Social Actions Roundup 4

The use of social media for social change is proliferating rapidly. In that vein, we at Cause Global are sharing this weekly round-up of social action links and varied tech news bits from Social Actions and its passionate, cause-wired team—Joe Solomon, Christine Egger and Peter Deitz.

Here is Social Actions' latest round-up, covering the two-week period from January 21 to February 2:

Kiva.org launched its developer API and a new Web site, build.kiva.org.

Google Exec Katie Jacobs Stanton was appointed to the Obama administration as Director of Citizen Participation; CauseGlobal introduced Katie Jacobs Stanton and her vision.

UC Berkeley Human Rights Center launched a Mobile Challenge on NetSquared; Civic Ventures began accepting nominations for The Purpose Prize; Ashoka GenV and the Lemelson Foundation started taking submissions for their Invent Your World challenge; DoSomething.org began accepting nominations for its 2009 DoSomething Award, and NABUUR began accepting votes for Volunteer of the Year.

Idealist.org launched a virtual volunteering program.

BetterPlace wrote about Generation Generosity.

PolicyPitch cited a GOP effort to crowdsource ways to Rebuild the Party.

PolicyPitch wrote about the Utah Senate's embrace of social media.

ChristmasFuture received a $50k creative services grant from Karo.

NewsCred blog analyzed the Endowment Model for newspapers.

TheExtraordinaries shared slides from Stanford's Computuer Science for Social Good Class.

Lucy Bernholtz of the Philanthropy 2173 blog raved about Twitter; the Culture of Collaboration blog raved about micro-blogging in general.

Social Velocity explained how to Ask for Money in a Recession; FrogLoop shared Everything You Wanted to Know About Online Fundraising in a Bad Economy.

Tom Watson started blogging for Social Edge.

FrogLoop wrote about the Joys of Google Grants.

TechSoup.org shared Ten Tips for Planning a Successful Webinar.

Beth Kanter posted a list of Women in Nonprofit Technology Who Rock.

Money on the Move blog offered up a handful of micro-philanthropyplatforms; 1DollarClub.org blog answered the question, Just What Is Micro-Philanthropy?; GiftHub hosted a conversation about Microphilanthropy for Macro Social Results; ExecDigital published an article on micro-philanthropy called Philanthropy: The Spirit of Giving.

Britt Bravo wrote about iPhone Apps for Nonprofits; Prelude Interactive asked readers to Look Beyond the iPhone.

Katya Andresen wrote about the lack of control when it comes to leveraging social media.

Global Mindshift posted a video from its Google Tech Talk.

Social Actions raised $14,715.34 in donations and pledges and launched its social media consulting plans.Its Change the Web Challenge introduced a proposed logo for the contest and published guidelines for Judge Nominations (or 50+ Rock Stars to Follow on Twitter).

Recent Discoveries

Dgoodr.com - Dreamers Who Are Doers

EthicL - Buy and Sell Things That Help Humanity

Knight Citizen News Network - Helping Citizens and Journalists Amplify Community News

Advocacy Online - eCampaigning Software

What are Social Actions Round-Ups?

Each week, Social Actions community members post links and news about online social action applications and nonprofit activism. This round-up is a summary of just some of the links that surfaced in the last two weeks, through February 2. You can share links and news for future Social Actions round-ups in the Peer-to-Peer Social Change FriendFeed Room. You can also check out past round-ups here and can tag your delicious bookmarks with "p2pchange" or include "#p2pchange" in your tweets; Social Actions will scoop them up and review them.

Social Actions round-ups are syndicated on CauseWired, CauseGlobal, TakePart, and NetSquared.

Newsbreak

A piece in The New York Times today, on the front page, caught my eye. It's a story by Richard Perez-Pena and carries the headline, Web Sites That Dig for News Rise as Community Watchdogs. Increasingly, the news business—information and its consumption—is becoming a nonprofit activity, more like public broadcasting.

Perez-Pena cited Voice of San Diego.org, which does original news reporting at close to half the cost of what it would probably cost offline. Similar nonprofit Web news operations have cropped up in other cities, including Chicago and Seattle, and news nonprofits without a specific geographic focus—such as Pro Publica, a news site devoted to investigative journalism -for-hire—also are trying to fill the void left by dying local newspapers and imploding old media newsrooms. In fact, public- or foundation-funded news operations are getting close to reaching critical mass: some of the people running these new nonprofit news operations say they plan to form an association to start fighting, collectively, for future funding.

The question, though, is scale. Is there (and will there be) enough funding available to nurture the expansion and adequate development of this new model for news? Is this truly the future of journalism—a form of taxpayer-funded, citizen-led advocacy, in its own right? The topic has been hotly contested for years—but there seems no doubt, especially this week (and in this economy) that the movement toward "nonprofit news" is accelerating.

Spot.us, a new platform for community-funded journalism, officially launched this week. It promises to give the public a way to commission journalists "to do investigations on important and perhaps overlooked stories." Its open-source platform promises to build a template that can be used by others, to reinvigorate civic engagement in local communities. Stanford's own John S. Knight Fellowship program, meanwhile, just announced it is revamping its vaunted program for mid-career journalists, to focus more on newsroom innovation and the use of social media to foster new forms of community engagement in journalism, online and off. (Last week, as if to underscore the urgent need for new models, the Knight Foundation launched a new community site called Knight Pulse, to discuss the future of information, itself.)

Buzz Woolley, a San Diego businessman quoted in the Times piece, says that "information should be thought of now in the same way as education and public health. It's one of the things you need to operate a civil society and the [current] market isn't doing it very well."

The bad news? Competition is becoming more brutal for existing nonprofit dollars, and the economy isn't helping. But there is also an upside: there have never been more ways to get a story told, nor as many people looking to help tell it. And that's not all: thanks to inexpensive video cameras, Webcams, digital video cameras, and still cameras, it's never been cheaper to tell stories that can make a difference.

This year's market-rattled giving season may have already gone bust, but now's the time to start engaging supporters, readers, and stakeholders of all stripes in telling the stories of their lives. This year's recession? A great place to start.

(Illustration, Target Man, by Miroslaw Pieprzyk for istock.com)