#4change wrap-up: collaboration and social media

I've been meaning to write a wrap-up of the #4change chat on collaboration for the week since it happened. My apologies for the delay, I'm still getting into the routine of blogging and Burning Man preparation has completely taken over ever available hour outside of work and a necessary minimum of socializing. I'll tell you all about it before I depart – in a week! Anyway....

Thank you to @lethalsheethal for her excellent and vastly more timely reflection on the chat. Having just discovered it I'd like to recommend www.printyourtwitter.com as creating by far the most digestible (and printable, naturally) twitter transcript (ht @writerpollock).

The topic of the most recent #4change chat was “How does social media open new doors for collaboration?” It was a vibrant and thought-provoking conversation, in my opinion the best #4change chat we've had so far.

There is no question that social media has created enormous new collaborative possibilities. Some of these are in the sharing of data, such as the Social Entrepreneurship API being developed by Social Actions and the merging of the North American green business databases of Gen Green (@gengreen) and 3^rd Whale (@3rdwhale), which was announced at the start of the chat. This was interesting and welcome news, but business alliances of this type are not uncommon. What, we wondered, where the unique collaborative capacities of social media?

@engagejoe summed up some of these possibilities as “exposing overlap, sharing resources, connecting communities, forging partnerships.” These things are not unique to social media but they are native to it – social media makes overlap and waste more transparent, speeds up information sharing and relationship-building and can increase the impact of collaborations. Messages can be shared between communities and networks both real-time and ad-hoc. And as #4change itself demonstrates conversations can be convened that were never possible before.

But how much of this is happening? And if these possibilities are not being realized what are the barriers standing in the way?

The conversation part seems easiest. It is, by definition, what social media facilitates. Making this conversations intentional, productive and constructive is harder, but we still see examples of this all around us, on forums and wiki's, blogs and microblogs, communities closed and open. These conversations can create new insights, understanding and relationships. And these conversations can lead to concrete action, from protests to petitions, fundraising to collaborative databases.

There was a real skepticism felt by some in the conversation about whether real work was being done online. This, of course, depends on what real work is to you, but most would agree that hearts and minds are a key part of most forms of social change and so anything that brings us into contact with each other in new ways has the ability to move us in new ways. As Michael Wesch said in his presentation at Personal Democracy Forum this year, “We know ourselves through our relationships with others. New media is creating new ways to relate.”

But to really scale-up the collaborative possibilities of social media we need to empower and lead our organizations to work together in new ways. As @ChristinasWorld said: “if we could get orgs and passionate people to start working together at a sector/issue level things will start to get exciting.” One key challenge to doing this, as @edwardharran pointed out, is that “social media is pocketed in silos.” While we might wish that this wasn't the case it is simply a fact of human existence that we build groups at all sizes, but that our closest communities are smaller and more digestible, whether on or offline (although the scale of what's digestible varies widely between these two states). With these distributed, frustratingly uncoordinated conversations also comes enormous space for innovation and creative thinking. However better search, aggregation and distribution is needed to reveal these conversations to each other in ways that support collaboration. We can see steps in this direction with WiserEarth groups showing related groups and Zanby which allows groups to connect while retaining their independence.

A schema began to emerge from the conversation which identified three distinct types of collaboration:

1. organization-to-organization

2. organization-to-individuals

3. individuals-to-individuals.

Again and again the majority of the examples brought up where the later two. For 2. you have organizations like the Sunlight Foundation who are harnessing the contributions of hundreds of coders to create their transparency tools and OneYoungWorld who are using social media to find 1500 leaders of tomorrow. You also have new tools which facilitate this form of collaboration in exciting new ways like The Extraordinaries. For 3. there are grassroots political fundraising campaigns and the entire open source movement.

(4. was also later suggested by @engagejoe: people-within-organizations. Any more?)

For 1. there is the previously-cited Social Actions-style data aggregation and sharing and some great examples of organizations collaborating around a social media-enabled campaign, such as the just-launched climate change campaign tcktcktck (@tcktcktc) but there was a clear feeling that much of this landscape remains to be filled out.

In discussing the barriers to better social media collaboration between non-profits people nominated time intensity vs staffing resources, fear, lack of connectivity in many parts of the world, desire to tightly control their message, geography and time zones and lack of skills as prime candidates. The need for clear strategy so as to not waste precious staff resources was also mentioned, along with the observation that many non-profits do not have the knowledge or experience to develop this strategy.

To close people were asked for their key takeaways from the conversation:

• “There is a desire to evolve toward more collaborative outputs; SM [social media] may not be enough to get there” - @ChristinasWorld
• “It's given me ideas about the barriers NP [non-profits] face with SM” - @chilli07
• “I think #4change in itself is a great example of international collaboration” - @tashjudd
• “Main takeaway: a sense of optimism. SM is not going anywhere and collaboration is only going to continue to get bigger and better” - @edwardharran
• “SM can be chaotic but still work” - @zerostrategist
• “I now see more kinds of collaboration: people-within-org, org-to-community, community-to-community, org-to-org” - @engagejoe

And if I could be so bold as to end on my own takeaway:

• “We must learn to collaborate as individuals first, then teach our organizations how.”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Please let us know what topics you'd like to cover in future chats!

#4Change Twitter chat tomorrow

#4Change is a twitter-based real-time conversation about how social media can be used for change. It was an idea which bounced around for a bit before a group of friends and contacts from three countries kicked it off a couple of months ago. Tomorrow will be our third chat.

Rather than introduce the next chat I'm going to use my friend Amy's overview for the 4Change group blog, of which I am a part, as I couldn't possibly do a better job.

The next #4change chat is this Thursday – I hope you can join us!

Details:

• Date: August, 13th
• Where: Twitter (search for #4Change)
• When: 5 – 7 pm US Eastern Time
• Topic: How do social media open new doors for collaboration (especially internationally)?

Starting the Conversations

Unfortunately for me, I will unable to join the chat this Thursday; so, I’d like to offer some conversation starters now to get you thinking of questions, ideas, and stories you want to share!

Here are some questions to consider:

• has your organization found new collaborators (other organizations, companies, networks, etc.) for your work via social media use/presence?
• have you reached out, either as an individual or an organization, with opportunities to collaborate to others you only connected with via social media? why?
• what issues are unique to collaborations of this type?
• what kind of reassurances (and what are the mechanisms for providing them) are unique to parties entering collaborations via social media?
• how could collaborations enabled or maintained via social media be more or less sustainable than traditional tools/outlets?

And here are some examples to consider:

• SocialActions – a great example of social media powering the sharing and aggregation (and thus the collaboration and partnership) of social action opportunity portals all over the world
• Amnesty International, Red Cross, and others – organizers working globally/locally have changed the way they campaign or operate now that they are really in the same space (online)
• Journalism – writers are now using their social media platforms (whether it’s Twitter or Facebook, or even the newspaper’s comment-enabled websites) to collaborate with witnesses, locals, and experts for their contributions to the story

Join the Conversation

1. If you want to contribute to the conversation, you’ll need to have a twitter account (it’s free).
2. To follow the conversation (whether you are planning to contribute or not), use http://search.twitter.com or another application to search on Twitter for “#4Change”
3. Jump in to the conversation by adding “#4Change” (without the “”) to your Twitter message

Rules for #Change Chats

1. #4Change will be structured around a series of questions which all participants can respond to. Send your questions to @tomjd without the hash tag (to keep them out of the stream) to have them considered.
2. Introduce yourself in 1 tweet at the start or when you join.
3. Stay on topic!
4. Stay cool.

Join us for the chat this Thursday – looking forward to discussing the role social media play in collaboration!

How late is too late?

Last night The Day After Tomorrow was on cable. It was one of the spate of big-budget Hollywood disaster porn films which came out in the late-nineties and early noughties which I had not seen before. The disaster in this film is a sudden and catastrophic ice age, triggered by the melting of the Artic and Greeland ice sheets, stopping the North Atlantic Current which keeps most of Europe and North America habitable and which, over the course of just a few days, freezes half the Northern Hemisphere, setting the scene for the heroic "struggle to survive" scenes always featured in movies of this ilk. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnvqsWVluCE]

So the film is, obviously, a bit over the top, and riddled with scientific inaccuracies as these things always are. But the general premise of government's refusing to take action on global warming until it's way, way too late is something that it's becoming increasingly hard to believe won't happen. Being in America is filling me with despair about our capacity to respond in time to avoid catastrophe and never more-so than when I saw this poll conducted by the University of Maryland, which asked people in 19 countries to rank on a scale of 1-10 how high a priority their government should place on addressing climate change:

America stands out as being, of the countries polled, uniquely disinterested in government action to address climate change. And whereas the Iraqi's and Palestinians justifiably have other things they think their government should be focusing on, in America the blame can only be placed on the presence of a well-funded denialist lobby, replaying exactly the delaying tactics of the tobacco industry. Their goal is not to prove that climate change is not happening, but to sow enough doubt about the science to forstall real action. So far they've been extremely successful, especially in the US and, sadly, Australia. The above poll shows just how successful, and what a steep hill we have to climb to get real action here in the world's greatest carbon emitter, without whom no strategy to address climate change can be successful.

This reminded me of a letter I read years ago, by Paul Gilding, former CEO of Greenpeace International, on the 10th anniversary of the founding of Ecos Corporation, which he has since left. The letter was entitled Scream, Crash, Boom. In it he declared that environmentalists had lost, that despite thirty years of concerted efforts, the development of huge global NGOs and contribution of millions of hours of activism, the chance to avert catastrophic climate change had passed. The forces resisting this change were just too big, or the tactics used had been insufficient, whatever the reason all the shouting for change (the "Scream" of the title) had failed to  move enough people to force the world's governments to take action. "We tried. We failed. It is what it is."

Therefore the Crash is coming, where we will see the impact of climate change in very real and terrible ways, whether through a Day After Tomorrow-style snap ice age, pandemic bird flu, peak oil or drought for decades without end (which seems to have already arrived in much of Australia). Millions will be displaced or, potentially, killed. "However it unfolds, it is certainly in my judgement going to be ugly, probably very ugly. You can’t keep messing with the system that feeds you, eating away at your capital without bad stuff happening in response."

However then would come the "Boom", the explosion of human ingenuity possible when we are mobilized around an immediate problem.  Humans are unique in our ability to adapt and change, we are just not very good at doing so until we absolutely have to (and sometimes not even then). When we are confronted with problems we experience first-hand, when people start dying (in the Western World) we will respond. "When we do, it’s going to be really interesting. We’ll reinvent cars that make today’s technology look as primitive and stupid as it is. We’ll have energy created everywhere as our roofs and cars become generators rather than consumers of power. Water will just go around and around our houses and we’ll use it on the way through."

I wish I was as optimistic as Paul. I think the Crash is inevitable, we are doing pitifully little to prevent it, and most Americans think we should be doing little more. Where leadership is needed we instead have denial, obfuscation and confusion. So long as there are dollars to be made. But the Crash is coming, and there are dollars to be made in helping us respond to this challenge as well. So how late will we wait, how bad will it need to be before denial turns into action?

Even if we have lost the opportunity to prevent destruction and displacement there is still so much to fight for, every day we lose to inaction will make the Crash worst, the correction harder, the loss of life greater. Every day is another chance to turn it around, before it is truly too late.

While looking up the link to Paul's original Scream, Crash, Boom letter from 2005 I discovered he wrote an updated, Scream, Crash, Boom II letter last year, where he claimed that the "Great Disruption" has already begun:

I want to be clear though that this is not the “end of the world”. It does, however herald an unparalleled era of system stress, economic stagnation and social tension – a global emergency during which we’ll evolve a new economic model and then rebuild. I call it The Great Disruption because it is most likely to be a disruption in society’s evolutionary process, rather than the collapse of civilisation.

It's worth reading in full. And then it's worth considering what you can do, to change both your lifestyle and the minds of your fellow citizens, to help bring about the change we need.

Related: the Pentagon has begun studying the national security implications of Climate Change, which may require military intervention to "deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics".

Tour de France reflections

On Sunday the Tour de France finished for another year. I love the Tour so its ending is a bit like Christmas for me: filled with excitement but also with the knowledge that it's a long year until it comes again. Given the time zone I'm currently in I couldn't watch it as avidly as I have done on previous occasions but I managed to catch most of the major mountain stages, including the epic battles on Mont Vontoux (with it's 23 kms of continuous uphill) and Le Grand-Bornand. It was amazing to watch the young and brilliant Alberto Contador and Andy Schleck fight it out over the mountains, a sight I'm sure we'll see for many Tour's to come, and it was inspirational to see Lance Armstrong return to the hardest race in the world after a four year break and finish third overall. It was fantastic to see the greatest riders of their respective generations ride together and I can't wait for them to go head-to-head on opposing teams in 2010. I like the Tour de France because it is so absurdly brutal that it becomes a race of the heart as well as the head; because it demands such manic strength of will and determination to keep going when the body is screaming for you to stop, to keep accelerating even as the gradient increases and mere mortals must bend to the will of the mountain. I love it because it also takes smarts; because it is much more than simply riding from A to B as quickly as possible but is rather a complex strategic and tactical game of knowing when to preserve and when to spend your energy; because while the honors are mostly individual it is still clearly a team sport and many riders sacrifice individual glory for the good of their teammates.

Since the race finished I've been thinking about how many of the themes of the Tour de France, and the reasons I so love to watch it unfold, are true in other parts of life also, and how we can take lessons from this the Tour as we can from almost any arena of human accomplishment.

Here, then, is my list of what we learn from the Tour de France:

It takes a team

While the sports reports only talk of individual placings and accomplishments (and, if you're in America, mostly of Lance's relative placing) the Tour de France is unquestionably a team sport, governed by team tactics and reliant on diverse contributions for success. The Team Manager is the primary strategist, deciding who the team will ride for and who will sacrifice themselves along the way. But to work everyone must play their part, from the 'domestique's' who destroy themselves leading their star rider as far as they can to the lead-out guy who aims to set up their sprinter in a bunch finish. And the guys behind-the-scenes are crucial too, from the masseurs to team drivers to chefs.

The dynamic of individual glory built on team competencies is one we see regularly in the business and non-profit words. We glorify CEO's and founders but the good ones always foster and build a team of individual and complementary talents around them. It is only through diverse contributions well-coordinated that change happens at scale. The last Presidential election is a great example of this. Undoubtedly Barack Obama is a once-a-generation candidate but he also built the best campaign organization, a team of rockstars who managed to work together without drama, out-strategizing, out-hustling and out-smarting his opponents. Obama was the leader but without David Plouffe, Robert Gibbs, David Axelrod, Joe Rospars, Chris Hughes and so many others Team Obama would not have had the success that it did.

It's all about heart

Of course a unique physique and relentless training are necessary preconditions for success in the Tour but over the course of a three-week stage race heart becomes just as important as muscle. Those who succeed are those who refuse to give up, who have the mental fortitude to ignore their screaming body and push themselves past the brink of exhaustion. Sometimes this can go too far. British cyclist Tom Simpson literally died on his bike pushing himself too hard up a mountain, his final words were 'Put  me back on my bike.' That's an extreme case, but all successful road cyclists, or any endurance athlete, must will themselves forward past the point when most of us would simply give up, our legs and our hearts drained of strength, our spirit broken. In other words it's not enough to be a brilliant rider, you need to have a spirit which transcends physicality.

Issues come and go in prominence and as an issue becomes trendy thousands of new activists will jump in and get involved. This is wonderful and necessary but the true hero's of any cause are those who stick with it, through thick and thin, shrugging off disappointment to continue forward, never waving in their determination to get to their goals.

I also see this as a reminder that spirit and intention matter in all that we do. In our dealings with others it is never simply about how well you write, how clever you are or how brilliant your idea is (okay, sometimes it is just about how brilliant our idea is, but it has to be pretty brilliant) it is about the heart and intention you put into your relationships. Social media embodies this. Those who are best at it are not simply clever, productive and forward-thinking, although all those things help enormously, they are usually also warm, open and generous. For social entrepreneurs and changemakers of all types empathy might be the single most important quality you can possess, as it allows you to understand the experience of others, which forms a platform for the collaboration, collective understanding and community so necessary to bring about social change.

When the going gets toughest real champions emerge

The leading contenders of the Tour almost never attack each other on flat or less intensively steep stages. It is on the mountains, and especially on stages which end with a mountain-top finish, where the real sorting out happens. In this year's Tour it was the mountain top finish at Verbier which Contador won to leap into Yellow and then the incredible battle on the slopes of Le Grand-Bornand which solidified Contador in first and catapulted Andy Schleck to second which determined the results.  Similarly last year's Tour came down to the legendary mountaintop Alp d'Huez where Sastre took enough time off Australia's Cadel Evans to claim overall victory.

In life it is when things are hard that you often find the true quality of a person, and the true quality of your relationships. It's easy to maintain friendships during good times, but in times of need you can often be surprised by who steps up, by who really cares.

In social change just as in the Tour de France it is great challenges that bring the greatest opportunities. The economist Paul Romer once said that “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” It is when are society is under stress that there is an opportunity to create fundamental change. Otherwise inertia and apathy tend to prevent us from grasping the opportunity to build a better world; the current state of affairs being 'good enough'. It's when they are no longer 'good enough' that the clamour and the opportunity for change grows, when people's appetite for risk and effort increases.

Success is created one day at a time

You don't become a world class cyclist overnight and you don't win the Tour de France in a day; it is through sustained effort that you reach your goals. This is true for all big goals: you need to be dedicated and you need to incrementally approach them, remaining motivated even if it's hard to see the progress you're making.

Chad Fowler, CTO of InfoEther, Inc. wrote about this in a fantastic guest post on Tim Ferriss' blog recently:

You might not be able to see a noticeable difference in the whole with each incremental change, though. When you’re trying to become more respected in your workplace or be healthier, the individual improvements you make each day often won’t lead directly to tangible results. This is, as we saw before, the reason big goals like these become so demotivating. So, for most of the big, difficult goals you’re striving for, it’s important to think not about getting closer each day to the goal, but rather, to think about doing better in your efforts toward that goal than yesterday.

In other words, what did you do today to progress towards your goal(s)? Did you do more today than you did yesterday? Focusing on your effort each day, ensuring that you do something daily to advance your goals, is the key to completely large and complex tasks.

Got any other Tour de France lessons? Let me know in the comments!

[vodpod id=Groupvideo.3078987&w=425&h=350&fv=%26rel%3D0%26border%3D0%26]

more about "Tour de France 2009 Showdown", posted with vodpod

Reflections from the Personal Democracy Forum

I spent Monday and Tuesday last week at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York, an annual conference which explores how technology is affecting politics. It was my second PDF after I took myself off to it last year soon after landing in America while I was waiting (hoping) for a job offer.

I much preferred this year's event. The upcoming elections loomed over PDF 08 and people could talk about little else: what would work, what wouldn't, what would happen next. Now we have answers for some of these questions and a lesser sense of urgency for others and therefore many the ideas and conversations at PDF 09 seemed focused on a higher order of questioning: not who would win an impending election but how were these technologies effecting our society, our communities and ultimately, us.

The past week has given me the chance to consider the ideas and information presented, re-read the tweets I favorited and see what has stuck.

The presentations which stands out in my mind most prominently was that by danah boyd, now a researcher at Microsoft. danah (who writes her name in lowercase) reminded us that the communities we are building online are not perfect and that they are in many ways reflecting the social fissures of the offline world. She described the shift of the educated, wealthy and white from MySpace to Facebook as a digital form of white flight, which instead of creating better understanding across class and racial boundaries is reinforcing those boundaries. When asked who was on MySpace almost no hands went up. It's easy to believe that Facebook is destroying MySpace in the social networks war but that's not the case, their traffic remains relatively even. But what is true is that the people I know are on Facebook and not Myspace, just like the people I know are mostly middle-class, educated, and urban.

This lack of connection and interaction with people unlike us, despite the possibilities of the internet to facilitate such connections, diminishes social cohesion, understand and empathy. This is powerfully demonstrated by recent polling which shows that the number one determinate of whether someone supports same-sex marriage is knowing someone who is gay. Contact leads to understand which leads to empathy. Gay people don't seem so threatening when they are your colleagues, teammates, friends, family. They cease to be the “other”. But according to danah social networks are failing to connect us across class and racial lines, which allows the sense of other to remain. In other words, if we're not careful social networks will simply mirror the fissures and divides in our offline communities.

I had not thought about this dynamic much, although I have thought a great deal of another pervasive divide across social media: political orientation. It is easier than ever before to curate a media diet which conforms entirely to your pre-existing opinions and biases. You can read dailykos.com, listen to Air America satellite radio and watch MSNBC for liberal commentary or redstate.com, most talk radio and Fox News for conservative commentary. This gap has become so wide that the two sides can literally barely talk to each other. They no longer agree on the same basic sets of facts, and each side's set of facts get supported by their team of talking heads and commentators with few questions and less nuance. Very little listening seems to happen. This reduces a societies ability to work together to solve tough problems and together to address shared challenges. There seems no hope currently that a consensus on what constitutes the key challenges could emerge, and America is the poorer for it.

Social media undoubtedly builds social capital, but danah reminds us that not all social capital is the same. Social media could prove to be the greatest tool invented to create bonding social capital, connecting you to people much like you in class and orientation while failing to meaningfully increase our bridging social capital, the connections between people who are unalike. It is bridging social capital that is most vital to the health of democracy, for it allows us to talk together in civil and constructive ways.

The internet almost automatically creates horizontal communities of interest. These contain both a bonding and bridging dimension, focusing around a particular theme and often encompassing people of significant geographical diversity. But other types of bridging capital are harder to create, and will take conscious effort to effect. I hope danah's presentation was a reminder for everyone that if we are serious about creating a fairer and more just world we must consciously reach out to those who's stories and perspectives are different from our own, and ensure that we include them in the conversation.

You can read danah's presentation here and I really recommend that you do.

Another highlight was Michael Wesch, of “The Machine is Us/ing Us” fame. Michael is a media anthropologist and has been focusing his inquiries on YouTube and the community and culture it creates, the humanity it allows people to express, the identify formation playing out in real time. His was a hopeful talk, with the central idea being that social media channels like YouTube are creating a shared culture which is very human and which has the possibility to inspire in us a sense of commonality, a chance to express ourselves and do “whatever it takes”. “We know ourselves through our relationships with others. New media is creating new ways to relate." Anything which alters the way humans express themselves and relate to one-another changes the way we view ourselves, how we define our contributions to society. Looking at the comments section on YouTube, easily the most useless comments anywhere on the internet, he observed that anonymity + physical distance + rare & ephemeral dialog = hated as performance but, importantly, also a freedom to experience humanity without fear or anxiety.

Michael's overall optimism was a nice balance with danah's concerns, and both pointed at the deeper changes social media is bringing.

His talk also featured the stunning statistic that 20 hours worth of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. And the somewhat less stunning but more important stat that after 1 minute, 54% of viewers have stopped watching a YouTube video, while after 2 minutes 76% have quit. Keep your videos short! But be sure to stick through the whole 20 minutes of this video of his talk, you'll be glad you did.

My friend from Australia Mark Pesce also did his usual mentally invigorating thing, drawing connections from across the media and cultural landscape to try and identify where we are going. He sees an immediate future filled with clashes between hierarchies and ad-hocracies, systems so different that they struggle to engage with each other effectively, leading to conflict and consternation. Meanwhile David Weinberger, one of the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto ten years ago (!), the reading of which got me really focused on the web for the first time, outlined the changing role of facts in our society - where once they were used to settle arguments now they are used to start them. He described it as the "great unnailing", a process as chaotic and messy as democracy itself. It is only through debate and argument that we arive at wisdom. "Knowledge is a property of the network, not the individual." (Update: You can see a video of David's presentation here).

PDF09 was a fascinating conference where we seemed to pause for a moment and reflect deeply on how, as Michael would say, the Machine is using us, and how the machine is us. Internet technologies are affecting our work, politics, social lives and cultural formation. At their most basic they can impact how we perceive ourselves and how we mentally construct society around us. In other words, we don't simply use these tools to win elections, raise money and advocate for our concerns, which was all so much the focus of PDF08, we use these tools as part of a process of identity and cultural formation, to figure out who we are and where we belong. PDF09 was a reminder that we are not simply sitting in the pilot's seat but that all of us who live online are changed by the experience and that these aggregate personal changes are adding up to something much more profound than the victories we seek.