I’m not the only one wondering this. There’s lots of speculation about video these days. Skellie over at Skelliewag wrote recently about video being “your chance to be a pioneer” (mainly in videoblogging or “vlogging”). The potential of mobile video is also getting a lot of buzz (i.e. this post on Mashable).

And now, late last month, Cisco Systems announced that they bought Pure Digital, the makers of the Flip Video Camera, for $590 million. Observers marveled that Cisco is dipping it’s toe into the consumer market beyond it’s traditional area of corporate networking and communications systems.

SMC @ Sheraton Universal Hotel. Photo by Marc Salsberry

Funnily enough, I heard more from another source in the know. I was fortunate enough to attend the Social Media Club gathering about brand building via social media this week where one of the speakers, Anne Plese, was from Cisco. Along with the other excellent panelists Babette Pepaj of Bakespace and Rob Frankel of Frankelbiz, Anne talked about how her company uses social media to listen and interact with the public to build their brand. Plese admitted that Cisco’s interest in the plumbing for information technology meant that they saw the rise in video usage testing the capacity of their pipelines. Of course, I had to ask a question about what this might mean for the future of social media brand-building. Anne said she wasn’t at liberty to discuss much… on camera, of all things! But she was happy to talk offline (see photo of me waiting).

[Here's the video of the panel from TechZulu.]

As you may know by now, video is compelling to me. It’s mainly because of video’s potential in promoting inter-community communication. Like text-based communication, video is not new but the opportunities to create, collaborate and share are. Unlike text-driven digital tools, however, video requires more conceptualization and pre-planning which provides the opportunity for offline group collaboration. Text-based tools are often anonymous, spur of the moment, potentially contentious and, due to the necessity of literacy in one common language, often exclusionary. Through visual forms of media like video, people speaking different languages can communicate a great deal through physical action and facial expressions (a process which can be augmented by subtitles). Food for thought and I’m curious what y’all think.

Stay tuned on this subject. Much more to come!

Cómo hacer las llamadas al Congreso: El Senado

Cómo hacer las llamadas al Congreso: La Cámara de Representantes

Aquifer Media created the above videos in collaboration with Homies Unidos and other family advocacy groups in support of the “Child Citizen Protection Act“. I set out to to facilitate a process where these teens helped conceptualize, write and perform in the video (I did the editing with lots of help from my friend Joe). They’re designed to be paired with an action alert on a specific legislative bill. We have Spanish narration versions in the works.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to encourage on-line progressive participation and collaboration and translating it into real-world action. While tools like blogs, etc.  have been useful, I’m wondering what other digital media is also conducive to get new folks involved, like video.

Rather than leaving video to the purview of filmmakers and journalists, websites such as YouTube and tools such as the Flip Camera  have demonstrated that digital video is a compelling medium that anyone can easily create. Allowing community members to hold the camera (both literally and figuratively) can build their leadership and teach new skills. Through the exercise of creating video content, participants learn about collaboration, negotiation and teamwork. Advocates can assist in this process by teaching effective messaging and basic technological skills. Such collaboration between advocates and constituents can seed wildfire participation in the immigration reform debate and ultimately lead to greater civic engagement.

You can put these videos to work right away!

• Call the House of Representatives to support “The Child Citizen Protection Act” (H.R. 1176) *

I’ve been thinking a lot about the popularity and impact of Facebook’s “News Feed” function and wondering if there’s a way for nonprofit organizations to use this emerging tool to strengthen their internal and external communications.

The article mentions how social scientists have this dubbed this sort of incessant online contact: “ambient awareness.” As Thompason writes “It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye.”

For advocacy groups and coalitions, “microblogging” might be a way for member groups, staff and volunteers to stay in touch about incremental developments in their campaign and larger work. Updates could cover what they’re working on at the moment, what areas they might need help with, highlighting new policy or news developments, etc. I’m still trying to envision what this on-line space would look like and what its parameters might be. So many social networking sites require extensive time spent maintaining and updating profiles. The tool would need to be easy to sign into, have some controls of who can join (to exlcude opponents) and some means of making it “embeddable” on a website.

I’m still thinking about this. I you have any suggestions or ideas let me know (leave a comment here).

For more than fifty years, advertising and marketing experts have conceptualized trend setting with the “Influentials” frame, based on the research of Paul Lazarsfeld, Elihu Katz, and colleagues. Proponents claim that highly connected individuals facilitate a “two-step information flow” (see left) between message-generators and the general public. Further propagating this thesis, Malcolm Gladwell in his bestselling book “The Tipping Point” claimed that “some of us count more than others” in developing trends. This conceptualization is part of the foundation for the concept of “viral marketing” in which advertisers target the most effective “carriers” for their viral message. In many ways, Progressive advocates have cast themselves in the role of “Influentials” in propagating a national “trend” that results the recognition of human rights and true opportunity for all.

Recent research by Duncan Watts and Peter Dodds refutes the idea of “Influentials” and claims that trends are started much more randomly, much like wildfires (see left). Watts and Dodds argue that we do not discuss the quality of a match in starting a fire but whether or not the conditions are right to make a fire spread quickly and broadly. Certainly Nativists and others are capitalizing on national conditions (i.e. fear over terrorism/crime and economic decline) that permit their messages to be disseminated effectively. In order to create a reverse “progressive” trend, it seems to me that we need to engage fully with new forms of collaboration. Watts calls his approach the Big Seed, which is basically mass marketing with a word of mouth component. I wonder if it’s about creating the right sort of platform where the conditions are created for a human rights wildfire.

There was a great article in the Sunday New York Times about the Obama campaign and how he may be the first “wiki-candidate”:

Mr. Obama’s notion of persistent improvement, both of himself and of his country, reflects something newer — the collaborative, decentralized principles behind Net projects like Wikipedia and the “free and open-source software” movement. The qualities he cited to Time to describe his campaign — “openness and transparency and participation” — were ones he said “merged perfectly” with the Internet. And they may well be the qualities that make him the first real “wiki-candidate.

If the Obama campaign understands and benefits from the power of wiki-type collaboration, why can’t social justice nonprofit organizations?

One of the defining aspects of this emerging — and sizable — generation is its collective approach to social issues and the rate at which its members volunteer, according to the researchers, whose work and its significance for politics have been chronicled extensively…

As if to prove the point, Obama’s online networking has been helped along by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, who at 24 is by definition part of this Millennial demographic.

But how can this intent and energy be harnessed and capitalized upon beyond electoral politics?

Indeed that is the question. But I’m not convinced that social tools and new forms of collaboration are just for Millennials. It’s too easy to write off previous generations without exploring how to get them to buy in as well. That’s the real challenge.

Shirky expanded my own thinking about the potential of the age of “Publish then Filter” (no longer “Filter then Publish” as in traditional media). I love how “outside the box” his thinking is, especially his case studies: i.e. Coney Island’s Mermaid Parade makes several appearances in the book as well as on Flickr. (During the nine years I lived in New York, I frequently marched in crazy costumes in the Mermaid Parade and took many photos of everyone.)

Shirky is the latest proselytizer for the unprecedented opportunities for collaboration that have been created by new developments in web-based social tools (i.e. wikis like Wikipedia, Flickr, etc.). I particularly liked how Shirky outlines the three simple rules for the good use of social tools:

• “The Promise is the basic “why” for anyone to join or contribute to a group.
• The Tool helps with the “how” – how will difficulties of coordination be overcome or at least held to managebale levels?
• The Bargain sets the rules of the road: if you are interested in the promise and adopt the tools, what can you expect and what will be expected of you?”

Shirky has made me think hard about how nonprofit organizations can harness the powers of 21st century collaboration to bring about the social change we’d like to see. While his subtitle “The Power of Organizing without Organizations” posits that the need for organizations is quickly diminishing, I wonder if there are ways in which nonprofit and social justice organizations can make themselves relevant in the Digital Age. Maybe it’s facilitating the participation of communities affected by injustice, fostering collaboration and perhaps using social to tools to help dissimilar communities to build new bridges of understanding.

It’s definitely something I’m thinking lots about. New ideas are percolating…

Read more here:

• Boing Boing on “Here Comes Everybody”
• London’s Daily Telegraph on the book in “Wikiphobia and Web 2.0″

Do you have any suggestions or ideas for it?

Anything unclear or needs more info?

I’m interested in your opinions. Leave a comment below. Thanks!