Cause Global: Social Media for Social Change

Teaching

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:25:00 +0000

This year, I'm delighted to be team-teaching a new course on social media strategy at New York University with my friends and colleagues Tom Watson and Howard Greenstein. The course expands a pilot social media strategy course I put together for NYU's Heyman Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising last spring -- and builds it into a 13-week class for the Center's Master's program.

The class is "The Wired Nonprofit 2012: Social Media Strategy and Practice" and Tom, Howard and I will be helping graduate students and future advocacy leaders "to create a comprehensive social media strategy for their organizations." Last year, I asked Tom and Howard to help me further develop the course for the Master's program, and I'm excited (and honored) to have lift-off.

The class began last night and will run through May 2nd. The three of us will be sharing some of the discussion, highlights from the class blog, comments from some of our guest speakers and links for some of the readings. I'll also be sharing some of the highlights here on Cause Global. You also can follow us at #wnpNYU on Twitter.

On another academic note, I'm also again curating Philanthropy 3.0, the Heyman Center's speaker series, a forum I developed for the Center last year that features national leaders in philanthropy innovation debating disruptive changes in the sector, including the latest influences of social media, cause video, the social enterprise movement and mobile fundraising/advocacy. I'll be moderating (and covering) those discussions for Cause Global and will be sharing the stage with some of today's most exciting new voices in social media.

Watch this space for updates.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration by Milos Marek)

Occupy Us!

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 12:10:00 +0000

It is said that good advertising anticipates -- and acknowledges -- social trends. [Apple's "Think Different" campaign comes to mind.] But bad advertising? Clueless. Consider Bank of America's new "Together, we are the 100%" campaign, which tries to monetize Occupy Wall Street's anti-greed movement, if not simply "re-image" the bank, which is under fire for improper foreclosures and hiking debit card fees.

The bank kicked off the new campaign earlier this month and promoted it on Thursday -- Occupy Wall Street's nationwide Day of Action, which successfully orchestrated protest marches across the country to celebrate the movement's two-month annniversary. BofA's ads are part of the bank's new image campaign that began in September across 12 of the bank's larger U.S. markets, including New York City. Says Bank spokesman T.J. Crawford: "The campaign aims to deliver the facts about Bank of America's local impact. Sharing the work we do and the critical role we play is more important than ever."

But many Occupy supporters are not impressed. Influential BoingBoing co-editor Zeni Jardin yesterday shared some Twitpics of the bilingual ads (including those above), and the images went viral. "I find BofA's new 100% ads positively revolting," she tweeted to a chorus of hundreds of RTs and thousands of thumbs-ups in the Twittersphere.

BOA isn't the only company trying to leverage the "Occupy US" theme locally. Major World, one of the nation's largest used car dealerships, launched a series of 60-second radio spots last week that invite listeners to "occupy us" for the "best deals on used cars in the nation." A spokesman for the Queens-based dealership said today the company has received "dozens of calls" from potential customers since the ads were placed but declined to characterize the feedback.

Okay, it's a used car dealership. But it is unlikely Major's and BofA's ads will be the last Occupy-themed campaigns to launch. Marketing sources across the financial sector have told Cause Global that OWS isn't just changing the political conversation; it's also re-shaping the focus of many ad campaigns being planned for 2012.

Let's hope marketers trying to exploit the Occupy meme will do a better job of it going forward. In today's social media world, smart marketing isn't about the brand so much as it is about making customers the heroes. It's about conveying shared values by supporting customers in authentic, sustainable ways -- not on-the-spot sloganeering. Occupy? Sure --it, too, is a brand. But part of its appeal is that it's the "anti-brand" -- not business-as-usual.

"We want more than slogans," says Occupy protester Nancy Popp, one of some 200 demonstrators arrested Thursday in Manhattan's financial district. "Don't give us slogans and fine print. Deal with us. Hear us. I mean, do they really think an ad campaign is going to make us open bank accounts at Bank of America? Maybe it's true that there's a sucker born every minute, but with social media, the suckers aren't the customers anymore. The message of Occupy? No more bullshit. Are these brands even listening?"

Seen any further examples of Occupy-in-advertising? Let us know. We'll publish them when we see them.

-- Marcia Stepanek

[Photos by BoingBoing.com]

Counter-swarms

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 14:33:00 +0000

Occupy Wall Street organizers -- to further protest their eviction earlier today from Manhattan's Zuccotti Park by New York City riot police -- are stepping up their scheduled global "Day of Action" rally set for Thursday throughout New York City and in other cities where Occupy encampments have been shuttered in recent hours and days.

In a flash rally today attended by hundreds of Occupy protesters along 7th Avenue in midtown Manhattan near the failed Lehman Brothers' former world headquarters building, the movement's organizers asked passersby to "join the Global Movement for Economic and Social Equality and the 99 Percent" for a Day of Action on November 17th. Events that day will include a 7 a.m. "Resist Austerity" rally at Zuccotti Park just before the opening of the New York Stock Exchange "to confront Wall Street with the stories of people on the front lines of economic injustice." Then, at 3 p.m., organizers have scheduled simultaneous rallies at 16 central subway stops in all five NYC boroughs "to listen to a singular story from one of our hardest-hit and most inspirational neighbors." At 5 p.m., Occupy supporters will move to Foley Square near Wall Street to "listen to stories, a gospel choir, a marching band" and "march to our city's bridges to demand that we get back to work rebuilding our country's infrastructure." The flier urges participants to "make it a musical march. ...Bring your songs, your voice, your spirit." [For more information, search N17Event on Facebook.]

Today's flash rally came hours after New York City police, acting on the orders of NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, arrested 200 Occupy Wall Street protesters in the wee hours as part of a long-planned eviction strategy aimed to clear Zuccotti Park -- the symbolic epicenter of the global Occupy movement. The 1 a.m. eviction was part of a coordinated crackdown by authorities in multiple cities, from Zurich to Portland to London and Calgary after two months of demonstrations in city parks and squares across the country and in cities around the world. In a morning news conference hours after police moved in overnight, NYC's Mayor Bloomberg said the city wanted to clear Zuccotti Park for cleaning but that it had intended to let protesters back in later -- provided they wouldn't live there and re-occupy the space with tents and tarps. But the city decided to keep the park closed when its attorneys were served with a Temporary Restraining Order mid-morning against the evictions. Zuccotti Park remained empty and closed for most of the rest of the day, pending the outcome of a court hearing on the TRO and the legality of the city's actions against the protesters. [ At about 5:30 p.m., the judge upheld the city's ban on tents and tarps, and protesters moved back into Zuccotti Park, without camping gear.]

The raid against Occupy Wall Street came just days after similar actions to break up Occupy Portland and Occupy Oakland-- and a half-day before Occupy Toronto, Occupy Calgary, Occupy Zurich and Occupy London were similarly confronted by authorities. Occupy Los Angeles spokesperson PJ Davenport told The Huffington Post that: "The timing of the evictions of occupiers in Portland, Oakland and New York City are no coincidence. Sources at Occupy LA have received notice from our information networks that the proverbial hammer is coming down and that a nationwide effort is underway to close all occupations. Here at Occupy LA, despite our friendly relationship with City Council and the LAPD, we believe that it is a short matter of time before we are asked to leave."

Occupy press spokeswoman Dana Balicki told WNYC Radio Host Brian Lehrer on his daily radio call-in show today that Occupy organizers would not be deterred by the evictions. "The messaging here is that we are undeterred, our spirits are high and our resolve is unbeatable. ...We are letting the City of New York, Mayor Bloomberg and the world know that we are not going anywhere and that you can't simply throw an idea in a dumpster." Gideon Oliver, one of the lead attorneys representing the Occupy protesters, told Lehrer the crackdowns represent "a new form of represssive conduct. Unlike temporary, stationary rallies of the past, Occupy has created a 24/7 component and taken on messaging and communicative tactics that are unique, so to attack" the movement by clearing the parks they occupy for health and safety reasons "is clearly a pretext."

Meanwhile, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan told the BBC that leaders of 18 cities in which Occupy protesters had set up encampments coordinated their raids across the county. "I was recently on a conference call with 18 cities across the country who had the same situation," Quan said.

On Monday, the Canadian magazine Adbusters, which conceived of the movement -- and apparently aware of the multi-city crackdowns yet to come -- said the protesters should “declare victory” and head indoors to strategize. "OWS isn't a geographical place so much as it is an idea and an attitude," spokewoman Balicki said.

Watch this space for updates.

-- Marcia Stepanek

[Illustration, top: Day of Action poster by Occupy Wall Street.]

[Photos of Tuesday's Occupy Wall Street eviction, top, by Don Emmert of AFP-Getty Images, and below, by The Associated Press - both with permission.]

Re:volution Notebook

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 13:39:00 +0000

New takes on the political impact of social media:

* Vlad Teichberg, a 39-year-old former derivatives trader, is in charge of Occupy Wall Street's livestream video feed of GlobalRevolution.tv. He says in this week's New Yorker that he has been working for months to help build, from New York, what he calls "camera Kalashnikovs" to help seed and sustain the movement, which he characterizes as having its roots not on Wall Street, but in the rise of the Arab Spring. Teichberg had been operating from under a tarp in Zuccotti Square but now manages the movement's livestream feed from a small, second-floor space in Manhattan's NoHo neighborhood donated by the A.J. Muste Memorial Institute, a pacifist organization that bought the building in 1974. He told New Yorker writer Andrew Marantz that live video, distributed via social media, can limit police brutality. "If everyone is watching, the state can't just crush people," he told Marantz. "That's what kept Tahrir Square from turning into Tiananmen -- they knew people were paying attention."

* Iceland President Olafur Regnar Grimsson (photo, above) speaking at the annual PopTech thought festival in Camden, Maine, noted the increasingly important role of social media in empowering people to challenge institutions. Grimsson said those now in political power around the world have a choice: use this moment in history to force citizens to bear responsibility for the actions of private institutions, or implement comprehensive political and social reforms. [Grimsson, himself, chose the latter following his nation's 2008 economic collapse. Fighting immense global political pressure, he refused to force Icelanders to bear responsibility for the actions of private banks in the meltdown.] He told PopTech conferees Thursday that Occupy Wall Street protesters have global resonance because "social media is people power in its purest form." Grimsson also sat down with PopTech's Emily Spivack to talk about how social media are destabilizing traditional institutions. Here's an excerpt from that interview:

"I have concluded, which is a strange conclusion for me to make because I have spent most of my life within the traditional institutions of a democratic political system, that the democratic power of this movement that technology has enabled and brought about, is now so strong and so fast that the operations of the traditional institutions have almost become a sideshow.

You see it happening in my country in the last three years, you saw it happening in Cairo, you've seen it happen in Athens, and you've seen it last week, in over a thousand cities, where you've got coordinated demonstrations initiated by Occupy Wall Street. Before, in history, it would have been impossible to coordinate these demonstrations at a relatively short notice.

Secondly, we are seeing a shift from the predominance of the financial and the market institution, over to the re-emergence of democracy, and what we have classically called the "public will," to use a philosophical term. But we are in the middle of that shift; we don't know where it will take us, or what will be the implications.

But the third shift, which is implied in all of this, is the shift in time. These changes are now so fast, helped by social media, that they are of historic proportions. We have nothing comparable in world history as a guideline."

* Kambiz Hosseini and Saman Arbabi, Iranian expatriates living in Washington, D.C., are the cofounders of Parazit [meaning "static" in Arabic]. It is a weekly half-hour TV satire show that pokes fun at Iranian politics and culture, and which grew out of Iran's so-called "Green Revolution" in 2009. "When they kicked foreign journalists out of Iran, citizen journalism because huge, and YouTube, Twitter and Facebook became the platform for communication," Hossesini says. "Seventy percent of Iranians are under 30 years of age, they live in media oppression and we set a new tone for them and a new voice with our show." When authorities jammed the show's satellite signals, Arbabi said last week, "we went guerilla-style, posting the show in online forums everywhere." Parazit is broadcast on Voice of America's Persian service. It also has been featured by John Stewart on The Daily Show and still lives broadly on YouTube. Speaking at PopTech's annual thought-fest Friday, Arbabi said of social media:

"It has changed the world and that's why dictators are afraid of it. It's the only source of information that some people have. ...Trying to stop social media is like trying to stop car theft. You can't. Thieves are always two steps ahead. Except that these protesters [in Iran and around the world] are not thieves. They're fighting for their freedom."

-- Marcia Stepanek

[Photo, top, of "calligraffiti" by eL Seed, a Tunisian graffiti artist featured at this year's PopTech conference, who uses Arabic script to convey messages of peace and justice, online and off. Photo of Iceland President Olafur Regnar Grimsson by Kris Krug.]

Rethinking Africa

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 02:12:00 +0000

Erik Hersman -- a cofounder of Ushahidi; founder of the group blog, Afrigadget; the author of the blog, White African, and the founder of iHub, Nairobi's innovation hub -- offered this week's PopTech conferees contemplating the world's geopolitical power shifts a new definition of the term, white space. "In business, it is defined as a place where rules are vague, authority is fuzzy, budgets are nonexistent and strategy is unclear," said Hersman, who was raised by missionary parents in Africa and spent his childhood traveling between Sudan and Kenya. [Hersman still lives in Africa, with his wife and three children in Nairobi.] "...Business white space is the space between the organization chart, where the real innovation happens" -- and this space right now is Africa, he says.

Hersman told conferees that 313 million people are now moving into Africa's middle class ranks -- a figure that comprises 34 percent of the continent's population. Additionally, 98 percent of Internet subscriptions in Africa are for mobile service, and five of the world's Top 10-fastest growing economies are in Africa. "Ghana has beat Qatar for pole position," Hersman said. And mobile Web innovation is at a peak. He cited three recent Web startups as examples of what he called "reverse development" -- the creation of new tech ideas that Africa is exporting to the West rather than importing from it: Ushahidi, the crisis-mapping service; M-Pesa, the mobile, peer-to-peer money transfer service that has so far conducted more than $8 billion of transactions within Kenya, and MXit, a free instant-messaging application in South Africa that has become an alternative to Facebook in that country and has some 24 million users around the globe -- some 13 million in South Africa, alone. "The mobile revolution that you hear about in Africa? It's real," Hersman said.

And Africa is also transforming itself culturally and spiritually, says Unity Dow (photo above). Young people are "beginning to question why they should mold themselves" into Western notions of what should be "normal" at home and abroad. Dow, a high court judge and human rights activist in Botswana, told conferees "there is a new generation that is not yoked to the past of colonialism" and it is "rethinking Africa. ...And they're asking, 'How can I move forward without having to be Western?'"

"...When people begin to have three meals a day and a warm bed at night, they begin to think," Dow said. "What is happening in Africa right now is that [young people] now have full bellies, cars to drive, and access to the Internet. They're beginning to look around and ask, 'What did we lose as a country in our attempt to be part of 'the Other'? What did we lose when it was un-Christian to be African and to dance the way we danced' and talk and wear our hair differently?"

Dow said this "new awakening" also is creating new diplomatic and economic friends for Africa -- chiefly China. "Africa has a right to extend its friendship across the world without people thinking it is being exploited," Dow said. Africans want to break the image of dependency on the West and rebalance its global relationships. "...When a Westerner sees a shoeless African, he thinks, 'How can I donate shoes?'" Dow said. "But when a Chinese sees a shoeless African, he thinks, 'How can I sell her cheaper shoes?'" China is catering to the continent's fast-growing middle class, she said, by offering inexpensive goods to Africa's new consumers. "It is more expensive to deal with Europe and America that it is to deal with China," she said. "...You can get a flight from Botswana to go to China, and when you land there, there will be a translator and a car waiting for you," Dow said, referring to buying trip services being offered by some Chinese companies seeking inroads into the Africa market. "For many Africans, this is their first trip outside of their country. ...You cannot afford these things in British pounds or dollars but you can if you go to China," she said.

"In the past," Dow said, "all of this would have been unimaginable. But in the last five years, we're seeing a reclaiming of what we lost when we tried to go global." The result? A new and different future for the continent. Said Dow: "The future of Africa is brown, the future of Africa is gendered, and the future of Africa is fair."

PopTech's conference, "The World Rebalancing," ended today.

-- Marcia Stepanek

[Photograph of Unity Dow by Kris Krug in Camden, Maine, at this week's PopTech conference]

The Impact Economy

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 22:32:00 +0000

New White House Social Innovation Director Jonathan Greenblatt told people attending this year's annual PopTech conference in Maine today that the White House is preparing for the rise of an "impact economy" - a new approach to social problem-solving that involves impact investing and new hybrids of business and philanthropy to scale good.

Greenblatt, a co-founder of Ethos Water and former CEO of GOOD who began his new job last month, said his office is "looking to create a new infrastructure inside government" to support social innovation "that can involve technology but also seeks new thinking that will identify, then fund, solutions that are already working." Greenblatt said this effort "isn't angel capital for the social space. That is what philanthropy does. We are looking for solutions that already work, and to fund them commensurate to their impact."

Since its founding two years ago, Greenblatt said, the Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation has expanded the Americorps program and is using competitions and prizes to help identify new, entrepreneurial solutions to social problems. It also has created the $200 million Social Innovation Fund to scale what works through dozens of community organizations already on the ground. Earlier this year, the Office also added a line item to the President's budget to create Social Impact Bonds, a new way to pay for public services. [The plan would use private, profit-motivated investment money to fund public services up front. The government would only pay if the services deliver as promised, and only out of government cost-savings. The idea: to avoid the waste of tax dollars on failed programs.]

But more is needed amid great challenges, Greenblatt said. "We remain in a very difficult set of economic and social circumstances, with a housing problem that has bedeviled the experts" and a national unemployment rate of 9.1 percent that gets worse in communities of color. "We also have companies that often don't abide by the letter or the spirit of the law" and "a political system where some of the actors remain committed not necessarily to governance, but to opposition in a way that I just don't think is constructive." The result, he said, is that the nonprofit sector is now often taking "the brunt of the blow." At a time when government has less resources, he said, more is being asked of nonprofit organizations. "We need them to deliver more in a moment when they actually have less," Greenblatt said.

A new and expanded definition of the social sector will help, he said. The nonprofit sector, he said, "isn't just a collection of soup kitchens" but a sector that "helps to cohere the whole population" with over $300 billion in aggregate wages. It represents 5 percent of the country's GDP and 11 percent of its work force. "Nonprofits are like small businesses," he added, with nearly all of them operating on budgets of $1 million or less. But there is something "even more profound afoot," Greenblatt added. "Business can be a force for change, too." When we look at businesses that have an explicit social dimension to their mission, he added, "the opportunity for the social sector is even larger. It is even more important," Greenblatt said. New start-up social enterprises, coupled with many large-scale corporations that are helping to create new models of shared value, working to service shareholders "but also thinking intelligently and in integrated ways about supporting their stakeholders" also are important players in the social sector. "Ensuring the health and vitality of the entire sector is critical," Greenblatt added, "and essential to our national health."

Greenblatt said the White House is preparing for two trends in social innovation -- first, the advent of an impact economy, which refers to changes in today's business community such as the emergence of impact-investing. "These are conventional capitalists who are identifying opportunities to invest in the social sector, to drive economic return and social good," Greenblatt said. He said the Monitor Institute has described this as a category that could be worth more than $100 billion by the end of the decade.

Second, Greenblatt said, he and the White House are also very focused on the idea of a civic engagement continuum. "The idea that you need to don a red jacket to serve seems important but we think there's a bigger opportunity at hand that is enabled by technology," Greenblatt said. He cited citizen advocacy efforts like Data Without Borders and Code for America as being important initiatives that "marry technology talent to need." And he cited Meetup and the crowdfunding platform, Kickstarter, as being "extraordinary" new ways ordinary people are convening to work for social change. "This is not 800 million people on Facebook who may or may never connect," Greenblatt said. "We at the White House are eager to help these phenomenon grow because we believe they represent the gears of a healthy society -- the foundation of a social sector that is vibrant."

Greenblatt concluded his remarks to the PopTech crowd by asking conferees for their help to "bring more financial capital into the field to scale the social sector" and to "boost the number of human capitalists" working in it. Said Greenblatt: "This work matters now more than ever."

-- Marcia Stepanek

[Photo of Jonathan Greenblatt addressing 2011 PopTech conference by Kris Krug for PopTech]

Between Kansas and Oz

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 17:12:00 +0000

The annual PopTech thought-fest got underway today in Camden, Maine, bringing together nearly 300 journalists, scientists, inventors, technologists, and others working at the forefront of social change for a three-day conversation about these volatile times and how the world is "rebalancing" into a new equilibrium. "We are," Curator Andrew Zolli told conferees, "in the midst of a great realignment - a series of connected and converging revolutions in technology, economics, ecology, energy, geopolitics and culture that mark the end of one global era and the beginning of another."

The status quo on all levels is being challenged at high speeds "from far away, from below and from within," Zolli told conferees, while new powers are rising in the form of new kinds of networks, leaders and influencers. "The very nature of power, itself, is evolving," Zolli added, and the changes are re-making relationships between individuals; re-framing society's notions of governance, and re-drawing the geography of innovation. This massive rebalancing also is driving "entirely new kinds of business opportunities, introducing new voices into global culture, and unleashing a wave of reactionary counter-forces -- simultaneously."

"We are not in Kansas, nor are we in Oz," Zolli said. "We are in the whirlwind."

Among first-morning conference highlights were talks by a trio of people working on initiatives intended to rebalance not just economic and political power, but also to negotiate new spaces for broader cultural and artistic expression -- "changing who gets to speak," Zolli said, "and who gets to shape the narratives of this new global conversation."

* Shahidul Alam -- a Bangladeshi photographer, activist and social entrepreneur -- kicked off the conference by introducing his work as founder of both Drik, an agency for photographers working in the East, and the Chobi Mela International Festival of Photography, one of the largest in the world. "A problem that comes up in the world today is a perception we often have of 'the other' and it makes it difficult for us to recognize equality in a wider sense," Alam told conferees. "Pictures have a power. Through them, we are working to change how 'the other' is seen and how, in this new space, we all present ourselves." In this way, Alam says, he is working to both fight media censorship and correct the West's distorted view of what he calls "majority world" countries like his own. "The rural poor only exist as numbers. By taking pictures, they are removed from anonymity." Added Alam: "I don't like the term, Third World, because I don't want to be third in anything. When you talk of democracy and freedom, by and large the G-8 countries which represent 13 percent of the world's population do not represent me or the majority world in which I live." Alam has created a Website called majorityworld.com to showcase and represent the unseen imagery of local, non-Western photographers. "The whole (Western) publishing process needs to be subverted," he told PopTech, so as to be able to convey the news more accurately, from local sources. "We can't simply let the West keep telling our stories," he said. "We need to be telling our own stories for global consumption."

* Anand Giridharadas, an American-born journalist for the International Herald Tribune, wrote his first book, India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation's Remaking, to update the picture of India he learned through the prism of his emigre family history and his childhood memories of India. "There is, in fact, some great news," says Giridharadas, who grew up in Cleveland. "And the great news is that contary to all you hear in the media, and contrary to all of this anxiety in this country right now, the American Dream is alive and well. It is, in fact, possibly doing better than it ever has before -- just not here," he added. In India, he says, a new version of that dream is taking hold. Indians are reinventing relationships, bending the meaning of what it means to be Indian and enduring the pangs of the old birthing the new. This rebalancing should not be seen as a threat of low-wage competition for the West, Giridharadas says, but rather as "a cultural and spiritual release." The "world is flat" idea, he said, "is a flat idea. It's not so much that the relationship between the West and India is flattening but that the world inside India is flattening, too -- becoming more fair" as old caste and class divisions are eroding. "Now, two powerful new ideas are taking hold," Giridharadas said. "The first is that destiny is something one makes rather than inherits. And the second is that ... the individual is sovereign" -- with an opportunity to excel according to individual ability and achievement, regardless of social class or circumstances of birth. Giridharadas warned conferees that political and class bickering among Americans "is making it harder and harder for people here in America to access the upward American spiral that brought my parents to this country from half a world away." This bickering is "not just eroding the America Dream" for Americans, he said. It is "wearing it down at the precise moment in history when the rest of the world has gotten wind of our once-secret formula, and I think that is something we need to think more about."

* Arvind Subramanian, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and at the Center for Global Development, argues in his new book, Eclipse, that China has already overtaken the United States as a global economic power, with consequences both positive and negative for Americans. "China's economic dominance will be much broader in scope and much greater in magnitude than anyone yet imagines," he told PopTech attendees. And he predicts that by 2020, the Chinese Renminbi will eclipse the dollar as the world's dominant currency. "We think of the United States now as going through an economic downturn," he says, "but the other dimension of weakness in the U.S. is that the middle class is getting squeezed and their mobility is declining -- the complete opposite of what is happening in India." Subramanian says "the U.S. is like an apartment block that used to be the envy of the neighborhood. Today, the penthouses are getting bigger and bigger, the middle floors are getting squeezed, the basement is flooded and above all, the elevator from the basement is broken down." He added that America needs to change the way it cooperates internationally and do more to integrate the Chinese into American culture and institutions. By 2030, he says, the Chinese economy will be 50 percent larger than the U.S. economy. Already, the U.S. and Europe no longer have "the carrots and the sticks to cajole China into anything," Subramanian says. "It's no longer about what America wants. That world is gone. The world now will need to be much more symmetrical and balanced."

* Paul Needham and his Bangalore-based company, Simpa Networks, are designing new products and services aimed at "doing capitalism differently" -- making things radically more affordable to the poor. In this case, it's electricity. There are now some 48 million people worldwide who have a mobile phone but no connection to the grid. Simpa is setting out to change that by offering the world's poorest people access to solar energy on a "pay-as-you-go" basis. It's a model that is similar to pay-as-you-go mobile phones in that there's a low initial cost for the hardware required -- but once the cost of the hardware is repaid, the device becomes the consumer's to use, and the electricity generated going forward is free. "Consider the power this model gives to underserved people to create new possibilities for themselves and their worlds, and in some cases for the very first time," says Needham.

Cause Global will be posting more highlights throughout the conference. Watch this space for updates. PopTech ends Saturday night.

Here's the livestream:

Watch live streaming video from poptech at livestream.com

-- Marcia Stepanek

[Illustration, top, by Cinoby/Germany for istock.com)

Wirearchy

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 15:16:00 +0000

Today is the official one-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, and supporters are congratulating themselves, with birthday cakes and marathon choruses of "Happy Occupy to You" from Manhattan's Zuccotti Park. But the movement's staying power should come as no surprise. What has been unexpected? Since the Tweet that started it all went viral July 15 -- "Sept. 17. Wall St. Bring Tent." -- the movement it catalyzed has appeared to kindle more heat globally than nationally. The New York Times journalist Nick Kristof, in a column Sunday titled America's Primal Scream, wrote how "it's fascinating that many Americans intuitively understood the outrage and frustration that drove Egyptians to protest at Tahrir Square, but don't seem to comprehend similar resentments that drive disgruntled fellow citizens to 'occupy' Wall Street."

Indeed, the #OWS movement had its largest single day of protests Saturday not in New York but far from Wall Street. Writes blogger Nate Silver: "In Europe, crowds in cities like Rome, Barcelona, and Madrid were estimated at 200,000 to 500,000 per city -- more, probably, than the protests in the U.S. combined." [See Cause Global's coverage of the rally in Times Square here.] Silver, who analyzed crowd turnout numbers and the distribution of the October 15th protests worldwide, also found that "despite Occupy Wall Street's name, its energy in the U.S. seems to be coming from the left coast" -- and apparently from people who didn't vote in the 2010 mid-term elections.

But it would be foolish to underestimate the movement's ideological diversity, its staying power, or its organizational savvy. This is not, as protester Justin Strekal told The Associated Press over the weekend, simply "a participatory democracy in a little park" near Wall Street. On the contrary, Occupy Wall Street has become a global franchise, backed by an impressively horizontal "wire-archy" of digitally connected strategy, media, and community organizing professionals, volunteers, sympathetic tech startups and consultants, online petition groups and other pro bono-minded social enterprises and innovators -- all of whom say they are working to redefine for the digital age what is meant by economic sustainability and participatory leadership (not to mention strategic planning).

For its part, the Zuccotti Park "branch" of the movement is continuing to meet daily in a general assembly and has aggregated nearly $300,000 of hundreds of individual donations into an Amalgamated Bank account. It has a local finance committee -- which, according to The New York Observer, just voted to turn down a donation from music mogul Russell Simmons because he wanted to help the group shape specific demands. (Victoria Sobel, 21, Occupy Wall Street's CFO, told The Observer Sunday that organizers are almost "obsessively sensitive" to any one individual or organization trying to exert leadership over Occupy; she said finance committee members are taking crash courses in money management to make sure the movement's books remain transparent and unfettered by New Age lobbyists.)

The Zuccotti Park installation also has its own newspaper, published in two languages, and a library, an infirmary, a rotating set of showers and rooms-for-no-rent in the area, and a waste disposal system set up by a social enterprise called Mobile Design Lab. And more widely, it has media savvy by the boatload, thanks to a real-time line-up of global PR volunteers and liasons who have, so far, managed the message cross-culture. People in London, Madrid, South Korea, Japan, Sydney and Stockholm, for example, were carrying similar signs and wearing similar t-shirts on October 15, all claiming membership in the "99 Per Cent." Meanwhile, multiple networks of crowdsourced "hackathon" techies are working to better connect sympathizers near and far, and more than 100 lawyers are donating their services to aid the arrested. Most protesters and their supporters, of course, don't live outside in parks, but rather in houses and apartments in multiple cities and countries. [Like the Arab Spring protests, this movement depends on people aggregating both geographically and online to continuously catalyze multiple communities while also populating a geographical "center" for public reference.]

And politically, at least for now, Occupy Wall Street is trending in the mainstream, if not on Twitter, among some of the movement's most unlikely supporters. The GOP-appointed Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke told a recent hearing of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress that "at some level, I can't blame them (the protesters)" for "blaming, with some justification, the financial sector for getting us into this mess."

In the words of New Yorker Senior Editor Amy Davidson, "this is a global conversation going on now, and it would be foolish not to listen. ...Wall Street has long been a multinational brand name; now Occupy is, too. ...For an anti-corporate movement, OWS has a good sense of franchising -- and more importantly, it has something to say about enfranchisement."

No doubt. Occupy, perhaps most significantly, offers yet another example of how the Internet is profoundly enabling people to reshape the status quo at multiple levels of society. Occupy's loose-knit, distributed networks of hyper-agile, group-led "adhocracies" are -- thanks to our growing addiction to social media -- both inevitable and impossible to ignore. Can such digital organizations and movements topple governments as we know them? If you count the Arab Spring demonstrations, they already have. What's not so obvious is what comes next.

-- Marcia Stepanek

[Photo of Occupy demonstrator by Reuters, with permission. Illustration: Cover of the October 24, 2011 issue of The New Yorker]

Times Squared

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 01:23:00 +0000

Just before the official 5 p.m. start time of today's Occupy Wall Street demonstration in Manhattan's Times Square, a small throng of formally-attired theatergoers standing near the discount TKTS booth began complaining loudly about the crowds clogging the sidewalks, apparently unaware that the biggest Broadway show in town was about to begin right in front of them -- no tickets required. ["Don't they know they're in the way?" theatergoer Rose Aberdeen, 67, asked no one in particular, pointing to a protester dressed up as the Statue of Liberty.]

But this was not just another day in self-expressive Gotham. Some 6,000 demonstrators took to the streets today in Times Square as part of Occupy Wall Street's official October 15th Global Day of Action, prompting the NYPD to close off Broadway for eight blocks in Midtown and erect steel barricades, mount horses and drive motorcycles in formation to break up the crowds. [After 4-plus hours of chanting slogans and texting at a rate of some 500 tweets per minute (according to Twitter), demonstrators headed south to Washington Square Park on the NYU campus, dispersing after police arrived through the Arch and warned they would be enforcing a midnight curfew. Fourteen were arrested for remaining in the park.]

Among today's Times Square protesters were 87-year-old Irwin Nack and Pat Alessandrini, 72, both in from New Jersey for the day. Nack, a retired American history professor from William Patterson University, recalled his first protest rally in 1946 in Manhattan, when he was organizing city teachers for higher wages. He praised social media. "We would have had so much more clout if we'd had those tools back then," he said. " With social media, you can simultaneously protest in multiple locations." Closer to where counter-terrorism police were rushing the intersection of 46th and Broadway, Annie Dawson, 26, from Ann Arbor and Jeffrey Demesch from Brooklyn called the protests "America's Spring" -- referring to the Arab Spring protests earlier this year that used similar tactics in Cairo's Tahrir Square. Meanwhile, chants of "This is our Street" and "This is what democracy looks like" erupted each time a new squad of police marched into the intersection at 46th and Broadway to separate protesters coming into the Square from the east from those pouring in from the west. "I think most people don't realize how neglected their democracy has become until they try to exercise their rights to free speech and assembly," Dawson said.

But for all the chanting and shouting -- and despite some pepper-spray incidents and minor skirmishes with police -- this crowd remained peaceful. And it was impressively self-policed: at various times, some protesters would advise others to stop shouting and sit down. [As one demonstrator passed out Fourth of July sparklers, others urged people to throw them away. "Fireworks are illegal in New York and you don't want to get arrested for that," someone said.]

The ironies conveyed by Time Square's famous neon signs also didn't go entirely unnoticed. Just above a placard that read "Beat the Banks" was a billboard advertising Bonnie & Clyde -- the musical. Beneath a billboard advertising GenX darling Zooey Deschanel in her new sitcom, The New Girl, sat NYU student Jennifer Bell, 22, wearing an AlterNation cap and sharing her opposition to "the status quo" with a fellow demonstrator. Later, beneath Bank of America's enormous red-and-white electric marquee sign on the southwest corner of 46th and Broadway, an Australian couple asked a passer-by to direct them to the nearest ATM -- but first, please, show them the fastest route through the crowd to the Winter Garden Theater. (It was in sight but blocked by mounted police.) They had show tickets for 8 p.m., they told Cause Global, and they "didn't want to miss the show."

When all was said and done, 78 people were arrested in New York, according to The New York Times, including 24 accused of trespassing in a Greenwich Village branch of Citibank during a mid-day rally encouraging people to close their bank accounts at various Citibank, Wells Fargo and Bank of America branches across the city.

The day's events from New York, while generally not televised, were livestreamed, tweeted, facebooked, foursquared and liveblogged, making cable news networks' lack of in-depth local coverage this evening all the more obvious and frustrating to the crowds, underscoring the rapid pace and wider reach of new and social media. "Where's the press? Where's the press?" was the chant at 10 p.m. when the Square's neon news tickers failed to flash much about the day's local demonstrations.

"The press is us now," protester Ann Dawson shouted back. "Shut up and keep tweeting."

-- Marcia Stepanek

[For more on the #OWS swarms, watch this space for continuing highlights, follow the Global Revolution channel on Livestream and jump into the Twitterstreams at #occupywallst and #ows, among others.]

[All photos, top, of Occupy Wall Street's October 15th demonstration at the intersection of Broadway and 46th Street in Times Square, by Marcia Stepanek for CauseGlobal]

Swarms Global

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 17:46:00 +0000

Occupy Wall Street's October 15th Global Day of Action catalyzed coordinated street demonstrations in dozens of cities today, including Taiwan, London, Rome, Belgrade, and Berlin. In Rome, demonstrations turned violent between ralliers and police, while other European and global demonstrations remained comparatively peaceful.

Meanwhile, in New York City, Occupy Wall Street organizers staged weekend hackathons to further advance the movement's ability to digitally coordinate simultaneous actions worldwide and nationally. At 3 p.m. EST today, marchers set off from Washington Square Park on the NYU campus and began making their way north to Times Square, where a large rally was scheduled to start at 5 p.m EST to cap off the global day of protest -- called United for #Globalchange. Protest actions are additionally being coordinated via Foursquare and Meetup.

A video calling for October 15th participation globally, below, sought actions in 951 cities in 82 countries.

To follow the day's events as they continue, watch this space for hilites. Additionally, go to the Occupy Together web site and watch the livestream of the protest marches in NYC today. Jump into the Twitter coverage from the front lines [#OWS, #Oct15, #globalrevolution, #99percent, #occupynyc, among others] and check out the liveblogging by Reuters and The New York Daily News.

[Photos, top to bottom: demonstrator ducking teargas in Rome by The Associated Press; a protester today in Taiwan and the demonstration near the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, both by Reuters; all with permission]

Connected (the movie)

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 23:28:00 +0000

From Cairo to Wall Street, social media are changing the way people come together. Connected, a new documentary film that opens this weekend in Manhattan, explores some of those changes, for better and worse. "For centuries, we have declared our independence but maybe it's time to declare our inter-dependence," says director Tiffany Shlain, also the founder of the Webby Awards. The film, which previewed at this year's Sundance Film Festival, has been shown mostly to California audiences until now. Here's the trailer:

Seen the film? Let us know what you think.

[Illustration by S. Fox for istock.com)

Wiki-leadership

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 15:34:00 +0000

Occupy Wall Street entered its fourth week of protests yesterday in Manhattan's Zuccotti Park, and despite claims of at least 800 arrests so far nationwide, the movement is showing no signs of winding down. Undeterred by rain, hundreds of demonstrators packed the 33,000-square-foot park of sparse trees and blue tarps again this afternoon -- standing, singing, sitting huddled under blankets, sharing donated food and texting from the ground.

The protest swarm that emerged there via Facebook on September 17 has now spread to many cities: Wikipedia counts more than 70, from Salt Lake City and Seattle to Providence, Rhode Island. About 130 people were arrested at Occupy Boston early Tuesday; the Occupy groups in Atlanta and Seattle, among others, were reported on Slate to be digging in at their sites for the long haul. Politicans and the media, meanwhile, have been forced to take notice and to take sides. On Tuesday, a group of demonstrators from Occupy Wall Street took to the road and marched from lower Manhattan to NYC's uber-wealthy Upper East Side, in what they called the Millionaire's March. The group walked and chanted past the homes of people like Rupert Murdoch, Tea Party financial backer David Koch and JP Morgan Chase Chairman Jamie Dimon. [Mayor Michael Bloomberg, himself a billionaire, was spared; his East Side townhouse was not on the visitation list.]

More marching is planned for this weekend: Occupy Wall Street is organizing a series of flash mobs at Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Chase bank locations across the country. Though Facebook, YouTube, livestreaming and Twitter have been key in organizing and perpetuating the movement, organizers also have been distributing "old media" -- paper fliers and a broadsheet newspaper called Occupied Wall Street Journal, published in English and Spanish.

"We're taking what worked in Cairo during the Arab Spring," says Jonathan Hull, 26, a protester who arrived in Zuccotti Park last week from Portland, Ore. A freelance graphic designer, Hull says the movement is less about the future of capitalism and much more about the need to create new models of leadership for a digital world. "These protests are kind of like a first effort by members of my generation to use social media to help create a new, consensus-driven model of self-governance," Hull told Cause Global. "We call ourselves leaderless but we're really fighting to create a shared kind of leadership, kind of like how Wikipedia works. It's a group effort. It's consensus-based. We're working to create a new way to give everyone a voice and apply those voices to solving what's not working" in society. (As Hendrik Hertzberg, writing in this week's New Yorker, observed: "The process, not the platform, is the point.")

Hull isn't the only protester to speak passionately about the need for new forms of leadership -- both to organize digital groups and then to grow and sustain them. Justin Wedes, 24, an Occupy Wall Street founder/organizer, spoke Wednesday with WNYC Radio host Brian Lehrer on his live, call-in talk show about the group's goal to create "a new form of direct democracy" enabled by social media.

What follows is an edited transcript of that interview:

LEHRER: Who are you and why are you involved?

WEDES: I'm an organizer with the New York City General Assembly, one of the organizing bodies behind the Occupy Wall Street movement. We started three months ago, when Adbusters and Anonymous put out the call to flood lower Manhattan in protest of Wall Street. We have been organizing in parks and local spaces, holding horizontal open, public meetings for anyone interested in joining the thousands of people we have in New York now and across the country. I trained as a high school science teacher and do part-time work designing Web sites and community activism.

LEHRER: Are you the person behind #OccupyWallStNYC on Twitter?

WEDES: Yes, I'm the captain of that tweetstream but not the only one.

LEHRER: Will you soon need to put out a list of demands to keep the movement from fizzling?

WEDES: I don't believe so. I think it's a goal of the movement to enunciate some serious demands, but organizing people is a process in and of itself. It's taken us now over three weeks just to get where we are, and we're still growing -- now at our fastest rate ever. If you look at the immense amount of solidarity and support and growth of our movement, it's not because we're enunciating any particular demands but rather because we are reaching out to people who are frustrated, who are really saying 'enough is enough.' Meanwhile, every night, we are meeting and talking about what our [specific] demands should be and building solidarity.

LEHRER: Enough is enough of what?

WEDES: Corporate greed. The political influence of monied interests on Wall Street in Washington and in our local and state governments. People are just fed up. It's not fixing our economy. It's destroying our country and people have had enough.

CALLER: Are you using Gandhi's ideals to influence your movement?

WEDES: Yes, absolutely. This is in the vein of Gandhi's nonviolent work of peaceful protest. The world we're trying to create in these general assemblies [Occupy groups] across the country is all about nonviolence and consensus. These general assemblies we're creating are now being built spontaneously in up to 100 cities. It's a mirror of what we're trying to get to in the end.

CALLER: Is this anti-capitalist?

WEDES: There is a broad spectrum of perspectives and agendas. We claim to be the 99 percent [of the population] and if we are, that represents a very wide spectrum of beliefs, so I don't want to narrow it down to one or another ideology.

CALLER: What is the process by which you all arrived at the organizational roles you play? How does the election process take place to form these general assemblies that choose you and others as leaders of this movement?

WEDES: I can't stake a claim to be a leader any more than anyone else. I call myself an organizer, as I've been there since Day One, helping to bring spirit and organization to this movement. We are a leaderless, horizontal movement, in the sense that there are no hierarchies of roles in this group. We are constantly rotating through facilitators in our general assembly [a daily mass meeting], so there's no ability of any individual or organization to co-opt us.

I think the magic that I believe is happening right now in Zuccotti Park (and really, across the country) is that the general assembly is a consensus-based process. It's not an elected or representative democracy. It is an attempt to bring consensus -- agreement to a group of people. And it works in a really amazing, magical way. Everybody has a voice in the general assembly. Every voice is heard. It's a slow process and at time, laborious, but people are patient because they know their voices will be heard and valued.

LEHRER: Consensus is a high standard. You can't always get a consensus in a marriage, much less among thousands of people in Zuccotti Park.

WEDES: No, that's right, and when there isn't consensus -- when there are blocks, for example, in proposals -- we move to what we call 'modified consensus.' But even before that, we try to modify our proposals with friendly amendments. The problem with representative democracy is that it has up-and-down votes. You know, 51 percent of the people may be in support of an idea but then the other 49 percent are then immediately marginalized. That doesn't work. Politics isn't working because it has become so confrontational. So our approach is rather than try to find the 51 percent agreement and leave the other 49 percent in the dust, let's do the extra work it takes to build consensus and unity.

CALLER: But if there is no one leader, this movement won't go anywhere. Every group needs a leader.

WEDES: The idea of a leaderless, horizontal movement is really difficult for a lot of people to grasp because it's only in the last few years that we've started to harness technology and social media and the possibilities that it all brings in order to facilitate communication and flatten communication hierarchies. I like to rather call [our movement] leader-ful -- a leaderful movement rather than a leaderless one -- because what it means is that everyone is empowered to take a role of leadership. Everybody is empowered to step forward and lead a cause or an initiative. And the way that we're able to do that is we're harnessing technology to open up streams of information --to keep from having information bottlenecks, for example, where too few people know too much and they are able to have access to resources that other people in the group don't.

LEHRER: If you're a tight little group of protesters in each city, you can do that. But if you want to become a major political party, or if you want to have a major mass influence on America, then you can't do it like a tight-knit little family, can you?

WEDES: I'm not sure whether we can or cannot. I think that's a little bit unpredictable. What I DO know is that what will grow out of this is being supported by the work of some very, very smart people on the software development end and the hardware development end, who are working on tools to be able to coordinate these movements all over the country -- and really all over the world -- so that we can collaborate in real time and hold things like simultaneous polling. We live in a world where technology has long surpassed the political realities of this country. We have a representative democracy that is so unparticipative right now, that everybody's democracy muscle is not being flexed. So let's find creative solutions to that.

LEHRER: How long will this movement keep going? It started September 17.

WEDES: There was never a deadline for when we go home. We always said we'll be here until our voices are heard and our demands are met. Those demands are being created right now. We will release them soon.

LEHRER: Will there be something like a news conference?

WEDES: I'm not sure, as that would be pretty old school and I think we're a bit beyond that now with our social media. [To follow Occupy Wall Street NYC, go to the livestream, search the calls to action on YouTube or go to Occupy's YouTube page. Or, go to Occupy Together to check out actions across the country and jump into the Twitterstreams at #occupywallstnyc, #ows, and #sep17 -- among others.]

-- Marcia Stepanek

[Photo, top, by Lukas Johnson/Reuters]

[Poster, above, by B.L. Singelton for Occupy Together]

Visual Swarms

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 04:14:00 +0000

The top photo, above, is one I've been using for years in some of my talks on social media around the world, and it always packs a punch. It's a photo of a Brazilian favela; the city-facing walls of the Providencia slum in Rio de Janeiro have been been plastered with large, poster-sized images of the people who live there -- and the effect is startling. It is collaborative, public art produced in 2008 by JR, a Paris street artist, to help the disenfranchised celebrate themselves and bear silent witness to police violence in the favela. JR says the digital work helped to embolden slum dwellers and "give them a face" after the military opened fire on a rally in a public square, killing three local children. "What we see changes who we are," JR says. "When we act together, the effect is much larger than the sum of its parts."

This past week, in California, JR received his public due -- this year's $100,000 TED Prize for humanitarian activity, awarded annually by TED organizers to help a deserving social innovator fund his or her wish to change the world. [JR's Prize was announced in October but awarded to him on Wednesday in Long Beach.] His "photograffiti" involves pasting up giant, black-and-white photos on city walls. "The streets comprise the world's largest art gallery," he says. [Late last month, 10 of his large-scale portraits showed up in Los Angeles as part of a trilogy of public art projects called The Wrinkles of the City. Previous installments appeared in Spain and China.]

JR's wish? "To use art to turn the world inside out," he says. Using his prize money, JR is launching a global art project called Inside Out. The idea is to empower grassroots volunteers to "stand up for what they believe in" by collaborating with him digitally via the Web. He is asking people to upload their photos to the project site for enlargement; his goal is to catalyze, by crowdsourcing the photographs of ordinary people, the creation of public murals in cities and neighborhoods around the world.

"It is all about making invisible people visible," JR told TED conferees, who have described the semi-anonymous artist as a "true humanitarian" whose art inspires people to look at their villages, neighborhoods and cities differently. "The power of image in a world of image is really strong," JR says. " All I am doing is giving the medium to everyone."

Here's his project and his story:

Here's JR's TED talk Wednesday:

-- Marcia Stepanek

Al-Jazeera's Wadah Khanfar

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 13:33:00 +0000

Al-Jazeera Chief Wadah Khanfar addressed this year's TED conference about the civic uprisings sweeping the Arab world and gave his take on where the unrest might be leading. He said he believes that social media are helping to make the Middle East and northern Africa more democratic.

"The future we were dreaming for has arrived," Khanfar told conferees (see the video of Khanfar's talk, below, made public yesterday). "A new generation, well-connected and inspired by universal values and global understanding, has created a new reality for us. We've found a new way for us to express our feelings and dreams. ...The regimes who invested billions of dollars in security systems collapsed and disappeared because of the voices of the people. They (the regime) tried to kill (the people), but the young people found something called Facebook and Twitter...and we found that all of these people in the streets are our reporters now."

Here's Khanfar:

(Photo of Khanfar, top, courtesy TED Conferences)

Cause Docs: The 2011 Oscar Nominees

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 20:23:00 +0000

Ken Brecher, the former executive director of the Sundance Institute and an anthropologist by training, told those attending the 2009 Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship that "video is the medium of the digital age." At that conference, he famously urged social entrepreneurs and cause activists to use film, YouTube and short video "to bring order from chaos and in doing so, fulfill the highest human function -- not as a visionary but with a strong sense of reality."

Five short "cause" films have been nominated for an Oscar this year; each offers a raw glimpse of contemporary life around the globe. Nominated films include the story of a Pacific Island threatened by climate change -- one of the first films about climate change refugees. Also up for an award Sunday night: a film that profiles a young cheerleader-turned-machine gunner in Iraq; another that tells the story of a wedding disrupted by a suicide bomber; a profile of Chinese villagers who fight back against the chemical company that is polluting the local water supply, and a short film about an extraordinary school in Tel Aviv that brings together students from 48 countries.

Here's a closer look at all of them:

Sun Come Up is the story of how the residents of Papua New Guinea's Carteret Islands are being forced by climate change to find a new home. Here's the trailer:

Killing in the Name explores the origins of terrorism and measures its impact on daily life. The film follows Ashraf Al-Khaled, whose wedding was the target of a suicide bomber that killed his father and 26 other family members. Here's the trailer:

Here's the podcast interview with the filmmaker, Jed Rothstein, on The TakeAway, broadcast February 22, 2011, on WNYC Radio:

Poster Girl is about one girl's journey from cheerleader to wounded veteran; click here for a recent Huffington Post interview with filmmaker Sara Nesson. Nesson met Sgt. Robynn Murray at a Combat Paper Project workshop on Martha's Vineyard, then profiled Murray's struggle to fit back into society post-Iraq. Here's the trailer, below:

Strangers No More is a short film about a school in Tel Aviv where children from 48 different countries and diverse backgrounds come to learn. Here's the trailer:

The Warriors of Quigang is another short doc nominee for the Oscar, about a Chinese village that fights back against the pesticide plant that has polluted the local water supply. Click here to watch the trailer.

What do you think of these films? Can you name a few that also should have been nominated? Let us hear from you.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Photo, top: Sergeant Robynn Murray, the subject of Poster Girl)

Anatomy of a Facebook Revolution

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 00:44:00 +0000

Tonight, Frontline airs Revolution in Cairo, a behind-the-scenes look at Egypt's April 6 Youth Movement as it plots strategy and then heads out into Cairo's Tahrir Square, hoping to bring down President Hosni Mubarak. "The film traces these young Egyptian activists' long road to revolution, as they made increasingly bold use of the Internet in their underground resistance over the last few years," Frontline's Executive Producer David Fanning recounts. "Through sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, the members of April 6 and related groups helped organize a political movement that the secret police did not understand and could not stop, despite the arrest and torture of some of the movement's key members."

The piece includes soundbites from David Wolman, the WIRED writer who has been reporting inside the April 6 movement and Mona Eltahawy, a popular blogger on Arab issues.

Here's the PBS promotion trailer:

Here's the fuller video; the story begins after a 30-second advertisement:

What do you think of this story? Let us hear from you.

(Photo, top, is of April 6 Youth Movement headquarters in Cairo.)

TweetMobs

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 02:37:00 +0000

Next month marks the fifth anniversary of the first Tweet -- which Twitter creator Jack Dorsey sent at 9:50 p.m. PST on March 21, 2006. The tweet? Nothing special, actually. "Just setting up my twttr," Dorsey wrote.

The microblogging service has since wracked up an estimated 200 million users sending some 65 million tweets per day worldwide -- and, says NPR's Terry Gross, "it has been used by heads of state, astronauts in outer space and protesters in Iran, Egypt and Tunisia trying to disseminate information after news media crackdowns in their respective countries."

Earlier this week, Gross interviewed Twitter co-founder Biz Stone about the rapid growth of the social network, the short history of Twitter in activism and efforts by some governments to censor usage. "Twitter has managed to find its way into almost every political uprising around the world," Stone told Gross. "...The Internet and social media are making the world a smaller place," he added, helping to synchronize thought and action globally.

Here's an excerpt of that February 16th interview; the full podcast is below:

TERRY GROSS: What were the first indications you saw that Twitter was being used as an organizing tool in Egypt?

BIZ STONE: Well, actually, Twitter's use in Egypt goes back to something that happened in 2008 that we heard about after the fact and we were just sort of chilled by -- and that was this photojournalism student named James Buck, who had traveled from U.C.-Berkeley to Egypt specifically to photograph protests. And he wanted to get great photos in Egypt.

And so he went out there on his own, and he kept missing all of the protests that were organized. And so he asked some of his Egyptian friends that he met there: How is that you guys are, you know, suddenly organizing these protests so quickly and so efficiently? And they said: Oh, we're using this tool called Twitter.

And, you know, James was from the Bay Area, hadn't even heard of it, and he's hearing about it in Egypt. And so he gets on Twitter, and he's suddenly plugged into this network. And so he's able to make it to these protests, and there he is, taking these great photos.

And suddenly, he notices something is up. He told us later, a lot of Egyptian police have mustaches, and the mustache quotient in the crowd went up significantly, which got him worried. And he suddenly said something doesn't seem quite right.

And he was grabbed, arrested by Egyptian police, thrown in the back of a car, really starting to freak out. He's this young guy, realized they hadn't taken his mobile phone from him yet and that he was on Twitter.

And so he sent out a tweet, and it was a one-word tweet, and the word was "arrested." Within about three hours, what happened was his friends back home in California knew the situation that he was in, they had been following his other tweets. They knew it wasn't - that it was serious, that it wasn't a joke.

His friends called the dean. The dean called a lawyer. The lawyer called the consulate, and within a few hours, James sent out another tweet that was also one word, and that was simply "freed."

And when we heard about this story and that Twitter was being used in Egypt in 2008 to organize these protests, that was one of the early, eye-opening experiences for us, that made us realize this was not just something in the Bay Area for, you know, technical geeks to fool around with and to find out what each other's up to, but a global communications system that could be used for almost anything and everything.

(Photograph of Biz Stone, top, by Joi Ito)

Swarms, Redux

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 03:28:00 +0000

In the past few weeks, a number of friends and colleagues have been sending me notes on the uprisings in the Middle East, knowing that I'm writing a book called Swarms, on social media and their ability to rapidly expand the coordination and power of self-organized groups.

As new protests spread across the Middle East [ the result, in part, of coordinated action via social media], here are some quick observations:

* The Internet, mobile phones and online social networks are tools for rapid coordination that can help people to synchronize their beliefs and coordinate their actions -- faster, easier and on a much larger scale than ever before;

* Establishment institutions aren't afraid of big ideas so much as synchronized action -- and social media tools in the hands of the voiceless, disaffected or disenfranchised (those with an ax to grind or a cause to promote) can effectively re-calibrate the balance of power;

* Social media can be an accelerant, enabling social movements to crop up in weeks and days rather than taking years to mobilize, as before;

* Social media can make weak social ties stronger, making it easier for people with similar ideas and sentiments to find each other and create communities of coordinated action;

* The Internet can help to distribute leadership and decentralize it; movements no longer need a single charismatic leader calling all the shots;

* Net-coordinated dissent is going regional. Social networks are now influencing other social networks;

* There is an arms race of technology between the governed and those governing. Egyptian authorities were clueless; China's are not. NYU colleague Kristen Taylor, on a social media panel last week in New York during Social Media Week, coined the term, "The Mubarak Effect." Said Taylor: "It's this tone deaf thing that's happening that can happen, really, in any sector. You have someone in there who's not listening (via social media), who's unable to listen and it ends up really bad."]

* A nation that disconnects its Internet and mobile phones opts out of the world economy -- insuring that no nation challenged by synchronized action via social media can afford to disconnect citizens completely for very long;

* The combination of online and offline activism is powerful, as is an independent press. Al-Jazeera's balanced coverage and livestreams of the protests added to the momentum and credibility of the youth movements in Cairo and Tunisia and elsewhere, spawned via social media;

* The ability of social media to bear unfiltered witness to events -- and distribute videos of them as are happening -- makes it harder for information "to go away" but easier for people in failed uprisings to be identified by regimes later -- and "disappeared."

For more on digital swarms, see Mary Joyce's blog post on the tech that powers activists on the Meta-Activism Project blog, and Clay Shirky's piece on social media and political dissent in Foreign Policy Magazine. See also Hillary Clinton's recent speech on Internet freedom, and this NPR interview, below, with Alec Ross -- the State Department's social media advisor. The State Department, Ross says, is now monitoring the tweets of influential people around the world, and chiefly those in the Middle East. "It's fascinating...the degree to which information can be made available in real-time from sources who wouldn't have been historically elevated," he says.

Here's Ross, below:

What do you think? Let us hear from you.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Photo: Street protest in Yemen: Reuters)

Twitter Contagion

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 00:44:00 +0000

(Click on the image for a full-sized view)

"Egypt is the crystal ball in which the Arab world sees its future," writes Kovas Boguta, creator of this data visualization (above), which analyzes the Twitter communication that erupted during the recent youth uprising in Egypt .

Boguta, founder and CTO of Infoharmoni -- which analyzes real-time social structures on the Web -- says he arranged the map to place individual Twitter users close to the people with whom they communicate. The red and blue dots represent which language users were using to communicate (Arabic is denoted in red, while English is denoted in blue). The size of the dots represents the individual's influence on the group as a whole. Different factions are placed near the factions they influence, revealing how weak ties get stronger.

Boguta offered this explanation February 11th on his blog, Computational History:

“Many fascinating structures can be seen. Wael Ghonim, a pivotal figure in this self-organizing system who instigated the initial protests on January 25th, is prominently located near the bottom of the network, straddling two factions as well as two languages. The size of his node reflects his influence on the entire network.

The lump on the left is dominated by journalists, NGO and foreign policy types; it seems nearly grafted on, and goes through an intermediary buffer layer before making contact with the true Egyptian activists on the ground. However, this process of translation and aggregation is key; it is how those in Egypt are finally getting a voice in Western society, and an insurance policy against regime violence. Many of the prominent nodes in this network were at some point arrested, but their deep connectivity help ensure they were not ‘disappeared’.”

"Most of those in this network speak both English and Arabic, and their choice of language says a lot about both the movement and about Twitter. Some may choose to primarily communicate with friends, while others make an effort to be visible to the rest of the world on purpose. They want to reach out, and connect with, the rest of global society."

Boguta told TechCrunch at the launch of Infoharmoni in 2009:

People are social animals, and love to both move in packs and purposefully individuate. ... Existing social groups incubate new topics of interest on Twitter, and existing interests incubate new social groups. Both move in response to each other. Twitter bills itself as the pulse of the planet, but it's more like the pulse of creative networks.

Cross-border Swarming

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 16:24:00 +0000

Cairo youth didn't act alone in using social media to depose Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, the New York Times says today in a front-page story. Their Facebook and YouTube activism was part of a sophisticated, two-year, online collaboration with Tunisian youth activists that used social media to reach across national borders to commiserate about torture, trade tips on evading tear gas, and plot how to use technology to duck surveillance.

"They fused their secular expertise in social networks with a discipline culled from religious movements and combined the energy of soccer fans with the sophistication of surgeons," Times correspondents David Kirkpatrick and David Sanger wrote, describing the anatomy of the movement that led to protesters' successful face-off in Tahrir Square against less tech-savvy Egyptian authorities.

"What we discovered in reporting this story was that what's happening in the Middle East now is more than just a contagion in which one group inspires the next," Sanger told WNYC Radio this morning on The Brian Lehrer Show. "There was, thanks to Facebook and other social networking elements, a lot of communication back and forth across borders, but of course there are no borders (on the Internet). ...Imagine what a shock that was to Egyptian authorities -- to discover that the entire security system they had spent billions to build and focus on the inside never even considered this other (cross-border technological) threat."

[Wael Ghonim -- the Egyptian Google executive whose Facebook page is credited with helping to catalyze the crowds in Tahrir Square -- told CBS 60 Minutes last night that "Without Facebook, without Twitter, without Google and without YouTube, this (revolution) would never have happened." CBS Correspondent Harry Smith, in this blog post today, quotes Ghonim as saying that the revolution "is like Wikipedia, okay?" Social media enabled everyone to be contributing content, Ghonim told Smith. "Everyone was contributing small pieces. No one was the hero but everyone was the hero."]

Sanger agrees that social media were critical to Cairo's youth revolution, which used online social networks to help destabilize the regime of former President Hosni Mubarak, forcing him to resign from his 30-year reign on February 11th. "But what was really remarkable" about the Egyptian youth movement, Sanger told WNYC, is that it used both high and low tech to organize support:

"While social media were used to organize ringleaders, once they got going, they also used some of the oldest forms of communications -- putting up leaflets and fliers and walking through some of the poorest sections to reach people without Net connections. They shouted their message in the streets and picked up a following, liked the Pied Piper. This was a combination of extremly high tech organization and extraordinarily low-tech organization."

And now the young leaders are looking beyond Egypt, Sanger says. He and Kirkpatrick quote Walid Rachid, 27, one of the members of the April 6 movement in Cairo -- an Egyptian Facebook group -- as saying that "Tunis is the force that pushed Egypt, but what Egypt did will be the force that will push the world." At a meeting of youth movement leaders last night in Cairo, Rachid told Kirkpatrick: "...If a small group of people in every Arab country went out and persevered as we did, then that would be the end of all the regimes." According to the Times story, the members of the Tunis and Cairo youth movements are talking about sharing their experiences with similar youth movements in Libya, Algeria, Morocco and Iran.

But Sanger cautions that the movement's success in Cairo doesn't insure its success elsewhere, especially in countries where authorities are far more sophisticated in the use of the Internet to organize protest. Sanger told WNYC: "I'd love to say Facebook was protection against the military, but had the military decided it was going to open fire on protesters and round people up, this could have looked more like Tiananmen Square, then I think we would have had something very different here." Sanger added: "...Just because social networks can be organized doesn't necessarily mean they will be successful at overcoming a regime." Sanger said that some regimes, like China, "are extraordinarily adept at using the Internet and social media to follow dissidents and punish them." Mubarak's regime, he says, "was clueless" about the power of social media and the Web -- but not every regime is, nor will be in the wake of what happened to Mubarak.

Meanwhile today, The Associated Press is reporting that the U.S. State Department has begun sending Twitter messages in Farsi to reach social media users in Iran, with some of the Tweets accusing Iran's government of "illegalizing dissent" while at the same time praising Egyptian protesters. The State Department's Farsi Twitter account had 60 followers within two hours of its launch, the AP was reporting. The AP also is reporting today that the State Department launched an Arabic Twitter feed last week in an effort to communicate with the Egyptian protesters and signal its support.

For more on the role of social media in political activism in the Middle East, see Cairo's Facebook Flat, below:

(Photo of Egyptian Facebook activist Wael Ghonim by Getty Images)

Wake-Up Call

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 01:35:00 +0000

Efforts by authorities last week to shut down the Internet in Egypt should serve as a "wake-up call" to citizens everywhere that social media are not free from government and corporate control, Web and foreign policy experts warned today at two separate Social Media Week gatherings in Manhattan.

"I don't worry about social media so much as I do about corporate and government attempts to shut them down," Micah Sifry, Executive Editor of the Personal Democracy Forum, told a mid-day panel hosted by Wired magazine at Google's New York science hub. Social media companies, he said, will do what is in their best interests -- and not always what's best for free speech, privacy and the security of citizen activists.

"...I'm terrified that we are relying on corporate entities to enable" citizen organizing over Facebook, Twitter, email and cellphones in one country after another, Sifry said. "I think it's very dangerous, as there's really no reason that social media companies have to be socially responsible at all. Their responsibility is to the bottom line." [See Portable Propaganda in CauseGlobal, about Vodaphone's Feb. 3 accusation that Egyptian authorities were secretly using its network to send anonymous, pro-government propaganda to protesters.]

Sifry, author of the recent book, Wikileaks and The Age of Transparency, also said he worries about a lack of transparency by social media companies when it comes to their policies governing user privacy and security. He said social media platforms "have become ubiquitous ... yet we as users have less rights on them than we do walking into a shopping mall." Sifry added: "I don't think that these [social media] companies will be good global citizens" in the years ahead. Typically, "the government asks for your data and companies hand it over," he said. "...This is a great wakeup call for citizens to fight for something better, and to ask themselves, What are our rights? How do we enforce them in this space?"

Later in the day, author Evgeny Morozov told a panel hosted by the Open Society Institute that "governments everywhere are looking for an Internet kill switch" now that social media are making it easier for activists to organize faster and in higher numbers than ever before. Morozov, the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, said the Utopian vision of the Net that most people shared a decade ago -- the notion that dictatorships would collapse under the onslaught of social media -- doesn't square with today's world. The Internet, Morozov argues, "is an uncontrollable and inherently political medium that will frustrate those who believe democracy can be promoted with the push of a button."

He said he wrote his book to help people understand that while social media can accelerate social movements -- these movements will not occur the same way across the globe, nor have the same outcomes, due to differences in local cultures and aspirations. Case in point: the failure of a Facebook campaign in Syria last week and separately, the recent use of blogs and other forms of social media by Sudanese authorities to disseminate false information in an effort to ferret out and arrest anti-government protesters.

For more on the subject, see the February 5 CNN Opinion article, "Internet is easy prey for governments" by Douglas Rushkoff, and "Caught in the net" -- a review of Morozov's book by The Economist magazine. See also "Voicing Opposition" by Sarah A. Topol in Slate.

Do you agree or disagree? Let us hear from you.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration: Miroslaw Pieprzyk)

Like Water

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 12:12:00 +0000

Just after the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square ended in a spray of live fire from government tanks that killed untold numbers of demonstrators, a Chinese journalist colleague of mine advised his fellow writers to "be like water." He was quoting a Chinese proverb commanding persistence in the face of towering obstacles: water, he explained, can seep through and around even the most imposing walls to get to the other side. I have been thinking of him recently, watching events unfold in Cairo's Tahrir Square.

Egyptian blogger and pro-democracy activist Mona Seif, when interviewed last week by National Public Radio's On the Media from Tahrir Square, affirmed that it was a challenge to organize anti-Mubarak demonstrators online after the Egyptian government had tried to shut down the Internet. But it wasn't impossible, she said. Seif, a post-graduate student in cancer research at Cairo University and the daughter of renowned human rights lawyer Ahmed Seif El-Islam Hamad, said the Web and social media not only helped to amass protesters but also to humanize them outside of Egypt. Additionally, she said, the government was unable to shut down all communication; information is still able to leak through.

Seif, via cell phone from the Square, told OTM that she and other activists are using a friend's wireless connection and her apartment as an online organizing hub. [Her friend's internet provider was not shut down due to its relationship with the country's financial exchanges, she explained. On the Media Host Bob Garfield quipped later that Seif's use of that wireless account was "like using a government tank to get behind enemy lines." Seif said she has another friend with a satellite connection "if things get worse."]

Here's a short excerpt from that interview:

NPR: When the (Egyptian) government shut off the Internet, did it have a backlash (effect), infuriating people who otherwise would not have mobilized?

SEIF: I think it had a backlash but not because of infuriating people. A lot of the people who would have normally been satisfied with just following the updates (of what was happening in the square) on Facebook and Twitter suddenly did not have this connection and so they found no way of being part of this movement except by going out into the streets. I think that cutting off the Internet actually helped the movement on the ground and in the street to become bigger.

NPR: We get lots of criticism here in the West about about Twitter; can you take this opportunity to explain what Twitter can mean?

SEIF: I understand this criticism because I've been getting it a lot from my friends. I think sometimes there needs to be an experience like the one we are in to really grasp just how powerful such a tool like Twitter is (and can be). The use of Twitter to engage different people in bits of your life is really what it makes it a powerful tool -- when there is a serious event and you want to engage people. If it is only used as a (personal) news feed, then it would be boring and it wouldn’t be as interactive as it should be.

Usually, I use Twitter for really personal things--to share moments from my work, or moments from my love life or I talk about my cats or my family. And it engages lots of different people, so that when these people are following you -- and suddenly you are talking about a torture case (for example) - some of them might not usually be exposed to such cases. But because they are following me and there is an ongoing conversation between us, they will suddenly be engaged in this as well. So it’s a really powerful tool in that sense.

NPR: The movement has coalesced a number of forces of anger at the (Mubarak) regime. There are trade unionists, there are Muslim Brotherhood elements, there are young people who have been facing hopelessness and despair and unemployment. How worried are you that what comes next may be worse than the status quo -- for example, an Islamic revolution?

SEIF: I really am not worried and I know that might sound strange to a lot of people. What I have seen these past nine days is making me really hopeful. I’m in Tahrir Square with thousands of people from completely different backgrounds and for once in my life, all of the big issues that we are usually encountering in the streets of Eygpt and are having to deal with, such as violence and tension and sexual harassment against girls, for example– all of these issues we keep on talking about now do not exist. I’m in Tahrir Square and feeling that I belong with those people and we are everyone -- there are Muslim Brotherhood (and) independent people who don’t belong to a political party. I really, really think this could (end up in) a much, much better scenario than what all of the outside world is expecting or feeling.

Here's hoping it will, long after (and through) the violence of the past few days -- though as of today, government forces have been moving in on protesters in the Square, attempting to minimize their numbers.

For the best ongoing coverage of the upheaval, watch Al-Jazeera's livestream, here.

To hear the OTM interview with Seif from February 3rd, click below:

For alternative views of what is happening on the ground, see this essay by Joshua Stacher, assistant professor of political science at Kent State University, which asserts in Foreign Affairs that "despite the tenacity, optimism, and blood of the protesters massed in Tahrir Square, Egypt's democratic window has probably already closed."

What do you think? Let us hear from you.

(Photo: Courtesy NPR; scene from street protests in Cairo's Tahrir Square February 3rd)

Portable Propaganda

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 15:25:00 +0000

There's no question that text messages are helping self-organized groups to assemble and vent their protests around the world. But as mobile phone operator Vodafone reminded the world earlier today, social media can just as easily be turned into new tools for government propaganda.

Vodafone is accusing Egyptian authorities of using its network to send pro-government text messages to its supporters, without disclosing that activity. "The current situation regarding these messages is unacceptable," Vodafone said in a press release. According to Reuters, text messages sent on February 2 announced the location and timing for a mass demonstration to support Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak amid mass protests calling for his immedite ouster. Vodafone says Egyptian authorities ordered Vodafone and two other mobile networks, Mobinil and Etisalat, to send messages to Egyptians to support the status quo, turning disabled networks back on briefly, just to be able to send them. The text messages were addressed to "Egypt's youth" and urged them to "listen to the voice of reason."

Vodaphone, trying to distance itself from Mubarak's propaganda efforts, said: "We have made it clear that all messages should be transparent and clearly attributable to the originator. These messages are not scripted by any of the mobile network operators and we do not have the ability to respond to the authorities on their content." Last week, Vodafone said in a statement that all mobile operators in Egypt had been "instructed to suspend services in parts of Egypt. Under Egyptian legislation, the authorities have the right to issue such an order and we are obliged to comply with it."

Speaking to reporters earlier today, Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao said voice calls remain off but that data services allowing people to access the Internet are now back on. Text messaging services, however, remain disabled for the general public. Reuters is reporting that one engineer who had been working on the network to keep services running has been seriously injured and another engineer is missing. "No voice and text but mobile internet is working," Colao told Reuters. "It will be restored when we are authorized. We are in a continuous dialogue with the government on keeping our services up. But this is a country that still has a curfew in place."

For more on censorship amid Cairo's turmoil, check out this Danger Room post and also this piece that appeared January 31 in The New York Times about the viral nature of censorship. Also see "Caught in the Net: Why Dictators are Going Digital'" in The Economist online.

- Marcia Stepanek

Oil and Water

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 17:03:00 +0000

The BP oil spill is out of the headlines, but not off the radar of international cause groups. The latest initiative comes out of Happiness Brussels, a Brussels-based design and communications studio that has created a pro bono project around the slogan, Oil and Water Don't Mix.

The designers, earlier this fall, scooped up some of the sludge still washing up on the beaches of Grand Isle, Louisiana, from the Deepwater Horizon spill and used it to "ink" a limited edition of 200 hand-printed posters featuring the slogan -- and as of today, all posters have sold out. (Designers are considering extending the run and/or designing new posters to continue the global fundraising drive.) All proceeds benefit the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, or crcl.org, an environmental cleanup group based in Baton Rouge.

The posters are cool, but even cooler is that social media linked this small studio in Brussels to these activists in Baton Rouge to printers in New Orleans to environmentalists all over -- faster than a plane ride to either location. Also significant? The oil is still washing up; the posters are proof positive.

Here's the video on the project:

OIL & WATER DO NOT MIX from Happiness Brussels on Vimeo.

Life, Edited

noreply@blogger.com (Marcia Stepanek) — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 00:28:00 +0000

We all talk about living with less, but Graham Hill is getting really serious about it. At this past week's PopTech2010 conference in Maine, the Treehugger founder launched Life Edited, a new project that -- over the next year -- will turn his 420-square-foot New York apartment into a crowdsourcing experiment on how to live smarter with less.

"It's about maximizing our enjoyment of small space," Hill told PopTech conferees over the weekend. "It's about reducing our stuff footprint." It's also about finding a way to live happily with far less of everything -- from friends to waste to media to furniture to clothing -- but all with more design. "I believe the skill of the century is editing -- cutting back on space, possessions, media, friends -- because it gives you a lot of mental clarity, a lot more space and a lot more financial flexibility. Less is more."

Hill is asking designers to help him renovate his new Manhattan apartment into "a transformable space furnished only with essentials and digitized media." [Think access to stuff versus ownership of stuff.] Hill said he was inspired during a recent move, when he discovered how much of what he had was useless. The design competition, cosponsored by Green Depot, Cisco Systems, Resource Furniture and others, will award $10,000 for the winning design. For more details, here's Hill:

What can you live without?

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration: istock.com)