Mobile Jujitsu

This is the week in September when every serious do-gooder and advocacy wonk in Manhattan goes into empathy overdrive, thanks to the simultaneous convening in New York of the United Nations General Assembly, the annual Clinton Global Initiative, Mashable's annual Social Good Summit and the gatherings of at least a half-dozen other social good events and Meet-ups and hackathons-for-change. (Anyone willing to trade their pass to WIE2012, on women's empowerment and 'mompreneurs', for a ticket to the Personal Democracy Forum's talk with authors Stephen Johnson and Clay Shirky discussing the evolution of peer-to-peer networks for social change?)

Let's be charitable.  Even the most passionate followers of this week's change panels across town — with names like "higher impact investing" and "strategic philanthropy" and "the built environment for women and girls" —should be forgiven for feeling just a tad overwhelmed.

But despair not, young activists. Mashable's just-ended Social Good Summit, despite the conference-hopping of many of its panelists, delivered enough fresh examples of mobile activism and social networking to keep things interesting for the under-40 set, even if  you weren't able to crash the geopolitical schmoozefest at CGI. 

Among the highlights of #SGSGlobal 2012:

* Larry Irving, co-founder of the Mobile Alliance for Global Good cheered efforts by activists to use their smartphones to distribute medicine, monitor climate change, spot election fraud, and take aerial photos of oil spill damage in the Gulf region. [He also cited Text4Baby and FrontlineSMS , among others.] But Irving said the cost and complexity of creating do-gooder apps has been dissuading many other causes from experimenting with the technology. To make it work well "in nonprofit mode," he said, "you're not just talking about technology. You've also got to talk about changing business models, changing cultures, changing operational models." To make mobile less daunting for activists, Irving urged organizers of digital hackathons to start making them more about pressing social needs that must be met and less about the event, itself. Irving also urged young activists to do a better job matching philanthropic investors with social entrepreneurs. "If Maasai warriors can use mobile phones to find water for their cows, we can do a better job in this country figuring out how to be connected via mobile for a purpose," Irving said.

* Todd Park, the Chief Technology Officer at the White House, urged attendees to take government data and "jujitsu it, put it in machine-readable form, let entrepreneurs take it and turn it into awesomeness." How to begin? "It's all about turning government into a platform for open innovation," Park said. "Data by itself is useless. I can't feed my baby daughter data. It's only useful if you apply it to create an actual public benefit." Park has been holding hackathons—"data-paloozas" and other events — aimed at encouraging social entrepreneurs to mine government data to leverage impact. He cited his office's June 2012 Health Datapalooza, which attracted 1,600 entrepreneurs over two days, with 242 companies competing for 100 spots to present innovations powered by open data from the government. "We took data already paid for and jujitsued it into the public domain," Park said. The cost? Zero, Park said. Data.gov is the federal government's online home for a wealth of machine-readable, cost-free data. "And now there's healthdata.gov, energydata.gov, educationdata.gov," he said, as part of the specialized data communities section of the site, open to all. Park announced Sunday a new initiative called the Equal Futures App Challenge, to encourage young girls to become leaders in democracy, to aggregate and create new apps to educate girls about gender gaps in elected office and new apps to teach girls about what it takes to run a successful campaign. "It's awesome stuff," Park told conferees. "Check it out and see what you can do with it."

"At the most fundamental level, we are not just connected, we are inseparable." -- Deepak Chopra

* The American Red Cross' Social Media Director Wendy Harman acknowledged that harnessing social media to help speed aid to people in disasters has been a "big challenge" at the Red Cross, forcing her and her team to meld the way people talk about social media with how organizations like hers process real-time information. Harman said that after the Haiti earthquake, "we got Tweets from people saying, 'I'm trapped under the rubble and in a particular supermarket and can you help?'" But the Red Cross didn't always have a way to turn that information into rescue, she said. "That landed like a thud on my shoulders and made me think we had to do something about this," she recalled. Last March, the Red Cross launched its new Digital Operations Center, built with a grant from Dell. "We now have huge visualizations of all of the data coming in to us via social media and we can get, in two minutes, a good idea of what is happening on the ground in a disaster and how people are feeling about the service delivery and how they are affected by a particular disaster," Harman said. Her team is also using the Center to identify topline trends in real time. During Hurricane Isaac, for example, "we were able to affect change on the ground based on what we were seeing at the Center" — to direct volunteers to specific groups of people who were able to communicate their need for help. Harman said social media can help nonprofits identify new ways to leverage existing, ad hoc networks to greater purpose. During the recent spate of Midwest tornados, Harman said, the hashtag #bathtub helped the Red Cross communicate and connect people who were hiding in their bathtubs to take safe refuge from the storms. "To see that people were doing that and to be able to tap into that conversation and connect people together more broadly in that way was awesome," Harman said. "A big part of the mission of the Red Cross is to provde hope and comfort, and in that really scary moment, this was the most rewarding thing I've ever done in my life." 

* Occupy Wall Street protester Tim Poole talked about how social media has been transformative, both for him and citizen journalism. After seeing a police officer dragging a protester by his leg during the height of the Occupy protests last fall, and noticing that the protester's hands were bleeding, Poole said he decided to start using his smartphone to broadcast the violence to the world via his Ustream livestream channel. On November 17, 2011, one of Occupy's most remarkable days of protests, Poole reached 750,000 viewers using his smartphone, filming the action for 21 consecutive hours — a feat that earned him profiles in TIME Magazine and The New Yorker as a pioneer of  livestream reportage. Poole told conferees how he turned a toy remote-controlled Parrot AR.Drone into an "OccuCopter" for aerial surveillance filming and has modified software for livestreaming into a system he calls the DroneStream. "This was reality TV," Poole said. "It wasn't the reality TV that everyone hears about, because that's just scripted BS. This is what it is: an unedited raw window into what's happening." It gets people out of their chairs, he said. "It can be incredibly empowering."

* Actress Maria Bello talked about her work to "Oprah-ize Haiti" —using social networks to begin connecting local women's groups in remote areas of Haiti to each other and to nonprofit support. She created We Advance University, a web and mobile site, as both a directory of local services and a hub for shared videos to educate women on everything from healthy food to the challenges of hygiene in refugee camps to advice on how to fight local violence against women. "This can let women to see that two miles away, the Red Cross is doing rape tests and 10 miles away there is a lawyer who can file rape-charge papers," she said. This will create a "revelation revolution" for women across Haiti, she said. "We got pissed off that women's groups in Haiti were not getting the access to help and community and the funding they deserve."

* "We have ironclad evidence that social media can help people take down bad governments," says Tomicah Tilleman, U.S. State Department senior advisor for civil society engagement and emerging democracies, "but can social media help replace those regimes with better governments?" Tilleman joined Slovakia's foreign minister Peter Michalko and Marina Kaljurand, Ambassador of Estonia to the United States, to talk about the LEND Network, a new experiment in social media hatched in Mongolia this summer by a partnership between the Community of Democratics and led by the U.S. and Estonia. It's a social network that connects people who are experienced managing democratic transitions with social activists currently engaged in that struggle. Activists can use the network to create Facebook-style profiles in which they list their 'change sustainability' expertise, be it training judges, writing constitutions, decentralizing utility companies or setting up the rule of law. A mid-level bureaucrat from, say, Tunisia who is training a police force to comply with human rights standards can browse network and find someone in Estonia who once held that job, or an expert from a human rights NGO. The network also taps into some cutting-edge translation tech and social media to remove the need for human translators.

* Brooklyn illustrator Sophie Blackall [interviewed by CauseGlobal in a 2009 post about her Missed Connections illustrations based on Craigslist postings by the same name] talked about her initiative to use her illustrations from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to stop the threat of measles in that country, in partership with the Measles & Rubella Initiative. "In some parts of Africa, families don't name their children until the threat of measles has passed," Blackall told attendees. "That threat disappears entirely when children are vaccinated, and a child can be vaccinated for a single dollar." Her illustrated stories of health workers and families in the Congo battling the measles epidemic there can be viewed here.

* Spiritual leader Deepak Chopra told conferees that social media marks the world's 'next phase of humanity.' It is a technological creation and extension of society's subconscious, he said, and is the inevitable next phase of humanity —for better or worse. "At the most fundamental level, we are not just connected, we are inseparable," he said. "What drones can't do, what the armies can't do, what the weapons can't do, what the weapons of mass destruction can't do, what biological warfare can't do —we can do through technology." Chopra said social networks can advance humanity but also can bring enemies together. "The world is at a crossroads," he said. "...You can never program true intelligence into a computer."

*  A panel of present and former U.S. diplomats talked about how they are using social media to engage in dialogues in countries and communities where the U.S. does not have a diplomatic presence. Victoria Esser, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Public Affairs for Digital Strategy at the State Department, said the agency has 300 Twitter profiles, 400 Facebook pages, and recently staged a Google Hangout in Persian to engage young people in Iran. Charles Ray, the former American Ambassador to Zimbabwe, shared as story about using Facebook during his tenure to circumvent a local government's obstructionism. "When the government discovered our face-to-face meetings with young people were having an effect, they started disrupting meetings," he said. "They hated it with a passion, so we came up with an alternative. We hosted a live Facebook chat, along with SMS, Twitter, and YouTube. In the first one, 200 people enrolled and we had 250 comments in the first 30 minutes." Dino Patti Djalal, the Indonesian Ambassador to the United States, says Twitter has become a critical way for him and others to interact with Indonesians at home and abroad. Djalal said he recently asked his followers to "do one act of kindness" to honor his recent birthday, and a few hours later, he got hundreds of replies. "They were amazing," he said. "One said, 'I proposed to my girlfriend' and another said 'I kissed my mom on the cheek.' That's when I realized that social media has a use in the field of diplomacy."

—Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration by PixelEmbargo for istock.com)

Who's Your Mayor?

Blanketing BART stations in San Francisco since mid-June are public service announcements urging passers-by to use their cellphones to "drill the oil industry." Another Twitter campaign? Guess again. Think Foursquare, the new mobile social network, which a number of nonprofits are using to drum up some money and a crowd -- online and off.

Earthjustice, a nonprofit public interest law firm in the Bay Area, is asking BART riders to "check in" with them on Foursquare. For every check-in, one of Earthjustice's major donors is pledging $10 to help the nonprofit's attorneys fight environmental pollution. So far, so good. The campaign has raised over $10,000 for the cause, says marketing manager Ray Wan, and has brought a crowd of people to the Earthjustice Web site that didn't know about the group previously. "We're getting some amazing buzz from this," Wan says. "It's an easy way to get people involved in helping us to fight for the environment."

It's not the first nonprofit to experiment with Foursquare. For the uninitiated, Foursquare is a location awareness application that people use on their phones to check in at various locations throughout major cities all over the world. People who check in this way earn points, join friends, and unlock goodies as they go. The person with the most check-ins at one place become that venue's "mayor." Businesses already using Foursquare to lure new customers to their venues are awarding those who come in the most often with discounts and free goods. Nonprofits are still experimenting.

At the Brooklyn Museum, chief technology officer and social media maven Shelley Bernstein has begun using Foursquare to boost the personal dialogue between the museum's staff and the people who visit the museum, live in the neighborhood, and patronize the site. On Foursquare, people leave "tips" at venues they like -- bits of advice so that other people know what to expect when they go there. "Many of our staff are essentially local experts, so we've queried them to compile tips to the wealth of options that exist in our local neighborhood, Prospect Heights," Bernstein says on the museum's Foursquare page. "So now, as people explore our area, the Brooklyn Museum staff help them along in their journey, pointing out the joys of pancakes at Tom's Restaurant or the killer wine selection at Abigail's."

Bernstein is working to establish venue pages for the museum's exhibitions and permanent collections. "People could check in at the galleries they visit -- American Identities, The Dinner Party, Egypt Reborn, etc. and become the mayor of not just the museum but of their favorite installation within the greater whole." The goal, of course, is to get more people to visit the museum -- via a Brooklyn Museum "badge" that gets unlocked after a certain number of visits, rewarding people for multiple visits. Writes Bernstein: "As simply as I can put this, Foursquare is about place and identifying yourself through that. It is a celebration of the visitor -- the people who crossed the river, who made it in the door and decided to identify themselves with us, right here."

Another nonprofit, Naperville, Ill.-based Big Love Little Hearts, which works to help children born with congenital heart defects, also has been experimenting successfully with Foursquare. Last April, the nonprofit's volunteers were asked to add the following "tip" to 600 Foursquare locations: "1 in 100 children are born w/ a heart defect. Pulse-Ox screening saves lives -- you can too! Check in with the hashtag #100X100." Organizers embedded a link in that "tip" on Foursquare that drove people to the nonprofit's Web site.

Seven hours into the campaign, a donor volunteered to donate $1 for every person who checked in. Within 12 hours into the campaign, the hashtag had been used 11,703 times, and the donor was so impressed, she ended up giving the nonprofit $25,000. The nonprofit used Foursquare again as part of a campaign to get supporters to check in (or contact) their Illinois lawmakers to push for legislation to help people with congenital heart defects. "And one last nugget," says chief organizer Estrella Rosenberg, "is that this was all free."

How is your nonprofit or social enterprise using Foursquare to raise awareness, boost patronage, or raise money for a cause? Let us hear form you about what works and what doesn't so far.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration: istock.com)

TEDxVolcano 2

Cara Mertes, the director of the Sundance Institute's documentary film program, called it the first "flash forum" she'd ever attended. Truth is, last night's TEDxVolcano gathering was the first such instant event that any of us had ever attended -- a little over two hours of short talks, film clips and music that had been pulled together (crowdsourced) spontaneously by blogger Nathaniel Whittemore and several other cause-wired souls for the hundreds of Skoll World Forum attendees stranded in London.

Some of the 12 speakers presenting at the TED-style event -- held at The Hub (a co-location work space in King's Cross in central London) -- spoke eloquently about the nature and importance of serendipity. Entrepreneur Gary Bolles called this "a moment in time that can be essential for all of us to reconsider how to upgrade the impact we have on the world or how we can spread the influence of what we do in our lifetimes. Perhaps it is an opportunity for all of us to do more."

But not all speakers urged a gentle embrace of the circumstances that had brought them (yours truly, included) together again. Larry Brilliant, the American physician and director of the Skoll Global Threats Fund, said there is a strong relationship between the volcanic eruption in Iceland and climate change -- "not the kind you think" but a relationship caused, instead, by the fact that "we don't know (much) about a lot of very important things" including science.

"...Right now, the single most important thing the world faces is climate change," he said. "It is the exacerbater of issues of war, water, population growth, pandemics and policy." Despite this, he said, "science is under attack from a new generation of Luddites, of climate deniers ... while the science about volcanos is uncertain, one this is certain: we need more -- not less - science. We need more and better scientists and we need to fund science better to create an entirely new cadre of scientists and new staff to help us address and tackle the problems of the 21st century." Thanks to the rapid evolution of information technology, he added, humans -- for the first time -- can see environmental problems earlier, though "we still don't always know if what we're finding is going to be a smaller or a bigger problem" down the road.

Brilliant suggested that "maybe there's a reason we all are here together tonight. We are going to witness, over the next few days, the interplay between science and policy as every King and President calls the Prime Minister (UK) complaining that their son or daughter is stuck in London; we're going to see an interplay of all of those things antecedent to the great global threats that we face. We are going to learn, if we haven't started to already, that we are all in this together. There is no rich, no poor in this. We're all grounded, equally."

Brilliant concluded his remarks with the admonition that "everything we will learn from science is going to help us. Science is the set of headlights by which we steer this ship. We need to fight for science because we are going to need every tool we can muster to deal with the problems we are going to face in the future."

Among other highlights of TEDxVolcano:

* Matthew Bishop of The Economist said Goldman Sachs' problems and the failings of Wall Street serve as reminders of the complexity of today's world. "The world has changed; a whole paradigm proved to be faulty and the practitioners of it couldn't see that the world had changed," he said. "The lesson here, the challenge to this moment, is to think: 'What changes are there that we are missing because we are just carrying on as normal?'" Bishop also asked what could be done to improve the quality of public debate over the tough and complex issues facing the world. "There is a moment now in our history that says if we rise up and think big enough, we can come up with a much more intelligent public discussion," he said. "We are really going to need it, and if we don't have it, we're all in big trouble."

* Travel news correspondent Peter Greenberg, on his way to Heathrow to do a stand-up report for CBS on the continued cancellations of flights, predicted the volcano would have greater impact on the economy than did 9/11. "People cannot fly but cargo cannot fly, either," he said. "Today, in Kenya, 400 tons of flowers are rotting and have to be thrown away. For every day we are not flying and air cargo is not flying, documents are still not being delivered, medicines are not being delivered, human organs for transplant are not being delivered ... the economic impact is going to be huge."

* Cara Mertes of Sundance spoke about the leveling effect of nature. "I thought I was clever enough to figure out a way home but none of us were clever enough because we're all here," she said. "Money doesn't matter, either. You can have a private jet but that just means you might die alone. So now I realize I'm in an alternate reality. To understand it is to see patterns in things, so I started thinking about what the pattern was here -- and here's what I think: the Earth is talking back. And I think the Earth is saying, 'You people are not listening.' What it is actually saying is that we have a really big problem on our hands with the current levels of human disruption. We are getting a sneak preview of what would happen with climate collapse. It's a peaceful sneak preview. Nobody died to tell us what we have to go through, right? But what will happen when serious cataclysmic events start happening across the planet?" Then, recalling a speech by environmentalist Paul Hawken earlier this week at the Skoll Forum, Mertes said: "We don't live in an historical moment but in a civilization moment. This is a generation that has to decide if we're even going to have a civilization."

* Jeff Skoll, founder and CEO of the Skoll Foundation, and Sally Osberg, the director of it, both read poems they wrote on the trip down from Oxford. Osberg's riffed on Robert Frost's Fire and Ice; Skoll's had a lighter feel to it, ending with the declaration: "Damn the volcano; let's have a ball."

* A performance by singer Susheela Raman

* A showing of the short video, Pixels, by Patrick Jean:

Watch this site for further coverage, as long as I'm still in London.

-- Marcia Stepanek

The Good Capitalist Party

South by Southwest (SxSW), the annual social media and cause festival that brings thousands to Austin, Texas, each spring, is offering something new this year for social entrepreneurs and other social innovators: The Good Capitalist Party. It's a bottom-up event organized by Justmeans reader and social entrepreneur Martin Montero that's gone viral in the past week or two among those SxSWers looking to party and network around making business better.

The event was originally to have been just another networking event at the festival, which is hosting more than 200 such side events this year at various locations around Austin. But the Good Capitalist Party [set for Monday night] is now destined to be one of the festival's biggest off-program networking events, having attracted so many RSVPs so far that Montero and his crew have had to change venues twice just to accommodate those interested -- not to mention an expanding roster of sponsors, which now include Acumen Fund, Social Edge, Good Magazine, Kiva, and the Austin Center for Design and others.

According to Montero, the event will focus on social entrepreneurship and the people and companies that strive to profit as well as make the world a better place. Montero says guests will include the founders of new for-profit and nonprofit hybrid models and a number of social entrepreneurs -- both experienced and just getting started. They'll be on hand to answer questions from attendees on how best to start your own social venture and share information about funding, fellowships, training, and startup contests and investors.

Montero says he came up with the name for the event -- good capitalist -- based on his desire to promote social enterprise among all kinds of citizens and "average Joe types" [including but not limited to MBAs]. Montero says he's been inspired by the groundswell and will announce a new enterprise of his own at the event, what he describes as a Web site for "average Joes [and Janes]" that will aim to be "an uber-practical guide to social enteprise for the blue collar." Watch this space for details.

For more information about the party -- now wait-listing people who haven't yet signed up -- check out the event's Web site.

Are you planning to attend? Let us hear from you!

Radical Shock

Make no mistake: the privacy debate is hotter than ever. The recent uproar over Facebook’s new Terms of Service – and then, even more recently, Twitter’s new service terms – is all about privacy, says privacy scholar Helen Nissenbaum. The Internet, she says, has introduced a "radical shock" to our notions of privacy in society, disrupting our long-held distinctions between what is private and what is not.

But what do people mean in today's world of YouTube and Facebook and email when they say their privacy has been violated? They don't care so much that their personal information has been shared, Nissenbaum says—but whether it's been shared appropriately. That's why personal information, she says, ought to be distributed and protected according to social context—what’s appropriate, say, in the workplace, or a medical clinic, or a social network, or a school, or among family and friends.

Today’s privacy policies and rules are not nuanced enough, Nissenbaum says. We've got “one size fits all” protections that either go too far by ignoring these distinctions or fail to go far enough.

“The rapid adoption and infiltration of digital information technologies into virtually all aspects of life, to my mind, have resulted in a schism — many schisms — between our experience of and expectations for privacy today,” says Nissenbaum, the author of the just-published Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life. These gaps, she says, are producing in society “a kind of radical shock, and we need some new ways to talk about privacy.”

I caught up with Nissenbaum earlier this week at her NYU office just off Manhattan’s Washington Square. She is an associate professor in NYU’s Department of Culture and Communication and a Senior Fellow of the NYU Information Law Institute. What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation:

Last week in Davos, social media company CEOs met at the World Economic Forum to talk about the impact of social networks like Facebook and MySpace on society. Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn CEO, told the group that “all these concerns about privacy tend to be old people’s issues.” He said the value of being connected and transparent is so great, that privacy is not so much a concern any more. What do you think? Is it an “old people’s issue?”

Nissenbaum: [Laughs.] Reid, actually, was one of my students at Stanford, years ago. But no, I totally disagree with those kinds of critiques that say young people don’t care about privacy. Some people say privacy involves withholding information or is the right to control information. But when I see people getting into a flap over privacy, I don’t think that’s what they’re really after. People want to share information; what they care about is the appropriate flow of information. They want the right information to go to the right people and under the right circumstances. They want this “contextual integrity” for the information going around about them. Everybody is interested in privacy under that definition.

Teenagers yell if their parents read their diaries; I have 18- and 20-year-olds in college coming to me all the time, saying, “Oh my god, my 12-year-old sister wants to friend me on Facebook! That’s awful.” I think these are all expressions of a desire for privacy. A number of years ago, at Princeton, where I used to work, I had an alumni event, with an audience of all different ages. I asked those assembled, “How would you feel if you were in a job interview and as a condition of that, you had to yield your medical records?” There was a huge difference in the responses. Older people were much more indignant about that request but many of the younger people said they wouldn’t mind. Does that mean they don’t care about privacy?

You say that individuals shouldn’t be able to control the flow of information.

That’s right. The nuts-and-bolts of my theory says that privacy depends on the social context of information being shared and what’s appropriate for those contexts. Right now, we take information and divvy it up into public information and private information, sensitive or non-sensitive – and then have two different ways of dealing with it. I think that’s problematic. People then get all wrapped up in knots trying to figure out if their IP address is personal or not. I know the EU is struggling with questions like these right now, and it’s a non-starter. Privacy isn’t ‘one-size-fits-all.’

We really need to be much more nuanced and descriptive, and to open ourselves up to the diversity of categories of all types of information and the range of social contexts for that information – and then act appropriately in each situation.

You and I are in structured situation at the moment. I know, more or less, what you expect of me in this interview and you know what I expect of you. These things are governed by social norms. So much of what privacy is depends on the nature of the information at issue and what our roles are as individuals within a certain social context. And then there’s something called the constraints on the flow of information. You could check out my Web site, for example. And then you could ask a whole lot of people to give you some information about me. And then you could go to ChoicePoint and pay them to write up a whole long report on me. In each of these cases, the way you’re getting information about me is governed by certain information flows and different constraints on the flow of that information. You could ask me some questions directly about myself, and I could choose not to answer some of those questions.

So there are circumstances in which people should control the information about them. But in other instances, this may not be appropriate. Let’s say you’re under investigation for having committed a murder and the police are investigating you, and they want to find out where you were on Friday night at 8 p.m. They may ask you, but ultimately, they must — behind your back — verify where you were at that time. And in this society, we’re not going to allow you to control that piece of information. We want the police to actually ferret out that information by any means. Nobody would say the police violated your privacy in this case, because we understand their need to get it independently of you. I think it’s intuitive.

Why did you write this book?

Too much time has been wasted deciding whether this or that piece of information – or this or that place – is private or public. What people really care about is whether information is shared appropriately, within the social context of any given situation.

You say some of this is intuitive. But do we need a set of rules that would lead to public policies that could more intelligently codify these distinctions – to honor what you call this “contextual integrity” of information?

Yes and no. We depend on entrenched social norms for guidance, so there are a lot of people who know already what should be public and private, particularly in the realms of the family. In the workplace, on the other hand, we need to be told what the rules are, and this is where information technology has been a radical shock. There, it’s not good enough just to have implicit behavioral norms, like those which tell you how you should behave at a cocktail party. If you screw up there, it’s not so terrible. But if you’re a doctor, it’s probably a good idea to be required to write down what your responsibilities are when it comes to somebody else’s information.

What is contextual integrity – the theory you put forward in this book?

There are two parts to it. The first asks us to identify the places where people are getting freaked out about information flow and privacy issues and recognize the kinds of challenges that we’re confronting with technology. And then, the second part, is the moral part of the theory that says that not all change is bad. The first part says here’s how we recognize the nature of the change on our expectations about the flow of information. The second part says look, we have much better medical monitoring devices and using them, we can now save lives, so that’s fabulous.

There are a lot of ways that we’re being monitored that are good and all to our benefit, and there are other ways that aren’t so great. Information that previously was available to your doctor is now being made available to entire consortiums of research institutions and insurance companies and so forth. We need to map these flows and how they’re changing. We need a way of looking at what types of information flows are appropriate so that we can start talking as a society about what works and what doesn’t – or what should. We need to be talking about all of this more intelligently.

Why now?

There are now things we can do with technology that we couldn’t do before – but that we, as a society, never really stopped to think about whether we should.

When suddenly we become confronted with something like Google Street View, we now have the possibility of surveillance cameras, if you will. Back in the day, it was considered okay if I saw you, so long as you could see me. But now, with Street View, we now have a surveillance image that gets posted on the Web and suddenly, this completely challenges our expectations of how some information flows, and is supposed to flow. Suddenly, there are people who can view you and you have no clue.

So my theory of contextual integrity really pushes for society to map out these technology changes, these points of radical shock where suddenly, information flows in highly unexpected ways and it challenges us. We freak out because it’s so unexpected. And no matter what you say about being in a public place so you should have no expectations, the truth is that you do have expectations – because that’s how life and (information) flow were governed for years and years. My book seeks to acknowledge the changes that information technology brings to our expectations, characterize the changes, and then advocate for us all to get on to discussing whether these changes are good or bad. Who are the winners and losers? Can we regulate the flow of information, or should we?

I mean, first you recognize the changes – such as the massive databases that can be aggregated from distinct sources, and then be used to mine different kinds of information and create profiles that can be used to make decisions about an individual. These are the types of radical, unexpected shifts in the flow of information that my theory seeks to address.

Hasn’t the legal environment been able to help add clarity to some of this already?

U.S. law has been heavily critiqued because it’s sectoral; it’s based on different sectors. You have, for example, financial privacy and communications privacy and video privacy, and so forth. People have said this is problematic, but I think the U.S. approach has merit because it has in mind particular contexts in which the information flow is occurring. I’m not saying that U.S. law is perfect: Choicepoint and Lexis-Nexis, for example, are out of control and highly problematic because they bring information from all different kinds of places, take it out of context and fail to respect the norms out of which it was shared with other actors – and then make that information available in contexts and under constraints that are inappropriate. This is an area in which the law, hopefully, will catch up. But I think we can do better.

It’s not hopeless. When the FTC, for example, was asked to create privacy rules for the financial industry, I think they did a pretty good job because they were able to focus on very specific types of information relevant to different contexts. For instance, there was an argument about whether your name and address, shown above the line in a credit report, should be public. Credit companies argued that it should be because it’s not financial information. But the FTC said it should be private, because it appears in the context of a financial action. The FTC went to court over it and won, and I thought that was fabulous. When laws are made correctly – with information flows and social contexts in mind – I think it could serve us all well.

Wouldn’t this all be easier if we simply put limits on what data could be archived, an approach raised by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger in his recent book, Delete? Should all the information about us be allowed to exist in digital perpetuity?

I do think information should be deleted, but again, to argue for deletion, you could say even that is a sort of arbitrary move. To restrict access to information may, in some cases, require deletion but the word that a lot of legal scholars use is that we’d want to tailor that deletion appropriately. There may be some instances where we decide there’s a whole lot of information being kept somewhere that should just be wiped out. But we want those constraints to be subject to the specific individuals and the context of given situations.

Some of the new mobile devices – from PDAs to the new iPad — are creating completely new contexts for the flow of personal information. Does the mapping of real-time, geographically-specific behaviors demand a new definition of privacy?

There’s an interesting re-configuration going on about what we think of as social space. People see their social space differently as a result of social networks and location-aware devices. I think we’re just now being forced to confront the question of geo-location. It’s now becoming a new aspect of information available about people that’s going to force us to start asking these same sets of questions around.

On Foursquare, for example, some people feel that by playing, they’ve already given their implicit permission to give up their personal information.

Nonsense. I think that before we start going around saying that anything is implicit in this way, we ought to explore whether it should be. What should the rules be? If you had to sit down and read every privacy policy on the Web or for every device that you bought, it would take you – and I’m making this up – two and half years, right? [Laughter] Ultimately, a lot of great work in privacy has been written about constraining the flow of information one way or another. But what I want to add to the mix of our discussion about privacy in society is the notion that we have to look at the contexts, themselves, to determine what’s appropriate, and under which circumstances. Thinking about privacy in this way leads us to ask much bigger questions.

I like working with computer scientists. Together with them, I’ve created a bit of subversive software, such as TrackMeNot, which is committed to privacy in Web search terms.

We’ve also created something called Adnostic, which is supposed to help against online behavioral targeting. And there’s another project we’re working on about court records and placing them online in certain circumstances.

So many of our questions about privacy and what’s appropriate when we’re creating this software takes us back and forces us to ask what are the functions of our institutions in society. Because of technology’s challenge to previous flows of personal information, we find ourselves almost having to go back to these first principles, even saying, what are the purposes of the court? What are records? That sort of thing.

For example, with the courts, if you don’t take care and dump everything onto the Web, including the names and addresses of jurors, for example, maybe the next time you get asked to serve on a jury, you will struggle hard to avoid it, and that won’t promote the values of the court. It will make the courts function worse, forcing us to reach back all the way to consider the roles of the institutions, themselves.

Very delicate considerations need to be embedded in these technologies.

Where has technology changed the traditional flow of information most radically, to what you refer to as “shock status?”

One is in monitoring and tracking. This isn’t visual anymore. It’s online and it can happen when you’re interacting with your supermarket. Second is this arena of aggregating information and analyzing it. It’s all behind-the-scenes and it’s driving a lot of the monitoring, so people are not so obviously aware of it. Sometimes, some little surprising thing happens and you think, hmmmm, I wonder how they knew that? And then, if you’re thoughtful, you realize that somebody has a database somewhere. But it’s not in your face.

Third, there’s the worry about communications and media because this is not just about information that sits in a database somewhere. It’s about distribution. This is Twitter and Facebook and blogs and email. In information science, this whole notion of aggregating information from different sources and then using it to profile people – to see if they’re terrorists or good mortgage prospects – it’s very cutting-edge stuff, involving statistical techniques and operations research. But here’s the problem. It’s not directly experienced except in the ways your bank will reply to you.

Are you hopeful about the future of privacy?

My hope level is in constant flux. When I think of the vast back end of information aggregators interacting directly and indirectly with personal information, such as Google, Choicepoint, ISPs, government agencies, and financial conglomerates, I fear the worst. I worry that the landscape of incentives will swamp just about any moral consideration we might bring to bear. At the same time, I’m buoyed by the growth in size and quality of privacy scholarship and practice, the guile, brilliance, and insubordination of computer hackers and NGO players. And sometimes, watershed events can be enormously important; grim as it is, the Google/China debacle may turn a few heads.

-- Marcia Stepanek

[Editor's Note: This interview was originally published on PopTech.com and is being reposted here with permission]

Social Production

There's a debate among business leaders about the impact of social networks on social enterprises and innovation. At the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, Don Tapscott, a strategy consultant and an author of books on the so-called Net Generation and corporate transparency in the Digital Age, predicted sweeping changes in the way companies operate. What follows are excerpts of his remarks during a hot-ticket workshop co-led by the top executives of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Ning, among others.

How do you think social networks will impact businesses and social innovation?

I think we're at an inflection point where social networking is changing and becoming a new mode of production. It's becoming what I call "social production." And social networks within the enterprise are becoming the new operating system of a business. Best Buy, for example, has a social network (Blue Shirt Nation) that involves tens of thousands of people, and this changes the way Best Buy operates its business. It has a link to its social network, as part of broader collaborative platform, to an electronic water cooler of 70,000 people that come up with all kinds of fantastic new ideas. It uses prediction markets to better understand what's really happening within the company. This is changing the way you run a business. It's no longer about hooking up online or creating a garden community for your products.

The more important opportunity for business is using these new collaborative platforms that are built around social networks to change the deep structure and architecture of the company; to orchestrate their capability to innovate and create value. I used Ning to run a contest for a book I'd written recently [Grown Up Digital], where I asked kids around the world to give me a two-minute video that says what's wrong with the education system and how they'd fix it. I had a person working on this for two weeks. I got hundreds of videos from dozens of countries and it changed the way that I, as a company, relate to the rest of the world.

What other examples can you share?

InnoCentive is basically built on a social network. I'm Procter & Gamble and I'm trying to find a molecule that will take red wine out of a shirt. I've got 9,000 people inside the company but there are 200,000 outside on the InnoCentive network, and sure enough, there's a retired chemist in Taipei or a grad student in London that comes up with a molecule. I pay them $200,000 for the fix and I have a product that ends up being a billion-dollar product.

Or take Goldcorp Inc., a gold mining company. The CEO there was very frustrated that his geologists couldn't tell him where to go into production -- where the gold was. So he ran a contest on a social network and collaborative platform. He offered $500,000 in prizes for anyone who could tell him whether he had any gold in his company, and if so, where it was. He got 77 submissions from all over the world. They used techniques that he'd never heard of. And for his $500,000 of prize money, he found $3.4 billion worth of gold. The market value of his company went from $90 million to $10 billion. He's my neighbor, and I can tell you he's a happy camper. Social networks are changing the way we innovate and the way we get capability.

What are the risks?

One big problem has to do with moving to this new paradigm. There's a crisis of leadership in companies and enterprises typified by this popular habit that some companies have of banning social networks like Facebook within the enterprise. I was talking to the CIO of a state where the governor had banned Facebook and I asked, 'Why do you do that?' And he said the governor felt the people were wasting their time on the job -- to which I replied, 'Well, if young people are wasting time, is that a technology problem? Do you fix that by banning the technology? Maybe it has something to do with work flow, or job design, or performance evaluations.' I asked what the effect was of banning Facebook, and he said that everybody went to MySpace. Another youngster, 27 years old, had a different answer. He said it was the single most demoralizing thing management has ever done. It said to him that management doesn't get collaboration, doesn't get his generation's tools, doesn't understand his generation, and doesn't trust him. So there is a crisis of leadership emerging.

...The whole theme of Davos this year is that the world is bust and we need to rethink, redesign, and rebuild our institutions. The current model of nation-states coming together to fix things isn't working very well. The model we are exploring now at Davos is to create new multi-stakeholder networks to solve problems, so that while world leaders get stalled at Copenhagen coming up with a climate change deal, for example, there are something like 10 million people organizing on the Web around this issue. This is the first time in human history where we're all pretty much on the same side as citizens on an issue like this. To me, this presents a new opportunity to change the way we collaborate in the world and in the way we solve problems.

Nike has just launched something called the GreenXchange, where companies are going to contribute their intellectual property and put it in the commons and use social networking to do this. Nike is giving away 440 environmental patents and placing them in the commons. It's not just on the idea that a rising tide lifts all boats but we have big environmental problems in the world and need to move toward more open innovation and competitive strategies. Social networks give us a platform that radically drops innovation costs. This is a big change.

...Transparency is a new force that's causing companies to be more open, truthful and honest. Now, it's true. You don't always see it. But that's the general trend. Companies that are honest can use transparency as a friend.

—Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration by Saul Herrera for istock.com)

The People's Lobby

From the folks who brought you "The Story of Stuff" a few years back comes a new video—just in time for the international climate talks set to convene in Copenhagen next week. Called The Story of Cap & Trade, the 9-minute, animated video was made in partnership with Climate Justice Now!—an alliance of more than 160 environmental organizations that want to give people outside congressional hearing rooms a thorough grounding on the approach that many international leaders are mulling as a way to reduce carbon emissions worldwide.

The filmakers' goal: an informed citizenry is one that can act/decide/challenge. And in this case? The film's backers want to crowd-source some public opposition, on the belief that complex "cap and trade" schemes create more political bluster than solution.

You may or may not agree or even like the video, but it will give you a better sense of one of the core issues to be discussed in Copenhagen. And at the very least? Story of Cap & Trade is just the latest example of a rising Web trend: viral "story briefing" videos about issues being put before governmental leaders to decide—a kind of 21st century lobbying technique that combines the power of stories with the vast reach of social networks wired to the Web.

Have a look:

The Story of Cap & Trade from Story of Stuff Project on Vimeo.

(Illustration by istock.com)

Plays Better with Others

In a recently-released social media survey of 200 of the largest charities in the United States as designated by Forbes Magazine, the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth's Center for Marketing Research found the following:

* 89% are using some form of social media—including blogs, podcasts, message boards, social networking, video blogging and wikis—to drum up new funds, friends, and awareness.

*45% of nonprofits surveyed said social media are very important to their fundraising strategies.

*Social networking and video blogging are now the most common forms of social media being used by nonprofits (79%); blogs are used by 57% of the charities surveyed, and 16% are using wikis.

*The use of video is up 38% over 2007; the use of social networking is up 47%, and blogging is up 23% over the previous survey. Of the nonprofits surveyed, some 90% reported that their blogs have been successful in keeping supporters up-to-date on their work and in engaging members and donors.

*About 1 in 4 of nonprofits with blogs use WordPress as their platform.

*Nearly two-thirds, or 65%, of the nonprofits surveyed use video on their blogs and upload their videos to YouTube.

*Nonprofits are "out-blogging" businesses and universities by nearly 2 to 1.

*Some three-quarters of nonprofits surveyed said they monitor the Internet for buzz, posts, conversations, and news about their institutions.

"Social media have become an incredibly important part of the communication strategy for U.S. charities," says survey authors Nora Ganim Barnes and Eric Mattson in their report. "The largest nonprofits are continuing to outpace businesses and even academic institutions int heir familiarity, use, and monitoring activity. These top [charitable] organizations ahve found a new and exciting way to win the hearts (and maybe the dollars) of potential donors."

(Illustration by istock.com)

Twitteleh & Other Stories

In addition to its intellectual breadth, the annual PopTech conference is also known for its sense of humor, on display again this year in the selection of its varied "interstitials" — 10 short films making the rounds of the Web and shown at the start of each new PopTech program segment. Here are my favorites from the conference:

* Twitteleh -- Written by Reg Tigerman and directed and edited by Matt Johnson

* Autotuning -- By Casey Donahue, below:

* "1981 primitive Internet report on KRON" -- from the San Francisco station's archives

* Baby Workout -- By Gavin McInness

The Facebook Economy

What a difference a year makes. This week's second annual SoCap09 conference in San Francisco is serving again this year as Ground Zero for hundreds of social entrepreneurs bent on using social media and Web 2.0 technologies to invent a new economy—one that's focused more directly on global problem-solving. But unlike last year, when the collapse of the financial markets made the notion of Net-powered corporate altruism sound like a pipe dream, this year's gathering is striking an entirely different chord.

The talk among the 800-plus delegates gathering now at Fort Mason is all about finding proof—devising ways to use new Web tools to measure the social value and profitability of the hundreds of new socially-conscious businesses being invented in the wake of last summer's meltdown. In her opening keynote, Sonal Shah, the chief of the new White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation, pledged growth capital to the most impactful of these new startups.

"A coherent industry seems to finally be coming together around the idea of social enterprise," said Economist writer Matthew Bishop, citing the half-dozen or so new Web platforms being launched in recent weeks and months purporting to be able to measure impact. [Kevin Jones, a co-founder of the SoCap conference, was using the conference to unveil his own version, called The Global Impact Investing Rating System (GIIRS), which includes a set of "impact reporting and investment standards"—an effort to define the main terms used in the social enterprise space. Says Jones: "People argue all the time about what constitutes a social impact. GIIRS is all about trying to settle those arguments."]

To be sure, many SoCap attendees believe they are building no less than a new "economy of integrity" fueled by social media, says Jonathan Greenblatt, a SoCap presenter and president of All for Good. "This new economy is like shoots growing out of the ground," he says, "and social media will allow this economy to take off. It will both cohere this moment of opportunity and catalyze it." Social networking is evolving into mobilization, he added, and brands are becoming increasingly focused on doing right by their customers' social networks. ["In a networked world where everyone is adjacent and everything can be known, we are seeing increasing evidence of the inequities around us," he told a group of Internet activists attending Mashable's social good conference on Friday. "When you are actually adjacent to ... the have-nots—when they know what we have—it puts a burden on the 'haves' [in society]." Social enterprises, he says, are "giving us different answers than the ones we've heard before to the questions we are facing."

Indeed, say Greenblatt and others, we are compelled to invent new alternatives. Steve Newcomb of Virgance, a SoCap09 presenter, told conferees earlier today that the buzz around social enterprise is now "more on par with the industrial revolution than the dot-com boom."[Dennis Whittle, CEO of globalgiving, says "we're in a period moving from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, combining (in the social action space) online discussions with offline engagement."] Given the rapid pace of Web-powered innovation, said Sonal Shah, the director of the new White House Office of Social Innovation, "government should be supporting grassroots innovators, not replacing them."

The conference continues through Thursday. Watch this space for highlights and follow the conference on Twitter, #SOCAP09.

--By Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration: Miroslaw Pieprzyk)

Missed Connections

The digital and physical worlds get reconciled beautifully in Sophie Blackall's five-month-old blog, Missed Connections, in which Blackall uses her skills as an artist to illustrate online "missed connections" ads from Craigslist New York. Her subjects are people trying to reconnect digitally with strangers they just saw or met in passing somewhere—at a diner, in a subway car, on the rooftop at a party in Greenpoint. New York magazine's August 10-17 Approval Matrix called Blackall's blog both "highbrow" and "brilliant"; coolhunting.com cites her renderings of "chance encounters, momentary glimmers of hope for a new friend or lover..."

["Uptown 3 train: If not for your noisy tambourine, I would not have seen you. Your green skirt looked terrible but that leather jacket makes you look just right. I was the attractive guy sitting to your left just before you got off."]

Here's another:


The Craigslist ads "are like digital messages in a bottle," says the Adelaide-born Blackall, who illustrates childrens' books from her Brooklyn studio. "I've lived in New York for 10 years now but still, it's fascinating to me that millions of people cross paths every day and occasionally, something happens that puts them into the immediacy of each others' lives for just a moment. Always, in these ads, there seems a deep hope that this might be the one connection, that if found again, could change their lives forever. I think the Web can be very hopeful in that way." Here's more from our recent conversation with Blackall:

Why this, and why now?
I was looking for an apartment on Craigslist and stumbled across this section for missed connections. It was so riveting, that I found myself trawling through page after page. One woman posted an ad for a 'misconnection' that hadn't happened yet. She was planning to have one in the future. She named a time and a specific place, one block on Second Avenue between 9th and 8th streets; she announced that she was going to be walking a dog on a leash and be wearing a black t-shirt. She wrote that she was going to see if anyone would show up and become her misconnection. I followed up; I kept reading the missed connections list to see if I’d see anything back from her, but I never did. What I did see were two posts from people who had been there but didn’t see her. Maybe she didn't show up. Who knows? Maybe she was sitting in a café across the street somewhere, watching to see if anybody would bother.

Which are some of your favorites?
I love the one where someone wrote, “Seeking girl who bit me TWICE last night while we were dancing.” It cracks me up—the fact this girl bit this guy twice but he couldn’t remember her name.

Scrabble Tattoo on Roof (above, top) is another favorite, from an ad placed by a man who was clearly besotted with a girl he met at a party on a rooftop in Greenpoint. He saw her while she was sitting on top of the stairs, and he asked her if she always sat in a circle of Asian girls. He also asked, Did she always sit at the top of the stairs, so everyone who would pass her would fall in love with her? The guy had gone downstairs to get her a piece of cake and then, when he got back, she’d disappeared.

Did you always want to be an illustrator?
My burning ambition when I was 12 was to illustrate a New Yorker cover. I'd papered all of my bedroom walls with New Yorker covers that belonged to my father; he was an Englishman and one of a handful of people in Australia at the time who subscribed. As soon as he'd bring the magazines home, I'd rip off the covers and tack them up on the walls in my room, like wallpaper, and he'd be furious because I'd never ask first."

For more of Blackall's work, see her Web site.

—By Marcia Stepanek

(All illustrations courtesy of Sophie Blackall)

Twitter-bashing

Here's the latest bit of Twitter-bashing that's roiling the social media/social advocacy crowd: U.S. market researcher Pear Analytics' short-term study of Twitter labels 40% of the messages sent over the microblogging service "pointless babble." Only about 8.7% of tweets, Pear says, have "value" as they pass along news of interest to others.

It's been enough to prompt some high-profile social media experts and advocates to rush to the defense of microblogging (again). danah boyd, a social media researcher for Microsoft and a fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, weighed in with a post shared on the Progressive Exchange network:

"I vote that we stop dismissing Twitter just because the majority of people who are joining its ranks are there to be social. We like the fact that humans are social. It's good for society. And what they're doing online is fundamentally a mix of social grooming and maintaining peripheral social awareness. They want to know what the people around them are thinking and doing and feeling, even when co-presence isn't viable. They want to share their state of mind and status so that others who care about them feel connected. It's a back-and-forth that makes sense if only we didn't look down at it from outer space. Of course it looks alien. Walk into any typical social encounter between people you don't know and it's bound to look a bit alien, especially if those people are demographically different than you."

Josh Nelson, with The Hatcher Group, a communications and nonprofit consulting firm in Washington D.C., suggested on Facebook that "if you scanned thousands of random emails or phone calls, it would probably be mostly irrelevant 'babble' as well." Tomorrow's headline? "Ninety-five-plus percent of all telephone conversations are irrelevant to outside listeners," Nelson wrote.

Meanwhile, Elana D. Leoni, the online membership coordinator of The George Lucas Educational Foundation, added in a post, also shared on ProgressiveExchange.org:

I think it's all about how selective you are when you decide to follow someone. I run my company's Twitter account and I've found Twitter to be one of the most effective ways to reach out to experts, get opinions, promote our content, and do some great market research.

Still not convinced of Twitter's power? Hollywood studios are on edge because blistering, critical word-of-mouth via Twitter and other social networks is cutting—from days to mere hours—the time during which word of mouth can make or break a film at the box office. Bruno and G.I. Joe, for example, experienced an unexpectedly fast tumble within their opening weekends. "People will be Twittering during the opening credits—and leaving when they don't like the film," Eamonn Bowles, president of Magnolia Pictures told The Washington Post.

Twitter can also help to save a production. Just ask Damian Bazadona, president of Situation Interactive, an online marketing and advertising firm. Bazadona was part of the team behind the novel marketing, via Twitter, of the Broadway play, Next to Normal. In early May, six weeks after the show opened, the production began what New York Times contributor Andrew Adam Newman said was, by all accounts, a Broadway first: over Twitter, a special version of the show began to be tweeted out to people, one line from one character at a time—over 35 days. "About a week into the N2N tweetstream, Next to Normal had 30,000 followers; when the show ended June 7, about 145,000 had signed up. Then, as the cast began texting followers, their numbers continued to grow, recently topping 550,000," Newman wrote. "...According to the tracking site Twitterholic, N2Nbroadway is ranked 210th, attracting more Twitter followers than celebrities like Paris Hilton and Stephen Colbert and brands like Starbucks."

Bardona told Newman: "You wouldn't go to a social event and start selling someone something. The content itself was doing the selling for us, so we didn't need to bang someone over the head and say 'Here's how to buy tickets.' That would have smelled so advertising."

What do you think? Is Twitter mostly uncontrollable babble—or a new way to find power and safety in numbers?

—Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration by Jayesh for istock.com)

Woodstocked

Why does the Woodstock music festival, held 40 years ago this weekend, still matter? Perhaps it's because it was "half a million strong"—mega-viral before flashmobs and the Web. "Woodstock had to have been one of the earliest examples of a viral event—long pre-dating blast faxes, mass emails, Web ads, the blogosphere, texting and tweeting," says Robert Goldstein, NPR's music librarian."Somehow, 40 years ago, word spread from person to person about a fabulous outdoor rock festival at a farm a few hours outside of New York City."

Woodstock also was a community of like-minded souls formed at the edges of the cultural mainstream. Today, there is no mainstream, and crowds are more apt to form digitally; in 1969, crowds were only physical—defined less by their collaborative networking potential than by their power to disrupt the status quo. Today, hundreds of thousands of communities are forming and communicating with each other, quickly, over the Web. Back in the summer of 1969, crowd-to-crowd communication did not exist and was beyond the realm of the imaginable. Woodstock was the original flashmob, shocking in both its size and its ability to rapidly self-organize. "This was a spontaneous, pre-Web community of the anti-Establishment, a kind of peaceful protest and celebration all wrapped into one," says Henry Diltz, a photographer who captured most of the festival in a series of iconic images.

Diltz also told the BBC in a recent interview that Woodstock's crowd-power gave the anti-Establishment a platform that signaled a change in the American spirit. One of Diltz's most vivid memories is of Jimi Hendrix playing the Star Spangled Banner:

"It was a Monday morning, there were only about 20,000 to 30,000 people left—most (concert-goers) had gone home already. It was very startling to hear (Hendrix play) the national anthem that morning; there had been such mixed feelings about it, our country, patriotism. The song in a way represented the (Vietnam) war machine, yet most of people who came to Woodstock were peace-and-love hippies who didn't want to kill anybody. But then to have Hendrix play that song? It was amazing. When you heard the sound effects of dive bombs and machine guns in Hendrix' playing, it reminded you that the (Vietnam) War was still going on...

...What was so amazing was that sound, in the still morning air, of the single string, the single instrument playing. The sound was so sharp and vibrant, and it went out and echoed against the mountains and came back again. And when you looked out onto the field—which had been a green alfalfa field five days earlier—now it was just a muddy hillside and looked very much like a battleground. Somebody had stuck a branch in the ground with an American flag flying and there it was, out there in that muddy field.
It was just a transfixing moment."

Here's Hendrix in that moment, below:



(Poster: Woodstock Music & Art Fair, 1969)