Wikileaks

The whistleblower Web site, Wikileaks, is becoming increasingly controversial as a hub for classified documents and video. At the 2010 TEDGlobal conference last Friday in England, TED's Chris Anderson interviewed the elusive, Australian founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, who is reportedly being sought for questioning by U.S. authorities. [A controversial figure, Assange has been criticized by some who question whether his site's publication of top-secret documents is reckless and does more harm than good. Others have lauded Assange and his work; Amnesty International last year gave him its International Media Award for public service.]

Here's an excerpt of the TEDGlobal Q&A:

Chris Anderson: It's been reported that Wikileaks, your baby, has -- in the last few years -- released more classified documents than the rest of the world's media. Can that possibly be true?

Julian Assange: Yeah, can it possibly be true? It's a worry, isn't it, that the rest of the world's media is doing such a bad job, that a little group of activists is able to release more of that type of information than the rest of the world's press combined.

Here's the video of the full interview, released today by TED:

(Illustration, top, by Brandon Lauftenberg, for istock.com)

Digital Sheep

In his recent talk at the 2010 South by Southwest conference in Austin, Program or Be Programmed: 10 Commands for a Digital Age, media theorist, author and cyberpunk soothsayer Douglas Rushkoff urged attendees to pay attention (or more attention) to how we are being manipulated by digital media. Here's the video of Rushkoff's address:



Rushkoff is host of Digital Nation on PBS and author of Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back. Which are you, a programmer or one of the programmed among us? Rushkoff suggests that most of us are the latter. Caveat digerati.

Let us hear from you.

Are 'Charities' Becoming Obsolete?

People have been asking for a while now whether there are too many charities—either too many focused on accomplishing the same things, or too few able to prove social impact.

But now, as the nonprofit charity sector enters its third year of steep declines in donor dollars, a new question is dominating the conversation: are traditional, middleman charities—whose purpose has been to raise money for various causes and spend it as their boards see fit—becoming obsolete?

To be sure, Establishment charities aren't just struggling for new dollars in this recession. They're also scrambling to regain credibility amid years of chronic waste, fraud and abuse dogging the sector. Traditional charities also are being pushed hard, to reinvent themselves amid new competition from Web-spurred advocacy networks and the rise of new "sector-agnostic" mass activism initiatives, including new social enterprises. For some time now, philanthropy thought leaders have predicted that unless traditional charities fundamentally reinvent themselves as aggregators and issues experts—and retool their funding models—they could die trying.

The signs of a massive charity shakeout are already under way. Donor trust continues to slide, according to recent survey data, and donations are down, government funding is falling and traditional nonprofits—from arts councils to food banks—are locked in painful restructuring, including mergers, acquisitions, collaborations, cutbacks, and closings. Industry estimates suggest a 30 percent rise in merger activity among nonprofits since this time a year ago, and rising.

But it's not just about the money. Indeed, today's nonprofit charity squeeze is being driven by multiple factors, not the least being the Web. Many charities still are hard-pressed to innovate using the Web, and it continues to spur wide-scale disintermediation; roles are being redefined, like it or not, in a world where it is now possible (and preferable in many cases) for supporters to "give direct"—with or without charities to guide them.

Today's charity squeeze also is a wake-up call around today's ever-more urgent need to prove impact. According to New York University public service professor Paul Light, "there have been very many niche nonprofits devoted to small slices of a problem and they have needed to be merged." Light has, for years, suggested that chronic waste and fraud has done much to weaken donor trust, and says that much of today's new thinking around the need for cross-sector approaches to social change is really an effort to "clean the slate and start over."

Also fueling the death of traditional middleman charities? The rise of social enterprises, and the rivalry they pose for some charities competing for donor mindshare and private dollars. New corporate forms and models that recognize social businesses (such as L3Cs and B Corporations); new calls for tax credits to social businesses, and new types of mission-related investing models and impact investing initiatives also are end-running traditional charities in the rush for innovation and impact.

Some sector leaders, including consultant Lucy Bernholz, are calling for the creation of industry-wise alliances to coordinate the efforts of social change efforts across the board; Bernholz and others have been expressing renewed concern about the viability of the traditional nonprofit charity model in an era where giving silos between businesses, nonprofits, and other social-change advocates are rapidly disintegrating.

What do you think? Is the traditional charity dead or dying? Is the fragmentation of the giving sector a good or bad thing for those in need of limited resources? Will current economic and technology trends force the demise of the financially weakest charities, regardless of what they do or do not offer to society? Let us hear from you.

—Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration by istock.com)
(This was first posted on Justmeans.com and appears here with permission)

Transparency Bites

There's a firestorm that's erupting over how JPMorgan Chase & Company has fumbled its online contest to award millions of dollars to 100 charities this holiday season, and the incident is sending a stark reminder to socially-conscious companies trying to raise their "good" profile.

The message? Transparency matters (a lot) to today's cause-wired consumers. But that's not all. There's another lesson here that bears repeating, and it is this: don't invite Web-savvy crowds to participate in a "do-good" project without giving them control over the outcome - regardless of what the CEO thinks of it. Online fans and networks, it's clear, cannot be shut down nor controlled once you energize them around open initiatives they care about. Try micromanaging or censoring the people you invite to an online gathering, and you risk being accused of "cause-washing" — or worse.

The Chase brouhaha, in case you missed it over the weekend, first came to light on Saturday, in a New York Times story by reporter Stephanie Strom about how Chase is keeping its customers and Facebook "fans" in the dark about the outcome of a recent online contest it organized to give supporters a chance to vote for their favorite charities. Three nonprofit groups among the candidates for aid — Students for Sensible Drug Policy, the Marijuana Policy Project, and an anti-abortion group, Justice for All — told Strom they think Chase disqualified them as they began to amass votes because the company "didn't wish to associate its name with their missions" if they won, Strom reported. Strom also wrote that until Chase made changes to its contest in its final days, "these groups appeared to be among the top 100 vote-getters."

But what really has social media advocates miffed is Chase's failure so far to publish the final vote tallies, and to clear up whether it had, indeed, disqualified any of the charities that had participated. Over the weekend, a number of bloggers began criticizing Chase for the allegations, as well as taking the company to task for failing to create a public leader board showing a ranking of the charities based on the votes each charity had received from the more than 1 million people who joined Chase's Facebook fan page to vote.

One blogger, Nathaniel Whittemore of change.org, was especially critical, writing Saturday what he called "an open letter to Chase about their big charity transparency fail." In that post, Whittemore took Chase to task for failing to run the contest in a more transparent way. "You had the potential to build an incredible amount of social oomph with this contest," Whittemore wrote in his "Dear JP Morgan & Chase" letter. "...Now, [most nonprofits I know] think you're just one more system to game. And me? Well, I think it's pretty clear how I feel." Whittemore said that failing to provide a public leader board made Chase executives "look like jerks."

Another blogger, nonprofit social media consultant Beth Kanter, also weighed in, choosing the advent of Pepsi's own online charity contest to write a post a day later entitled, "What Lessons Will Pepsi Learn About Crowdsourcing for Social Change from Chase Bank Contest Fail?" Kanter's post yesterday, about the new Pepsi Refresh Project — another crowdsourced cause marketing project aimed at recognizing influential changemakers in society — also questioned Chase's handling of the contest. "Let's hope [Pepsi] learns from the recent Chase Bank's Online Contest Fail," she wrote. "I hope they avoid going to the dark side and waste (sic) money on projects and processes that don't have impact as well as many nonprofits' most valuable resource: their time." Kanter asked her readers, "What can Pepsi learn so its contest can truly make a difference in local communities, help them sell more soda, and avoid having its brand get tarnished?"

While Chase's official contest rules state clearly that the company "reserves the right to disqualify any charity for any reason whatsoever" — its apparent decision to exercise that right has struck social media advocates as being unacceptable, including the followers and creators of ad-hoc Twitter groups called #chasesucks and #ChaseDoesntCare. Wrote Kanter: "There are some things to think about with a completely open contest, one where anyone can submit an idea and the crowd votes on the best idea and the one with the most votes wins. The sponsor needs to ask if they are truly committed to the idea that gets the most votes, no matter who suggests it."

She has a point. As social media expert Clay Shirky told me earlier this year for a post I wrote for CauseGlobal, social media are starting to require companies and institutions to invent new ways to manage their organizations. Said Shirky in that interview:

"People managing these newly interactive organizations need to start explaining why it is that what they're doing and asking is important. They need to start articulating how people's input is helping the organization and its cause. It really does involve a degree of openness on the part of existing organizations that we haven't seen before. In fact, if you're a manager of a traditional organization looking for control, you will have trouble in this Web 2.0 environment. It's a little bit like the relationship between a trellis and a vine. You can shape it, but the organic growth and the ultimate structure is really going to be produced by the people who come there, and especially by the people you invite."

Okay, now it's your turn. What do you think? How much damage do you think this incident caused to the Chase brand? What do you think are the key lessons about corporate activism and social media to be gleaned from this incident? What would you have done differently if you were running the Chase social media campaign? Let us hear from you

—Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration, Gossip, by Malombra76 for istock.com)

[This post first appeared on Justmeans.com and reposts here with permission]

Blockage

Change, Obama-style—the social media/open White House stuff—hit a bit of a brick wall this week, but it was mostly silly stuff. [See Jeff Zeleny's piece in The New York Times about Obama's hard-won fight to keep his Blackberry and see Tom Watson's grumbling over the sluggish postings and flat content he found on the Whitehouse.gov site that debuted Tuesday.]

The irony wasn't lost on anyone: Obama's tech team pretty much wrote the book on how to use social media to drum up and engage supporters, build a movement, and raise a lot of money online to challenge the Establishment. That this same team—now itself the Establishment—would diss the computers, networks, and software it inherited at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was mostly to be expected. [Obama spokesman Bill Burton told Washington Post reporter Anne Kornblut Thursday that going from the working conditions of the campaign to the working conditions of the White House has been "kind of like going from Xbox to Atari."] How cool is that, right? [We got it.]

Ultimately, of course, it's not about the equipment. The much harder bit will be figuring out how to manage [and effectively lead] the crowds that Obama's social media brought to the party—namely, millions of cause-wired constituents impatient for 24/7 information-sharing and input on everything from the economy to the names of the inevitable First Dogs. How best to keep feeding these newly cause-wired constituents ever-newer things to share-hear-diss-do? How best for anyone to lead in an era of ever-higher demands for participation spawned by wider use of social media? Nonprofits are being pressed to do no less than reinvent their role as charity middlemen, thanks to social networks that can [and are] creating new causes, with or without established nonprofits to support or guide them. What follows is an edited transcript of a conversation I had recently with new media expert and Here Comes Everybody author Clay Shirky on the need for new forms of leadership to manage in this new climate. [Watch this space: a podcast version will air here next month as part of Cause Global's new Cause Radio series.]

Do social media require us to invent new ways to manage organizations?

They absolutely do. I don’t think traditional management is something that can control this. Organizations everywhere are essentially wrestling with how do we hybridize with these newly capable, self-organized groups that use social media to come together around a cause—or, in Obama's case, around a candidate. It's really that kind of Vatican II sensibility—Vatican II being the 1960s doctrine from the Catholic Church that said the people are the church, a fairly radical move; and yet, compared to what's happening in the organizational world and in politics—the idea that the government is the people—the Vatican was actually 40 years ahead of its time.

There's a temptation among most managers to view social media tools and crowdsourcing as simply a sort of novel set of instruments, kind of like, "Oh, here are some new tools for us to get our job done." But this isn't just about laying our hands on some new tools. These crowds are people. It’s really an organizational shift. People managing these newly interactive organizations need to start explaining why it is that what they're doing and asking is important. They need to start articulating how, say, your input is helping the organization and its cause. It really does involve a degree of openness on the part of existing organizations that we haven't seen before. In fact, if you're a manager of a traditional organization looking for control, you will have trouble in this Web 2.0 environment. There's an analogy here. It's the relationship between the structure an organization can provide and what eventually grows up among the people who come there. It's a little bit like the relationship between a trellis and a vine. You can shape it, but the organic growth and the ultimate structure is really going to be produced by the people who come there.

Is there someone or some new organization doing this well?

Boing Boing, one of the well-trafficked Web blogs, has a brilliant community manager named Theresa Nielsen Hayden, whose principal MO is to sit back and watch. She is in charge of one of the Internet’s real hot spots, an incredible amount of conversational energy forming around the various things that Boing Boing posts on its Web log; and yet, she doesn't go in and try and set the tone. She simply tries to set outer boundaries for the conversation, like, this is name-calling and it's off the rails, or, this is a person riding their hobbyhorse. And so she's not trying to guide the community so much as keep it from going into a rat hole where the conversation will collapse. It’s the opposite of the traditional managerial style. When she got to Boing Boing, she did almost nothing for three months except watch. And everybody was like, "What are you doing? Aren't you supposed to be going in and managing the comments?" She was like, "Hang on a minute. Let's just see what happens."

Occasionally, she would step in when she had to. And what she was waiting for is to identify who in the community would come forward and start essentially taking on the community as a whole, shepherding it, the natural leaders emerging from in the community base. And then once she identified them, she hired them to keep doing it. That kind of managerial style is not the 30,000-foot visionary and it's not the micro-manager. It's in this middle zone where there's a high degree of facilitation, but there's also just a high degree of observation—What is going to happen next?—because in these kind of new open environments, there's a good chance that what happens next organically will be more interesting, more effective, and more important than something you could decide in a morning meeting.

So it's a kind of natural selection: if left alone, the group will choose its own leaders?

Yes. There's a lot of rhetoric around about self-organized and bottom-up and so forth. And it is very possible to overstate the case, to take the illusion that if you just dump a million people together, somehow Wikipedia emerges as a side effect. But I think, critically, for these large-scale, long-term management efforts [of newly interactive organizations and institutions], there is a profound need for [a new type of] leadership. It's not that, you know, somehow social media and crowdsourcing lead to mob rule. Rather, those most interested and able in a crowd tend to identify themselves and emerge to step up to the plate.

When you look at, say, Wikipedia—2 million articles in the English language contributed by over 3 million users—you see that there's a core group of people who care much more than the average person in that crowd about the success of the project as a whole. The kinds of leadership that make those core groups work is very different than, "Well, I'm the CEO, and you're the CFO, and you're the COO, and we have this org chart." It's much subtler and more flexible than that. But just because the structure doesn't look like what we're used to doesn't mean there's no structure. This isn't a choice between structure and no structure. It's more of a choice between a more rigid and a more flexible structure.

We've all seen those orchestra conductors who walk off stage and, of course, the orchestra keeps playing brilliantly. Is the type of leadership required here more comparable to that of an orchestra conductor, or is there a need for a new kind of leadership that we've not yet invented?

There is an Israeli conductor, Itay Talgam, who gives a talk on leadership styles using orchestra conductors as the example. And the critical thing that a conductor does is synchronize the orchestra because the complexity of self-synchronization is hard at that scale. Critically, string quartets have no conductor. The first violin is essentially providing the synchronization. But the need for the kind of management that the conductor provides really only comes with scale.

So if you've got a small-scale group, you can actually get away with much lighter management styles than if you have a large-scale group. It's when you grow that you need a heavier style. The other question about the new type of leadership is how to get a group of people to all agree that a shared vision is something they'll pursue even if they don't agree with every particular. Some of this is ancient stuff—you can go back to Plato and Aristotle and the argument about how to form an ideal republic. Today, what we're dealing with is essentially a new mix, precisely because of the new technology capabilities. Every political norm is really a bargain with the current environment. When the environment changes, the political norms can change, as well.

One of the political norms has been that it takes a large institution to accomplish large-scale, long-term tasks. But that's no longer true anymore. You can write a complicated piece of software or create an encyclopedia without needing the kind of institutional and managerial frame you needed before. What I think is coming is a new type of leadership style that will expand into other kinds of collective action—in particular, real-world collective action. And so, for a traditional institution, this is really a moment where, if the organizational structure doesn't change, then the institution is essentially going to find itself working at cross-purposes with many of its members. This is a challenge that people in the Obama administration are facing; that people in nonprofits are facing; that people in many institutions are facing: how to change the organizational structure enough to accommodate Web-enabled, ground-up, collective action—self-organized groups of members or supporters or constituents that, because they're using new technology tools, are demanding interaction at far higher levels than before. This is something that really is unprecedented. Those organizations which fail to exert new leadership will risk losing support.

(Illustration by Miroslaw Pieprzyk)

Future Imperfect

A new survey of Internet experts—the third in a series by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and Elon University—has triggered a lot of debate among social media thought leaders since it was released less than a month ago. Most of the 1,200 respondents surveyed for this latest report, called The Future of the Internet III, said they expect major advances in information technology by 2020, as voice recognition improves and as the mobile phone becomes a primary device for online access and social problem-solving. But many of these same thought leaders—from the scientists and engineers who created the first Internet architecture to social commentators and advocates, corporate technology leaders, government policy strategists, and tech experts in higher education—also disagree sharply over whether the Net will, in fact, build a better world.

To get a better sense of the fault lines, Cause Global Publisher Marcia Stepanek caught up last week with survey co-author and Pew project director Lee Rainie, who also co-wrote Up for Grabs: The Future of the Internet, based on much of the center's research. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation:

Who and what inspired you to conduct these ongoing surveys about the Internet?
Back in the late 90s, I came across a wonderful piece of scholarship by a guy named Ithiel de Sola Pool, who wrote a book called Forecasting the Telephone. Fifty years after the telephone became mass-introduced into the culture, Pool and a team of students at MIT looked at the things that were predicted about what was going to happen when the phone became widely diffused, and then at what actually happened. We’re in a position to look at the dawn of a new technology, the Internet, and to measure its social impact in real-time, as it is evolving.

What are the big themes that emerge from your latest findings?
Technologists are now very convinced that the technology, itself, will continue to improve. It’s going to get faster, better, smaller, more convenient, and more plugged into people’s everyday lives in very powerful ways. At the same time, though, they are not at all convinced that human beings will improve along with the technology. Some people think an improved Internet will encourage better human behaviors, better social interactions, and better political discourse, but there are a lot of people who now are pushing back against that, saying that even if the technology gets better, people will use it in ways that will reinforce some of the worst tendencies of human beings: they will use these new tools to act tribally and in nasty ways towards each other. There are very ambivalent feelings about whether the species is going to progress when it uses these new tools.

Many of those same experts that you interviewed also predict that the transparency the Net creates won't necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness. Some 56% said the potential for bigotry, hate, and other forms of intolerance may expand.
What’s very clear in the minds of a lot of these respondents is that people are good and kind to the fellow members of their tribes—but they are not good and not kind to those people who are not in the charmed circle. Respondents were making the point in their answers that human tendencies are embedded in us; they’re not going to change. Technologies, they said, can facilitate some of the darkest sides of human nature, whether it is about hate, harm and fraud, people exploiting each other, or simply just not paying a lot of attention to people who aren’t like them. In bygone days, of course, people who were not like me were people who were not of my race, or weren’t of my physical community or didn’t share my language. Now, though, the possible number of tribes to which one can belong extends well beyond classic demographics. What these experts worry about is that when we break ourselves into niches that are formed around our specific, varied interests, we have less time for other people, and less chance of discovering experiences but more opportunities for our views to be reinforced and affirmed, even if they may not be right.

Another survey finding—but one on which most respondents agreed—is that mobile devices will be the primary way people will connect to the Internet by 2020.
Wireless connectivity—mobility—is going to be much more important in the future to our online experiences than it currently is and the environment itself will become networked as objects become networked. We will be operating in a very different kind of information sphere than the one in which we now live and work. Certainly, the introduction of the iPhone and all the other companion phones now on the market have given people a taste of what the future might look like already. Bandwidth will improve, our capacity to boost stuff through the electromagnetic spectrum will get better and better. The devices that we carry around now which we now call cell phones are going to be cell phones and computers and life managers in ways that we don’t quite yet employ them—and that in less-developed parts of the world, mobile phones will offer most people a much less expensive, more efficient way to connect to the Internet. People won’t have to buy laptops or desktop computers in order to have access to all the other people and all the information that people who now have a computer now have access to. So the hope is that the rise of mobility will help a whole new cohort of people to have access to the things that people in the developed world have had for 10-15 years.

There’s been a lot of talk – particularly in the wake of Barack Obama’s effective use of social networking—that one's social capital will continue to become more critical to one's success in society and could one day become even more influential than wealth.
The experts are very interested in the subject of social capital and in the survey, they broke off into several strains on how the concept may evolve. Some experts absolutely think that the capacity of the Net to bring new people and experiences into our lives means that the volume of social capital is going to grow. There are others–guys like Barry Wellman, a sociologist at University of Toronto—who says the idea of social capital is sort of transformed by the Internet. It’s not necessarily taking place in traditional, tight-knit groups like the family or the neighborhood or even the workplace, he says. Rather, it’s more of a networked phenomenon. People can segment their lives based on their interests. I might, therefore, have one group of buddies online who share my passion for my favorite baseball team, and I might have another set of buddies online who share my passion for the dog that I own and another set of buddies who can help me with financial information, especially in hard economic times. So we’re acting like networkers now. [Wellman and I are writing a book that says just that.] Another group of respondents thinks people aren’t necessarily building extra social capital online and certainly are not reaching out to others who are not like them. In fact, many think that online, people will ever more tightly close into smaller information worlds, where the only people and information they will encounter will perfectly match up with what these people already think and believe.

And transparency will become even more uncomfortable for some?
There’s a very strong feeling of concern that this new world we’re entering is not necessarily going to be one in which people are going to have better experiences. One of the big dimensions of that dark side is that, of course, as we expose ourselves to more—and as more is known about us in this new online environment—traditional notions of reputation, power, and privacy are going to change; a lot of experts think we are not yet socially equipped to deal with that. We haven’t figured out the new norms and the new etiquette and the rules of the road for how to behave responsibly in a world where anybody who wants can ask you to be their friend and follow your profile and your comings and goings in ways they couldn’t before, when they didn’t have physical access to you. The experts we surveyed are very anxious about the ways that governments and big corporations may be able to exploit the new vulnerabilities that may be part of this new world.

(Illustration by frenta - Fotolia.com)