Eradicating Malaria With the Tony Blair Faith Foundation

Hello web-friends,

I have been appointed to my dream job and I need your help to make it rock.

I have been selected to join the Faiths Act Fellows, a cadre of 30 young interfaith leaders in the US, UK, and Canada who will spend August 2009-June 2010 working to promote malaria eradication. This is a brand-new program which will operate under the auspices of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation (yes, THAT Tony Blair) and the Interfaith Youth Core. It's all fantastically exciting! I'll be traveling to London at the end of July (farewell, Denver) for induction and training. Then it's off to a malaria hotspot in Africa for on-the-ground work. We finish with training in Chicago. I report for duty to the Islamic Networks Group in San Jose, CA on October 1st. My job will be recruiting faith communities, and especially young people of faith, to work towards malaria eradication. Getting rid of this wicked mosquito-borne sickness can be done!

It goes without saying that I will utilize the fluid world of social media in order to reach these goals. I blog, tweet, and share most things, so this will be no different. I will be relying on my network (all of you) to help me spread the word and find kinds of people who can partner with me to get things done.

I'm short on the finer points and details, and for that I apologize. As a first order of business, I need to know ANYTHING about San Jose. My first ever trip to California is this Saturday when I attend the Nonprofit Technology Conference, so any advice/thoughts are welcome.

Post what you will, and send this one far and wide - the more, the merrier!

social media, technology, twitter, facebook, ntc, ntc09, nonprofit, malaria, tony blair, tony blair faith foundation, malaria no more, interfaith youth core, tbff, ifyc

What is Twitter?

This video explaining Twitter is awesome. I think it should replace the Common Craft version that Twitter uses:

social media, twitter, supernews

Social Magnetism: Gravity, Guys, and Gals

I spend a lot of time working on hypotheticals, constructing "what if" questions about the future. This is part of the curse of being a political science guy - it's up to us to figure out what's going to happen in the future (I say this to anger my historian friends - Drew, that's for you). So in my latest WHAT IF, I thought about what might happen if someone quite famous, say Al Pacino or @Kofi Annan were to hop on Twitter tonight.

I refer to @THE_REAL_SHAQ to further my what if. The guy tweeted for the first time back on November 18th, largely to tell the world that he was, in fact, the real Shaq. That's less than a month ago. As of right now, he's being followed by 21,356 people. That's insane. Once we get enough case study data, I'm sure we'll be able to chart exactly how quickly big names expand their follower count. So let's say that Pacino hops on Twitter tonight and starts tweeting about whatever strikes his fancy. Within a few days he will have thousands of followers. We know that this happens, but it can't be just as simply as celebrity worship. I follow @Ban Ki-moon, but I'm more interested in what the Secretary General of the UN is up to than merely curious about a big name's daily plans.

In much the same fashion, once someone creates an especially engaging blog post/article (more than likely a list!), it circulates wildly throughout the social web. If we're not keeping up with ourselves, it is almost impossible to figure out where our content ends up. People will cut it up, give credit where credit is due, and repost, retweet, and reshare it ad infinitum. It's like casting a satellite out into space. Even if you point it in one specific direction, it's still going to be affected by the gravitational pulls of other objects, i.e. stars, asteroids, planets. Its course will be determined by the larger (and smaller) bodies that inhabit space. In the social web, the role of gravity and social magnetism cannot be ignored. If we don't pay attention, we may end up floating out into the social web alone.

social media, technology

Through the Swamp

I've been commenting a bit on Steven Hodson's recent post Is Social Media Becoming A Social Mess? over at Inquisitr. It's been a really lively discussion, and even though the conversation is a few days old, it is still pretty interesting reading.

Hodson is right - social media, and the interactive web in general, is a great mess. Early adopters and the like have to act as the pathfinders/explorers to figure out what works in the new digital world. Some things will fail, but other tools will become as ubiquitous as email. I've addressed the unknown future of social media in terms of governance before, and the discussion developing over at Inquisitr is keenly complementary.

social media, governance

An Evening With Michael Seltzer

So I hit up the Denver Young Nonprofit Professionals Network tonight for a little speech and Q&A with Michael Seltzer. He's a nonprofit consultant, awesome dude, and the author of Securing Your Organization's Future. You can find a better bio of Seltzer here. We had some light refreshments and then gathered in the studio at Denver Open Media. Since there were only about 15 of us, Michael had us all pull our chairs into a tight little circle, which was just super.

He talked about how his life in the nonprofit world began with a trip to Cameroon under the precursor program to our Peace Corps. From there he bounced around to a handful of different places, gaining valuable experience in a wide variety of situations and cultural contexts. He was coming of age politically during the late 60s. It was, as we know, a crazy time full of hope and cooperation. His contention was that the social movements of the 1960s were based less on organizations and more on the Movement qua Movement.

Many nonprofit organizations precipitated out of these social movements, but as they did, they lost the "vision." Suddenly the game was about promoting the organizations themselves. Granted, they had to do this to survive, but a mentality of competition came to rule the sector. And so it goes.

Nowadays, as Seltzer noted in his talk, it seems that we are edging back toward being parts of movements as opposed to solitary organizations. This is not simply a matter of playing on the same team, but perhaps an entirely new organizational structure. It's all quite a grand vision, and we talked as a group about how technology is changing the ways in which we can work at this sort of retro-collaboration. Sure, the idea of macro-movements is back in force because it has to be, but also because it can - the spirit of the 1960s has broken upon the shore of the internet and social media.

---

We also spoke about "sector-jumpers," those people from, say, the corporate world who are finding their existence threatened by the market. They will head for an equally precarious, but far more rewarding place, like the nonprofit sector. Seltzer talked about seeing the explosive growth of "social entrepreneurship clubs" in major MBA programs - these people want to help.

After someone referred to nonprofits as the "third sector," Michael said, "No. Nonprofits are the first sector. In 1636, a minister donated his library and some money. The organization became the first corporation in the United States, and was named after the man. That man was John Harvard." Nonprofits have been an important part of the fabric of America for some time, and Seltzer noted that, especially during this past election, Americans voted not only through the ballot box, but through their checkbooks and their volunteer hours. He sees our democracy as relying in large part upon the continued activity of Americans in the nonprofit sector. As he noted - 80% of us either donate or volunteer. We can't get those kinds of numbers even for small-town elections.

---

One of the participants expressed confusion about the use of technology to build the aforementioned new organization structure of Movements. She wasn't a technophobe or anything, she simply didn't know how being able to communicate digitally (ubiquitously) was going to change anything. Seltzer asked us what we thought about that, so I broke into the song-and-dance about nonprofits being on the cutting edge of communication, collaboration, and social networking/media - not so much because it's good for us, but because we have to to survive.

Along with that, someone mentioned the seeming loss of depth in our connections for breadth in our connections, but pointed out that we therefore have a responsibility to "drill down into that breadth in whatever ways we can," and in essence, "humanize these new technologies." Seltzer agreed, noting that we are still very much about face-to-face interactions. We like touch.

The whole evening was very inspiring, really. He noted that we definitely need to think of ourselves as skilled people, with cultural competency being a chief proficiency. The social movements of the 1960s were anti-professional. Nowadays, we are the professionals. We have opportunities to build great big things with lots and lots of people. New Movements. Old Movements with new names. Lots of things.

It's going to be a grand old time.

social media, michael seltzer, nonprofit, social movements

Governance and Social Media (Digital Superstructure pt. 1)

I was picking through two old posts, one about the disembodied nature of empire and the other about the shifting nature of political/economic/social authority on a global level, and I started to think about how to apply my older thoughts on such things to my current interest in social contract theory and the growth of the "digital superstructure(s)" that are increasingly front-and-center in our lives.

In this case, being a contributor, or at least a mildly active participant in one's own "digital life" (since you've got one even if you're not online!) is a better idea than sitting back. The benefits (real or perceived) of being plugged in are simply higher than staying out. Pragmatism, not popularity, is driving us onto the internet - into the diffuse, sometimes highly-selective networks that are changing the speed of news, connecting consumers to producers, or even helping people.

We have absolutely no idea what is coming next, but we know that when things change, or when something big happens, there will be reflexive, collaborative and, above all, supportive networks in place for dealing with whatever it is. Best of all, these networks are, to a certain extent, self-regulating. We are governing ourselves by a loose set of rules that become more and more codified as time goes on. I doubt we'll ever have a "Blogger's Bill of Rights" or anything like that, but things are progressing, whatever that means.

For an interesting look at what might be coming around the bend, take a look at Teilhard de Chardin's Omega Point Theory, but instead of viewing it in terms of true global consciousness, put it in the language of social networking and the internet. Doesn't sound quite so far-fetched now. Or does it?

Technorati Tags: social media, politics, political science, empire,

Tweeting the Terror

Tweeting the terror: How social media reacted to Mumbai - CNN.com

Rough title, there. Yikes. Even I wouldn't (probably) title something like that. The articles puts out a bunch of really good info. It makes mention of the blood donation/helpline tweets. It completely ignores #mumbai and the use of hashtags.

Still, it's an easy-to-understand "primer" of sorts on the role that services like Twitter played and are still playing. The article ends on a sour note for me, and I think that it illustrates quite plainly the distrust and confusion which surround "crowdnews." I shall reproduce the final lines here:

What is clear that although Twitter remains a useful tool for mobilizing efforts and gaining eyewitness accounts during a disaster, the sourcing of most of the news cannot be trusted.

A quick trawl through the enormous numbers of tweets showed that most were sourced from mainstream media.

Someone tweets a news headline, their friends see it and retweet, prompting an endless circle of recycled information.

Technorati Tags: mumbai, social media, twitter

The Digital Contact, pt. 1

I would say that I am a political scientist. It's not the first thing I do, nor is it the most important, but it's a big part of my life. I've been studying quite a bit about the concept of the "social contract." In its most basic terms, the social contract is a descriptive theory about why human beings choose to join together in civil society and appoint people to lead them. The idea is that before the rise of civil society/government, humans existed in a "state of nature," an amoral place wherein there was a great risk of violent death. Furthermore, in the state of nature there could be no real progression; history was not important because everything, day in and day out, was the same.

The social contract is the agreement between a people and the leader or leaders that they appoint to lead them. The social contract assumes that the people will give up a number of their rights in order to be protected and supplied by the sovereign, or leader. Political scientists have been writing about the social contract for 4oo years. Every new author has an interesting twist or a different viewpoint that furthers the dialogue and contributes to our understanding of the need for government in our modern era.

My intention is to combine extant theoretical notions of the social contract theory with modern network theory and social media to build a framework for the Next Big Step. It is an ambitious project, to be sure, but I think that it is eminently possible.

The basic idea is this: Things have gotten to the point where the traditional systems of government are no longer doing what they were created to do. The growth of communication/globalization has changed the way that people (be they citizens of whatever state) relate to one another and to their leaders. A possible example of the "new way" is Barack Obama's change.gov, which provides Web 2.0 functionality to the American government. Whatever the case, we are in a very good position to provide not only a descriptive account of what the new social contract theory will look like, but also a prescriptive account of what we ought to be doing in order to make the transition.

I will be posting periodical updates here, and when I have a whole bunch of stuff written down, I will make the GoogleDoc live, enabling all who have thoughts to weigh in and aid me in producing what will hopefully be a practical, hopeful schematic for the future of social media, governance, and the world community. Best to you all. These are exciting times.

Technorati Tags: social media, political science, politics, social contract

Motrin and Such

The last day or so has featured a flurry of Motrin (yes, the pain reliever)-related activity on the Twittertubes. I was working at the library most of yesterday, so I avoided keeping up with the madness. I didn't know what was happening, and I figured that I'd savor that and wait to find out today. And so I did, by following through to Thinkjose's post about Motrin's Twitter Headache. He does an awesome job of explaining the evolution of the damn thing, and it's well worth the visit. Apparently, the hubbub was about this video:



Yeah, I agree. Pretty silly. I do like the wordart stuff, though. The entire fiasco is another example of how different things are these days. Gives me more fodder for my upcoming Magnum Opus, which will be a research project involving social media, democracy, and international relations. Gotta think big, you know.

Technorati Tags: social media, motrin, technology