Cause Week 2013

It's Cause Week again in New York, that wonky week-long stretch of mid-September when a perfect storm of three global-class, do-gooder gatherings floods Manhattan.

[Concurrent with the opening sessions of the United Nations General Assembly, Cause Week also means the start of the annually high-powered, invitation-only Clinton Global Initiative in Midtown, as well as the run of the annual Social Good Summit , the social-media-for-social-change crowd's Millennial version of CGI that's held across town.]

What all of these events have in common—besides their ability to paralyze Midtown traffic—are A-list attendees and speakers from all sectors pushing new policies, new partnerships, and tech-driven social innovation. From Barack Obama, Bono, Sean Penn, and IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde, to Queen Rania of Jordan, philanthropists Bill and Melinda Gates, and Facebook's Sheryl Sandburg, the goal of these thinkfests is to take stock of the world's most pressing social problems, and to rally society's brightest minds to work more effectively for solutions.

First to launch this week is the Social Good Summit, which is being livestreamed to 120 locations around the world in 8 languages. Among top takeaways so far:

* Internet freedom is under growing attack around the world. Samantha Power, the Pulitzer Prize-winning human rights activist, former Harvard scholar and the new U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, warned #2030NOW attendees of a "crackdown on civil society" by governments around the world. "It's clear that a lot of governments are now sharing worst practices on how to crack down on civil society," she said. They are doing this "to impede the kind of connectivity that can occur virtually, even as they close off public streets and squares." The goal: to dissuade cause-wired activists from using social media and other methods to demand human rights and economic reforms. "Governments are getting more and more sophisticated at shutting down the Internet, and are blocking, filtering, and using technology to trace human rights activists" for retribution, Power added. "They are aware of the explosion in civil society and of the power of social media. It is time to sound the alarm."

* Millennials' passion for "good" products is growing.  Tina Wells, CEO and Founder of Buzz Marketing Group, cited "conscious consumption" as the No. 1 trend driving Millennials today. "Millennials don't just want to buy things that are cool. They want to buy things they love that also contribute to the world in a positive way," Wells says. That's not news, of course. But 80 percent of Millennials are now spending more than three hours a day online, and brands are getting smarter at working with the cause-wired online, inviting them to participate in conversations around the issues that are important to them. Wells is working with the United Nations to elevate the voice and input of youth globally via MyWorld, a UN initiative that enables youth to participate more broadly in the conversations around the UN Millennium Goals. "Millennials understand there is room for digital nonprofits and for-profit organizations to work together for change," Wells said. Note to social marketers and nonprofits: shared experiences equals trust equals consumption and support.

* Drones aren't all bad. Most people would associate them with military strikes, but a handful of activists are finding ways to use drones and tech surveillance capabilities to promote peace and stability in countries experiencing conflict. John Prendergast, co-founder of the Enough Project, is working in partnership with Google and satellite companies "to get eyes on remote locations in conflict zones, where there is no other way to verify that human rights abuses are occurring." Prendergast said that monitoring for mass grave sites and rebel movements, for example, can help warn innocent civilians and prevent human rights abuses from occurring in some areas. Kevin Kennedy, chief of integrated training services at the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations and Field Support, said his office is using drones for good in four countries—the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, South Sudan, and Haiti, to help monitor public health and rebel movements.

* The news is going social. It's no longer enough to be informed by the media. A couple of new journalism startups also want you to act on the story you just saw, read, watched, or Tweeted. "I think any of us who are Millennials would argue that if you have a microphone plugged into an amplifier, it's wrong of you not to sing," says Ian Somerhalder, co-founder of RYOT.org, a new news platform that drives readers and viewers to get involved in embedded action steps that appear at the end of each article. "We take readers to the next step with calls to action," Somerhalder added. "No longer do you have to read an article and that's it. Dead. Social media engages people. It has changed the world and we're all here witnessing it, and we're all part of it, and it's a really phenomenal thing."

* There is a new Africa rising. Two social entrepreneurs working with social media to fuel support for their organizations in Africa talked extensively about the rapidly growing entrepreneurial scene there. "Charity? Rather than support the traditional NGOs in Africa, support the African social entreprenuer," urged Magatte Wade, founder and CEO of Tiossan, a cosmetics startup that uses proceeds to benefit local education. Teddy Ruge, an Africa-based entrepreneur and a leader of the social enterprise movement there, agreed that local African entrepreneurs are reshaping their own communities for the better, and it is time for traditional aid organizations to work with these new innovators—and to hear their input—rather than drive their own agendas without collaboration.

* Traditional nonprofit philanthropy is dead, reimagined by social media.  In a world of social media, philanthropy and nonprofits can no longer remain in fortresses and operate without partnering with businesses and governments. "Philanthropy needs to collaborate more across sector and with supporters," said Jean Case of the Case Foundation. "We need to help nonprofits master social media and help them to communicate with these tools. When we think of philanthropy, our definition is any effective effort that promotes human progress, which doesn't mean we should get just anyone in the tent. We need talent and help from companies, too. The traditional sense of charitable giving is not where we should stop, because stopping would mean we're not using all the tools in our toolbox." One recent attempt at new engagement: feedbacklabs.org, a mobile app that asks nonprofits what they're trying to do and helps them measure their effectiveness by putting them in touch directly with their aid recipients. Another sign of change? The ACLU is now raising its digital voice, busting out of the gate with soon-to-be-launched multimedia campaign called "My Big Gay Illegal Wedding." The campaign asks supporters to help it find and marry five couples in hotspot states. Think crowdsourcing for mobilization. "The thing about social media is that it demands boldness and excitement," Romero said. "Social media makes us all activists. We can redefine who we are."


The Social Good Summit ends tonight, just as CGI begins. Keep current with the highlights. Follow us @CauseGlobal for coverage and watch this space for updates.

-By Marcia Stepanek

(Photograph: Ripped posters on a wall, Carrer de Bailen, in Barcelona, Spain, by Rene Mansi)

Crackdown

At this week's Social Good Summit in New York, Samantha Power, the new U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, told conferees that governments around the world are increasingly cracking down on Web activists "and it's time to sound the alarm." She said social media have the potential to counteract these forces against Internet freedom, but urged young conferees to "team up to make your voices heard."

What follows is an edited transcript of that interview, conducted from the #2030NOW stage by Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore:

Q: Your entire career has been about the importance of human rights. Why do those things matter so much?
I was very moved when I was in college, when I saw for the first time the footage from Tiananmen Square. I was working as a intern in the sports department of the CBS affiliate in Atlanta at the time, and I was taking notes on the Braves game and I looked up, and there was Tiananmen and the crushing of this democratic movement and moment. So that kind of got in my head, looking at what the citizens in China were trying to do for their country, for their children and their grandchildren. And then when I graduated from college, I was struck by images in The New York Times of emaciated men behind barbed wire, again in Europe—just 50 years after the Holocaust. It was a time when the Bosnian Serbs were cracking down brutally, committing ethnic cleansing, and I thought there has got to be something we can do about this.

Q: Are people more informed or less informed in a world of social technologies?
Well, as tech evolves, it feels like people are alert to the risk of seeing and hearing only what they want to see and hear and not, necessarily, what they need to be discovering, serendipitously. On one hand, we've become more insulated and cocooned, and other the other hand, more and more people are trying to seek out greater connections. There are inconvenient topics—topics and issues we wouldn't voluntarily really seek out because they're depressing or disempowering because of the magnitude of the badness. I think a lot of us have those emotions. Syria is the latest example of that. It's just so heartbreaking, and you can imagine why young people might not want to spend a lot of time watching videos of people getting gassed by chemical weapons. But I think technology also can be a force for good, a dream. It's a force multiplier like nothing we've seen.

Q: Is social media and communication technology fundamentally pro- democracy and civil society, or is it neutral?
We've got examples on both sides of the ledger. Governments are growing more and more sophisticated at shutting down the Internet, blocking, filtering, using technology to trace human rights activists. There was that devastating incident not long ago in Homs, Syria, where Marie Colvin, one of the greatest war correspondents of the last century was we think, tracked down by the coordinates of her cellphone and then struck by the Assad regime and killed. I just came from a meeting with civil society activists to talk about the use of technologies to impede rather than expand democratic accountability and civic activism. This one young Syrian activist was describing that Assad has used SCUD missiles and fired them in Syria, on his own people. He said it takes 8- to 15 minutes for these missiles to land from the time of launch. Young activists in Syria now have people organized to text ahead if they see anything in the launch phase, then text the coordinates of that launcher from where that launch occurred, which helps activists predict the missiles' path. Texters then send their messages into a central hub, and people can see where this SCUD is likely to land, and when—so they can get out of the way. It's an example of the creativity and ways in which people are using digital technology. And here's another example. I traveled with the President a couple of years ago, to India, and there's this amazing web site there called "I Paid a Bribe" and it's people sharing their personal stories around the indignity of having to have paid a bribe. Social media is good so far at creating communities of concern in this way. The Satellite Sentinel Project, which George Clooney and John Prendergast are using, gets companies to donate satellite time as resources so activists can document mass graves in parts of the world that are not necessarily accessible to humanitarian organizations. So technology has an upside and a downside, and it's all about how you use it.

Q: To what extent is government responsible? What is the role of the civilian and what is the role of government?
I think it depends on the situation. Citizens have the capacity, as they did in Darfur, to put an issue on the map. Young people and people in the faith community made Darfur matter in Washington and did impressive fundraising using tech. Once people get moved by what they see or what they're exposed to,  social media can be a great way to pool resources and get them to people in need. ...We were talking a minute ago about Twitter. I just joined but already I'm seeing the power of it. In the old days, you'd almost have to stage a press conference to get your voice out there, even as the UN Ambassador. But not anymore.

Q: Are you increasingly using Twitter to break news and decisions on social media?
A: I think that because you can move information so quickly, it's very easy to do it that way. But I also think that all forms of media still do remain relevant. Sometimes doing things so quickly is not always the way to get out the nuances of a policy, which is challenging anyway—especially on issues that are as complicated as many we work on. But when it comes to putting pressure on a government that has a mission here or an embassy there, you can use social media to connect with people in European countries or in African countries and have them raise issues that are critical. There are ways to build coalitions, particularly around the fate of civil society and the prospects for human rights, that just didn't exist when we were relying solely on the mainstream media.

Q: How are global activists engaging with tech to get their voices heard?
Tech is a major piece of how they connect with one another but this crackdown on civil society by many governments around the world is very sad, whether it's shutting down the Internet or blocking Twitter or blocking Facebook or, just as egregiously, using plain old-fashioned laws and regulations to restrict foreign funding to NGOs or to inhibit the space that activists have to protest publicly, or to crack down on their freedom to associate. So tech is not the only problem, and it's not the only solution. this strangulation by regulation can also be very effective. We used to talk in development and in human rights about best practices, about how we can push for best practices. It's now clear that a lot of these governments are now sharing worst practices on how to crack down on civil society, how to use the tools of tech to impede the kind of connectivity that can occur virtually, even as they close off public spaces and public squares. They're migrating those kinds of practices that they've used over time to the Internet, and to the social media space, and we're pushing governments in our meetings now to bring civil society back to the table.

Q: How can individuals get involved? What actions can they take?
A: We've seen activists in Haiti, for example, famously creating crisis maps and crowd-sourcing, where you could document who was buried where by virtue of people using technology to track them. We've seen tech being used in the U.S. and also in Kenya, during elections, to stop fraud. These kinds of things are very important. Tech also is a great feedback loop. Now that I'm on Twitter, if I give a speech and people are telling me that it didn't make sense when I said something about this, or didn't square with what I'd earlier said about that, it's not aways pleasant reading but it's important to hear. I don't think that leaders before these tools were able to have such direct and rapid sharing with the people they service. This is important.

Q: Finally, what's the outlook for civil society in the future, by 2030?
I think right now the trend lines are not positive. The truth of the matter is that many governments, in the last five years, have become more sophisticated in their response to cause-wired movements by the people to get their voices heard. More than 40 governments now are restricting freedom of speech and association and religion—the basic stuff. These governments are sharing worst practices but they are doing so because they are aware of the explosion in civil society and of the power of social media. Who will win going forward? I've always been on the citizens' side but right now, a crackdown on civil society is a pattern across the globe. It's time to sound the alarm. If we can get other like-minded governments and citizens and NGOs and foundations to team up to contest this worrying trend, then it won't be a close call between anachronistic governments trying to crack down on basic human dignity and the power of the people. History shows who's going to win that one.

-Marcia Stepanek

(Photograph: Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore interview Samantha Power (left). Photo by Mashable with permission.)  

Wake-Up Call

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)

Battle Royale

Susan Crawford, a former technology policy advisor to President Obama, issued a stark warning to civic activists and Internet technologists attending this year's Personal Democracy Forum in Manhattan. "We are," she said Friday, "in a titanic battle for the future of the Internet in the United States" -- one that pits those who would keep open, high-speed Internet access available to all and those who would seek to change that.

Crawford, an Internet and communications law professor at the University of Michigan, said Web technologists and social media-for-social-good activists are "radically under-represented" in this battle and need to start getting involved so that online social advocacy and open government can evolve and thrive, unfettered by corporate controls and new pricing restrictions. She said that Web innovators and social media entrepreneurs should not take for granted the kind of low-cost, high-speed, open Internet access they now enjoy -- nor ignore Washington's telecom policy battles any longer.

Crawford, a member of the board of directors of ICANN from 2005-2008, opened her speech with a reference to Wikipedia Co-founder Jimmy Wales, who -- when asked on Thursday whether he thought free and open high-speed Internet access for all was critical to online activism, ducked the question. "I have no idea," he said from the PDF stage. "I build Web sites."

Crawford, picking up on Wales' comment the next morning, told PDF-ers the following:

"What Jimmy was saying is that 'Web sites mean government over there.' And I have a lot of sympathy for that viewpoint. I was brought up -- trained -- in the Internet Age by people who really believed that nation-states were on the verge of crumbling and that anything that a telephone company wanted to do, we could just geek around it --we could avoid it, and that these people were just irrelevant, essentially. So I feel as if, for the last seven years (of now working in and with policymakers in Washington) that I have been learning a foreign language and traveling in a foreign country, and so I'm here today to do a little translation (of Washington) for you.

...You might have thought we broke up AT&T in 1984. Well, I want to report to you that they've found a way to gather together once more. We essentially have two gigantic telephone companies dividing the country up amongst themselves. You also may not know that the cable providers have (divvied up the country in such a way) that no one (cable company) competes with another. So there is lots of merging going on and no legal limits on (broadband providers) and their ability to discriminate. And what I am really here to tell you today is that we are in a titanic battle for the future of the Internet in the United States; that the technology community is radically under-represented in this conversation and that Jimmy Wales' response -- 'I make Web sites' -- is no longer appropriate or sufficient."

Crawford then cited another co-keynoter at the PDF conference, U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra, who told conferees earlier that the government has what he called "a new role" -- opening up increasing amounts of government data to the public over the Internet, information that Chopra said has been, "until now, hidden within the bureaucracy." But there's a second big new role for government, Crawford said, "to provide a level playing field for Web innovators." She told conferees they need to worry about Web personalization -- the growing use of increasingly sophisticated filters by Web data aggregators such as Google to narrow and define the information people have access to online. People also "should worry about personalization at the network level," Crawford said, "because these (telecom) carriers are convinced that monetization of Internet applications content is the only way they are going to survive."

She then reminded conferees that "the Internet would not exist absent government regulation. ... The fact that telephone companies were required to allow computers and modems gave rise to the Internet. If those same phone companies would have understood the Internet (back then), they would have tried to monetize it. They didn't get the chance," Crawford said, but they're trying again now.

She said FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski's recent proposal to make high-speed Internet access a regulated service has triggered a furious round of lobbying by telecom companies and their lobbyists -- even though "high-speed access to the Internet (by all) is a central economic tenet of our age," Crawford said. She added: "Companies are arguing that they should have no oversight and not be regulated by any federal actor. So that's where we are. A titanic battle. And what's at stake? I saw some comments on the Twitter feed (at this conference) about the importance of rural America (having better access to the Internet). The FCC wants to be able to bring broadband to all Americans and they can only do this by classifying Internet access as a regulated service."

Just how intense is this battle on the Hill? Crawford said AT&T spent $6 million in the first three months of this year lobbying against any form of regulation, "attacking the FCC and (waging) a definite campaign of personal destruction. ... We need your help and the tech sector needs to be part of this conversation and it's not yet there. [The FCC] is doing its best to be constructive and do the right thing ... but I want to encourage you to find ways into this conversation and make sure that your voices are heard."

Crawford also asked those in the audience to speak up against further consolidation of broadband services as represented by recent merger talks between Comcast and NBC. She said the FCC is holding a public forum July 13 at Northwestern University Law School in Chicago on the proposed Comcast/NBCU/GE joint venture, and urged everyone in the audience to spread the word.

"Remember Jimmy Wales' comment, 'I make Web sites'?" Crawford asked the audience. Concluding her remarks, Crawford quipped that Wales should, instead, be asking: "Do I want to be able to make (Web sites) in the future?"

Crawford got a standing ovation.

What do you think? Is it time for the the technology, social advocacy and open government communities to get involved in this fight? Let us hear from you.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Photo: J.D. Lasica, on Flickr)