Flash Causes

Earlier this week, something happened involving Twitter that has convinced me and a lot of other social media watchers that on-the-fly “flash” advocacy—rapidly, self-assembled groups formed to instantly solve a problem—has already arrived, big-time.

On Tuesday, a Chicago design executive, David Armano, posted an emotional tweet on his Twitter feed to request help for Daniela, an acquaintance facing urgent family and economic problems. We’ve all heard about social media appeals but this one turned into a genuine flash cause, as Armano’s online social network of more than 8,000 followers galvanized into action. Within a few hours on Tuesday, Armano’s appeal had raised more than $5,000. By Wednesday, thousands of sympathetic tweets had poured into his Twitter feed along with donations topping $11,000. By noon today, the cash raised had exceeded $15,000—and growing. “OK friends,” Daniela tweeted this morning, "thank-you for an unforgettable day and a half [sic]. I’m cooked. Really am so proud at how you came through.” [One of the people who donated to Daniela called the flash group, in a tweet, “the social media compassion mafia” and congratulated it for its generous and rapid response.]

The significance here is that Daniela’s digital rescue isn’t an isolated phenomenon. For months now, people in social networks have begun to self-organize into flash causes using Twitter—as well as other forms of social media. [Much has already been written about EpicChange.org’s recent Tweetsgiving campaign, which raised $10,000 in the 48 hours before Thanksgiving to build a classroom in Tanzania.] Earlier this fall, techPresident blogger Nancy Scola and colleague Alison Fine organized the Twitter Vote Report, which began as an effort on election day to create a real-time citizen-watch campaign to guard against voter intimidation—but also ended up providing a popular way for mostly first-time voters to share their personal experiences voting in a presidential election.

So what does all of this mean for social action? Can people like Dave Armano or EpicChange organizers Stacey Monk and Avi Kaplan be as successful a second time—if, say, they tried mobilizing their networks again, but this time on behalf of someone or something else? What makes people more prone to staging a successful flash cause than others? Are flash causes a temporary phenomenon fueled by the novelty of the technology, itself, or yet another powerful example of how one’s social capital online can be more powerful, in some ways, than personal wealth in fighting social ills?

There’s no science yet on the subject, of course, but there seems to be many things that flash campaigns have in common so far—a social network of highly motivated people who want to do something autonomously of any established group; the belief that no other group can help as quickly or as effectively; the shared desire to help create something new and unique, and the inspiration of an influential, highly engaged catalyst [or pair of them] with an already-large online social network poised to make a difference.

Still skeptical? HubSpot’s recent State of the Twittersphere Report estimates there are some 5 million people in the Twitter community and that it's growing by some 10,000 new accounts per day. Key to more growth will be the types of conversations the community will have; many social media watchers [myself included] believe Twitter use will become more cause-focused as it integrates a search function—and as more sophisticated mobile phone technology becomes ubiquitous this year. Watch for more efforts using Twitter as a “citizen watch” or flash-cause organizer locally and abroad.

For more on David Armano’s campaign for Daniela, go to Armano’s blog, here, and his Twitter page, here. For more on the rise of self-organized, online cause groups, see this video clip (below) of Clay Shirky addressing the recent Pop!Tech 2008 conference. Social media, Shirky says, are encouraging people to “design [new groups] for generosity” and are—in the process—“reversing everything we’re used to” about traditional philanthropy.



(Illustration, above, by Miroslaw Pieprzyk for istock.com)

So now what?

Okay, the crowd's all here. The cause-wired came out for Barack Obama. They delivered. They're still hanging around, for the most part. So now what?

Is this crowd-force sustainable? Can it be turned into a perpetual vox populi for the soon-to-be Obama administration? Or, more significantly, can any crowd amassed via the Web for any purpose be persuaded to stick around as a cohesive group for a while? It's the question of the hour as nonprofit advocacy groups (and corporate America) look to evolve their as-yet-untested social media strategies to raise new money and court more supporters, Obama-style. Obama proved it's possible to build an effective viral marketing machine and an online mega-fundraising army for a cause. Can nonprofits apply some of those same strategies to, say, saving the whales?

Yes—and no, not yet. Even Obama's people are locked in a spirited debate over how to keep everyone engaged post-election. (According to Los Angeles Times reporters Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten, some Democratic Party insiders are pushing to make Obama's Internet operation part of the party apparatus, while deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand fears that pulling it into the DNC might alienate Obama's cause-wired following: many of Obama's Net faithful have not necessarily seen themselves as party devotees, and could easily flee if they felt that someone or some group was trying to co-opt or control them, insiders say. Click here to see that LA Times piece.)

Jeff Howe, the author of the book, Crowdsourcing, is asking the same questions. In an interview earlier today, Howe says that "building a community is really, really hard; maintaining a community is much, much harder." Sustainability of any crowd-sourced group, he says, depends on the ability of the cause—in this case, Obama's social media gurus—to keep engaging group members in ways that reassure them that they're truly having an impact. One has a much better chance of being able to influence a volunteer army of supporters via social media if the cause or candidate keeps winning ongoing victories. (There's a cause-and-effect momentum in a campaign primary season that's easy to exploit.) But when it comes to governing, that input-equals-results factor that feeds the self-organized might not be so easy to demonstrate and maintain—at least not in a system where change can often take months, if not years, to accomplish.

Perhaps, then, the Web is ushering us into a new era of hyper-incrementalism, a time when it will be more important than ever in social advocacy and politics, alike, to tout—if not to really start sweating—the small stuff. "You have to give the people in a crowd-sourced group lots of stuff to do, all the time, and they have to feel like they're genuinely having an affect...or they'll dissipate and move on," Howe says. "Communities form as long as they're needed or feel like they're having an affect day-to-day." It's a crowd-management challenge, at the very least. It used to be said that all politics is local. Now it's becoming even more important, in a digital world, to make it feel that way to potential supporters.

As a hopeful campaign blogger, Christopher Hass, recently wrote on MyBarackObama.com: "The tools here are your tools now—they always have been."

The promise of social media in politics and advocacy is empowerment, for better or worse. It's all about engagement. Social media make it easier to organize a group to make change. (See the four-day-old Jointheimpact.com, a flash-reaction to California's anti-gay Proposition 8.) Now let's see if social media can help to make the often more tedious, sticky business of democracy and compromise easier, too.

(Illustration: "Expectant Crowd" by Philip Atherton for iStock.com)

Top 100 Social Action Sites

For a list of Top 100 change Web sites—"networks for people who want to change the world"—check out Christina Laun's just-released list HERE. The cause-wired networks she's citing are divided into categories, including the environment, social responsibility, charities and nonprofits, politics, and more.

(Photo of paper dolls by Stefanie Timmermann)

Cause-wired

In his 2002 book, Smart Mobs, futurist Howard Rheingold predicted the next social revolution would be triggered by the ubiquity of mobile phones. Their ability to send text messages, photographs, videos, and other instant data directly to a computer, he predicted, would give people a powerful new way to organize themselves to fight poverty and other social ills on the fly—ultimately reshaping cultures and transforming communities, for better or worse.

Rheingold's glimpse of the future is now—and is being promoted by a rising new crop of mobile activists like Katrin Verclas, cofounder of MobileActive.org, a Web site and community of about 8,000 people and NGOs from around the world. The group is meeting in Johannesburg this week to promote the use of cellphones for social change. About 80 percent of the world has cellphone coverage, Verclas says, and more than half of the global population has a cellphone—or access to one. "We're at a tipping point," Verclas told Cause Global.

Here are some of the mobile-for-good projects being highlighted at the MobileActive08 conference this week in South Africa:

Avaaz.org, the 10-month-old, Web-based, agit-pop protest movement (its name means "noise" or "voice" in Urdu, Hindi, Dari, Persian, and other languages) is kicking off a series of SMS (short message service) campaigns to get rapid signatures on petitions to fight climate change and the war in Iraq. Cofounded in January by MoveOn.org, Res Publica, and GetUp.org.au, Avaaz already has more than 3 million members around the world, and offices in Rio de Janeiro, Geneva, London, and Washington, D.C. Says Graziela Tanaka, an Avaaz coordinator in Sao Paolo, Brazil: “Cellphone videos and instant messaging has the affect of decentralizing old-media control over information. We think SMS and cellphone videos are the new way to mobilize people around the world. The Internet is still restricted in some countries. SMS is not. Everyone, or nearly everyone, has a cellphone.”

The Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET) is using a "bulk SMS" service out of Cape Town to organize demonstrations against sexual violence, chiefly against girls 15 years and younger, and to share health information. The nonprofit sends out thousands of instant messages to a targeted list of members, simultaneously, to mobilize support for its various campaigns, without fear of interference by local governmental authorities or family members. According to WOUGNET's Nora Naiboka Odoi, cellphone use in many African countries is still largely controlled by the men in the family. SMS, she says, makes it easier for word about demonstrations to get out virally and bypass these constraints. Adds MobileActive.org's Verclas: “The cellphone in these communities is an empowerment tool, a way for women to reach out to each other as well as to get help in a violent situation."

Alo Cidadao! (Hello Citizens!) is a year-old text-messaging community news service that connects some 450 residents of the low-income section of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, with information about jobs, cultural events, classes, and health vaccinations. "People in this neighborhood are afraid to leave their homes," says coordinator Daniel de Araujo. "We are trying to help them feel less cut off and are encouraging them to re-join the mainstream by giving them knowledge about what's going on outside their doors." Each person who signed up for the service gets about 40 messages per month, Araujo says, and most forward these messages on to friends and family members.

The International Youth Foundation's BridgeIT project is using cellphones to boost the quality of education for 5th- and 6th-graders in the Philippines and Tanzania. Science and math teachers there can use their cellphones to download science videos and other content-rich material via satellite to a digital video recorder connected to a television set in the classroom. Videos focus on subjects such as space, ecology, geology, or human anatomy—all part of a special text2teach lesson plan. So far, the program, partly funded by Nokia, is being used by 938 schools in the Philippines and 200 in Tanzania.

M4G, which stands for Mobile for Good, is helping people in Kenya find jobs. For a video on the project, click here. More than 70,000 people now use the service, launched in 2003 and funded in part by the European telcom company Vodafone Group Plc. Some 60,000 have found jobs through the group's job service, Kazi560.

Next? Look for more people bartering their cellphone minutes for other goods and services in Mexico and parts of Africa, including the Congo.

The conference ends today.



(Photograph, Power Line Birds, by Patrick Herrera for istock.com)

Democracy Is...

As the economy careens further into recession, more nonprofits are starting to experiment with citizen-made "cause videos" to invite mass collaboration from supporters and rally new ones to the cause. What's key is the community-building and buzz that comes from this kind of crowdsourcing. (Click here to see Part 2—posted today—of the 4-part series on social media that I've been directing and producing with colleagues Cristina Maldonado and Richard Balestrino for Contribute Online and msnbc.com. Click here for Part 1.)

Cause videos are one of the least expensive ways to create emotionally resonant engagement with supporters, new media experts agree—and it's no wonder. It's one thing to talk about a problem; it's another for people to be able to share what they see. "A lot of the power of the Web isn't in the technology," says NYU new media professor Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody. "It's in the ability that the Web is unleashing for people to come together, to share things together, to collaborate, to take collective action."

One of the most ambitious, recent examples of this comes from TakingITGlobal, a Toronto-based international youth nonprofit co-founded by Michael Furdyk. Last month, he helped to launch Democracy Video Challenge (DVC), a video-engagement initiative, through his nonprofit's new video-sharing network. (That network, called Youth Media Exchange, invites visitors to "make a video in three minutes or less and join the conversation with youth around the world.")

DVC is inviting people from around the world to make a 3-minute video that completes the phrase, "Democracy is..." Submissions are due January 31. For more on the project—itself a collaboration with 10 other nonprofit and educational groups, including the U.S. Department of State—go here. Says Natalie Rodic, TakingITGlobal's video project coordinator: "What's important for us is the discussion that takes place around the videos."

And speaking of engagement, Furdyk's ymex.org is one of 7,065 sites (as of today) with a collective audience of some 9.7 million readers taking part in Blog Action Day next week, on October 15, for bloggers who wish to talk about relevant issues in the world. This year's topic is poverty. For more information about this annual, nonprofit event, check out this video below:


Blog Action Day 2008 Poverty from Blog Action Day on Vimeo.

(Illustration: "Paint Hands" by David Franklin)

Peep Show

For cause-wired advocates this week, there’s been no missing the irony of China’s Olympic slogan, One World, One Dream. The aggressive push by China’s 30,000 cybercops to continuously monitor and control the information that citizen advocacy groups are able to send in and out of China is only boosting the perception of this year’s Olympics as a qualifying heat for one of the biggest contests of the coming decade—the battle between an expanding, cause-wired citizenry and governments around the globe who would block the free flow of information. (For a comprehensive overview of the battle, click here.)

Indeed, like the athletes competing for Gold in Beijing’s Water Cube, China's censors have wasted no time showing off their speed and muscle: their moves to censor Twitter, crack down on video-sharing sites (both YouTube and a Chinese version of it called 56.com), and make it hard (if not utterly impossible) to load some Web sites such as Human Rights Watch and Reporters sans Frontieres from inside the Foreign Press Center remain firmly (and predictably) intact as of today.

But what's happening this week in China, despite the widespread use of beefed-up, anti-censorship software by those would not be bowed, is more than simply an internationally-broadcast dust-up over who gets the last word (or the first online).

Internet censorship is on the rise in many countries, partly a reaction by nervous governments to the rapid and growing use of social media by citizen activists around the world. John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, says there has been a surge in the scale, scope, and sophistication of Internet filtering. In the past five years, he says, "we have gone from a couple of states doing state-mandated Net filtering to 25."

But there's another big reason for social-change advocates to pay attention to Net censorship. The issue isn't just about the type and number of Web sites accessible to Netizens at home and abroad. It's also about what a free flow of digital information enables people to do. Social media, unfettered, change the way people in society organize themselves to get things done. Such things as mobile phones, Twitter, video-sharing services, and social networking sites make it really easy for people to self-organize into groups from the ground up rather than to be organized by others from the top down.

New media expert Clay Shirky, the author of Here Comes Everybody, a new book on the impact of social media on society, says this Net-driven social revolution (with a small "r") won't be occurring at the expense of existing institutions (like governments or nonprofits, for example). But it could, he says, provide compelling alternatives that may, over time, weaken them considerably.

And that's mostly what's making officialdom from Beijing to Washington really nervous lately: this Web-enabled shape-shifting is already starting to happen. "Newly capable groups are assembling," Shirky puts it, "and they are working without the managerial imperative and outside the previous institutions and structures that bounded their effectiveness in the past." (Quick—remember that panel you missed at the last Net conference you attended about the waning influence of government? Odds are, they weren't talking about George Bush.)

For now, the information war has no definitive winners or losers: governments, as seen in China this week, are winning some rounds; citizen activists are wracking up other wins elsewhere, as in Burma during last fall's Myanmar revolt and again in May, after Cyclone Nargis. But Net activists fear that sooner or later, governments could get the upper hand—and they've been using China's Olympian censorship efforts to get everyone into the pool. (Amnesty International’s new Uncensor Web site named July 30 a Day of Protest against Net censorship in China. The Uncensor campaign is a joint fundraising effort with an Australian Facebook Cause group and organizers hope the partnership will last well beyond the Olympics.)

Not sure you're ready to jump in yet? Go ahead. Re-read your mission statement. Take it global. Welcome to the war.

(Illustration: Copyright2008 by Cathy Gendron for theispot.com)

Mobile Volunteers

NYU new media professor and Here Comes Everybody author Clay Shirky likes to tell the story about a recent day when two of his friends were sitting with their four-year-old daughter, watching a DVD. "In the middle of the movie, apropos nothing," Shirky says, the girl jumps up off the couch and runs behind the screen. Her dad thought she was going to see if Dora (the explorer, from the kid’s cartoon show) was hiding there. But no, the girl was rooting around in the cables. "What are you doing?" her father asked. Sticking her head out from behind the screen, the girl says, “Looking for the mouse.”

For Shirky, it's a tale of the times. “Four-year-olds know a screen that ships without a mouse ships broken,” he says. “Four-year-olds know that media that is targeted at you—but that doesn’t include you—may not be worth sitting still for.”

No question: all social media innovators today are “looking for the mouse”—working to find new ways to let those who use, hear, read, and watch media to participate more fully. The most innovative enlist the use of mobile phones for a cause: the nonprofit National Democratic Institute uses text messaging to spot vote fraud in elections around the globe; Witness.org asks its supporters to photograph human rights abuses with their cellphones; the Zumbido project in Mexico created a mobile social network for people living with HIV/AIDS.

But nobody has cracked the challenge of "on demand" volunteering—until now. Social media entrepreneur and activist Ben Rigby, author of Mobilizing Generation 2.0, thinks he's "found the mouse" for it with Volunteer NOW, his on-the-spot, GPS-aided mobile application that directs people who suddenly find themselves with some free time on their hands to a list of short-term volunteering opportunities near to their present location—be it an airport, an office building, a local Starbucks, or a city park. Rigby's goal: to transform volunteering into an "impulse activity" that, for the cause-wired not otherwise looking to tune out or cat-nap, could be done on the fly. (Got 20 minutes? Review a contract for a nonprofit. Translate a document for a non-English speaker. Or, text for the nearest beach or park clean-up drive and spend your lunch hour in the sun.)

"Projects like SETI@Home showed that massive computational problems can be solved when a distributed group of people donate their computers' spare CPUs to crunch data," Rigby says. "(Volunteer NOW! ) explores the possibility that this same theory can be applied to spare human 'CPUs.' We believe it will reveal a massive, untapped capacity to do good."

Rigby is not the only social media innovator intrigued by the idea of spare-time, mobile volunteering. Leaders of Do Something, a New York-based nonprofit, started using mobile phones in March to recruit volunteers. The Beta version of its Do Something NOW! mobile program, funded in part by the Sprint Foundation, invites young people to sign up for volunteering through a form on its Web site; Do Something then sends them one or two text alerts each month with volunteer opportunities that fit their locations and preferences. So far, more than 1,000 people have signed up for the text alerts: Do Something hopes to have 10,000 signed up by year's end. Opt-out rates, says Chief Marketing Officer Aria Finger, are running less than 5%.

Look for more examples of mobile volunteering in the months ahead. Katrin Verclas, founder of MobileActive.org, will be showcasing some at her global summit on cause-mobile technology in Johannesburg, South Africa, October 13-15. Google's recent entry into the mobile phone market will add fuel to the mobile advocacy movement in coming months.

For more on how cellphones and other social media are dramatically changing society's notions of free time, check out the Blip.tv video of Clay Shirky's wildly popular talk at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco this past spring. It's about 10 minutes long but well worth the cognitive surplus—Shirky's term for free time—that you carve out to watch it.

(Illustration by Richard Borge c/o theispot.com)