Times recently made their archives available in linked data.

Want to also add “culturally”: There is a movement underway driving resources towards sustainable and triple bottom line businesses. The power of this shouldn’t be underestimated or under-appreciated.

What's missing that if it were to exist would make the vision outlined come to fruition?

-- We need more people deciding to do what they can right now, even if it feels small, working with what they have from where they are.

-- We need to make it easier to find out what everyone in this sector is doing. Not more firehoses of information, not more huge spotlights, but devices that filter and make sense of what’s going on.

-- We need to keep making progress on the culture of openness, transparency, information-sharing, and collaboration that’s building.

-- We need more entrepreneurs to design a consistent thread from their vision to their mission to the methods they’re using.

-- And of course a lot of what we do at Social Actions is about moving information into an open-to-the-public data cloud where it can be filtered, sorted, and seen by as many people as possible. We need more open data, more organizations willing to share what they’re building and learning and creating. We need more applications that mash-up and combine that data – so the work each of you are doing is visually and tangibly embedded in that context.

What is working well from each of these directions?

What I see working well is in the middle ground, with an iterative process that draws from both bottom up and top down directions. This works well when there’s time and an inclination toward it.

Described process for governing the Social Entrepreneur API, where the project and dataset are truly generated in that “middle space.”

-- Gathering inspiration and a starting point from a discussion on Social Edge – very bottom up. It came out of a discussion on Social Edge entitled The Case for Online Support for Social Entrepreneurs that our founder Peter Deitz hosted. Last December, a huge discussion like this one – what’s being built? What does the sector still need? And this idea was born. (bottom up)

-- Middle-ground build-out of the initial partners, contents, and governing process

-- The raw materials were:
o Modeling off of another open cross-platform dataset we’d already built, one that collects opportunities to take action from over 60 online giving platforms
o Already publicly-available information about vetted social entrepreneurs from a number of award and fellowship programs
o Some light facilitation on our part -- Sufficient organization while allowing the diversity of actors and voices to remain intact.
o Seed funding (top down)
o and some authentic buy-in from the groups participating – Skoll, Draper Richards, PopTech, and the others – to build start small and work together to create something that was more than the sum of its parts.

I want to emphasize that more than these raw materials, it’s the collaborative process that makes this project so powerful and an important model.

Also, “what works well” includes getting really clear about what you can remain unclear about. For projects like ours that involves not getting caught up in definitions that would alienate and cause friction (i.e. defining social entrepreneur)

Ways to organize an exploration of "what's yet to be built"

-- Think in terms of identifying the negative space – who’s not here around the table with me? In our board room, in our conference room, on this online network? Why are they missing? What do I lose by not including them?

-- Thinking about this from a chaos theory or complexity science perspective – there is a lot of uncertainty and finding-our-way that cannot be designed out of this work. Very little in social entrepreneurial work is lined up in a cause-and-effect way. Would encourage us not to think of building this system as engineers, or fixing problems, but creating conditions that encourage the most positive possible side effects.

-- The take-away here is to find a metaphor or perspective that works for you, figure out what a ladder of engagement for your own participation would look like, and then get going.

:cde

Creating a Network to Nurture Social Entrepreneurs and 3BL Businesses: Notes from 2009 Net Impact Conference session

2009-11-17T15:45:36.000Z

Social Actions and Open Data Standards: A conversation is building

2009-11-04T20:57:29.000Z

Watching several conversations unfold related to open data, and open data standards, for the philanthropic sector. I caught up with most of them just last night, and had a hard time falling asleep. It's fantastic to feel the momentum shift from either-or questions about whether an organization should be transparent or not, to the kind of nuanced Q&A engaged in here. Of course, I'm excited, especially, for the potential to more broadly encourage data standards for the nonprofit sector (see Marnie Webb's post especially). Looking forward to linking that topic more explicitly into Social Actions' Open Actions XML initiative in future posts.

For now, some quick links:

Lucy Bernholz responds to Lawrence Lessig's recent article "Against Transparency: The perils of openness in government." with a post that asks "What are the downsides of transparency? Which of these are due to technology or existing legal frameworks, and which of them come from elsewhere, from our norms and assumptions about how giving works or what philanthropy is for? And what scenarios can we imagine from greater data sharing that we'd prefer to avoid?"

Alison Fine on nonprofits and transparency ("Nonprofits need to begin to ask themselves questions about transparency to guide their work.")

Rachel Weidinger proposes an NTEN panel that would provide nonprofits a ""basic framework of things to consider including identity and anonymity, digital inclusion and access, community management, taxonomy, content ownership, and your data ecosystem" among other things (it's a very robust proposal, I hope you'll check it out).

Marnie Webb pulls inspiration all of the above to tentatively suggest "aggressively sharing our data, collecting and share the representative stories and, agreeing on some data standards across the sector so that we can achieve the dream of having simplified, relevant data that informs decision-makers and provides support to the social changes we seek."

Peter Campbell ties the issue of transparency to that of security, reminding us that the appropriateness of data-sharing is linked to the organization's mission.

And Beth Kanter asks about the pros and cons of nonprofit dashboards (data presentation), interesting in its own right but especially because Holly Ross reveals in the comments that one for NTEN might be on its way (woot!).

Networks, social change, and tech tools

2009-10-19T14:30:00.000Z

On her Philanthropy 2173 blog, Lucy Bernholz recently posted a request for "examples of networks that have made some kind of positive social change happen. Ideally these are networks that:

* Consist of unaffiliated individuals, not coalitions or alliances of existing nonprofits
* Made something concrete, and socially positive, happen
* Continue to exist after making a change - so they are more than 'just' a protest group (this is the hardest one to find)"

I have to think that My Social Actions members are especially familiar with these kinds of networks. Manny Hernandez' Tu Diabetes and Juan Carlos Zaldivar's Art Tribes Network come quickly to mind. Tori Tuncan has already added Lend4Health to Lucy's list, and I proposed Social Actions, which grew out of a loosely-affiliated network that came together in a Google group.

What other networks should be added to Lucy's list? Hop over to the blog post and leave a comment with your suggestions.

The Social Actions suggestion prompted Lucy to ask a follow-up question that's also of interest to My Social Actions members and got me thinking:

"Seems that many of the examples we can find are about human networks + tech tools so that organizing happens more easily, faster, and on a grander scale. It is also much more distributed organizing. So if that is what we can learn from what has already happened, can we "apply" them prospectively to hypothesize about how change might happen on tangible, nearby challenges (homelessness, prenatal care, job training....)."

How do you see your local initiatives affected by the availability of tech tools, if at all (yet)? Are you seeing groups make use of mobile phone technology, social media, and tools like the Social Actions API to gather and mobilize resources for on-the-ground efforts? If that's a ways off -- and I suspect that for most communities it is -- what do expect that "change-making" will look like?

One of the things I'm struck by, when I talk with local nonprofit-development-charitable organizations, is how dismissive they are about social media and online tools as a resource for what they're doing locally. If they've always been able to get by with phone calls, check-writing, and an occasional emailed newsletter and article in the local paper, why should they deal with the challenge of figuring out Facebook or Firstgiving pages? If their cause and work are geographically centralized, why should they leverage technologies that are clearly about connecting with people far away?

So I'm contacted daily by nonprofits from far away, using these tools to connect with me where I am. And I hear very little from the organizations in my town because if I'm not already on their email list, and miss the blurb in the local paper about their next event, I'm out of the loop.

(Technologically) distributed organizing and communication doesn't have to mean (geographically) distributed impact. The more quickly that's understood, the more quickly we'll see a groundswell of networks + tools + transformation.

Social Actions Adds Five New Action Sources; Connects to the WiserEarth API

2009-09-11T16:00:00.000Z

Today, we added five new action sources to the Social Actions API, an open database of opportunities to make a difference. For a full list and profiles of the latest innovators contributing to Social Actions, please see Our Guide to 60+ Action Sources.

As part of this update, we're excited to announce that Social Actions has connected to the WiserEarth API. Applications powered by the Social Actions API can now feature rich information about job opportunities and events from across the global WiserEarth community. We built a similar plugin for the DonorsChoose.org API in the fall of last year.

Welcome to all of the new partners!

New Action Sources

ChristianVolunteering.org -> Volunteer
GetInvolved -> Support a campaign
Givology -> Donate
PopTech -> Join a group
WiserEarth -> Apply for a job & Attend an event

The Full List of Action Sources Contributing to Social Actions

Amazee
Apathy is Boring
betterplace
BringLight
CanadaHelps
Care2 Petition Site
Celsias
Change.org
Changents
ChangingthePresent
CharityFocus
ChristianVolunteering.org
ChristmasFuture
ClimatePath
Delicious
DemocracyInAction
DonorsChoose.org
Do Something
DreamBank
Earth Justice
Firstgiving
FREEDOM SPEAKS
Fundable
GetInvolved
GiveIndia
GiveMeaning
Givology
GlobalGiving
GlobalGiving UK
Greater Good SA
Helpalot
ideablob.com
Idealist
Kiva
KnightPulse
Lend4Health
Live Earth
MicroGiving
Modest Needs
NABUUR
NGO Post
OptINnow
PincGiving
PledgeBank
Policy Pitch
PopTech
Prax.ca
Razoo
SASIX
SixDegrees
Stop Climate Chaos
TakingITGlobal
ThePoint
Twitter
VolunteerMatch
WildlifeDirect
WiserEarth
Wokai
YouthNoise
Zazengo

Analytics

2009-09-11T01:46:12.000Z

Another cross-post from my blog at http://preludeinteractive.com

Social Actions recently started releasing their corpus of volunteer, donation, and other opportunities (social actions) as a nightly dump. I think that's super! I've started setting up some analytics for the data, as I think there is a lot of wisdom and science to be found within. The eventual goal is to do some fancy topic modeling using the data, but since I accidentally stomped the file I was starting with, I decided to try a few simpler things first.

First, I did some simple averages across the database.

12.7886 hits per action. Not too shabby!
The average action specifying a goal amount (typically US dollars) is 77% achieved. Neato!
The average action was updated 10.33 days ago.
The average action was created 218.56 days ago.

Why is this useful? If split by action source, you can give the people posting these actions a good idea of the relative health of their data. There might be good reasons why some actions take 20 days to find resolution, while others only take 5. But what are those reasons? Maybe some are novel and interesting and unknown?

Next, interested by the average ages of the actions, I made a couple simple plots of how recently the actions were updated or created.

I think those big spikes correspond to the dates various action sources were added, but I could be wrong. It's also interesting that the long tail of actions goes all the way to 2000+ days old. They were discussing cutting really old actions out of the database (since the information is probably no longer valid anyway), and I think that might be a good idea.

This exponential decrease is not surprising. The 16 day shift right is because I was testing with a dump a little more than 2 weeks old. The real puzzling thing is the big spike around 205 days. What's that all about?

Sure, the Social Actions folks could have run these figures anytime they wanted, but the great part about them being so open is that they don't have to. Maybe something we uncover can inform the action sources (and ultimately those in need of volunteers, donations, votes, etc) and allow them to reach people quicker and more efficiently.

Social Entrepreneur API launches at SOCAP09

2009-09-02T18:00:00.000Z

It’s a thrill to share today's public launch of the Social Entrepreneur API, formally announced at SOCAP09. From the project's website:

Lifting the Social Sector: Fellowship and Award Programs Collaborate to Make Data about Social Entrepreneurs More Accessible

Civic Ventures (sponsor of The Purpose Prize), The Draper Richards Foundation, ideablob, PopTech, The Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, and The Skoll Foundation are pooling their data to create an open database of information about vetted social entrepreneurs.

The Social Entrepreneur API (Application Programming Interface) is the first open database of information about social entrepreneurs who have won fellowships and awards from social enterprise funders. The tool allows philanthropists, investors, press, and fellow entrepreneurs to find social entrepreneurs based on keyword, location, cause area, population served, and a variety of other factors. As with the Social Actions API, this open dataset will be available for any website or individual to search, syndicate, republish, or use to build web applications, widgets, and search engines... Read more

As you might have heard, Social Actions has been facilitating the Social Entrepreneur API’s development with seed funding from the Peery Foundation.

Peter Deitz and I had a chance to describe this work in some detail in July’s issue of Open Source Business Resource. There, we drew attention to the open and collaborative process that’s been a part of the Social Entrepreneur API’s conceptualization and build-out.

Using terms like open and collaborative to describe projects like this is often a stretch, but not in this case. Even a cursory review of the Social Entrepreneur API Google group (where a full history of the project, answers to frequently asked questions, and other documentation can be found) demonstrate the extent to which those design principles have been followed. The organizations whose social entrepreneurs are profiled in the API will continue to govern the process for adding more profile sources, building out the data taxonomy, and addressing other issues relevant to the project’s development.

That intentional design, combined with the cooperative spirit and shared commitment of each of the organizations involved, has made the Social Entrepreneur API initiative a joy to be a part of.

I hope you’ll take a closer look at the Social Entrepreneur API website (where you’ll find invitations to get involved) and search interface (the first of many applications this API will inspire), and join me in congratulating everyone involved creating – and officially launching! – the Social Entrepreneur API.

The Future of Social Actions, Part III: A Constellation of Consultants

2009-07-28T17:30:00.000Z

Open Standards, Yes We Can

2009-07-17T14:00:00.000Z

(Source: Robotson on Flickr)

I don't know about you, but I am a big fan of open standards, particularly when my bladder Direct Messages me with the hashtag #urgent. Open standards (see picture above) guide me to a place where I can @reply in a hurry.

In the non-profit technology community, open standards of a different variety could help us all become more effective at what we urgently need to do: raise money, recruit and coordinate volunteers, promote events, create profiles on social networks, generate reports for grant-makers, and the list goes on.

In June, I hosted a discussion about Collaboration and Competition on Social Edge in which the topic of open standards for the nonprofit sector was raised.

In response to a comment from David Wolff, I wrote:

"When a sector comes together to create a standard, anything from the diameter of a bottle cap to protocols for mobile devices, businesses and consumers in the sector benefit. Businesses reduce their costs because manufacturers don't have to build custom factories / product lines each time they sign a contract. Consumers also benefit. Anyone who has fastened a Pepsi cap onto a Coco-Cola bottle and then ridden their bike home knows what I'm talking about ... Sometimes collaborating in one area raises the bar of competition in another. Chris Messina recently made this point at the NetSquared conference as it relates to open standards for managing one's identity online, '... [Social networks] should compete on the quality of the service that they're providing, as opposed to just their lock in.' Have a look at this interview, Building a Ubiquitous Social Network - Interview With Chris Messina for more information."

Jo Davidson then replied:

"I agree with you Peter, a single universal standard would be the best way to work collaboration into competition, setting everyone up on a level playing field to bloom and grow."

I replied to Jo:

"The beauty of widespread adoption of universal standards in the social sector is that they could be used to both compete better _and_ collaborate better, depending on one's personal preference. I envision the adoption of open standards for nonprofits and philanthropy leading to dramatic and meaningful collaborations that can form on the fly. Rather than bringing the boards of multiple organizations together to have conversations about sharing data and knowledge, the data would already be exposed and already be interchangeable. The collaboration question becomes when and how, instead of if. Coming up with the standard, to ensure that it reflects as much nuances in the form of the data and knowledge is difficult. But the process absolutely can and should be done, across the social sector and in business as well. ... Open data is a powerful force that can drive both collaboration and innovation. But a collaborative and innovative mindset is critical to ensuring that the open data that emerges is rich and reflects the best interests of everyone involved."

Where to go from here

The nonprofit technology community is filled with many bright minds and innovative thinkers. For better or worse, this passion often gets channeled toward one-off projects that benefit a single organization or a coalition of organizations.

I would like to see the brightest minds and most innovative thinkers in the social sector come together to create open standards that lift all organizations making use of the social web. The open standards that I'd like to see developed and adopted would help social benefit organizations seamlessly publish rich information about their donation opportunities in a structured format, helping major grant-makers and citizen philanthropists make smarter choices about their giving. I'd also like to see open standards developed and adopted that help organizations publish rich information about their volunteer opportunities and the events they are hosting, helping individuals connect with service opportunities and events effortlessly. Finally, I'd like to see open standards developed and adopted that help nonprofits fill out their social media profile once and have it syndicated everywhere and anywhere on the fly.

From a technological perspective, these are modest goals. Where they become difficult to achieve is at the level of organizational culture, grant-making priorities, and leadership. I understand fully that this conversation has been launched on many occasions over the years. I'm hoping that in 2009, we can overcome cultural, funding, and leadership barriers to create a non-profit sector that charts its own course toward open standards, open data and collaborative innovation.

If you are interested in participating in the open standards and open data conversation, please leave a comment on this blog post.

The next time your nonprofit's stakeholders collectively Direct Message you with the hashtag #urgent, you'll be able to @reply with a simple message: Open standards and open data are helping you respond quickly and effectively.

Jolkona Foundation and UniversalGiving Join the Social Actions API

2009-07-14T16:19:07.000Z

Today, Social Actions added two new action sources to its open database of opportunities to make a difference. For a full list and profiles of the latest innovators contributing to Social Actions, please see Our Guide to 50+ Action Sources.

New Action Sources

Jolkona Foundation -> Donate
UniversalGiving -> Donate

The Full List of Action Sources Contributing to Social Actions

Amazee
Apathy is Boring
betterplace
BringLight
CanadaHelps
Care2 Petition Site
Cause Caller
Celsias
Change.org
Changents
ChangingthePresent
CharityFocus
ChristmasFuture
ClimatePath
Delicious
DemocracyInAction
DonorsChoose.org
Do Something
DreamBank
Earth Justice
Firstgiving
FREEDOM SPEAKS
Fundable
GiveIndia
GiveMeaning
GlobalGiving
GlobalGiving UK
Greater Good SA
Helpalot
ideablob.com
Idealist.org
Jolkona Foundation
JustMeans
Kiva
KnightPulse
Lend4Health
Live Earth
MicroGiving
Modest Needs
NABUUR
NGO Post
OptINnow
PincGiving
PledgeBank
Policy Pitch
Prax.ca
Razoo
SASIX
SixDegrees
Stop Climate Chaos
TakingITGlobal
ThePoint
Twitter
UniversalGiving
VolunteerMatch
WildlifeDirect
Wokai
YouthNoise
Zazengo

The Future of Social Actions, Part II: Projects in the Pipeline

2009-07-08T15:30:00.000Z

Over the next several weeks, I will be thinking out loud about the Future of Social Actions. Our initiative is approaching its two year anniversary at the end of August, and would benefit from some community participation in creating a long-term plan going forward. I hope this blog post, and others in the series, will serve as a spark for brainstorming where Social Actions should be headed, how to get there, and how best to make the operation fully sustainable.

Part II: Projects in the Pipeline

For the first six months of 2009, I was on the road far more than would reasonably be considered productive and healthy for the founder of a budding organization. Nevertheless, I returned home at the end of June with a treasure trove of new contacts and inspirations. Below are a few of the project ideas that I would like to see Social Actions amplify or launch in the coming months, consistent with our commitment to collaborative innovation in the social sector and our desire to work on a range of high-impact projects that help engage people in making a difference.

Ongoing development of the Social Actions API and related web applications
Social Actions' primary contribution to the world to date is the Social Actions API, a pioneering effort to aggregate opportunities to make a difference and distribute them across the web sites, social networks, and mobile phones that millions of people use everyday via third-party applications. To take this project to the next level, we need to do more to engage our developer community and potential distribution partners. So far, our focus has been primarily on core functionality of the Social Actions API itself. I'd like to see Social Actions shift its focus to the developers and distribution partners that are building web applications from the Social Actions API. What resources / incentives / support do they need to make the greatest impact? I don't have an answer to this question but look forward to developing a strategy that effectively engages this community.

Advocating for open standards for publishing and sharing actions
Since the very beginning of Social Actions, I have been writing and talking about the importance of open standards for publishing and sharing actions. At this point, we have proposed a format called Open Actions that can serve as an open standard for all kinds of social actions: volunteer opportunities, donation opportunities, events, campaigns, petitions, groups, do it yourself actions, and micro-loans. We need to increase awareness, interest in, and adoption of this format and others to add coherence to the online social activism and philanthropy sectors. Suggestions on how to go about this are encouraged.

Building community among the 50+ partners we work with
We work with an impressive group of social innovators from around the world. When we first launched My Social Actions in January, I though that this social network would serve as a meeting point for the partners we work with. To date, this has not happened. Instead, My Social Actions has developed in an entirely different direction, attracting a wide range of social change professionals and providing a forum for them to blog about and post events related to the work they're doing. To build community among our 50+ partners, I am considering two parallel solutions -- 1) regular conference calls and in person events for the partners we work with focused on specific projects (Social Actions API, Social Entrepreneur API, Open Actions, My Social Actions, etc) and 2) a private social network (kind of like an intranet) just for our partners. The private social network would also serve as the main channel for regularly communicating with our partners and creating a safe and secure environment for them to network with one another. We don't normally create projects that do not leave a public archive. At this point, however, I can sense a need to create a private space for a the staff of Social Actions' partners to network with one another. The combination of regular conference calls, in person events, and a private social network would provide fertile ground for our partners to not only deepen their relationships with Social Actions but also to identify collaborative opportunities among themselves.

Open-sourcing the inspiring 1-to-1 conversations we have on a regular basis
For over six months, I have been contemplating open-sourcing many of the phone calls I have on a regular basis. I spend at least 6-8 hours per week hearing about amazing online platforms and brainstorming who the founders should be talking to, how to integrate with Social Actions, and how new initiatives fit into the broader online social activism landscape. While I love every minute of these calls, they don't contribute to the public archive and public conversation about our sector. To fix the problem, I have setup a BlogTalkRadio channel and will be scheduling public calls throughout each week. The format will be incredibly informal -- just a conversation between me and/or Christine and one or our current or potential partners. The calls will focus on the partner and will be publicly archived and available for comments, download, etc. Thoughts?

Telling the stories of our high-impact partners and friends
This project idea came up through conversations with Amy Sample Ward and Rachel Weidinger. Social Actions is all about the impact that its partners are making. We don't, however, always do a very good job of demonstrating this commitment to our partners. Nothing would show interest more than profiling the work of our inspiring partners and friends. Over the next several weeks, it would be awesome if members of the Social Actions community (Amy, Rachel, Christine, myself, and others) started writing profiles about the inspiring work we see our partners doing on the ground. All of the infrastructure is in place for this story-telling. My Social Actions provides an ideal place in which to post an event or write a blog entry about anyone or group you find who is affiliated in some way with Social Actions. Do we need a story-telling calendar or Basecamp project? Let me know if this would help kick-start the story-telling.

Drawing more attention to our paid consulting work, trainings and events
Over the last six months, Social Actions has been involved in a range of innovative consulting projects, trainings, and events. Our most notable paid consulting projects to date are the Social Entrepreneur API (Launching on August, 31, 2009) and Mozilla Service Week (September 14-22, 2009). We've also been doing work with Social Capital Markets 2009, The Case Foundation, The Skoll Foundation, TakePart, NABUUR, Music National Service, Consulting Within Reach, and Small Change Fund. Since we've been so busy working on these projects, we haven't successfully drawn attention to the work we're doing. I would like to use My Social Actions and the main Social Actions website to feature the work we're doing for hire. After all, that's what keeps us afloat financially. Any suggestions on how to draw more attention to our paid consulting work, trainings, and events.

Doing a much better job of reporting back on the impact our partners and projects are making
One of the biggest embarrassments for me is that the footer of the main Social Actions website, My Social Actions, and search.socialactions.com has statistics that are from December 2008. This shortcoming is a sign of just how poorly we have been conveying the impact of main project, the Social Actions API. Somehow, we need to find a way to loop the reporting on impact into our daily work-flows and find ways to automate the sharing of this information. Similarly, we have not asked our partners for metrics on the impact they are having nor have we crunched the numbers on the impact our other projects are making. Of course, measuring impact is never simple. But at least making an effort would be better than what we're currently doing. I'm not sure how to frame the reporting of impact as a project. Your advice is welcome.

If you have any thoughts on these projects, please share them below. I'd also be interested in hearing about other projects ideas that Social Actions can/should be prioritizing. Thanks for taking a moment to leave a comment.

The Future of Social Actions, Part I: Partners and Projects

2009-07-07T15:30:00.000Z

Social Actions in Open Source Business Resource (OSBR) July 2009 Issue

2009-07-03T13:56:00.000Z

Social Actions had the opportunity to share its story in the July 2009 issue of Open Source Business Resource (OSBR), a peer-reviewed monthly publication for individuals and organizations contributing to, and interested in, open source projects and technologies. Guest Editor Stephen Huddart extended an invitation to feature Social Actions as an example of collaborative, open source principles in action. Peter and I had a great time co-authoring what effectively is the most comprehensive description of Social Actions' development to date. There's much more to tell about why and how Social Actions is developing in the way that it is, and what could and will come next for this initiative, but there's alot here that hadn't yet been put to paper (or cyber ink).

"Social Actions: Making the Web More Philanthropic" by Peter Deitz & Christine Egger

Social Actions makes it easier for people to turn their good intentions into meaningful action. The organization has created an open source database of actions people can take on any issue.... This article describes how Social Actions applies open source principles to the organization's products and processes. In its entirety, Social Actions is intentionally designed to contribute to the ongoing and vibrant conversations about open source practices and principles.

For an insightful overview of where those conversations might take the entire social sector, and the kind of infrastructure that would facilitate a truly collaborative process along the way, read Stephen Huddart and Anil Patel's article in the same issue:

"Applied Collaboration Studios: Transforming Complex Problems into Systems of Continuous Social Innovation" by Stephen Huddart & Anil Patel

This paper asserts that the voluntary or social sector plays a pivotal role in generating and disseminating social innovations through collaboration with diverse partners. The authors explore the potential to engender a quantum shift in the sector's efficiency, reach, and impact through the combined use of open source technologies, social process tools and collaboration platforms.

Social Actions Community Call, July 2009

2009-07-02T11:30:00.000Z

On July 1, 2009, Social Actions convened a Community Conference Call. Below is the transcript from that discussion ~

Participants

Jason Mott
Ehren Foss
Amy Sample Ward
Megan Schiebe
Celine Takatsuno
Tori Tuncan
Tom Watson
Peter Deitz
Christine Egger

Welcome & Introductions

Social Actions update (Christine)

We want to first catch everyone up with a quick overview of all that Social Actions has been up to recently. Incredibly, we’re halfway into the year already, and have a number of highlights of the past 6 months to share. Then we’ll do a little forward-visioning and strategizing out loud about where Social Actions could and should go next.

Peter and I can share some ideas that are already underway, but we also want this to be a reminder and an opportunity for truly community-sourcing that work going forward. Peter gave a keynote recently where he talked about flipping around the way that nonprofits usually describe what they do and how they do it: they talk about their work and their mission, and then they invite people to “help” them. Social Actions has fast forwarded from being a plucky and promising project at last year’s NetSquared to being a bonafide nonprofit initiative with ALOT going on, but at its core it is about empowering people to take action on issues that they care about – that’s what this is all about – and where people care about this intersection of taking action online, this causewired space that Tom writes about, developing the philanthropic web as Peter describes it – when its about this space that Social Actions contributes to as an organization, we are still all about empowering people to take action.

So these conference calls for Social Actions’ community are just as much about listening to what each of you want to see Social Actions make possible for you. Maybe you’re on the call because you’re just mildly curious about what Social Actions is up to, but we hope you’re here because something about this work feels important and empowering to you and we want to hear what that is and make sure that’s what we’re moving towards – making it easier, or perhaps just more possible, for you to do what seems most important in this causewired space.

So news to share from the Social Actions galaxy:

The number of kinds of online platforms and action sources for the Social Actions API continues to soar – well over 50 sites, now, plus Twitter and Delicious #takeaction tags. The most important update on this front, though, is that there’s an open, inclusive API that continues to grow and reflect an increasingly global cloud of actions. GiveIndia, Greater Good South Africa, the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition from the UK were all in the most batch of additions. Back at the start of the year, in envisioning what we wanted 2009 to hold for Social Actions, internationalizing the Social Actions API was near the top of the list, and it feels great to see that happening.

The number of APIs out there continues to grow, too, and we’re continuing to make it as easy as possible for every action source to not only tap into the Social Actions API but others that are available, too. One of these of course is the All for Good API, which I’ll mention by name so it doesn’t feel like the elephant in the room . That was disappointing, to not be included that project’s development, but there’s a great deal we can do and are doing to coordinate not only our two APIs but others as well, and Peter’ll describe all of that tech-activity in a couple of minutes.

On the distribution side, the Change the Web Challenge was a phenomenal success, thanks to Joe Solomon’s amazing stewardship: a dozen sponsors; $10,000 in prizes; 35 fully functional applications to distribute the Social Actions API across the web; 100 members of the Social Actions Developers Google group keeping up on ways to make even more applications – just a fantastic project that continues to create ripple effects.

And we hung out our consulting sign in February. We haven’t been blogging about or talking about this work publicly much, but there are some fantastic projects that more people should know about. We’ll share more news about these shortly, but let us know if you have any questions about this part of our work.

One of those projects – we consider it a consulting project even though seed funding came from the Peery Foundation – is the Social Entrepreneur API (quick description ~ see http://www.socialentrepreneurapi.org).

Along the way, Peter especially has been sharing Social Actions story and commitment to building this open, philanthropic web literally around the world – keynotes or plenary or panel speaking opps at Connecting Up in Australia, the Semantic Technology Conference and Nonprofit Technology Conference in the Bay Area, My Charity Connects – part of Net Change Week – in Toronto. There’ve been online opportunities, too – the discussion on competition and collaboration on Social Edge is still going on, and Peter and I coauthored our first article for a peer-reviewed journal – July’s issue of the Open Source Business Review, which will be published online later this week.

Also along the way, the My Social Actions network has grown to 1,300 members, which is crazy and inspiring and makes us wonder what we could or should be doing to empower a real community there. Which is a great segway into the forward-looking, visioning, strategizing part of the call!

Looking ahead (Peter)

The only update I would add to Christine’s description: we’ve been working with Mozilla on the Mozilla Service Week project – to come up with the concept, identify partners, reach out to them, engage the Mozilla community in technology service. Many of you on the call will receive an email from me or Mike Everett-Lane in the next few weeks inquiring on the role you could play in making the Mozilla Service Week a huge success (http://www.mozilla.com).

As far as Social Actions being in the middle of 2009 and having a chance to step back – I’m fortunately not going anywhere in the next few months. Will be planting myself into Montreal and working on some important long-term strategic and development. First and foremost, Social Actions needs to be doing more of presenting itself as a resource to the sector, for amplifying the impact that our partners are making. Traditionally Social Actions partners have been considered the action sources that we work with – you can review all of their profiles at http://www.socialactions.com/meet-the-platforms -- but I think there’s an opportunity over the summer to broaden our definition of partners to reflect the full range of groups we work with and amplify. Include for example foundations that participate in the Social Entrepreneur API, Mozilla, and the Case Foundation who we did some work with earlier this year in a consulting capacity.

Then there are our projects and I don’t think they’re fully visible from a new person’s perspective. The Social Actions API, which is a core flagship project we oversee and manage, and we have a collection of other projects that are hugely exciting – the Social Entrepreneur API, Mozilla Service Week, all of the applications that build off of the Social Actions API, initiatives like the Change the Web Challenge or blog series we did on embedded philanthropy, and our push for creating an open standards for the philanthropic web – what we refer to as the Open Actions XML schema – we consider that a project and feel it needs more visibility in our material and our website. If you can think of Social Actions as composed of projects and partners, I think we have a lot of work to do over the summer on the website, to reflect that focus and really present ourselves as a mature open source project that has a lot of momentum and that is having a tremendous impact through the partnerships and project it gets involved with, which would be really consistent with my message at My Charity Connects: your people are your impact. Our partners are our impact, and the projects we work on. We’ll be reaching out to all of you to restructure our website to reflect all of that work. I’ll be interested in knowing how each of you might want to be involved in that redesign.

Jason, our lead developer created a plugins functionality for our API. Allows us to look at any data that’s out there, publishing opportunities to take action, and transfer that data to our schema for aggregation and distribution. One of the things we’ll be doing in July is building plugins for the All for Good API, Kiva API, GlobalGiving API, etc. so that we can aggregate really rich information about actions without needing these groups to integrate with and adopt the Open Actions XML schema. That’s a tremendous development; I’m not doing full justice to its funcationality; you’ll see us promoting it in the next few weeks.

I attended the Semantic Technology Conference in San Francisco. The idea of a linked open data cloud completely blew my mind. Seems there’s an opportunity to present and plug into this linked dataset a node that relates to action. This would allow any site that publishes any kind of information to seamlessly query the action data cloud and import actions from our partners around the world. Going to have to figure out what the linked open data cloud is about and how Social Actions can contribute. You’ll see some leadership from us on that. It’s really cutting edge, bleeding edge as Ehren described it. The project’s being overseen by the WC3, the group that invented the web, created the initial standards for the web.

There are other conversations we want to embrace – standards, transition in how nonprofits work and engage people. We want to draw attention to them and participate as much as possible.

To fuel all of this – a news alert, although not signed sealed and delivered – there is major support coming to Social Actions in the form of a grant/services agreement. Participant Media’s TakePart network will be providing a hefty sum to make sure our lights stay on and to make sure that our contributions to the open standards conversation move forward. I’m looking forward to being able to announce this support in more detail as soon as the kinks are worked out. [Yay!] Yes, this is huge. Social Actions is a bus that’s been running on financial fuel; will be nice to add some financial fuel to the mix as well.

And of course need community support, input, direction, to make sure that this initiative that grew out of NetSquared becomes a movement to build the philanthropic web.

Open discussion

Celine: I was lucky to sit down with Peter at semantic technology conference – it really is "bleeding edge." The Linked Open Data cloud is pretty huge and important. As technology and the web grow, it’s been a web of people and pages. Now, companies are uploading data to the cloud to be able to link the data. The New York Times will be uploading their entire corpus. The data cloud connects related data so that if someone is building a site or application or coding something, they can draw directly on the taxonomies that are already developed. Someone trying to find out about philanthropic activity in any location would be able to draw from the cloud and find data from the New York Times or Social Actions. There’s no action-oriented taxonomy right now. The opportunity for Social Actions to drive this is huge. When it comes to setting standards – in two years when people figure out that this cloud is important, Social Actions will already be the de facto leader. Very exciting, Peter.

Christine: I can imagine creating a Social Actions task force, or something like that, for people who want to participate in Social Actions work in that area.

Ehren: What Peter and I talked about with open data cloud is very interesting. As was mentioned, it’s an idea that’s been around for a while, but it’ll be a critical mass issue – people jumping in and contributing to it. What’s interesting to me, Zemanta and others are doing a really good job not using keywords, but using uniquely identified topics that people using different languages can tie into. A friend, Jake, and I are getting into – instead of searching for actions – we’re getting into the problem of searching for people based on their actions. Even if the action isn’t very detailed, trying to get location, topic, and areas of expertise down, and then locating people who have identified themselves as resources for that area.

Jason: The Social Actions API is already really far ahead in term of semantic technology. We’ve designed the API to be really easy to figure out. Haven’t looked into linked open data much yet, but looking forward to.

Peter: Was reassured by Ivan of WC3 that it’s a simple step, publishing in RDS. We’re already, as you say, ahead of the game in being prepared to take these steps. Need to get caught up with help from Wc3 and Zemanta. Also exciting – using freebase – we have our twitter action pack with 30 feeds of actions, but sometimes the actions that show up aren’t what you expect. If we can know for sure that actions are in the right issue area, those twitter feeds will be of higher quality. This topic we’ll get into more deeply during Friday’s developer call.

Christine: Social Actions is about actions where the Social Actions API is concerned, now with the Social Entrepreneur API we’re creating resources for finding people. It sounds like these resources will help us create resources that meet in the middle, so there’s less of a divide. Tom, an invitation to chime in. Social Actions caught your attention long ago. Any big picture thoughts on where Social Actions is heading, could be heading, to make sure we’re contributing to a CauseWired sector you could get really excited about?

Tom: First, congratulations on TakePart’s support. Setting technical things aside – which I think is going brilliantly – I still think there’s need for more public conversation in this CauseWired/Social Actions sector. Even though some of the platforms are talking to each other at conferences, there’s room for more and I think Social Actions should be seen not only as a leader on the development side of things but a real leader in the conversation. That’s there to be done, and the experience you bring to the table having negotiated these waters over the past several years is invaluable and contrasts to the top-down efforts we’ve seen come along recently. Picked up at Personal Democracy Forum, that you should be aware of: Think-Social.org, launched by Jamie Daves (?), believe he has some ties if not directly to the Participant Media crowd. I’ll be talking with them and looking for ways to introduce you. They want to create a big conversation, maybe host an awards process or event. I don’t think they should be competing with the NTEN, TechSoup, etc. I think that space is very well served, and there isn’t much to add there. If they want to be of service, some of the more blended new things that are coming along are where the action is. The attention they might be able to generate would be helpful to Social Actions.

Peter: Great. If I could address your point – when we think of the Social Actions API and what it provides the platforms, we think of click-throughs, drawing attention to actions and the platforms behind them. But we also provide them with the support they need to do what they do better. Means introductions to other partners, partnering into initiatives like Mozilla Service Week, etc. We should take these conversations on what an offline event should look like –

Tom: I think so, too, and it doesn’t have to be a big-ticket item to get started. It can almost be like the way Social Actions got started. We can talk about that, although there’s probably some sponsorship money available.

Peter: I like what Allen Gun says – under-promise and over-deliver. Perhaps the first few could take the form of a barcamp or unconference.

Tom: Although could probably get some good speakers… a bit of both, perhaps a new kind of conference.

Peter: Social Actions would very much love to help convening that group with CauseWired and others, because if our partners are our impact, it’s not just delivering eyeballs that will create that impact. This is what we’re going to be spending the summer figuring out: how do we explain that deep commitment to our partners, and then moving the sector in the direction we were discussing on the recent Social Edge discussion.

Christine: Thinking about Tori and Amy and Megan – where I hope your passions overlap with what you’ve seen Social Actions do, is in creating this space where the stories are celebrated, whether it’s your story Tori in creating Lend4Health; Amy your work in celebrating the nonprofit organizations that are involved and connecting them with the philanthropic web if you want to call it that, or just this social media universe, to have the impact they want to have; Megan, the interviews you’ve shared with us, you clearly have an interest in exploring globally how people’s lives are being changed because of these services and conversations that Social Actions is leading. There are only 10 minutes left on the call but I’d love to fill the space with hearing from you about what you wish we could be doing, would love to see us creating and amplifying even further in those areas.

Megan: What I really like about Social Actions – it’s very accessible, not complicated. It’s easy to connect with people with similar issues, and I like that when you login you can easily see what’s been happening over the last couple of hours. Visually, very accessible.

Amy: What Christine and I were talking about the other day, was about pushing the stories, so it’s not just about the infrastructure and the technical opportunity that has been created by Social Actions, but also sharing stories about new partners – who they are and what they do – and make that story focused about them with maybe a little paragraph that says, “This platform is a part of Social Actions” but it’s really a post about that group. To take that further, not just to say that Social Actions is about it’s partners but show that it is: there could be a webinar series – do you want to learn about these things. For example, today’s webinar is about Kiva – actual people who have used it, people who have benefited from it. Social Actions is putting this on, by the way, but really exciting ways to tell the stories of the partners and the people that are actually changing the world via those partners.

Peter: Featuring Ehren, for example, and the applications he’s creating.

Amy: Exactly.

Peter: Love it.

Celine: Awesome idea.

Tori: Interesting, because I’m just putting the finishing touches on another blog post. I love having that space to blog on. It’s not like blogging on Lend4Health. It’s a very different audience. I feel like I get to take a vacation from Lend4Health when I’m blogging there. What I love about Social Actions is that it’s going to help Lend4Health. I have limited money and time, I’m at the point where I need a lot more eyes on Lend4Health but am not able to make that happen all myself. Having you guys doing what you’re doing, putting Lend4Health in front of other people, is exactly what I need. Keep doing what you’re doing because it’s exactly what I need.

Peter: Eyeballs, yes, but we can provide other services as well. We have so much to bring to bear to make sure your initiative is a success. Let me put more thought into that.

Tori: You’re already being so helpful. You’re basically giving me free consulting.

Megan: I think I’ve done a number of interviews just from people I’ve met on Social Actions, just over the past four weeks.

Peter: That’s wonderful. We have just a few minutes left. I don’t want to use that time to schedule another call, but want you to know we will be scheduling these regularly. They’re incredibly supportive, I’m feeling the excitement and the interest in what we’ve created here. We’ll be looking to schedule these biweekly or triweekly. I’ll close with just a thought, something that’s shocking to me: Social Actions could be evolving into a foundation. It’s shocking because I’m in personal debt and Social Actions is just barely not in debt. But in providing support of all kinds for our partners, and creating projects that profile them, this is peer-to-peer but also foundation-esque as we identify initiatives to support. This cascading effect, it isn’t hierarchical, but ripples. When we relaunch our website and can relay that rippling impact, very exciting to think we’ll be articulating that over the next several weeks.

Christine: Thank you, Peter. We’ll have a full hour Friday to get into some of the technical issues covered here and more updates from Jason. On My Social Actions there are feedback tabs now. Keep the feedback coming. Let us know what could be added to or even taken away so it becomes even more intuitive. Amy, I really heard your message that we have not just be saying we’re about our partners and their stories but we have to BE about that. So whether we have to create resources for that or as a group get out of our own way for those stories to be told, we’ll be doing careful exploration of that, too. Tori, looking forward for your next blog post. Thank you for sharing those with us. Celine, thanks for the words of wisdom and I know there are more to come. Tom, thank you for the visioning. Ehren and Jason, thank you both. Goodbye for now, but before the end of July we’ll be scheduling a call and look forward to keeping in touch in the meantime.

:end

Social Actions conference calls this week: community (7/1) and developers (7/3)

2009-06-29T21:10:25.000Z

Social Actions will host two conference calls this week to share some exciting news and planned activities, and invite community members (as always!) to participate as full partners in shaping the next several months of Social Actions' initiative.

Social Actions Community Call
Wednesday, July 1, 11amPacific/2pmEstern

Social Actions Developers Call
Friday, July 3, 11amPacific/2pmEastern

Looking forward to your RSVPs and to talking with many of you soon!

Social Edge discussion on competition and collaboration: 48 hour check in

2009-06-25T22:30:00.000Z

Over on Social Edge, Peter's hosting a discussion about competition and collaboration. The introduction, cross-posted on My Social Actions here, draws attention to the relationship between All for Good and Social Actions as a case study and invitation to jump into a broad consideration of these themes for the entire social entrepreneurship sector.

I hope you get a chance to hop over, browse through, and join in. Lots of room to go broader and deeper.

My contribution to date, with more to come:

In a way I see collaboration and competition as a false dichotomy [or], more precisely, as short-hand for different ways to approach and describe a relationship or intent (working with, and working against, ARE distinct). But placing them on either ends of some kind of metaphorical stick, dualistically, doesn't make much sense to me. There are myriad opportunities, at myriad levels of participation and organization, to be simultaneously engaged in both collaborative and competitive practices. The question then immediately jumps to exactly the point you're making: "We need both and the wisdom to know which is the most likely to succeed at what task or, as an alternative, how to sequence them correctly."

But for me a second question immediately comes to mind, and this ties closely with Hildy Gottlieb's contributions to this discussion: "In addition to choosing what is most likely to succeed at this particular moment, which is most likely to generate the kind of environment/context/system/etc. that will best serve your mission in the future?" In other words, a competitive stance today may be exactly what your organization needs in order to accomplish X. However if that competitive stance doesn't contribute to, or worse detracts from, a cultural norm that would significantly lift the sector as a whole, that would be extremely unfortunate.

To my mind collaboration -- working with -- is one of the key principles of social innovation, betterment, well-being, whatever we choose to call "being kind to each other." Competition or collaboration in this environment is more than a "what's best for a particular organization here?" kind of question. There's the larger question of consistency with the principles that inform the entire sector.

While the introduction to this discussion described two organizations, what it really presents as a case study for all of us to learn from are two different approaches to HOW we're each drawing attention and resources to similar issues. Should it matter that we're considering volunteer and other types of engagement as the outcome here, rather than types of tires, or tax structures, or t-shirts? In addition to checking the appropriateness of our method to the impact we want to have, I hope the discussion here recognizes the importance of checking whether our methods and mission are equally aligned. Should competition have less of a role to play in this environment than in others, and if it doesn't, what long-term opportunities to truly enrich our capacity to care about and for one another are being lost?

Social Actions Adds Six New Action Sources; Partners with Innovators in India, South Africa, and the UK

2009-06-25T13:00:00.000Z

Today, Social Actions added six new action sources to our open database of opportunities to make a difference. For a full list and profiles of the latest innovators contributing to Social Actions, please see Our Guide to 50+ Action Sources.

New Action Sources

GiveIndia -> Donate
Greater Good South Africa -> Donate
OptINnow -> Lend
South African Social Investment Exchange (SASIX) -> Donate
Stop Climate Chaos Coalition -> Support a campaign
YouthNoise -> Join a group

The Full List of Action Sources Contributing to Social Actions

Amazee
Apathy is Boring
betterplace
BringLight
CanadaHelps
Care2 Petition Site
Cause Caller
Celsias
Change.org
Changents
ChangingthePresent
CharityFocus
ChristmasFuture
ClimatePath
Delicious
DemocracyInAction
DonorsChoose.org
Do Something
DreamBank
Earth Justice
Firstgiving
FREEDOM SPEAKS
Fundable
GiveIndia
GiveMeaning
GlobalGiving
GlobalGiving UK
Greater Good SA
Helpalot
ideablob.com
Idealist.org
JustMeans
Kiva
KnightPulse
Lend4Health
Live Earth
MicroGiving
Modest Needs
NABUUR
NGO Post
OptINnow
PincGiving
PledgeBank
Policy Pitch
Prax.ca
Razoo
SASIX
SixDegrees
Stop Climate Chaos
TakingITGlobal
ThePoint
Twitter
VolunteerMatch
WildlifeDirect
Wokai
YouthNoise
Zazengo

Join the Discussion: Competition or Collaboration?

2009-06-23T20:30:00.000Z

This week, I am hosting a discussion on SocialEdge.org called, Competition or Collaboration?. I look forward to your contributions to the discussion. Please don't be shy. This is an important conversation to have out in the open, and a timely moment to have it.

This morning I googled the phrase “collaboration is a good thing,” and found 2,650 results. Then I googled “competition is a good thing,” and came up with 80,700 results.

For every web-page that has acknowledged the hard-won value of collaborative projects and processes, there are 30 web-pages that hale the hallmark of North American enterprise, competition. This shouldn’t surprise me. We live in competitive times. For my entire adult life, competition has been credited with everything from maintaining the quality of healthcare and education in America to sending people to the moon to spurring innovation.

This month, competition is being credited with helping more people to serve. That’s right. One of those 80,700 results for “competition is a good thing” is a quote from a fellow social innovator who I deeply respect, Jonathan Greenblatt. His quote appeared in Suzanne Perry’s recent article in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, “An Obama-Inspired Volunteer-Recruitment Web Site Will Soon Debut.”

Jonathan was referring to the unfortunate (in my opinion) dynamic that has characterized my organization’s relationship with the recently launched All for Good platform. Social Actions and All for Good are both open source databases that help people find and share opportunities to make a difference.

Social Actions was built from the bottom up, by and for the nonprofit technology sector. All for Good was built from the top down with inspiration coming directly from President Obama’s call for a Craigslist for Service and with support from Google and the Craigslist Foundation. All for Good’s board of directors reads like a Who’s Who of technology, the media, and nonprofit worlds. Social Actions supporters, friends, and mentors are the rockstars of the nonprofit technology sector, ie, geeks who care.

As far as I am concerned, there is no need for Social Actions and All for Good to compete with one another in an effort to help more Americans find ways to serve. Here’s why:

* There’s no such thing as an organization too big to collaborate
* There’s no such thing as an organization too small to collaborate with
* When the grassroots and giants conspire for good, the possibilities are endless (think Obama)

Most importantly, in certain circumstances, collaborative dynamics and processes can be far more effective at producing innovation than competition. For example, Social Actions has been working for the last five months on a project called the Social Entrepreneur API. We have brought together the staff of five leading award programs in social entrepreneurship and are building out the infrastructure for distributing information about social entrepreneurs far and wide. The service, which will launch later this summer, represents a breakthrough example of similar organizations leaving their similarities and differences behind and actively pursuing a collaborative opportunity that advances the entire field of social entrepreneurship.

I worry that if All for Good and Social Actions become outright competitors, the outcome will not be as good for volunteerism and service as it could be. Conversations about open standards will become partisan. Efforts to create innovative applications that distribute ways to do good will be duplicated. And the opportunity to lead the social sector by example in the direction of collaborative innovation will be squandered.

I’ll leave you with this thought: global competition may have sent people into outer space for the first time, but now collaboration between large and small nations keeps them there. I cannot recall if that sentiment is original. If it’s not original, please let me know who I should give credit to. Attribution for a good idea is the first step toward collaborative innovation.

Here are some questions for this discussion:

* Is it possible for large and small organizations to collaborate?
* In what circumstances does collaborating compromise or contribute to innovation?
* In what circumstances does competing compromise or contribute to innovation?
* If you had to choose competition or collaboration as your default, which would you choose?

Join me in the discussion on SocialEdge.org >>

Servezilla!

2009-06-16T02:00:00.000Z

Mozilla, the friendly folks who make your Firefox web browser and a whole lot more besides, have announced the launch of Mozilla Service Week. Mozilla will be bringing together the open-source community to not only build a better web, but also to build a better world:

During the week of September 14-21, 2009, we're asking individuals to step up and make a difference by using the Web to better their community. We're looking for people who want to share, give, engage, create, and collaborate by offering their time and talent to local organizations and people who need their help. We think everyone should know how to use the Internet, have easy access to it, and have a good experience when they're online. By utilizing our community's talents for writing, designing, programming, developing, and all-around technical know-how, we believe we can make the Web a better place for everyone.

Social Actions is proud to be supporting this effort. If you're thinking your non-profit organization or social enterprise could use some help from the Mozillians, head over to the page Idealist has set up for this effort. Stay tuned for further details!

All for Good and Social Actions conference call transcript and takeaways

2009-06-15T18:00:00.000Z

Last Friday, Social Actions hosted a conference call for its 50+ action sources and other partners to discuss the launch of a new platform called All for Good (event description and list of 60+ participants posted here).

The purpose of the call was to:

• Provide an overview of the All for Good platform as we understand it;

• Invite our partners to share their thoughts and experiences to date with All for Good;

• Provide an open forum to discuss All for Good and other opportunities to work more intentionally and closely with one another; and

• Describe the next steps Social Actions is taking to ensure that our initiative and All for Good do not emerge as competing or incompatible aggregations of opportunities to make a difference.

Below is a summary of key takeaways followed by full transcripts of the call and of the Social Actions chat window that was available for text messages during the call.

Key takeaways ~ conference call

• Both Social Actions and All for Good are committed to exploring ways to work together, with an eye toward aiding everyone.

• All for Good is an open source aggregation of volunteer opportunities in the U.S. built with support from The Craigslist Foundation, Google, and nonprofit partners. All for Good’s dataset can be accessed directly through allforgood.org and via an open API, which third party developers can use to embed volunteer opportunities in websites and mobile applications.

• Between May 2008 and June 2009, Social Actions’ Founder and Executive Director Peter Deitz met, spoke with, and corresponded with staff at Craigslist Foundation and Google. On these occasions, Peter explained Social Actions in detail and proposed numerous ways for Craigslist Foundation, Google, and Social Actions to work together.

• While the process behind All for Good’s development has not consistently been viewed as open or collaborative, there is optimism that this will improve going forward.

Key takeaways ~ text chat

• Strong support for regularly-scheduled conversations like this one for the sector;

• A desire for coordination and collaboration among aggregations serving this sector; and

• Requests for clarifications about All for Good and the process to get involved.

Social Actions’ next steps

• Social Actions is excited to use the All for Good API to mirror the volunteer opportunities that have been aggregated through this new platform. Integrating with the All for Good API will add a number of new action sources to our open source database and will immediately make the volunteer opportunities listed on All for Good available to the collection of web and mobile applications that are powered by the Social Actions API.

• We are building the capacity to consume XML feeds written for the All for Good platform so that organizations that want to partner with Social Actions and with All for Good won’t need to create two different kinds of feeds.

• We are inviting Google developers to participate in the Social Actions Developers Google group and will encourage innovative and genuine collaborations between our and the All for Good developer communities.

• We will follow up with All for Good leadership to ensure that as they expand into other forms of action for aggregation, they consider the Social Actions API as a resource.

• Social Actions will continue to innovate ahead of the curve, working with our developer groups to come up with innovative applications and hopefully inspiring new directions for the All for Good platform.

• Peter Deitz will be thinking out loud as a social entrepreneur about the All for Good product and what it represents in terms of opportunities for Social Actions to do more, and also the All for Good process and what that has been like.

• Social Actions will be convening conference calls regularly in the future to explore what genuine collaboration can and should look like in the nonprofit tech community both from the technical perspective (XML feeds, APIs, etc) but also from a mission-focused perspective.

Links

All for Good website:
http://www.allforgood.org

Social Actions website:
http://www.socialactions.com

Social Actions’ presentation to Google, September 2008 (video):
http://my.socialactions.com/profiles/blogs/social-actions-presentation-at

Social Actions Developer resources:
http://www.socialactions.com/developers

Transcript ~ conference call

Christine Egger, Social Actions: Thank you very much, everyone, for joining this conference call. My name is Christine Egger, I'm a founding team member of Social Actions and I look forward to facilitating today's conservation. Peter Deitz is of course here as well, the founder and executive director of Social Actions. Hello, Peter. [Hello] There unfortunately isn't time for everyone to say hello, but we encourage you to use the Chat window to introduce yourselves. That's at "socialactions.com forward-slash chat", and you're encouraged to click "edit nickname" in the lower left corner so your name appears next to your messages. We'll do our best to monitor and respond to that chat activity during the call and will be sure to incorporate your questions, comments, and suggestions into the notes and follow-up. Welcome -- this is a fantastic gathering of many of the most innovative organizations in the online philanthropy and volunteerism community. I want to specifically thank those of you calling in from India, Great Britain, South Africa, the Netherlands, and other regions far from US time zones. We really appreciate your joining this conversation at all hours of the day and night. And we want to thank Jonathan Greenblatt for joining today's call. Jonathan was a member of the Obama administration transition team and has been an important leading member of All for Good, or Footprint, working closely with Susan Nesbitt at Craigslist Foundation, and with developers at Google. Two quick notes: In the interest of reducing background noise, please consider muting your phone on your own handset or by entering *6; to unmute your line, press *6 again. And lastly, we would like to record the call, to help in preparing the transcript which we will publish online. I’ll pause here in case there are any strong objections but if there are none we’ll start recording now.

[Recording]

Christine Egger, Social Actions: The purpose of today’s call is to provide an overview of the All for Good, or Footprint, project as we understand it; a forum for sharing your thoughts and experiences with that project; and to describe the steps that Social Actions is taking to ensure compatibility and collaboration with All for Good. And again it’s of course to provide an open discussion about this initiative and other opportunities to work more intentionally and closely with one another. I’m going to turn the mic over to Peter. He’ll provide a very brief description of Social Actions, both for the benefit of those who aren’t closely familiar with us but also to clarify the distinctions between our initiative and All for Good. Peter?

Peter Deitz, Social Actions: I’ll jump right into things here. Thank you, Christine, for the introduction and thank you everyone for joining us. This is really a milestone for us, to be able to bring together such a diverse group around our project and around other developments in the sector. Quickly, for those who are less familiar with Social Actions, we are an open source database of opportunities to make a difference. We’ve been at this for two years, and we aggregate service opportunities online of course, but also donation opportunities, petitions, events, campaigns and groups that people can join, microloans, and other individual actions that people can take to effect change in their communities. Our database is fully open source, both the code and the dataset, and we encourage third party developers to build applications off of the Social Actions API. We currently have 50+ partners contributing to the network and we’re really proud of the international diversity of those partners as well as the breadth of forms of actions. Our goal really is to create a massive cloud of actions people can take in any issue, and then to encourage third party developers to slice that cloud, in a way, and to embed those actions into the social networks, blogs, mobile phones that people use every day. I’ll also mention that there are 35 applications that are actively distributing this dataset across the web. We register about 20,000 click-throughs from our dataset to our partners’ websites monthly, and there are about 1,500 searches directly from search.socialactions.com to our partners’ sites. At this point I’m going to go right into a description of All for Good as I understand it, as Christine and I understand it, and segway from there to a brief timeline of interactions with the initiative. I’m definitely grateful to Jonathan from All for Good joining us, and Jonathan I’d encourage you in the next part of the call to clarify anything I say that might be not full or accurate as you would determine. What I understand All for Good to be is an open source database of opportunities to make a difference specifically, for now, serving the volunteerism sector in the United States. This is a project that has been built by volunteers for the most part working closely with staff -- members – of Obama’s presidential transition team, staff at Google, and staff at Craigslist Foundation. The project has been built for the most part behind closed doors so there have been a lot of rumors or discussion about All for Good, previously known as Footprint, but this is not a project that has been built out in the open and that is certainly a distinguishing characteristic between All for Good and Social Actions. We understand that the project does have an interest in aggregating and distributing forms of action that are distinct from volunteerism, so at some point they might expand into donations and petitions and other forms of service, broadly defined. The project – this might be news for some folks – it isn’t formally a Google project, it isn’t formally a White House project, it’s an initiative that’s going to live in an independent organization called Our Good Works, and Jonathan can tell us more about that subsequently. The one point that I want to make very strongly and clearly is that we want the story of how All for Good and the process that led to it to be reflected in All for Good’s materials but also in the press and media coverage that will accompany its formal launch later this month. While nothing on the About Us page is factually incorrect, we do feel that there is more context to this initiative that we would like to see disclosed. In the full spirit of doing this collaboratively, Jonathan I’m going to invite you to clarify or expand on anything I said that you might feel is off or inaccurate.

Jonathan Greenblatt, All for Good: First of all, it’s really a pleasure to be on the call. I’m grateful for the fact that you’ve been able to organize this, Peter, and I’m grateful for the fact that so many people from across the country and from around the world are participating. And I think it’s heartening to see the convening of so many nonprofit actors from so many different quarters, to have AARP on the same call as The Extraordinaries says something about the breadth and vibrancy of the sector. To my mind that’s very exciting. I think we’re here together at a very propitious time, meaning if you look at all the trends, I think the phenomenon like social entrepreneurship, crowdsourcing, and all the different factors are really evolving and blossoming in a powerful way. Open source also deserves mention. What this administration is doing, I think, is monumental as you mentioned. Again, I’m really encouraged by the – There was a post yesterday I saw on the White House blog about asking for ideas about civic leadership and engagement. There is an open government initiative that is brand new, and I think it heralds a moment of cooperation and collaboration between all of us who are endeavoring in our own different ways to improve upon nonprofit models, engage more people, strengthen communities, and suddenly we have this administration in Washington which is embracing –

Peter Deitz, Social Actions: Jonathan –

Jonathan Greenblatt, All for Good: -- so I think that’s great. So I’d like to preface my comments – what I’d like to do is use this call to draw attention to both – because to your point, Peter, I don’t think this is happening in a vacuum, I think you’re seeing a remarkable marketplace of ideas and initiatives and in my mind that’s just amazing and I would say that in my mind Social Actions really exemplifies that. So I tip my hat –

Christine Egger, Social Actions: Jonathan, this is Christine if I could interrupt. We have just a few more minutes in this section and I want to make sure that Peter’s request to perhaps illuminate any of the background behind All for Good’s coming together as a project. Would you like to make any clarifications in the time you have remaining?

Jonathan Greenblatt, All for Good: Sure. First of all, Peter, I appreciate your background. The initiative called All for Good was inspired by President Obama’s call to service and directly took inspiration from the activities of a number of amazing social entrepreneurs, the call to action. Craig Newmark, in the post he made last year. It’s true that several of us during the Presidential transition came together and said, “Are there ways that we can contribute to the process? Are there ways that we can add value to the sector. I wish we could collaborate with the great work that’s already being done.” So it’s probably better, I would say, and a great use of our time on this call, to focus less on Peter and me dissecting point by point what you have to say and really simply remark on the amazing group of people you’ve been able to assemble and the fact that we at All for Good have created an open source platform that I hope we can collaborate with Social Actions and that we can collaborate with many of the organizations on this call because there are a lot of ways to innovate and improve on what we’ve done and we don’t have all the answers. I think the answers are bottom-up in communities all over the country and if we can get the people on the call involved, the organizations on the call and others not even here I think we’ll all benefit in the sector. And maybe what I can do, Christine, if you’ll allow me, there are people on the call who have been involved who I’d like to recognize. So for example I think I saw Ami Dar –

Peter Deitz, Social Actions: Jonathan I’m going to have to jump in here, I’m sorry –

Christine Egger, Social Action: Jonathan, if you would, we’ll segway into this next section of the call then, inviting our platform partners to share their thoughts and experiences with Social Actions. Many of the people on the call have had experiences with your group and they're welcome to share those here. I’ll repeat, as a reminder, for those who came in a little late, that there is a text chat window open as well at socialactions.com/chat. Feel free to use that. I’ll be monitoring that and pulling in observations and questions from that forum as well. Feel free on the chat window as well to directly ask for a chance to speak and we’ll get to you if at all possible. We’ve got about 15 minutes allotted here for specific thoughts and experiences on All for Good. I’m opening the floor.

John Lyman, Google: This is John Lyman from Google. One thing I just wanted to respond to was – and I do want to hear from others on the call as well – our involvement on this project from day one has been very open. Everything’s been open source and collaborative from day one and we’re excited and happy to work with anybody. The XML code is out there, the API is all open source, and I think anyone can join in who wants to.

Christine Egger, Social Actions: Thank you very much.

Andrew Drake, Hands on Network: This is Andrew Drake from Hands on Network, Points of Light. We’ve been working with Jonathan and with John Lyman, people at Craigslist, and have found them to be highly collaborative, have found them to be really easy to work with, and intensely focused on delivering the most good for the most people. So I think it’s a great initiative and they’ve been great partners.

Christine Egger, Social Actions: Thank you, Andrew, that’s great to hear.

Peter Deitz, Social Actions: I’d encourage other people to jump in.

Ami Dar, Idealist.org: Hello, this is Ami from Idealist, can you hear me?

Christine Egger, Social Actions: Hi, Ami, yes. Welcome.

Peter Deitz, Social Actions: Hello, Ami.

Ami Dar, Idealist.org: So we have been involved in this project for the last three or four months in a variety of ways. I want to sort of start from the end. At this point we’re involved in the process. We’re feeding our volunteer opportunities into the platform. I’ve also joined the board of the new organization that’s being created to support this. At the same time I don’t want to sugarcoat the fact that the process has not been easy. I think it would be a mistake to come out and say that it’s all been open, collaborative, etc. It has not. It has been pretty difficult, pretty combative. To give just one example there was a Google group that was set up for the partners, and the moment that the group was used to criticize anything, the group was actually shut down and people could not post anything. It was used just for announcements. So it has not been an open process. It hasn’t been a great process. I’m optimistic that going forward, because many of us have actually spoken up, things are much better. I hope that going forward, especially now that there will be an organization, a board, a group that’s actually more formally behind it, and things are more open and more transparent, that things are going to be much better. So I’m optimistic, going forward – there’s a first board meeting coming up in ten days. I think we’ll be able to come out after that and be sort of more formal about the whole thing. Bbut I also want to acknowledge the fact that it hasn’t been a great process for everyone. I don’t think we should sugarcoat that because that would appear false to many people who are part of it.

Christine Egger, Social Actions: Thank you, Ami. Any thoughts or experiences from other platform partners? [Pause] At the close of this call, the last 15 minutes will be for an open discussion, but at this point we wanted to create a space for these specific observations.

Peter Deitz, Social Actions: Christine, in the absence of additional comments from platform partners I can go in and describe a little bit about Social Actions’ experience with the organization to date.

Christine Egger, Social Actions: Please do.

Peter Deitz, Social Actions: Before I do that again I’ll put out the call to other people on the line, other groups, to share their experiences or thoughts to date on All for Good/Footprint. OK – did I cut someone off? –

Christine Egger, Social Actions: No. Jonathan, I’m reading your text messages and you’ll absolutely have a chance to share your thoughts during a broader discussion later in the call.

Jonathan Greenblatt, All for Good: It just seems like it may be helpful to answer the comments. It depends on what you want. Do you want a dialogue or do you just want people to make – to post comments to a wall, if you will? I’m happy to respond however it’s appropriate, Christine, and again I’m grateful that you’ve organized the call.

Christine Egger, Social Actions: OK. Tom Steinberg’s asking for a quick explanation again of what All for Good is. But again I would like the mic to be passed back to Peter. Peter, please do share the experiences that Social Actions has had because we do want to share that as well, and then explain what the Social Actions and the All for Good platforms are as specifically distinct from each other.

Peter Deitz, Social Actions: I’ll address the question really quickly. All for Good – you can have a look at it at AllforGood.org. It is essentially an aggregation of volunteer opportunities in the U.S. and there’s very rich information about individual volunteer opportunities. You can see them by location or organization and type of volunteer opportunity. Social Actions’ experience to date with the entity that is All for Good hasn’t been collaborative from the start. So I just want to put some facts down on the table so we have them out in the public. First of all, we’ve identified that Craigslist Foundation, Google, and the Obama transition team have been involved in project, as well as other partners. I originally consulted with Susan Nesbitt, Arthur Coddington, and Darien Rodriguez Heyman of the Craigslist Foundation in May 2008 following Social Actions’ win at the NetSquared mashup contest. We received some support at that point for our open source project of aggregated opportunities to make a difference, and I received an invitation from Craigslist Foundation to visit their office and explore opportunities to collaborate, to explain in detail how we were creating this aggregation of volunteer – of all kinds of opportunities to make a difference. Following that meeting I did follow-up with some specific suggestions on how Craigslist Foundation and Social Actions could work together on the open source project and I received a clear message from Susan declining that offer for the moment and indicating that Craigslist Foundation would be looking for additional opportunities to build something even more collaborative. In September 2008 I visited the Google headquarters in New York City and Christine and I made a presentation about Social Actions in which we explained the vision, the open and inclusive process through which our open source database is being created, and the video of that presentation which also included our XML feeds and the process was all shared. During that [presentation] – you can see the video, we’ll include it in the links – I did get a question from Google employees specifically saying, “How could Google lend its support to your open source project.” I said that I’d love to have some access to developers’ time and developers’ resources to build out and enhance and solve some of the more difficult problems as it relates to aggregating opportunities to make a difference. And then the final point I’ll make regarding this process is that in January I received a call from Craigslist Foundation and Google with a request to “pick my brain” about what projects would serve the nonprofit sector well, and a clear indication and reassurance that whatever they were building in collaboration with the Obama transition team would not recreate the wheel or produce projects that were redundant with other open source initiatives. After that, there wasn’t much communication until I brought up the subject again in April 2009 to really and intentionally discover and explore genuine opportunities to collaborate.

John Leyman, Google: Peter, this is John from Google again. I haven’t been a part of any of these discussions or even aware of them, but are there specific ways that Social Actions wants to contribute and collaborate now?

Peter Deitz, Social Actions: Yes, we’re going to be getting to that in this next section of the call.

Christine Egger, Social Actions: Absolutely. Jonathan, any points of clarification or any points you’d like to add?

Jonathan Greenblatt, All for Good: Well, I guess, to be frank, I appreciate the comments and the feedback. I think it’s fair to say that the process has not been perfect. I don’t think, I mean, I wasn’t involved in any of those conversations so it’s hard for me to disclaim them. I don’t work for the Craigslist Foundation. I don’t work for Google. I don’t work for any of these entities. I’ve been doing this on a volunteer basis, much like my service on the transition. So, with that said, things have been imperfect. We have a lot to learn, and that’s why we’re excited to be on the call today, to learn how we can be better. I think there are a lot of very relevant, salient questions being asked in the chat room. I’d rather focus on those and think about on a going forward basis how we can collaborate to benefit the sector, how we can support the communities and the organizations that are doing such great work. That’s what’s best, where I’d really like to take the conversation. I think that’s where we all win.

Ami Dar, Idealist: This is Ami again. Peter, let me sort of reiterate that again because you and I have talked and we’ve been parts of both sides of this. It’s important to understand where we are now, which is that we’ve had a process that for all kinds of reasons was a messy process that ended up annoying a few of the people that were involved in it, absolutely, including us. We’re now at a point, I think, where things have moved forward. There is a site. There is an organization behind us. There’s a lot of goodwill behind us, and I think we have to stop and think going forward, how do we go on and make the most of these resources, and how do we look ahead and try to improve the process and try to improve the product going forward, which is why I’m optimistic, looking ahead, and I’d rather not go back too much and put a focus on the methods that preceded this.

Peter Deitz, Social Actions: Ami, I’m going to take that as an invitation to share the next steps that Social Actions is taking to ensure that we are not competing aggregations and that our two systems are fully compatible, because I agree that what happened is in the past, is in the rear view mirror. Nothing’s going to change that process. Right now what we need to do is adjust to the new reality that there are two projects that are open source and have similar goals and visions for the space, and here’s a few of the things we’re going to be doing. First and foremost, we have been talking with Jonathan and Adam Sah at Google about ways in which to mirror the dataset. So Social Actions, as of later this month, will create a mirror of the very rich information about volunteer opportunities that All for Good has put together. That means we’re going to be able to add a number of new platforms to our open source database which will immediately make available to all of the web applications that have been built off of Social Actions a new, broader set of volunteer opportunities in the U.S. So that’s very exciting. We are going to be building in the capacity as well to consume XML feeds that are written for the All for Good platform so that organizations that want to partner with Social Actions and with All for Good won’t need to create two different kinds of feeds. We’ll be taking on the burden in that respect. We’ve invited Google developers, particularly Adam Sah at this point, to participate in the Social Actions Developers Google group, and we’ve also asked Adam to share with us any names of developers he thinks should be part of that conversation. While working together at the leadership level and exploring opportunities to collaborate is great, we think some really innovative and genuine collaborations will also emerge from our developer community also working closely with the All for Good developer community. We’re going to be following up with All for Good leadership going forward to ensure that they’re aware of the Social Actions dataset in its entirety and that they look to expand into other forms of action for aggregation, that they consider our API as a resource. I think an important next step for us, and one that will lead to some really fruitful collaboration, is that we’re going to be continuing to innovate ahead of the curve, and what I mean by that is working with our developer groups to come up with innovative applications that really leverage all of the tools available whether those are social networks, mobile phones, blogs, websites, media outlets, and hopefully some of the products we come up with out of our sandbox will help inspire to inspire new directions for the All for Good platform.

Christine Egger, Social Actions: Peter, can I ask for a quick clarification at this point? There’s a question from Ryan on the “duplicate datasets.” Could you repeat what the message was there, provide a clarification on why that’s necessary at this stage?

Peter Deitz, Social Actions: OK. Social Actions right now doesn’t have a complete overlap in its sources with All for Good. We’re going to mirror the dataset that they have in order to add new partners and new action sources to our aggregation. All for Good, by the same token, doesn’t have all of the sources that we have contributing to its aggregation, so we welcome All for Good to recreate and mirror some of the data on our end so that they have a broader dataset of opportunities to make a difference. Does that make sense?

Ryan Scott, CauseCast: Yes.

Peter Deitz, Social Actions: Speaking to Ami’s point earlier about moving forward in a collaborative and open spirit, I am going to be doing some thinking out loud as a social entrepreneur about what it means when groups with tremendous resources enter a space in which you’ve been working for years. I think that thinking out loud about the All for Good product and what it represents in terms of opportunities for Social Actions to do more, and also the All for Good process and what that has been like, will keep the pressure on All for Good to move in a more open dialogue with our sector. Specifically what I’m looking for, in reflecting out loud, is somewhat of a product roadmap that more people can be aware of and help shape.

Jonathan Greenblatt, All for Good: You know, Peter, this is Jonathan. I think that what I might like to say is that, again, we’re excited about the chance to collaborate. We’re excited to learn from everyone on the call. It feels a little like this format doesn’t necessarily allow all of these individual questions to be answered. So we’ll explore setting up some kind of session and invite everyone on this call to participate so that if you have questions that this format hasn’t allowed us to address we can still do that. I’ve posted my email on the Social Actions chat box. People should feel free to email me so we can follow up. I’ll also just add one last point. I really deeply respect you, Peter, and those on the call as social entrepreneurs. I think many of you know I co-founded a company called Ethos Water. It was a company that we bootstrapped. We had no investment dollars for a long time. We ran it out of my house for quite some time as well. I’ll tell you that large competitors came into our space, too, large competitors. Much more capitalized with lots more advantages in the space. And that forced us to innovate. That forced us to evolve and adapt, and I think that made our brand stronger. And eventually, those other competitors they grew the entire space. So my hope is that here, in this field, there may be a similar dynamic. All of us can benefit as more people get excited, invest more capital, bring more resources, and frankly enable more Americans and people all around the world to serve. If we can get more Americans involved in service and volunteerism, I’ll feel like all of us have accomplished something really meaningful.

Christine Egger, Social Actions: Peter, with your permission, with the few minutes that we have left in this segment – at 12:45 we really do want to open it up for an open discussion again -- in responding to some of the questions on the text chat, there does seem to be more of a need for more clarification, still, on what All for Good is creating and what your roadmap would be. So Jonathan, could you spend just a couple of minutes, very briefly with some bullet points, clarifying the All for Good platform and specifically if possible what your roadmap is.

Jonathan Greenblatt, All for Good: OK. All for Good is a free open service that, again, was built by volunteers. The intention was to make service opportunities accessible to everyone no matter where you might be, and to do so in such a way that we enlisted more and more opportunities to serve. The product – initially the product has two main features and functionality. You can see it manifest on the web page AllforGood.org, a very robust search application that, again, let’s be honest, we are fortunate to be working with some of the folks on this call and hope to extend that to embrace many, many, many more nonprofits who are either providing us with data or figuring out how to collaborate with us so we can number one, allow people to search for service opportunities in their area. Number two, we allow socialization, so we have capabilities that allow individuals to find service opportunities they’re exited about to use Facebook Connect or use the Open Social platform to share those opportunities with their quote-unquote friends, their social network. We think that’s really important, to bring the power of social networking into this space of service and volunteerism. And maybe most importantly, again, much like the marvelous product being developed by Peter and Christine at Social Actions, our product is really the API innovative spec. It is really our hope that the community centers and city hall and civic organizations and faith-based institutions and nonprofits and individuals and schools and the list goes on will be able to use our data and build on top of our platform. So they’re creating different interfaces with their own UI [user interface] and different ways to cut the data. We think that innovation is a bottom-up, decentralized process. So I’m less focused right now on what our product roadmap is and more, how do we get there. How do we get this code in the hands of the community so they can show us – much in the same way that we’ve seen with Firefox or Linux or Apache or any of the other marvelous open source initiatives – they’ll demonstrate the power of innovation and how they’re going to improve and iterate the product going forward.

Christine Egger, Social Actions: Thank you, Jonathan.

Jonathan Greenblatt, All for Good: And I’d make one last point, Christine, which is really important, that we need input to determine for how we can improve the core platform. So I say this with humility that so many people are doing such marvelous work on this call. We would welcome and we are open to your ideas. Tell us how we can collaborate. Give us your requests about where you would like to see this go. We’re excited to have that dialogue with each and every one of you.

Christine Egger, Social Actions: Great. And then two specific questions taken from our chat window. One, do you have plans, or is All for Good planning to expand internationally in the scope of the actions that it aggregates from, and can you address the observation that All for Good’s development is not accurately reflected on your About Us page. Those two specific questions are coming from the community on the call.

Jonathan Greenblatt, All for Good: Let me answer the first question and then if you could repeat the second one. In terms of the international space, it’s certainly something that we are considering. I think in large part we’ll take direction from the users. We’ll see what kind of feedback the alpha site gets, and what we’ll hear from the community, and that will help determine how we think about expanding to broader service opportunities. I know again there are folks on the call from Ashoka and other organizations doing great work in this space. We’d love to find ways to collaborate. What was the second question, Christine?

Christine Egger, Social Actions: The second one, Micah Sifry has posted. Micah, if you’d like to repeat that question verbally you’re welcome to.

Micah Sifry, Personal Democracy Forum/TechPresident: It’s socialactions.org, right?

[Difficult to hear]

Christine Egger, Social Actions: I’m sorry we’re having trouble hearing you. Try one more time and if it doesn’t come through I’ll repeat the question.

Micah Sifry, Personal Democracy Forum/TechPresident: It’s weird, I’m having trouble –

Christine Egger, Social Actions: OK. The question -- I’ll read just read it – says, “Jonathan, can you directly address Peter and Christine’s assertion that contributions to All for Good’s development have not been accurately reflected on your About Us page.”

Jonathan Greenblatt, All for Good: I don’t agree. I’m not sure what specific point we’re talking about, and again I’m not really sure it’s the best use of everyone’s time to go line by line through the About Us page –

Phil Noble, PoliticsOnline: I don’t know if you’ve heard about this, but this whole sort of Craigslist, All for Good thing. This is a conference call that I’m on that is with about 40 or 50 people and it is –

Jonathan Greenblatt, All for Good: Is someone asking a question?

Unidentified: I think they don’t know that we can hear them]

Christine Egger, Social Actions: Phil Noble, please mute your phone. Well again, this seems to be an appropriate time to open this up to open discussion. Again, the floor belongs to the community members on the call. I think we’ve answered the questions that I’ve seen pop up in the chat window, but please do post your questions there if I can make sure we call on you in the next 15 minutes or so, the time we have remaining. I’ve got a question here from Dave Boyer [Network for Social Responsibility]: “Jonathan, can you speak to a) the sources of your supply, your action sources; and b) your planned capabilities; c) your plans to attract traffic. So you do have the opportunity to share those three specific pieces of information with this community now if you’d like.

Jonathan Greenblatt, All for Good: So, sources of data, what was the second point?

Christine Egger, Social Actions: I think you’re reading the window as well, you’re on the chat as well. Dave Boyer’s message there.

Jonathan Greenblatt, All for Good: Let me pull that up.

Christine Egger, Social Actions: He’s asking for your action sources –

Jonathan Greenblatt, All for Good: I see it, I see it. Right now, some of the parties we’re working with us to provide data include but are not limited to Idealist, Network for Good, AARP I think that’s also on the call, Hand on Network Points of Light Foundation, and a number of other organizations. Civic Ventures, Civic – there’s a lot of them. I’d have to pull up the whole list to tell you. We’re in conversation with some of the other large players in the space, specifically Truist and VolunteerMatch, looking for ways we can collaborate. So the planned capabilities of All for Good, again I think we’re really focused on getting the API and the data spec out there in the hands of developers so they can take our platform and build on top of it in different ways that make sense for executions, whether it’s a MySpace page or a town hall website or some blogger’s webpage, or etc. We’re taking advice and input as to how we can then improve the core platform and facilitate innovation. Third, we plan to attract traffic – again, in case I wasn’t clear about this, we did not build All for Good to create a destination site that would compete with some of the names that I’ve already mentioned. What we hope to do is accelerate more people to serve. We think of All for Good as a platform. In that sense we are talking with other parties right now who might want to use our tool but hope to drive eventually all those users to Idealist, to VolunteerMatch because we work with them, to Hands On Network, to AARP and to the other organizations with whom we’re collaborating. That’s really the goal, to promote those brands and simply use All for Good as a platform that allows that to happen.

Christine Egger, Social Actions: Thank you. I’d like to open it again for open discussion. If anyone has anything to add, we have just about 15 minutes.

Jonathan Greenblatt, All for Good: Does Micah have a question we didn’t have a chance to answer before?

Micah Sifry, Personal Democracy Forum/TechPresident: I’m sorry, I’m in a very noisy place. I’m going to unmute and ask it again because I think you said you thought it wasn’t worth discussing but it seems to me that the question is: has All for Good in its About page properly given credit to Social Actions for its contributions towards the development of your project? Please address that.

Jonathan Greenblatt, All for Good: Well, I think that, as mentioned earlier – I’d have to go back and look, Micah, at the About Us page and look at it line for line and what it says about or not about Social Actions and you know, to be frank I haven’t done that –

Micah Sifry, Personal Democracy Forum/TechPresident: The last I looked it doesn’t say anything, so I guess the question is, should it?

Jonathan Greenblatt, All for Good: That’s certainly something we can think about. Again, I wasn’t involved directly in conversations with Social Actions when we wrote the initial project requirements for this, nor did I know about Social Actions at that time, nor have our developers been working with them. I mean, I have enormous respect for the work that Social Actions is doing and I think I’m excited about the collaboration. They weren’t involved in this process at the earliest stages.

Micah Sifry, Personal Democracy Forum/TechPresident: Peter, do you want to comment?

Peter Deitz, Social Actions: I like – I prefer to just post what I was earlier regarding my interactions with the different players involved that created All for Good. I don’t want this to focus entirely on the back story. I do want to request Jonathan’s and Ami’s request that we look forward to what can truly serve the nonprofit sector. Going forward, I see building out All for Good platform in the open. Not requesting that people submit formed information and then review it, but really create a wiki for the All for Good platform and where it could go. I think that would be a tremendous contribution, Jonathan. And I also will say that Social Actions has every intent to gather groups like this in the future, everyone on this call, to explore what genuine collaboration can and should look like in the nonprofit tech community both from the technical perspective like XML feeds, APIs, etc. but also from a mission-focused perspective. So we will be sending out invites to additional calls like this in which there’s room for exploring what genuine collaboration looks like. I would respond quickly to one thing that Jonathan said around his experience with Ethos Water. The fact is, in our sector, there is a tremendous amount of competition already. Social Actions is committed to not innovating based on competition, but innovating through collaboration with other entities whether they’re our platform partners, developer opportunities, or other aggregations. I’ll make the point as well that we do recognize that for all of our missions to be fulfilled, to move volunteerism and philanthropy forward, there should be many aggregations in this ecosystem. So we welcome All for Good in that respect and we’re excited to see other aggregations emerge. What we don’t want to see happen is for each new aggregation of volunteer opportunities or other kinds of action to add to the burden and the time and attention required from the contributing platforms. If that makes sense or not I can elaborate further. Basically we don’t feel that platforms who are serving nonprofits directly should have to spend more – there should be systems in place to make new aggregations form on the fly that doesn’t require time and attention from each and every platform when new aggregations come about.

Christine Egger, Social Actions: Let me convey a question that’s come from the text chat from Rolf Kleef, who’s calling in from the Netherlands on NABUUR. Rolf, I’ll allow you to make your contribution directly if the connection is good.

Rolf Kleef, NABUUR: OK I just have to unmute my microphone. We had a couple of discussions here in the Netherlands between different platforms also about exchanging information in whatever way possible. Apart from all kinds of standards that are available or can be developed, a lot of issues that came up were about privacy and kind of legal issues of getting data in social networks from one platform onto another, and the lack of a standard in that area or emerging standard, something like Creative Commons for copyright, but then for privacy or something. I’d be curious to know whether Social Actions or All for Good is doing anything in that direction.

Peter Deitz, Social Actions: I think it’s probably more of a question for Jonathan than for us. Our scope is really limited to aggregation of the opportunities themselves and distribution, and the All for Good platform does have the opportunity to track your actions, your volunteer opportunities that you like, and then share them with friends. So privacy might be more of an issue that Jonathan can speak to.

Jonathan Greenblatt, All for Good: Privacy is certainly something we care about. We have a privacy policy right on the AllforGood.org website that crystallizes our approach to user data. That’s probably the best place to go to learn about what we’re doing in that.

Christine Egger, Social Actions. OK. Kevin with CharityCHAMPS has a question on the chat. Kevin, if you’re able to unmute and ask that question directly that’d be helpful. I’ll give you just a moment to do so and then I’ll repeat the question. [Pause] Kevin from CharityCHAMPS is asking for a commitment from All for Good to synergize with Social Actions, to connect with us on the resources, which I this is what we’re hearing –

Jonathan Greenblatt, All for Good: All for Good – just so we’re clear – All for Good is a volunteer effort. We don’t have – the nonprofit entity that has been created we don’t have a whole lot of resources. Everyone like myself, like with this call today, is just volunteering their time. I think what we are committed to do is to grow the sector and committed to explore ways to collaborate with everyone. So I don’t know if I would say our goal is to get any one player additional resources. What I would rather see us do is explore ways to work together, to give everyone an opportunity to enable more Americans to serve, because at the end of the day, I think our highest priority is not our selves on this call, it’s the communities that we’re attempting to serve, and it’s not our self-preservation, it’s how do we grow this space and engage more Americans and the broader citizenry in service. So we’re excited to form partnerships that help us to achieve that objective.

Christine Egger, Social Actions: Thank you. We’re opening back up again. I haven’t caught any new questions on the chat but please feel free to unmute and speak up or raise your hand with the text window if you’d like.

Peter Deitz, Social Actions: Christine, what about yourself? Do you have a question for Jonathan or any observations? You’ve been involved in this process as well.

Christine Egger, Social Actions: No observations – well, no, no observations. I do appreciate, Jonathan, your RSVPing for the call this morning, and we’ve created a profile for All for Good as one of our platform partners on the site and are glad to be including you in the conversations going forward.

Jonathan Greenblatt, All for Good: That’s great, and again I would say – I don’t know how much time we have left – I would simply reciprocate. I would say that I’ve had the chance to spend a little bit of time with Peter a few times on the phone, and more recently in Los Angeles where I’m based, and I’m excited for the chance to learn more from Social Actions, and again to learn more from everyone on this call. At the end of the day I feel like the tone is a little bit difficult but I know we’re all committed to the same objectives which is how do we get more Americans to serve, how do we strengthen our communities by using our technologies and other services to make them better, and I think that the fact that we share those missions I hope we can work together to achieve those aims.

Christine Egger, Social Actions: Great, thank you. JD Lasica is on the line. JD, if you have a chance to unmute you have a question about the next steps that are being taken. I know that Peter outlined some earlier, but do you have some specific questions about what you hope to see? Again, I’ll wait just a moment for you to unmute if you’re able to.

JD Lasica, SocialBrite.org: Christine, are you able to hear me?

Christine Egger, Social Actions: Yes, thank you.

JD Lasica, SocialBrite: Yes, I was just wondering specifically for any of the organizations who are involved, who are on this chat, on this call, are their specific next steps that are being suggested for us to go forward, beyond spreading the word and talking with our developers about getting involved with the API. What are the collaborative opportunities that we’re talking about here?

Christine Egger, Social Actions: Peter?

Peter Deitz, Social Actions: I’ve sent a number of collaborative opportunities to Jonathan and to Google developers. The one that we’ve honed in on is that between Social Actions and All for Good there is an opportunity to mirror datasets, and unfortunately we haven’t honed in on an opportunity to advocate together for universal standards that help publish opportunities to make a difference, nor have we come up with a way to really make the resources to developers to ensure that they are fully aware of widgets and applications that have been developed off of the Social Actions API that might come in handy when developing All for Good applications. Possibly, a shout-out to the Social Actions toolkit would be helpful in the developer section for All for Good. But I’m going to be following up specifically with Jonathan on those sorts of opportunities.

Christine Egger, Social Actions: Joe Solomon is asking, Jonathan, if you could share – actually let me pause for a second – JD, did that answer your question?

JD Lasica, SocialBrite: Sure, as long as there’s follow up and we can figure out how to contribute to this going forward.

Christine Egger, Social Actions: Sure. We’ll be pursuing it as much as we’re allowed. Joe Solomon’s question, Jonathan, if you can address this, is sharing the appspot link for the All for Good or Footprint code. That’s certainly something we can include with the notes if that’s not something that you have on hand right now.

Jonathan Greenblatt, All for Good: I’m trying to pull it up, will see if I can.

Joe Solomon, EngageJoe.com: Jonathan, I’m happy to add the link. I have it.

Jonathan Greenblatt, All for Good: Who’s that, is that Peter?

Joe Solomon, EngageJoe.com: This is Joe Solomon.

Jonathan Greenblatt, All for Good: OK, great.

Christine Egger, Social Actions: Rolf Kleef, earlier, was looking for specific links to the API and source code and we’ll distribute those as best as we’re able to as well. We’ve got just about three minutes before we come to the top of the hour. Are there any final words or questions or suggestions? We do look forward to convening additional conference calls on this and related topics going forward, so we’ll share some dates quickly with the notes. Anybody would like to take advantage of the last few minutes we have available here?

George Weiner, DoSomething: Hi, this is George from DoSomething.

Christine Egger, Social Actions: Hi, George.

George Weiner, DoSomething: I just have a quick question I posted in the comments. I wondered what you guys have coming up in the roadmap for vetting teen-specific volunteer opportunities for safety and quality.

Jonathan: We’re sourcing the opportunities directly from our partners, like Idealist and Network for Good, the Hands On Network, etc. so they’re doing some measure of vetting on their own for those kinds of opportunities. I would be very open to talking with you and Nancy, think about how we can do a better job of doing that, site provides service that’s safe and secure for all ages. So let’s make that a point to follow up on. To that end, to follow up on that specifically or anything else, I’ve posted my email address in the chat room. I’ll repeat it out loud for people to hear. It’s jonathan dot greenblatt at gmail dot com. I’m extremely open to talking with all of you and following up on this call to make sure that if you have questions that I was not able to answer or if you want to talk specifically about aspects of All for Good, and just in the interest of continuing the dialogue, I’d be delighted to correspond with you.

Peter Deitz, Social Actions: Along those lines I’ll add that we will be posting the notes from this call on My Social Actions which is our social network, and I’d encourage also to post questions or feedback from the call and ideas on how our sector can be served through intentional collaborations. On that blog post, there’s definitely something to be gained from having these conversations and doing these follow-ups very much out in the open.

Christine Egger, Social Actions: With that, we’ll wrap up at the top of the hour here. And again thank you sincerely to every single one of you for joining this call and for making time for this conversation today. We will let you know as soon as notes have been posted, and as Peter said please don’t hesitate to follow up with us in the meantime with any questions or requests and thank you again. This is Christine Egger and on behalf of Social Actions, thank you very much for joining the call.

Tom Dawkins, Ashoka: Thank you so much for organizing this.

Peter Deitz, Social Actions: You’re very welcome. Thank you.

Christine Egger, Social Actions: Take care, everybody.

:end

Transcript ~ text chat

08:47 Tom W. [Wanted to make sure you saw this] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/all-for-good-a-new-craigs_b_208407.html
08:48 ChristineEgger We did ~ welcome Tom ~
08:51 Peter Hi Tom, Dean, and Christine
08:52 Peter Hi Tom, I haven't read the Huff Post piece yet -- just found out about it through Christine
08:52 Peter I'll have a look after the call
08:57 Peter Deitz Tom and Dean, Feel free to join the call -- we already have VMatch on the call
08:57 Tom W. I'll be there!
08:57 Peter Deitz Conference Dial-in Number: 616 597-8000 Participant Access Code: 1002410#
09:00 Dean I am calling in now
09:00 Dean Just so that you know, Tamzin apologises - she has had to attend to an urgent matter and asked that I apologise for her.
09:01 ChristineEgger Please click "edit nickname" so your real name appears next to your message
09:02 Peter Deitz Hi everyone,
09:02 Peter Deitz Thanks for joining the call
09:06 Tom D. Hi all, Tom here from Ashoka
09:06 jacob colker Jacob from Extraordinaries here
09:06 Tom Steinberg Tom Steinberg, mySociety - Ashoka fellow :)
09:06 Beverley Pomeroy Bev from Pinc
09:06 Mike Everett-Lane is someone playing the piano?
09:06 Romina Hi everyone, Romina from NABUUR.com :)
09:06 Jo Anne from TakingITGlobal Hello this is Jo Anne from TakingITGlobal www.TIGweb.org
09:06 Tom W. Tom Watson from CauseWired - hey all
09:06 Francisco Pereira – TIG Hi Francisco Pereira from TakingITGLobal
09:06 Mike Everett-Lane it might be hold music?
09:06 Tom D. Hi Tom! I'm a huge fan of mySociety, great to have you here.
09:06 Mike_Lee_aarp Mike Lee from the AARP.org web team
09:07 Sebastian – Razoo I think the main line was muted
09:07 Romina is the line muted?
09:07 Tom Steinberg And there's the piano again
09:07 Better The World Mark from Better The World - happy to be on the call.
09:07 Dean - SA Social Investment Exchange Dean Hand from SA Social Investment Exchange
09:08 celine takatsuno hi everyone - great to see so many people here, happy to be here
09:08 Tom W. Hi Jonathan - glad you're here
09:08 Dean - SA Social Investment Exchange no objections to recording
09:09 Jonathan Greenblatt thanks Tom, I am delighted to be here! its an amazing group of people
09:09 Parul NGO Post Hi all .. this is Parul from NGOpost.org .. we are a community for sharing social welfare news and ideas
09:09 Beverley Pomeroy imagine if we had a meeting like this once a week, the impact we would have on the world...amazing
09:09 Rolf Kleef Rolf Kleef here, from Amsterdam - fighting with Meebo...
09:09 Scott Stadum Scott Stadum from Idealist.org
09:09 jacob colker Hey scott!
09:10 Tom W. Yeah it really is - amazing brainpower and commitment!
09:10 sundeep sundeep from kiva here
09:10 Cesar – DonorsChoose.org Cesar from DonorsChoose.org
09:10 Tom W. Sundeep - congrats on USA initiatve!
09:10 Parul NGOPost.org yes, this call was a great idea!
09:10 Deron Triff (Changents.com) Hi Sundeep. Hope all is well..
09:10 ChristineEgger Welcome Cesar, everyone ~ Thank you, Parul!
09:13 Tom Steinberg "an open source database of opportunities to do good, within the volunteerism sector in the US"
09:13 Dean - SA Social Investment Exchange what was that foundation?
09:13 ChristineEgger Dean, Craigslist Foundation
09:14 Dean - SA Social Investment Exchange tx
09:18 Parul NGOPost.org scott - I am a big fan of idealist.org .. also saw the new new idealistnews .. would like to speak to you about it sometime
09:18 Deron Triff (Changents.com) Could Jonathan describe the platform?
09:19 Beverley Pomeroy who led this initiative initially?
09:20 Tom Steinberg I think there needs to be some clarity about how all the different volunteering databases in the US are going to interrelate
09:20 Jonathan Greenblatt I can describe the platform
09:20 Jonathan Greenblatt I woulud be happy to do that if christine mhgt allow us to do it
09:20 Tom Steinberg in the UK we've seen poor coordination between 'rival' volunteering databases, especially when politicians wake up and decide they need a new one
09:21 Beverley Pomeroy How do you get involved with the platform or find more information to get involved?
09:22 Rolf Kleef is there a link for the xml and api documentation?
09:22 Better The World What type of Partners is all for Good looking for i.e. (content , members, ideas etc...) and what's the process to follow up to get involved?
09:22 Sebastian - Razoo I would also like to see/understand the platform:it sounds vague
09:22 Jonathan Greenblatt I would be delighted to answer these questions
09:23 Tom Steinberg Worth describing the platform using the question "How does it help citizens do things they can't otehrwise?"
09:23 Jonathan Greenblatt This is strange. do you want me to respond?
09:23 ChristineEgger Rolf, we'll describe the technical pending links soon
09:23 Tom Steinberg We need to know what it *IS* before we can understand people's experience, really
09:24 Dawn-DreamBank Is this only for non-profits and volunteer acts? We are hybrid trying to bring change in a different way and not sure if we fit here or not.
09:24 Tom Steinberg Please explain what it is!
09:24 Tom Steinberg And how it is NOT like other platforms... :)
09:24 Siegfried Will All for Good be open to international civic engagement opportunities?
09:25 Jonathan Greenblatt Again, I am pleased to answer these questions.
09:25 Beverley Pomeroy all for good platform auto picks up your internet connection and displays closest city, similar to craigslist
09:25 Beverley Pomeroy interesting
09:26 Parul NGOPost.org is there any plan to expand it to geos outside the U.S?
09:29 ChristineEgger Siegfried and Parul, will make sure to forward your question re: international expansion
09:29 Beverley Pomeroy I don't want this to become exactly what the criticism is in the nonprofit world, competitive feelings create barriers
09:30 Rolf Kleef +1 Beverly
09:31 Romina I share your sentiments, Beverley
09:31 ChristineEgger Dawn, has your question been answered regarding the scope of All for Good's actions?
09:31 Rachel - Apathy is Boring can we get rid of the spammer, please?
09:31 Jonathan Greenblatt I have not had a chance to answer Dawn's questions
09:31 Dawn-DreamBank thx christine, not yet.
09:32 Sebastian - Razoo why, long-term, would any platform other than allforgood need to exist?
09:32 Beverley Pomeroy Jonathan, how do we contact you for conversation beyond this chat room?
09:32 Jonathan Greenblatt it seems like it would be useful to use the presence of all these organizations to answer tehir questions rather than spend time talking about events taht took place more than 12 mos ago
09:32 ChristineEgger This is an open forum so cannot get rid of spammers. Apologies for the distraction
09:32 Mike Everett-Lane you can scroll to their name and hit "block"
09:32 Sebastian - Razoo I would imagine it will have a huge marketing push - and over time - why would any end-user decide to go anywhere else?
09:32 ChristineEgger Jonathan, the purpose of this call is to create a public record of our experiences with All for Good, as well as to outline steps we're taking going forward.
09:32 Ryan whats he saying that the dataset will be duplicated? whats the point of that
09:32 Sebastian - Razoo it looks really impressive though
09:33 mgifford Not sure ifit's been brought up yet, but I was curious about interaction with http://openwiser.org/
09:33 Jonathan Greenblatt I am open to collaborate wtih everyhone on this call as I am not sure that this format has allowed the group to rasie questions and explore opportunities for collaboration - you can reach me at jonathan.greenblatt-at-gmail-dot-com
09:34 Deron Triff (Changents.com) Christine, could we take a step back and have Jonathan describe the vision for All for Good? We understand the politics, but can we get a better understanding of All for Good. We can talk about integration later.
09:34 Jonathan Greenblatt again, please feel free to email me so that we can set up time to engage and explore what might be possible
09:34 celine takatsuno mirroring and shared feed format are critical to lifting the space and collaboration - terrific
09:34 Sebastian - Razoo Jonathan - what's your email address?
09:34 Jonathan Greenblatt and perhaps we will arrange some type of call
09:34 ChristineEgger Deron, will definitely make room for that during the open discussion -- thanks --
09:34 Jonathan Greenblatt jonathan-dot-greenblatt-at-gmail-com
09:35 Beverley Pomeroy donors want choice of action...so aggragation of all our platforms can only help, and long term...make a bigger impact on our world, in our communities
09:37 MicahSifry Jonathan et al: Can you directly address Peter and Christine's assertion that their contribution to All for Good's devt isn't reflected accurately on your "About" page
09:39 ChristineEgger Micah, thank you for the question. Will be prompting this momentarily.
09:39 Mike Everett-Lane will the AFG platform focus on volunteering only?
09:39 Dave Boyer - Network for Social Responsibility Is there an advanced search featuere? Or just the one text box?
09:39 Rolf Kleef so to repeat my question: where do I find the code, the API, etc? just a link please :-)
09:40 Sebastian - Razoo at the very bottom of the site - click on "about us"- and a request for api is there
09:41 Ryan Scott - Causecast.org afg is just volunteering, at least for now, from what i understand
09:41 joesolomon collaborate by exploring open standards - then everybody can go to town
09:41 JDLasica Beyond today's recording, is this the best place to find a summary of this initiative? http://www.allforgood.org/about
09:41 MicahSifry too noisy here
09:41 Beverley Pomeroy anyone interested in having a regular call like this to discuss our mutual desire to do good online and create a linkedIn group or something?
09:41 Jonathan Greenblatt i will send a link with the code
09:42 MicahSifry i'm sorry, but i'm in a very noisy room
09:42 Beverley Pomeroy It would help with situations like this so we all contribute to the greater good, same mandate
09:42 MicahSifry someone tell Phil Noble to mute his phone
09:42 AndySternberg *6 to mute Phil
09:43 Dave Boyer - Network for Social Responsibility Jonathan, can you speak to: a) the sources of supply (i.e. handson, volunteer match, RSS feeds, etc, b) planned capabilities, c) plans to attract traffic.
09:43 Dave Boyer - Network for Social Responsibility planned "search capabilities"
09:44 Tom Steinberg My question, as an outsider in Europe: What was the failure of previous volunteering sites that meant the US market needed a new site?
09:44 Mike Everett-Lane I think a regular forum would be great -- we'd be happy to host it (although perhaps not with Meebo...)
09:44 Mike Everett-Lane we = Social Actions
09:45 ChristineEgger Absolutely, Mike, we definitely look forward to convening regular conversations on these particular developments in the sector, as well as the broader work we're all involved in
09:45 Dave Boyer - Network for Social Responsibility Thanks!
09:47 Siegfried can we move on
09:47 Ryan Scott - Causecast.org indignance is not a strategy and its wasting time.
09:47 Ryan Scott - Causecast.org move on
09:47 Rolf Kleef +1
09:47 DOSOMETHING QUESTION: What are you doing to ensure quality/safety of your opportunities especially for teens?
09:47 Mike_Lee_aarp Love the open wiki idea.
09:47 Tom W. Regular conversations like this one could be a homerun for the whole sector - I do think SA should be recognized for its leadership
09:48 ChristineEgger Let us know if there are additional questions about the technical steps we'll be taking
09:49 Kevin-CharityCHAMPS christine, did you get my question?
09:49 Beverley Pomeroy competitive switch to co-opetition... :)
09:49 Rolf Kleef we had a couple of inter-platform discussions here in the Netherlands in the last week, overarching issue that came up (apart from standards) was also about privacy and other legal and organisational "alignment" -- is any work being done on that?
09:49 ChristineEgger I'm sorry, Kevin, I didn't. Can you repeat here?
09:49 Dean - SA Social Investment Exchange Christine, I am going to sign out - might well pick up with you offline and perhaps with johnaton. Also interested in further collaboration. Have found some of the discussion for our context here in South Africa
09:49 Jonathan Greenblatt I would be open to responding to each question if people can send them to me directly or reach out to talk via phone
09:50 ChristineEgger Thank you, Dean ~
09:50 Beverley Pomeroy data 'ownership' is important, good question
09:51 Kevin-CharityCHAMPS Jonathan: We're all trying to do good things here, and All for Good has managed to achieve great access to resources. Since there seem to be such synergies with Social Actions, will you be committed to helping them connect with such resources?
09:51 Beverley Pomeroy beyond the surface of any platform data is a very coveted
09:51 Kevin-CharityCHAMPS (For example the google developers that Peter asked for in his TechTalk, although I'm sure they know better)
09:51 VanceBane Bored? Check out this fun little game. Only takes a second. See if you can win
http://thesupakorean.mybrute.com
09:52 Kevin-CharityCHAMPS sorry, hard to unmute here
09:52 Beverley Pomeroy why reinvent the wheel...All for Good and SA could bring their solution, their technology and platforms together
09:53 DOSOMETHING What are you doing to vet opportunities especially for teens?
09:53 Ryan Scott - Causecast.org @DOSOMETHING - Causecast is working on this
09:53 JDLasica what are next steps?
09:54 Mark Bachman - Better The World it would be great if there was a call for partners with some details on what types of partners fit.
09:54 DOSOMETHING was this discussed? @ryan
09:54 Tom W. RT @jdlasica what are the next steps?
09:56 joesolomon Jonathon: Can you share the appspot link the allforgood/footprint code?
09:56 ChristineEgger Great suggestion, Mark, we look forward to doing so ~
09:57 Mike_Lee_aarp easy: Google "google allforgood"
09:57 rachel weidinger Would an independent standars setting collaborative be useful?
09:57 Jonathan Greenblatt http://www.allforgood.org/docs/api.html
09:57 Rolf Kleef rachel: that was one of the sggestions here in The Netherlands too
09:58 JDLasica It would be nice to get a list of all the participants on this call, including links to their organizations/initiatives, if that's possible.
09:58 joesolomon Jonathon - That link doesnt seem to go to the code
09:58 rachel weidinger I'm definitely thinking it might accellerate our getting more awesome done faster. :)
09:59 Mike_Lee_aarp http://code.google.com/p/footprint2009dev/
09:59 joesolomon Thanks Mike!
09:59 Ryan Scott - Causecast.org linkedin group
09:59 Mark Bachman - Better The World Great idea getting all of these players together. Very tough format. Thanks for the effort everyone. Exciting to hear all the good uses of social media for social good.
09:59 MicahSifry Thanks for putting this together. Appreciate everyone's openness.
10:00 Ryan Scott - Causecast.org thanks everyone!
10:00 AndySternberg thanks everyone
10:00 Dawn-DreamBank thanks for makingit happen sa!
10:00 celine takatsuno thanks for organizing this!
10:00 Rolf Kleef thanks!
10:00 Mike_Lee_aarp thanks. really hope this dialog continues
10:00 ChristineEgger Thank you, everyone. Feel free to continue to use this chat window to post additional thoughts/ questions ~ we'll fold all of them into future open discussions ~
10:01 Romina thanks for organizing this. looking forward to more discussions. bye, everyone!
10:01 Kevin-CharityCHAMPS thanks, christine
10:01 Siegfried many thanks. wonderful way to drink a whiskey (19.00 hrs here) and take part in an important conversation
10:02 Tom W. Agreed on 'important conversation' - this sector needs more group discussions!
10:02 Mike Everett-Lane how often would a group call / chat like this be useful? Every other week?
10:05 ChristineEgger Good question, Mike. Ideas?
10:16 ChristineEgger FYI we'll be posting a full set of comprehensive notes, and list of participants, as soon as possible. Looking forward to connecting again soon ~
10:23 ChristineEgger Suzanne Perry has just posted an article about the All for Good initiative on the Chronicle of Philanthropy site:
10:23 ChristineEgger http://tr.im/oisz

:end

I am not an ATM machine - Your charity from the donor perspective

2009-06-10T15:30:00.000Z

Below are the video and slides from my presentation at My Charity Connects in Toronto, June 9, 2009. I will be adding the transcript at some point soon.

I Am Not An ATM Machine: Your Charity From The Donor Perspective from CanadaHelps on Vimeo.

I am not an ATM machine - Your charity from the donor perspective

View more OpenOffice presentations from SocialActions.

John Haydon creates the first Social Actions music video!

2009-05-21T01:30:00.000Z

The inimitable John Haydon has just created Social Actions' first music video! Karma, the action cloud, tweeting goodness, L-O-V-E, it's all here :)

Thank you, John!

Join Me at My Charity Connects, Toronto, June 8-9, 2009

2009-05-21T00:30:00.000Z

During the week of June 8-12, 2009, Toronto is playing host to an impressive array of social tech events and conferences. The NetChange Week, organized by the Social Innovation Generation team at MaRS, includes a two-day a workshop called My Charity Connects.

I will be presenting a keynote at My Charity Connects, called "I am not an ATM machine" - Your Charity from the Donor Perspective. The presentation will outline new opportunities to tap the full range of resources and activities that supporters can bring to your organization. Among other things, I will be making the point that social networks and social media are far better at drawing on the connections and creativity of individuals than at extracting donations.

Please let me know if you plan to join me at My Charity Connects.

I have included a full description of the conference below:

My Charity Connects is a two-day conference that aims to build the capacity of the charitable sector by connecting charities to online technology – in easy and cost-effective ways. With the pace at which technology is advancing, the bridge between donors and charities is ever increasing. Though donors are ready to raise awareness and funds for their favourite causes, many are eager to do so in technologically innovative ways … ways that aren’t so familiar to, or practised by, many charities. It’s not that charities aren’t interested, it’s that they’re strapped for both financial and human resources, doubtful that the investment will reap the rewards, and perhaps a little fearful of the seemingly complicated online space and all it has to offer. It’s time to bridge the gap.

On June 8 & 9, 2009, with an expected attendance of 250 people, CanadaHelps will be hosting the My Charity Connects Conference for those charities interested in enhancing their connection and engagement with donors online, with the aim to:

(*) Reduce the fear and frustration of technology often felt by small and medium sized charities;

(*) Engage the charitable sector in an interactive manner to demonstrate the value and ease of technology and how it can assist in their efforts;

(*) Provide opportunities for individuals from the sector to network and learn best practices from one another; and

(*) Build the capacity of the sector through their use of technology and improve their overall comfort level with new media in general.

The Lend4Health Journey: Designing for Better Health

2009-05-18T19:30:00.000Z

Lend4Health has been selected by a panel of five judges to be one of 10 finalists in the "Designing for Better Health" competition sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and being held on Ashoka's Changemakers website. Online, public voting is currently open through May 28, 2009; three winners will be announced on June 1, 2009. Each of the three winners will receive a $5,000 prize.

There were 281 entries to this competition, from 29 countries. The fact that Lend4Health was one of the finalists is quite exciting!

Voters must first register on the Changemakers website. The link to register and vote is:
http://www.changemakers.net/en-us/designingforbetterhealth

Lend4Health is one of the 50+ Social Actions platforms. Lend4Health facilitates community-funded, interest-free micro-loans as a creative funding option for individuals and groups seeking optimal health. Currently, Lend4Health is facilitating loans for the "biomedical" treatment of children and adults with autism spectrum and related disorders. Other health issues may be included on Lend4Health in the future.

Hope Phones: Your Old Cell Phone Can Make a Difference

2009-05-18T14:32:54.000Z

If you've been eyeing that new mobile toy, here's another incentive to go for it: thanks to a new mobile health initiative, instead of simply discarding your old cell phone, you can now put it to use as a valuable tool in the fight against HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis in the developing world.

At the helm of this initiative, aptly called Hope Phones, is FrontlineSMS: Medic, a nonprofit organization advancing rural healthcare networks in the developing world through the implementation of sustainable, appropriate technologies delivered through mobile phones. Its first pilot project distributed cell phones to community health workers in 100 rural villages in Malawi, saving thousands of dollars in travel and hospital costs and doubling the number of patients treated for tuberculosis in the catchment area. (Learn more about FrontlineSMS: Medic via this video featured on CNN last week.)

Hope Phones is a nationwide mobile phone collection campaign supporting mHealth programs at medical clinics in over 30 countries. The campaign will make use of nearly 450,000 cell phones discarded every day in the US to provide phones for clinics and healthcare workers in the developing world.

HopePhones.org allows donors to print a free shipping label and send their old phone in to The Wireless Source, a global leader in wireless device recycling. The phone’s value allows FrontlineSMS:Medic to purchase usable, recycled cell phones for healthcare workers.

“Hope Phones lets you give your old cell phone new life on the frontline of global health. That’s powerful,” said Josh Nesbit, Executive Director of FrontlineSMS:Medic. “Just one, old blackberry will allow us to purchase 3-5 cell phones for healthcare workers, bringing another 250 families onto the health grid via SMS. Old phones can help save lives.”

How can you help?

1. Visit www.HopePhones.org and donate your old phones.
2. Spread the word!
• Email your friends, family, classmates and coworkers.
• Post on Facebook and become a fan of the Hope Phones page.
• Tell the world on Twitter - use #HopePhones as a tag so we can thank you.
• Let us know if you want the Hope Phones widget for your website or blog.
3. Contact info@hopephones.org if you’d like to help set up a Hope Phones collection center.

Embedded Philanthropy Blog Series, Sponsored by Telecom for Charity

2009-05-18T06:30:00.000Z

From the RED campaign to CREDO cellular phone service, embedded philanthropy has emerged as an innovative and scalable form of corporate social responsibility. Social Actions is convening the "Embedded Philanthropy Blog Series, Sponsored by Telecom for Charity" in order to draw attention to the practice of embedding donations to nonprofits in the sale of commercial goods and services.

Social Actions has invited leading philanthropy bloggers to respond to the statement, "Embedded philanthropy is transforming business as usual for the public good." Between May 19th and May 31st, a number of bloggers will post their responses to this statement.

As the blog posts are submitted, we will link to them below. Here are the first two submissions:

Embedded Philanthropy, URL Shorteners for Good, and Maximizing Meaning
"... I don't think that this sort of embedded philanthropy is going to in any way diminish more "traditional" forms of philanthropic action. I think it's power is that it reflects a growing desire I think we're experiencing to integrate our values with our commercial and career desicions. We're increasingly all about maximizing value and meaning - both the value and meaning we derive from the array of our experiences and the value and meaning we contribute to communities and causes we care about."
- From Nathaniel Whittemore of Social Entrepreneurship @ Change.org

Embedded Philanthropy: Does It Matter?
"... Maybe embedded giving will prove to increase the amount Americans donate to charity each year by presenting consumers with an option that makes them behaviorally more likely to donate. But for now, I have to say that I see embedded giving as an indicator that Americans have an increasing interest in philanthropy rather than as a driving force of that interest."
- From Sean Stannard-Stockton of Tactical Philanthropy

Embedded Philanthropy: Will it Ever Really Add Up?
"... I think the real question is how can we convert a new era of embedded philanthropists into passionate advocates for the causes to which they donate? If we can take the mindset of the conscious consumer and translate this kind of behavior into our giving habits, then embedded philanthropy will be more than a trend for "good." It has the potential to drive a deeper kind of philanthropic engagement."
- From Kari Dunn Saratovsky of the Social Citizens

Best Practices for Embedded Philanthropy
"... If you incorporate these best practices into your embedded philanthropy program, you would welcome and promote transparency. If you use corporate philanthropy as window-dressing, beware. The consumer public is going to figure it out and you’ll end up looking like a phony–a death sentence in today’s authenticity-adoring society."
- From Sharon Schneider of The Philanthropic Family

Embedded philanthropy
"... embedded philanthropy offers you, the consumer, no benefits, and has a couple of costs: (1) it narrows your options as a consumer (for example, you buy (RED) clothing instead of whatever clothing you want); (2) it narrows your options as a donor (i.e., the amount and recipient of your giving is determined by the company, not by you) ... Why not just buy what you want and give what you want?"
- From Holden Karnofsky of GiveWell

The Final Word on Embedded Philanthropy
"... There is at least one looming irony about embedded giving. As it becomes more embedded it may become less of a distinguishing factor for a merchant ... Remember, embedded giving is as much (if not more) of a merchandising tactic as a fund/awareness raising tactic. In this case, embedded giving could die out from its own "success.""
- From Lucy Bernholz of Philanthropy 2173

Embedded Philanthropy: A New Age of Giving
"... We are at the beginning of a new age of giving and embedded philanthropy is one of the first signs. Everyday people are starting to see and understand that regardless of the amount of money they make they can make an impact in their world. As people have started to realize this businesses are following suit allowing people to give back through ordinary purchases."
- From Jason Dick of A Small Change

When Embedded Philanthropy Works (Hint: It’s All in the Story-telling)
"... If embedded philanthropy can be used to bring more attention to important causes, maybe its rise is more than an indicator – but a potentially important tool in recruiting a higher percentage of consumers to become more active philanthropists in general. Has RED increased attention for the African HIV/AIDS pandemic? Have the ads for Tom’s Shoes increased consumer empathy toward children living in poverty? To me, those are key questions to ask – in addition to counting the dollars raised."
- From Tom Watson of CauseWired

Thank you Nathaniel, Sean, Kari, Sharon, Holden, Lucy, Jason and Tom for your thoughtful contributions. If you find these excerpts thought-provoking, please read the full blog entries and leave your comments to keep the conversation going.

We hope that this blog series will encourage interesting discussions on the state of embedded philanthropy in today's economy.

About Telecom for Charity
Telecom for Charity is a socially responsible way to procure and maintain your business' voice and data services. Our no-cost consultative services will assist you in selecting the best possible solution for your phone, internet, and bandwidth needs. The Telecom for Charity Initiative puts forth five percent of your monthly telecom spend towards whatever cause you wish to support. You can be socially responsible and improve your company's bottom line at the very same time. Join us on our endeavor to hit our first goal of donating one million dollars through socially responsible everyday business telecommunication services.

Learn more about Telecom for Charity >>

Become a fan of Telecom for Charity on Facebook >>

Join Telecom for Charity's LinkedIn Group '>>

10 Ways to Change the World Through Social Media

2009-05-12T18:03:59.000Z

Citizen journalism, open government, status updates, community building, information sharing, crowdsourcing, and the election of a President.

Editor's note: This is first guest post from Max Gladwell.

Our children will inherit a world profoundly changed by the combination of technology and humanity that is social media. They'll take for granted that their voices can be heard and that a social movement can be launched from their laptop. They'll take for granted that they are connected and interconnected with hundreds of millions of people at any given moment. And they'll take for granted that a black man is or was President of the United States.

What's most profound is that these represent parts of a greater whole. They represent a shift in power from centralized institutions and organizations to the People they represent. It is the evolution of democracy by way of technology, and we are all better for it.

For most of us, social media has changed our lives in some meaningful way. Collectively it is changing the world for good. Given the pace of innovation and adoption, change has become a constant. Every so often we find the need to stop and reflect on its most recent and noteworthy developments, hence the following list.

Please note this is not a top-10 list, nor are these listed in any particular order. It's also incomplete. So we ask that you add to this conversation in the comments. If you'd like to Retweet this post or take the conversation to Twitter or FriendFeed, please use the hashtag #10Ways.

1. Take Social Actions: The nonprofit organization Social Actions aggregates "opportunities to make a difference from over 50 online platforms" through its unique API. It recently held the Change the Web Challenge contest in order to inspire the most innovative applications for that API. The Social Actions Interactive Map won the $5,000 first prize. The result is a virtual tour of the world through the lens of social action. "People are volunteering, donating, signing petitions, making loans and doing other social actions as we speak -- all over the world. To capture the context of the where, this project uses sophisticated techniques to extract location information from full text paragraphs." You can also join the Social Actions Community, which is powered by Ning...which now boasts more than one million individual social networks.

2. Twitter with a Purpose: This list could be exclusive to Twitter. The micro-blogging sensation was featured on our first two lists (a three-tweet), and it's certain to be a fixture. From Tweetsgiving, the virtual Thanksgiving feast, to the Twestival, which organized 202 off-line events around the world to benefit charity: water, it's become the de facto tool for organizing and taking action. Tweet Congress won the SXSW activism award, and celebrity Tweeps Ashton Kutcher and Kevin Rose Tweeted their two million followers about ending malaria. Max Gladwell recently initiated the #EcoMonday follow meme as a way to connect and organize the Green Twittersphere.

3. Visit White House 2.0: Inside of its first 100 days, the Obama administration has managed to set the historic benchmark for government transparency and accountability. The President's virtual town hall meeting used WhiteHouse.gov to crowdsource questions from his 300 million constituents, complete with voting to determine the ones he'd have to answer. All told, 97,937 people submitted 103,978 questions and cast 1,782,650 votes. The White House continues to raise the bar with its official Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter channels. In so doing President Obama is not just setting the standard for state and local government in the U.S. He's establishing the world standard. The Obama administration is spreading democracy not by force but through example. Because you don't have to be an American citizen to be a friend or follower of White House 2.0.

4. Claim your Zumbox: What happens when all mail can be sent and delivered online to any street address in a paperless form? That's the big question for Zumbox, which has created an online mail system with a digital mailbox for every U.S. street address. And while the answer to that question remains to be seen, it promises to be as liberating as it is disruptive. A key quality for Zumbox is that it's closed system much like that of Facebook, only instead of true identity it's true address. This will enable people to better connect with their communities including their neighbors, local businesses, and the mayor's office. The primary agent of change, though, might not be that this uses street addresses but that it enables direct and potentially viral feedback, which is a virtue that e-mail and the USPS do not offer. The first methods are to request exclusive paperless delivery and to block a sender, but others are certain to evolve such as real-time commenting and ways to share mail with friends, family, and colleagues. Welcome to Mail 2.0. (Disclosure: Zumbox is a client of Rob Reed, the founder of Max Gladwell.)

5. Host a Social Media Event: This is the year of the social media event. No meaningful gathering of people is complete without an interactive online audience, especially when it's so easy and cost effective to pull off. Essential tools include a broadband connection, laptop, video camera, projector, and screen. Add people and a purpose, such as entrepreneurship. Promote it through social media channels, and you have a social media event. A recent example in the green world is the Evolution of Green, which was hosted by Creative Citizen, a green wiki community. It celebrated the launch of a new Web property, EcoMatters, while also establishing a new Twitter tag. By posing the question, "How can we go from green hype to green habit?" and including the #GreenQ hashtag, it sparked a conversation between attendees and the Twittersphere in real time. Thus was born a new mechanism for getting answers to green questions via Twitter.

6. Travel the World: More than anyone else, Tim O'Reilly knows the potential for social media to change the world. In his opening keynote at this year's Web 2.0 Expo, he called for a new ethic in which we do more with less and create more value than we capture. This provided the context for SalaamGarage founder Amanda Koster, whose presentation followed O'Reilly's. The idea is that social media has enabled each of us to have an audience. Whether through Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, or a personal blog, each of us can have influence and reach. What's more, it can be used for good. SalaamGarage coordinates trips for citizen journalists (that means you) to places like India and Vietnam in conjunction with non-government organizations like Seattle-based Peace Trees. The destination is the story, as these humanitarian journalists report on the people they meet and discoveries they make. Their words, images, and video are posted to the social web to gain exposure and because these stories just need to be told.

7. Build It on Drupal: You may not have noticed, but the open-source Drupal content management system (CMS) has quickly become the dominant player on the social web. While we still prefer WordPress as a strict blogging application, Drupal has emerged as the go-to platform for building scalable, community-driven Web sites. It powers Recovery.gov, a key part of President Obama's commitment to transparency and accountability. PopRule uses it as a social news platform for politics. And Drupal will soon become the platform for Causecast, a site where "media, philanthropy, social networking, entertainment and education converge to serve a greater purpose." This is especially significant because Causecast CEO Ryan Scott is transitioning the site off of Ruby on Rails because Drupal has proved more efficient, user friendly, and cost effective. (Disclosure: Max Gladwell founder Rob Reed is co-founder of PopRule.)

8. Green Your iPhone: Looking for an organic diner within biking distance that has a three-star green rating? There's a app for that. It's called 3rd Whale, and you can download it for free. (Except that the star rating is actually a whale rating.) Complete with Facebook Connect, this iPhone app locates green products and businesses in 30 major North American cities. It uses the iPhone's dial function to select a category (food), sub-category (restaurants), and distance (walking, biking, or driving). In Santa Monica, this might give you Swingers diner for its selection of veggie and vegan fare. You could then get directions from your current location using the iPhone's built-in Google map, rate your experience on the three-whale scale, and write up a quick review. 3rd Whale recently released a new feature that integrates green-living tips, which can show how much energy or waste you'll save by taking a given action.

9. Unite the World Through Video: Matt's dancing around the world video inspired many to tears. Today, more than 20 million people have viewed his YouTube masterpiece, where he performs a kooky dance with the citizens of planet earth. The most recent example of this approach is Playing for Change, which connects the world through song. The project started in Santa Monica with a street performance of the classic Stand By Me and expanded to New Orleans, New Mexico, France, Brazil, Italy, Venezuela, South Africa, Spain, and The Netherlands. The project was superbly executed via social media, complete with a YouTube channel, MySpace, Facebook, and Blog. It's received tremendous mainstream media exposure and also benefits a foundation of the same name.

10. Rate a Company: The conversation about corporate social responsibility (CSR) takes place across the social web on blogs, Twitter, and YouTube, but a central hub for this information and opinion is still to be determined. SocialYell seeks to address this by building an online community around the CSR conversation, where users can submit reviews of companies together with nonprofit organizations and even public figures like Michelle Obama. The major topics are the Environment, Health, Social Equity, Consumer Advocacy, and Charity. The reviews are voted and commented on by the community in a Reddit-like fashion with both up (Yell) and down (shhh) voting. The site is relatively new and still gaining traction, but there's no question that a resource like this is needed to shine a bright light on CSR and and other related issues.

11. Publish a collective, simultaneous blog post on a universal topic: As Nigel Tufnel might say, this list goes to eleven. Let the #10Ways conversation begin...

Final note: This is Max Gladwell's third list of "10 Ways to Change the World Through Social Media." The first was posted a year ago today on Sustainablog.org, and the sequel followed five months later. If a single headline can capture the Max Gladwell raison d'etre, this is it.

Time and Social Action

2009-05-11T08:30:00.000Z

Note: The transcript below if from my keynote presentation at Connecting Up Australia in May 2009.

Thank you for the introduction.

A little more background on what Social Actions is building. We are an open source database of actions people can take in support of the nonprofits and causes they care about most. The database currently has 90,000 opportunities and is updated every 30 minutes.

Rather than create a destination search engine with this database, we want to distribute its contents to the websites, social networks, and mobile phones that millions of people use every day. We are encouraging third party developers to connect to the Social Actions API, and create innovative firefox extensions, WordPress blugins, iphone Apps, Facebook Apps, and other kinds of utilities that effectively distribute the calls to actions everywhere and anywhere.

Our mission is to make the web more action oriented.

We don’t want people to have to seek out opportunities to take action. We want the actions that are most relevant to them and would get them the most excited to find them. This sounds more difficult than it actually is. Think about distribution models in other sectors, particularly news and advertising. I learned about the Swine flu a few weeks ago, but I don’t know where. News of the swine flu found me (probably on Twitter).

We can make the web as action-oriented as we like. But if the actions themselves don’t get people excited in a social media context, then they will be ignored. For this reason, I am increasingly focusing on and giving attention to the kinds of calls to action that translate well on social networks.

I’m going to share with you a few campaigns and platforms that have done really well in the last year.
Interestingly, they all share one thing in common. They treat seconds, minutes, and hours as perfectly reasonable units of time in which to raise money, coordinate volunteers, and communicate with supporters.

Let’s start with fundraising.

Last year, during U.S. Thanksgiving, a woman named Stacy Monk decided to conduct a social experiment.

She put together a fundraising campaign called Tweetsgiving and invited people who are active on Twitter to state what they are thankful for in 140 characters or less, and to back that expression of gratitude with a donation of $10 to EpicChange.

The proceeds would be used to help build a school in Tanzania.

In 48 hours, Stacey’s Tweetsgiving campaign raised $11,131 dollars from 372 donors. Compare the success of Tweetsgiving with a fundraising campaign that my organization launched 7 days later.

In December, Social Actions launched a 2 month annual fundraising campaign to support our work. We invited people to donate $20.09 to support 9 goals that we came up with for 2009.

In 2 months, we managed to reach 75% of our goal with donations from 148 people. Tweetsgiving engaged twice as many donors in a 48 hour period than our campaign engaged in 2 months.

This difference can be explained in part by the friendly looking turkey that accompanied the Tweetsgiving campaign. But I don’t think that’s the only factor.

A few hours after launching the Social Actions’ fundraising campaign, a donor sent me this message…

Even though this woman donated to our campaign in the first 48 hours, she was bothered by the fact that our campaign had a 2 month horizon. As it turns out, the majority of donations to Social Actions arrived within the first 48 hours of our campaign and the last 48 hours. Whether we intended to or not, our 2 month campaign was experienced as two 48 hour campaigns separated by 8.5 weeks.

These two stories serve as evidence that people are hungry for opportunities to coalesce around real time opportunities and events, whether they are fundraising related or otherwise
.
The 48 hour online fundraising campaign has an urgency to it that can drive donations and help you reach new donors, but it’s also an opportunity for your nonprofit to build community in the seconds, minutes, and hours that real life is experienced.

Let’s turn now to volunteering in small units of time…

Out of curiosity, raise your hand if on March 28, 2009 you turned off the lights in your apartment or office from 8pm to 9pm. And raise your hand if you did the same thing as part of EarthHour in 2008.

For those who don’t know, EarthHour is campaign that calls on people to turn off the lights in their apartment or office for just one hour a year, all at the same time.

The call to action was simple to respond to. Not surprisingly, the call to action traveled far and wide.

According to an official EarthHour press release, the 2009 campaign engaged people in 25 time zones, across 88 countries, and from 4,000 cities.

Social media factored heavily into the success of EarthHour this year. The organizers relied in large part on Facebook and Twitter to get the word out. In fact, I believe I learned of EarthHour through Twitter. This is a perfect example of the action finding me, instead of me finding the action.

EarthHour saved the planet a lot of electricity. But it also succeeded in feeding people’s desire to connect in real-time around a cause and to experience the present together.

What I find most interesting is that EarthHour took a private activity – using less electricity at home and in the office – and converted it into the cost for membership in a global, if momentary, community.

The question that all of us should be asking is, “What other kinds of routine private activities are actually micro-volunteer opportunities in disguise and can be rewarded with membership in a community?”

A group based in San Francisco and Washington DC is building a cell phone application called The Extraordinaries. When it launches, the application will connect people with 20 minute volunteer opportunities that they can complete through their mobile phone.

Like EarthHour, The Extraordinaries has the potential to create tremendous social impact, if for no other reason than it operates under the same economic model. The Extraordinaries converts a private activity – killing 20 minutes while you wait for a bus – into an opportunity to do something good and plug into a real-time volunteer community.

Prior to the social web, it wouldn’t have been cost effective or even feasible to organize a group of people for 20 minute volunteer opportunities. The cost of finding the volunteers, assigning them tasks, and ensuring that the service opportunity was completed responsibly would have outweighed the benefits.

As a result, organizations became accustomed to thinking of volunteer opportunities in terms of days of service, weeks of service, and even fulltime volunteer positions. But the social web is challenging us to come up with more innovative opportunities so that busy people can also take actions that support our missions.

EarthHour and The Extradordinaries are just two examples of what volunteering in small units of time could look like. I am sure there are other examples.

I’d like to turn now to a few observations about communicating with supporters in small units of time.

Communications is not normally considered a call to action. But when it’s done frequently enough and in small enough chunks of time, then a conversation emerges. Each small message that a nonprofit distributes becomes an opportunity to respond in some way or forward the message to someone or a group of people who could be helpful.

In 2007, a woman named Tori Tuncan launched a website called Lend4Health. Tori is a mother of two in Virginia. Her youngest child had an undiagnosed mild form of autism. She started doing research online about biomedical treatments for Autism and discovered two things:

(1) Biomedical treatments of child autism aren’t covered by most health insurance plans; and

(2) Many of the parents would happily lend each other money to help cover the expenses.

Tori put together a very simple website (inspired by Kiva.org) that allows anyone to make an interest free loan to cover a portion of the month-to-month expenses for treating a child with autism. A community quickly developed around this website.

Depending on the cashflow in a given month, a parent can lend money or receive money to help cover the treatment schedule. Lend4Health is one of many online marketplaces that is serving the nonprofit sector.

What makes Lend4Health unique is the way in which Tori has been telling the Lend4Health story. As far as I know, Lend4Health doesn’t have a monthly e-newsletter and it hasn’t published an annual report.

But more than 1,000 people are aware of her deep commitment to seeing the Lend4Health website grow and prosper. People know about Lend4Health because Tori is active on Twitter and she posts regular blog entries and video updates about the project.

Through her frequent communications, Tori has attracted a pro-bono developer to help her build a more advanced version of the website.

Kjerstin Erickson of FORGE has a similar story. In November or December of last year, Kjerstin’s organization decided to replace the paid volunteers from overseas, who were helping to build capacity among Rwanda’s refugee population, with the refugees themselves. This decision, which was empowering for the refugees, had the effect of cutting off critical revenue for her organization. As a result, FORGE was short roughly $100,000 for 2009.

Kjerstin’s response to this situation was to start blogging on SocialEdge.org about her organization’s situation. Leading philanthropy bloggers heralded her approach as the ideal model for nonprofit transparency. Her story-telling in small units of time turned into a call to action for philanthropy bloggers, family foundations, and pro-bono consultants – who all offered their time and resources to help her put her social venture back on stable financial ground.

Tori and Kjirsten are using social media to tell the story of their nonprofits in the same way that people use social media to provide personal updates. In fact, for them, the distinction is difficult to make.

There’s no better example of this trend to tell a nonprofit’s story as if it were an individual update than the recent changes to Facebook’s fan pages. A few months back, Facebook changed their Fan pages so they look more like individual pages. Facebook was essentially inviting organizations and companies to tell their stories in the same way that individuals with Facebook profiles share their news.

Lend4Health and FORGE are creating an as-it-happens archive and interactive story. Anyone online is welcome to join the conversation. The conversation takes less time to produce and disseminate than a monthly e-newsletter. And it does more to demonstrate the impact they are having than either an e-newsletter or an annual report could accomplish.

People want to connect and hear from people who are committing themselves to change.

For the last ten years, nonprofits have been extremely cautious in their communication to supporters. But there’s an opportunity, in fact, an imperative to participate in an ongoing conversation with supporters. The effect of participating in that conversation is to create many points of engagement in which supporters can reply and engage with the messages your are putting online.

I feel strongly that asking the question, “What is our nonprofit’s strategy for engaging and communicating with people in small units of time?” will help your board and staff set aside preconceptions on what raising money, coordinating volunteers, and communicating with supporters has traditionally looked like, and will lead you in the direction of more innovative strategies that work well on the social web.

I want to be very clear that I am not advocating that the nonprofit sector becomes a slave to the last ten minutes of status updates and then next 2 minutes of video footage. That would be a completely dysfunctional and tragic destination for our sector.

The kinds of fundraising, volunteering, and communications that I have discussed should coexist and reinforce traditional nonprofit communication and engagement strategies.

But the fact is that real life is experienced in seconds, minutes, and hours. Adding opportunities for engagement that are rooted in the present will strengthen the rapport between your nonprofit and the people and communities who support it.

If developing a seconds, minutes, and hours approach to conducting the work of your nonprofit is too uncomfortable for your organization right now, then stick to the more conventional approaches to fundraising, volunteering, and communications -- and leave the social web for later.

That said, the next time your board of directors comes to you and asks, “What’s our nonprofit’s social media strategy?” tell them to be patient and that it’s just a matter of time.

Thank you.

Links:

www.tweetsgiving.org
www.socialactions.com
www.earthhour.org
www.theextraordinaries.org
www.lend4health.org
www.forgenow.org

30 Social Media for Social Change Twitter Updates! (Week in Review)

2009-05-09T18:00:00.000Z

Via folks updating their Twitter status, there was so much awesome news and resources shared this week around using social media, the web, and technology for social change. You can check out a bunch of that awesomeness below -- and follow folks for more! You can also follow me @EngageJoe!

romioliverioKicking it off - 'Destination N2Y4' http://bit.ly/k3Ncp#N2Y4about 3 hours ago from web
mdresortLayoffs prompt Facebook activism http://bit.ly/3cyL6about 15 hours ago from TweetDeck
mogusmovesKnow any Cdn NGO's who need a boost to their digital program? 3 Free Tuitions to the Social Tech Training:http://bit.ly/1a6mEXabout 20 hours ago from TweetDeck
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zemantaAre you a non-profit/charity? Make the first blog post yourself and raise part of $6k USD - http://bit.ly/blog4cause7:13 AM May 6th from Tweetie
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rootworkEffective Twittering in 5 minutes a week - great resource for nonprofits from @socialsignal http://bit.ly/Wb65Y#phlnet2 #nptech5:03 PM May 5th from TweetDeck
slashdottGoogle Puts the Brakes On Saving the Worldhttp://tinyurl.com/d7pa9f3:18 PM May 5th from twitterfeed
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nishlandReading: Measuring Engagement and Return on Relationships http://bit.ly/ULIAV by @kanter - good article, will use some #feedly6:02 AM May 5th from feedly

How Can We Jump the Shark of Connecting Nonprofits Online?

2009-05-05T19:00:00.000Z

Also posted on the NetSquared Community Blog!

Photo by Bill Ward - Thank you John Dumbrille!

We're on the edge of using the web for change in ways we are just beginning to imagine. One thing I'm really interested in is how we can connect nonprofit data together. There are so many different 'green' nonprofit websites - so many different 'human rights' websites - so many different 'health' websites, etc. How can we connect the dots so these orgs' sites can talk to each other and help us find the information we need from across their issue-based networks?

Let's get a bit more specific ...

What if when you visited 1Sky.org - You could see events, petitions, and engage with changemakers across the climate change movement?

* Zanby is working on providing this technology - and is currently weaving 1Sky and TheUpTake, 350.org, and The Energy Action Coalition's online communities together. Engaging on any one organization's website means you're also engaging with the other networks!

What if when you visited Amnesty.org - You could explore the latest human rights news and research across orgs like Amnesty, Humans Right Watch, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights?

* IssueLab is working to aggregate research on social issues and push that research back out to other online communities and end-users. A human rights focused nonprofit could, for example, grab their Human Rights feed and share it on their website!

What if when you visited a nonprofit website that focused on disability issues, you could easily find the resources for the stuff you were looking for from that first site + a range of sites dedicated to disability issues?

* I used to be roommates with the Founder of DisabledCommunity.org - an index of resources for disability-related issues. Hooking up Google Custom Search, any website focused on disabilities could add a widget that enabled their users to search across DisabledCommunity.org on their site.

The potential of sharing events, communities, actions, research, resources, and news across nonprofit sites could be huge for raising awareness, increasing impact, and helping us find the most relevant information.

What are some ways we could build on these approaches (and others) to make it even easier and more effective for organizations to share across their online presences? How can we 'jump the shark' of webbing nonprofit & social change orgs together? Is this kind of cross-pollination something your organization would be interested in adopting? What would be the consequences (both positive and negative)? Are shared resources something YOU would want to engage with on your favorite nonprofit websites? How would YOU want to interact with this information?

I'm very excited for folks' thoughts on this topic, about how we can connect nonprofits & orgs together online. Looking forward to the comments & conversations!