Mobbin'

Here's a look at Saturday's Seattle flash mob in Pioneer Square's Occidental Mall, dancing to some of the hit music from Glee. Co-organizer Bobby Bonsey, a freelance choreographer and photographer, told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's blogger Monica Guzman yesterday : "I want people to be staring at their computer and be watching this and have that really cool smile just creep across their faces, and have those goose-bumps." Besides this one, Bonsey's flash mobs around Glee also occurred at Seattle's Pike Place Market and Kerry Park in Queen Anne.

Memo to social change advocates: an estimated 3,000 people took part across the three locations; unlike most flash mobs to date, these were mildly choreographed and rehearsed in public parks yesterday morning prior to their tri-space debut, which had been kept somewhat of a secret to the general public. Mobile tech played a huge role in organizing, of course -- and the addition now of new geo-location apps are just making it easier to scale the size of the crowd, Bonsey says.

Are Cause Mobs next? Let us hear from you on that.

The Year Ahead

It's New Year's Day and time to forecast which trends are most likely to shape the cause-wired landscape this year. More than ever, it seems, online activists are divided over how they think the Web will empower them in new ways to make change in the world.

To be sure, 2010 will be another tough year economically for many start-ups and social advocacy groups. At the very least, proving social impact will matter more than ever. But these same rising pressures to make measureable change also will lead to innovative new forms of online collaboration and consolidation. Low-cost social media will be used ever-more widely and creatively by social enterprises and advocacy groups to aggregate new levels of clout, funding, innovation and community support.

In short? Collaboration and consolidation are this year's mega-trends. Here are some of the ways these trends will show up in the weeks and months ahead. (And this list is just for starters. Have your say at the end of this post.)

* Divisions between traditional "giving" sectors will continue to fade. More organizations, companies and consumers will seek to achieve a branded, demonstrable impact on social problem-solving with the dollars, time and ideas they spend or contribute. Look for social entrepreneurs to collaborate on new ways to prove, measure, and scale their social impact across time, place, sectors and ideologies. The recent launch of the Global Impact Investing Network, for example, will push the cuase of social investing by bringing together global philanthropists, ethical banks and social entrepreneurs and enterprises to apply the microfinance model to health care an other services needed by those living in poverty around the world. Look, too, for more offline conferences that celebrate collaboration among activists across sectors for social change. Example: The two-year-old CUSP conference in Chicago, which features social innovators who are reshaping society by design, regardless of whether they are from the corporate, education, religious, nonprofit, entertainment, or technology sectors. Look for more such efforts to scale cross-sector social innovation for greater impact.

* New ways to measure impact will emerge. Mobile and location-awareness technology -- because it will enable people to get closer to measuring their personal impact on the world in real-time -- will continue to radicalize the social enterprise space and the giving experience (watch for Foursquare, Google Latitude, Loopt, FireEagle and other such geo-location "games" to become more socially conscious this year), reshaping how and what people donate. Giving money will become less important than giving voice, giving time, giving influence, and giving work. Look for social networks to create new ways to reward those who demonstrate the most activity around socially-conscious activities.

* Micro-activism will proliferate. Expect to see new start-ups modeled after The Extraordinaries, an online micro-volunteering enterprise that enables people to give short bits of their time via their mobile phones from anywhere at any time. Also look for more micro-gift enterprises to emerge, such as Dreambank.org, which allows causes or individuals in need to receive a portion of what they need or want from many people rather than get gifts or input they can't use (such as wool blankets for weather-disaster victims in tropical climates). Additionally, look for more micro-funding groups like World Nomads, which through its Footprints program funds large-scale international development projects through micro-donations. Expect, too, the rise of micro-seed funding and 1-to-1 financing of social entrepreneurs. Additionally, get ready to see new types of micro-work enterprises to stem from SamaSource, which uses the Web to outsource digital work for larger companies to educated people living in poverty in developing nations. The micro-craze will also lead to more innovative uses of social media platforms like Twitter and Ning by social enterprises to crowdsource micro-services and influence that scales.

* More small causes will be aggregated to achieve greater impact. Consider the innovative umbrella group, Wildlife Direct, a Kenya-based nonprofit enterprise that aggregates autonomous wildlife conservation activists under a single umbrella and gives each exposure to individual donors. Says Paula Kahumbu, a 2009 PopTech fellow and Wildlife Direct's executive director: "Underfunding is conservation's biggest threat. By giving each of the wildlife activists a blog, we enable individual donors from around the world to communicate directly with the people they are funding." [Think donorschoose.org meets The Huffington Post meets wildlife conservation.] The goal, says Kahumbu, is to create a single platform for the many smaller groups working to save wildlife in Africa. "We have much to share with each other -- each activist or group of activists is working on a different animal or aspect of the problem. We are stronger working together than we are alone." Additionally, the newly-launched Social Entrepreneur open API, which is a search engine for finding social entrepreneurs, is an effort to provide an exchange and transfer of information so as to avoid duplication in the "do-good" sector. One site to keep watching in 2010 is SocialActions.com, as well as the Compathos Foundation, which connects volunteers and financial resources with nonprofits through digital storytelling.

* Co-working goes mainstream. Until recently, co-working spaces -- which Wikipedia defines as "the social gathering of a group of people, who are still working independently, but who share values and who are interested in the synergy that can happen from working with talented people in the same space" -- were concentrated most heavily in San Francisco and New York. In the past, co-working has mostly been a way for newbie start-up founders to share space and expenses. 2010 will likely see the expansion and formalization of these types of spaces both geographically and intellectually, as more will become incubators for start-up funding and volunteer support. Example: The Unreasonable Institute, a new nonprofit, has announced it will bring 25 global social entrepreneurs to Boulder, Colo., this summer for 10 weeks to co-train, co-work, and explore seed funding collaborations. Look for more such social enterprise colonies and retreats to pop up this year, based on the 20th century model of artist's colonies and writer's workshops.

* Online swarms gain clout. The combination of mobile phone, geo-location, and real-time organizing technologies and platforms will embolden "flash cause and consumer mobs" to exert their influence in new and expanded ways. Globally, mobile data traffic is set to double every year through 2013, increasing 66-fold between 2008 and 2013. Look for more nonprofits to "hire" members of online social networks who have the most online and mobile followers to help them raise funds and awareness on-demand; look for a continued rise in new consumer-complaint platforms such as Quiet Riots, a UK start-up that offers disgruntled consumers a way to crowdsource their complaints and give companies a way to address them. Look, too, for more companies and nonprofits to be held more publicly accountable for their actions. Case in point: JPMorgan Chase's recent online contest snafu.

What are some of your predictions for the year ahead? Go ahead, it's your turn. Tell us what you think -- and what we missed.

- By Marcia Stepanek

(This post first appeared on Justmeans and is being reposted here with permission)

Swarms

Manhattan's birds are brilliant. From my 42nd-floor conference room in Midtown, I often see flocks fly by in perfect formation, suddenly veering right, then left, to dodge the buildings below. It's as if they're being choreographed by some grand master hawk squawking orders from atop the Empire State Building.

Truth is, of course, birds aren't very smart. [Central Park's birds still can't seem to distinguish a cookie wrapper from a bagel chip.] But flocks of them? Different story. Group-think helps them to negotiate skyscrapers and migrate to Miami in a heartbeat.

Humans, too, gain some advantages in groups: we're just starting to figure out how much smarter we can be when linked online. [Five years ago, we began using social media to find and aggregate the people we knew into simple social networks. Then we started organizing our networks to do things, like raise money for a cause.] Now? We're experiencing another big evolutionary shift in the way we use the Net to collaborate. Think swarms—multiple social networks that aggregate rapidly to influence the offline behavior of others. They're much bigger and more powerful than our single social networks ever were. And like SWAT teams, they're all about swooping in to do something quickly, then disbanding.

Four types of super-swarms made headlines last week, offering up some tough lessons in mass collaboration for organizers and bystanders, alike:

* Twestival—the 250-city, one-day global gathering of Twitter users offline—ended up catalyzing hundreds of thousands of people in 186 cities worldwide to raise money for charity:water.org, a New York-based nonprofit that builds freshwater wells in Africa. It was the largest, if not the first, swarm-for-good ever assembled. Yet today, nearly a full week after the Feb. 12 event, Twestival organizers still don't know how much money they raised toward their goal of $1 million. Amanda Rose, Twestival's London-based chief organizer, sent out a tweet early yesterday that attempted to lower expectations: "Reaching $1 million that quick was always going to be tough," she tweeted, "but the awareness that came out was worth it. Will not blame those who didn't reach it." [This followed an earlier tweet that indicated that only 25% of the cities participating had reported how much money they raised. Later still, she tweeted: "We are close to £200k ($284,703.210) so nothing small. Announce soon."] Throughout the day, Rose urged people to continue donating in a last-ditch effort to bring the tally closer to the goal. Take-away: Swarms can easily overwhelm the individuals who organize them; their behavior is very difficult, if not impossible, to document in detail or control by any one individual or nonprofit once catalyzed.

* More than 4,000 people swarmed into London's Liverpool Street Station Feb. 9 to both mock and mimic an ad by a local phone company. Some characterized this Facebook-driven swarm—which totaled 14,000 participants online and off—as, simply, the latest in a series of Internet-inspired pranks in recent years [The first recorded flash mob occurred in Manhattan in 2003.] But this one was different. It might be the first swarm mobilized to mock or mimic something commercial. Previous "flash mobs", new media experts say, have been focused simply on having fun. This swarm resulted from viral marketing writ huge. Take-away: Companies can help to launch a swarm as part of a viral marketing campaign but can't guarantee it will stay "on message."

* The Women's Media Center mobilized a swarm in New York and Washington on Feb. 10 to protest remarks made by TV personality Bill O'Reilly following President Obama's first press conference. O'Reilly derided veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas, calling the 88-year-old journalist "the wicked witch of the East" and poking fun at her age. Within hours, more than 10,000 people sent angry emails to O'Reilly and his producers, forcing the conservative provocateur to apologize to Thomas on air the next day—precisely what the swarm ordered. Take-away: Swarm-advocacy can be used to both challenge and promote free speech and social norms in new and highly powerful ways, raising new questions about the power of a networked crowd to shape the expression—and the behavior—of an individual.

* al Qaeda forces Feb. 11 staged simultaneous suicide attacks on three Afghan government ministries by mobilizing newly formed online strike-swarms. Terrorist "flash mobs" are now being used in smaller-scale terrorist violence, similar to the kind first seen in Mumbai last November, swarm theorist John Arquilla says in a piece he wrote Feb. 17 for The International Herald Tribune. Arquilla says al Qaeda and its affiliates have been using swarm tactics for several years and that they are being coordinated, increasingly, through the use of social media. Take-away: Flash causes, or swarms—when politicized—can be dangerous and difficult to minimize or pre-empt.

Howard Rheingold, the author of the 2003 bestseller, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, says digital swarms are just getting started. Given the evolving "brush fire" mentality of the Web, expect to see many more of them taking collective action offline—for better or worse—in coming months. Warns Rheingold: “As these [flash groups] become politicized, there is a potential for good and for danger.”

For more on the early work of swarms, see Cisco engineer J.D. Stanley’s recent paper, Digital Swarms, here. Also check out Swarm Theory, an article by Peter Miller in the July 2007 National Geographic. And for the upside of swarms, check out Charles Leadbeater's 2008 book, We Think, about mass collaboration and innovation.

(Illustration, The Birds, by Harley McCabe for istock.com)

Mind-share

I just finished skimming a proof of Michael Kinsley's new book, Creative Capitalism: A Conversation, due out December 2. Kinsley asked Warren Buffett, Oxfam's Elizabeth Stuart, Matthew Bishop and a few dozen others how to retool the global economy to ease poverty.

Say what you will about its timing; the book is intriguing—especially for the way Kinsley got it written. Remember how Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer talked his friends into painting his Aunt Polly's fence (so that he wouldn't have to paint it, himself)? Right after Bill Gates delivered his now famous speech on "creative capitalism" at the 2008 World Economic Forum, Kinsley—the founding editor of Slate—set up creativecapitalismblog.com, a place where people in his network could debate Gates' concept.

Kinsley made their postings into a book. It's 310 pages and 75 very short chapters long and roughly resembles a comment string at the end of a blog entry. Kinsley makes no apologies:

"We can debate the quality of Internet prose: the suspension of grammar, the cutesy acronyms (not to mention emoticons!), the casual spelling, the half-finished sentences, but it is the language of our time. And people do read it. And write it. So the idea for this book was to find a collection of smart people, entice them into a Web-based discussion of creative capitalism, and by this means trick them into producing a book. The book would have the quality of a blog or a "chat" or one of Slate's email dialogues. The prose would be casual, the organization perhaps a bit chaotic. The experience of 'reading' it would be somewhat like surfing the Web—except without the hyperlinks. Plenty of books have grown out of Web sites. But have there been Web sites started with the specific intention of using them to produce a book? Maybe so, but not many. This may remind you of the way Tom Sawyer got Aunt Polly's fence whitewashed. But rest assured that contributors will be compensated."

Most impressive is the brevity of some of the commentary, considering the sources. Kinsley may be on to something (again). Look for more "fast" books to be created this way, via the mass participation of a social network. It's just another way that social media are reshaping the conversation.

(Bending Globe, above, by Laurie Simmons for Project Globe 2008)

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)

It's Getting Crowded in Here

Thanks to the rise of social media, more people are having their say about things. The audience has begun talking to the stage: consumers, more and more, are talking to the producers; activists/donors are talking to the nonprofits; citizens are talking to the media. The information flow has reversed. The result? A cacaphony of input and ideas, from the ground up. Across society, says Charles Leadbeater, social media are fueling the "rise of the amateur professional." Here's an animated whiteboard that Leadbeater made to explain what he means. He shared it last week in Amsterdam, at the third annual PICNIC idea-fest:



Leadbeater is the author of the book, We Think, about the impact of social media-driven mass innovation.

Clay Shirky, the author of Here Comes Everybody, also spoke at PICNIC this year. I caught up with him before the conference and I got his take on the rise of mass collaboration and mass innovation. Shirky wonders whether society's traditional institutions are ready to handle this surge of mass input. New types of leadership, he says, are needed to manage it all:

"There's a general awareness now that the Net isn't simply a decoration on contemporary society. It's a challenge to it. A society that has an Internet is a different kind of society than one that doesn't, much like a society with a printing press was very different than the one without it. Unlike all of the media revolutions in human history, though—the printing press, the telegraph, moving images and sound, and finally the ability to harness broadcast—the Internet creates groups. It moves us into a world of two-way groups.

Group action in society just got easier. This is a big deal. Freedom of speech, assembly and religion are all now the same freedom. We are living now through the largest increase of human expressive capability in history."

The significance for nonprofits and other advocacy groups? "A big part of the traditional organization is going to be comprised now of people you have to convince rather than command," Shirky told Cause Global. "Where the organization is headed will be set partly by management and partly by the members, and it's something employers will have to learn to live with."

For more big thoughts—the top 10 trends stemming from social media shared at PICNIC this year—click here.

(Illustration by istock.com)