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)

Mom & Popism

[Photograph from the upcoming exhibition reinterpreting James and Kala Murray's latest book, Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York. The exhibit, set for August 15 in the Bowery, brings together the work of 28 notable graffiti and street artists; each was invited to create new artworks on top of life-sized reproductions of James and Kala Murray's store-front photographs. Collaborating artists include Blanco, Buildmore, Cake, Celso, Cern, Chris (RWK), Crome, Cycle, David Cooper, Destroy & Rebuild, Enamel Kingdom, Goldenstash, Infinity, Kngee, Lady Pink, Matt Siren, Morgan Thomas , Peru Ana Ana Peru, Plasma Slugs, Royce Bannon, Shai R. Dahan, Shiro, The Dude Company , Tikcy, Under Water Pirates, Veng (RWK), Zoltron and Billi Kid.]

(Image: Courtesy Store Front)

Global Wiring

Thanks to social media, says British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, "foreign policy can never be the same again." In remarks delivered at TED Global 2009 this past week in Oxford, Brown said the Web is offering the world an historic chance for grassroots, collaborative problem-solving. Political and governmental institutions, he says, can no longer be run only by elites.

"Take what modern technology is capable of: the power of our moral sense allied to the power of modern communications and our ability to organize internationally. That, in my view, gives us the first opportunity as a [global] community to fundamentally change the world.
Foreign policy can never be the same again. It cannot be run by elites. It's got to be run by listening to the public opinions of people who are blogging, communicating with each other around the world."

Tweets + 12s = video twitter?

If tweets were short video clips instead of words, they'd probably be something out of 12seconds.tv —a Twitter-like video-messaging startup based in Santa Cruz, Calif., that's already starting to bend the rules of both social advocacy and marketing. Tweets are 140 characters long; a 12seconds.tv video lasts no more than 12 seconds—a kind of talking, moving, real-time snapshot that can capture anything from an opinion to a baby's first steps to a feeling or a news flash. “It’s a different way to engage with someone on the Web,” says cofounder Sol Lipman.

Unlike most of the fare on YouTube, 12seconds’ videos—known as "12s"—are uber-short and often emotionally evocative glimpses of “right-now” moments, more like a memorable photograph and a feeling than a story. [See the 12-second Me Plus Italy, above]. Also different about 12s, says Lipman, is that they're made mostly for consumption—for the people who would watch them. To be sure, video-messaging represents a new step in the evolution of social media that offers fresh opportunities for creative expression, event coverage, and persuasion.

Big advertisers and new-wave nonprofits are sitting up and taking notice, especially now that the new iPhone3GS is fueling a bump-up in 12seconds' traffic. A variety of advertising and marketing agencies have approached Lipman and his colleagues, looking to sign up 12seconds to co-create user-generated content for brands ranging from M&Ms to LG Electronics to Adidas.

Consider the startup’s recent “12omercials” [tweet-able commercials] for Adidas, called the 12th Man Campaign. The initiative asked 12seconds.tv members [known as 12ers] to create their own 12-second shorts to broadcast their enthusiasm for England’s Chelsea Football Club during the run-up to tomorrow’s friendly soccer match against the Seattle Sounders. Participating 12ers made videos in May and June to earn a 12th man spot on the Chelsea bench. Adidas has been running some of the better 12s on the JumboTron in Seattle’s Safeco Field. But only this clip won the contest, which ended last week. (Here’s another that made the finals.)

12seconds is trying the same formula to help boost the visibility of some nonprofits, including the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, the Summer of Social Good, and Earth Hour. The Summer of Social Good campaign, for example—organized by Mashable—asked 12seconds to invite its community to film people (and themselves) saying what they would do or give up to benefit the good of society. Here’s one of the three, 12-second spots that won a free Kodak Zi6 pocket video camera for its producer. “I don’t think we’ve been able to raise tons of money directly for nonprofits yet,” says Lipman, “but I think 12seconds is a great tool for spreading the word, creating a video brand, and then giving people a bunch of great content to utilize.”

Lipman says about 60 percent of the videos appearing on 12seconds.tv are produced on Web cams, 30 percent on mobile phones, and about 10 percent in video uploads. But that’s soon to change: With the iPhone3GS, Lipman says there’s been a surge in the number of mobile spots across the site. "Mobile, in general, is just beginning to become this huge opportunity to bring us all closer together,” Lipman says.

What do you think?

—Marcia Stepanek

(Top video: Me Plus Italy, courtesy Italyworkshop on 12seconds.tv)
(NOTE: This post first appeared on PopTech.com and is being re-posted here with permission)

Davos Daze

The World Economic Forum got under way today in Davos, Switzerland. The theme this year is, fittingly, the global economic crisis. "The level of global wealth has changed," Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1997 through 2006, told an opening press conference kicking off the conference. "The question is, are we capable of changing or adapting fast enough to save our planet? That is the challenge."

For the first time—perhaps to ease public ire over this year's sinking global economy—Davos organizers have agreed to let bloggers and other social media types tweet and blog the otherwise venerable proceedings. Among them will be 24-year-old Pablo Camacho, of Bogota, Colombia, who competed against 250 other YouTube devotees for the honor of covering it all for the video-sharing site. Here's his first dispatch, about philanthropist George Soros' remarks to a luncheon that weren't part of the mainstream fare:



Click here to view WEF's Facebook page. And see below, BuzzMachine blogger Jeff Jarvis' invitation to have your say at Davos from the comfort of your own home. The conference ends Sunday.

Mind's Eye

Witness.org, the Brooklyn-based nonprofit started in 1992 by rocker Peter Gabriel and the Reebok Human Rights Foundation as a project of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, is marking the 60th anniversary of the United Nation's December 10, 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights with this short video, above.

What video or image first opened your eyes to human rights? Click here to see some images that people have shared so far with the United Nations.

What images first engaged you? For me, it was this one, below, Tomoko in Her Bath, by photojournalist W. Eugene Smith for a series for LIFE Magazine on the mercury poisoning of the waters off the coastal Japanese village of Minamata, by the chemical company Chisso, in the 1950s. It is known as Smith's best portrait, of a mother and her child—a victim of the pollution.


I visited Minamata in 1991, while a correspondent for Hearst Newspapers based in Tokyo. The stigma surrounding those born and raised in this former fishing village off the South China Sea persists, despite an aggressive public relations campaign by local officials to promote tourism, some 30-plus years after the poisonings.

Which images most moved you? Share them with Cause Global, and we'll post your recollections (either comments or videos/photos) in the coming weeks.

(*W. Eugene Smith photo, above, used here with permission)

Vote Watch

Social media as tools for election-monitoring are being put to their first U.S. presidential election test. Vote Report (which I wrote about here two weeks ago, when it launched) is a nationwide project that is asking anyone with a cellphone, personal digital assistant, iPhone, or computer and a Twitter account to immediately share any first-hand knowledge of voting irregularities via instant-messaging. You, too, can participate. For more information, check out project partner National Public Radio's recent podcast about the initiative here. (Also worth checking out is Twitter's general election 2008 page, the fast-running Twitter stream of commentary by voters heading into the final hours of this historic election cycle. Much of the chatter this morning alludes to voting delays and massive turnout that could slow final tallies.)

YouTube, meanwhile, has been working with PBS to organize its Video the Vote project, a national project that asks voters to shoot short videos with their cellphones or digital video cameras to document any examples of vote suppression or other problems—and then post them to the site. "This is a way to spotlight voter experience...and get people to show and share experiences where there have been exceedingly long lines, voter intimidation, or broken machines," says Steve Grove, head of news and politics for YouTube. "We want people to use YouTube to get those messages out to the world." Want to participate? Click here for a blip.tv video about how.

Other non-partisan election-monitoring and voter-information sites worth checking out include:

* iDashboards: a running string of results from the election that allows you to roll your mouse over states to see up-to-the-hour voting results so far.
* Social Median: a news aggregator with an election page that includes blogs and Twitter posts, along with an array of videos that can be filtered easily
* Topix election site: a national, digital debate by topic.
* FiveThirtyEight.com: a site that shows up-to-the-minute projections of who's winning, for political junkies who want to track the last-minute whims of the undecideds, all the way up to the concession speeches.
* TechPresident.com: a daily digest of Web content that tracks the election.

And here's one of my favorites, Shifting the Debate, which measures the movement of ideas through social networks, chiefly tracking which YouTube videos bloggers are linking to on both sides of the political spectrum. It is creating an ongoing portrait of video political commentary, with the site's Video Barometer displaying who's watching which videos, and which are most popular at any given time. Fascinating.

Go ahead, share your favorite electon sites and give us a head's up about your favorite election videos. And don't forget to vote.

(Illustration, Angry Elephant, by Diane Labombarbe for istock.com)

Tilting Windmills

Social media don't just help ignite collaboration and innovation for social change. Sometimes, their ability to spread word of a single person or idea from a remote part of the world can help to keep either alive. Consider the oft-told story of William Kamkwamba, a Malawi youth who, at 14, built a windmill for his family after seeing a picture of one in an old textbook. Now 20, Kamkwamba is still building windmills, and he's planning to build a larger one for his village.

This short video about him, below, was shown at last week's Feast conference on social innovation in Manhattan. So far, it has gotten over a million hits on YouTube and other Web networks, and the attention it has brought Kamkwamba continues to change his life. According to the Wall Street Journal, a group of investors who met Kamkwamba at the TED conference last year are now putting him through school so he can make good on his desire to build more windmills for other villages across his country. Here's his story:

Democracy Is...

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

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

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

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

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


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

(Illustration: "Paint Hands" by David Franklin)