Changes afoot on Facebook (March 2010)! Stay tuned for update.

Wow, I didn’t know that Facebook was so responsive to user ideas!

Earlier this month I contacted the social-networking website with some suggestions for their event listing function. I’ve been using Facebook for more than a year to post information on Moth StorySlams and the Digital Cabaret in Los Angeles.

I’ve been noticing how people I invite to events tend to check out who’s coming and NOT coming to events (sort of like the way you do on Evite). It seems to me that if you’re wanting to promote an event, you want folks to see the number of people who ARE coming and NOT the number of folks who are not. So I wrote to Facebook on their Suggestions page and explained this.

And now today, when I went to add a new event: there it is!  See third line in the clipping below. I’m sure other folks made this suggestion too.

I’ll be curious to see how this helps with promoting an event. I know there are still a lot of Facebook users out there who never look at the event invitation panel on the right.

My other idea for Facebook was some sort of Digg-like function that weights events in the main newsfeed. If more people say that they’ll attend a group or share it with others, it appears more in the newsfeed, sort of like the notifications for joing a group or becoming a fan. The difference this would make would be that folks who haven’t responded would get a sense of how much excitement an event is generating.  Maybe this is too complicated to implement but we’ll see…

Thank you, Facebook! You continue to amaze us!

It’s interesting to watch swarming behavior on-line and figuring out how it happens. Conflict and debate seems to be a  key part.

With the inauguration of Barack Obama just around the corner, the internet has been buzzing with hope for real change. As an example of this, Change.ORG, the social networking website that launched in 2007, has been compiling “ideas for change in America” to present to the new Obama administration. In the first round of idea-gathering, advocates on multiple issues rallied their respective members to post ideas and vote for them on the site. From November 24 – December 31, 2008, Change.org reports that it had more than 7,783 submissions for ideas and over 288,694 votes.

At the beginning of 2009, Change.org announced the winning issues for the second round and the results were contentious, especially in the case of immigrant rights.  Some proponents of immigration enforcement weren’t happy that their agenda didn’t make the final list. One of the “hater” groups, admitted to its members that it had confused Change.org with Change.GOV, Obama’s official site for his transition that launched in November 2008.

Student activists for the DREAM Act (which would give undocumented students legal status) saw the difference between the two sites and rallied their supporters on both platforms. The Dream Act is now in Change.org’s Top 10 issues and it’s also getting traffic on Change.gov. See one of their videos below “Vote for the DREAM Act at Chang.org.”

So who benefits from this flurry of activity?

Well, Change.ORG to begin with: it now has lots of new users and members. Even the people unhappy with the results are helping publicize the site. Advocates also benefit because they learn something about cyber-rallying supporters and what it means to communicate the change they want to see. Activists unhappy with the results might write off websites when they don’t see the results they want. Some idea “losers” are dismissing the entire site, citing that drug legalization tops both lists.

But unlike corporate media, social media means that people on both sides of an issue are learning what it means to frame and support thier beliefs, something integral to civic engagement.

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″

Politics’ video game: Getting the message out has a whole new meaning in the free-for-all YouTube era.

by DAVID SARNO

Los Angeles Times: April 9, 2008 Wednesday

CALENDAR; Part E; Pg. 1

(Photo: Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films)

A shot of a dark bedroom. Soothing music. A little girl and boy slumber easily. It’s 3 a.m. when, yes . . .

. . . the phone rings.

Think you know who’s going to be answering that call? Don’t be so sure.

“Ghostbusters,” says Annie Potts.

That’s one of the many alternate endings to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s original late-night phone call commercial that you can find on YouTube. Other interpretations have the call being answered by Bill Clinton (he’s expecting a call from the pizza delivery guy), “Sesame Street’s” Martian Yip Yip puppets and Alfred, Batman’s butler.

You can see the other candidates’ red-phone mash-ups online too. Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign did its own riff on the red-phone ad (“In a dangerous world, it’s judgment that matters”). And last week, Sen. John McCain gave the genre a go, same ringing phone, but “this time, it’s an economic crisis.” Instead of explaining what your sleeping children have to do with the economy, the McCain ad semi-dementedly concludes: “It’s 3 a.m.: Time for a president who’s ready.”

It’s the hottest election in recent memory, and the first of the YouTube era, so no wonder political video is whizzing around faster than you can tape your cat mouthing “superdelegate.” Bedroom producers, the campaigns themselves and everyone in between is using online video to make a point, a profit, both, or neither.

Though videos like Jack Nicholson’s popular pro-Hillary video, “Jack and Hill,” made with help from Rob Reiner, can score big on YouTube, you don’t need to be a celeb or a “Saturday Night Live” writer to get noticed. Ben Relles put himself on the map when he and two partners brought the world “Obama Girl,” the candidate’s sultry, singing follower who rings in millions of page views every time she bobs onto the computer screen. (Her first video, “I’ve Got a Crush on Obama,” was nominated Tuesday for a Webby Award.) Relles’ fledgling BarelyPolitical.com was bought by the Web TV company Next New Networks last October and now has four full-time employees.

Steve Grove, YouTube’s head of news and politics, said videos in that category had seen a “lurch forward” in popularity in the last year, and the last month has been no exception. A March 24 CBS News segment showing that Clinton had misremembered the details of her 1996 trip to Bosnia became YouTube’s most-viewed video that week, no small feat considering the site gets hundreds of thousands of new uploads every day. The week before that, those Fox News videos of Obama’s fiery longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, accounted for five of the top 12 political videos on the site, and the Obama speech that controversy engendered has been watched on YouTube more than 4 million times, the most ever for a video from a presidential campaign.

‘Idea-driven’ videos

In two adjacent office bungalows in Culver City, Emmy-winning producer and progressive filmmaker Robert Greenwald has set up a kind of online video war room. Brave New Films, a next-generation studio stocked with high-tech digital production equipment and a young staff of Web-wise editors and coordinators, can crank out content on a dime.

The goal is to make bite-sized political video that is professional quality and “idea-driven,” Greenwald said, “not just throw another blog on the fire and stoke it higher.”

In addition to broadening its outreach by partnering with organizations like MoveOn, Brave New Films attaches petitions to many of its videos. “It’s not enough to get people to watch our stuff. We must move them to the next step,” Greenwald said. About 200,000 people signed a petition attached to his “Fox Attacks Obama: Part II” video, a montage of Obama-centered footage from Fox in which network commentators call Obama a “halfrican” and say of a response to one Obama speech, “that kind of spontaneous affection, Chairman Mao only dreamed of.” The petition, which called on the mainstream media to “reject Fox’s smears of Obama, not parrot them,” was delivered to ABC and NBC offices at the end of March.

Speaking of the conversation between the Web and big media, CBS News reporter Sharyl Atkisson didn’t realize she had a story on her hands until a colleague e-mailed her a link to 12-year-old footage of the Bosnia trip that she herself had reported on, which had been posted on newsbusters.com several days earlier. “I clicked on a link and was stunned to see it was the same trip,” Atkisson said in an interview. Her team dug up CBS’ archived footage and had a segment questioning Clinton’s account on that night.

This back and forth continued the next day, when the Web crowd took Atkisson’s segment and ran with it. Various media outlets had noted the dubiousness of Clinton’s account, but the CBS segment gave the story a shot of testosterone. The viral reaction was so great that in a follow-up report the next night, CBS even mentioned the YouTube clip of their own segment, noting it had scored more than 1 million views and had “spread all over the Internet.”

But it’s leaner, independent Web operations, such as Brave New Films and TPM Media, parent company of TalkingPointsMemo.com, that are setting the pace for old media stalwarts like CBS News. Both Greenwald and journalist Joshua Micah Marshall, the founder of TPM, who recently won a Polk Award for the site’s investigations into the firings of eight U.S. attorneys, produce work that tends to strike a serious note. Marshall produces a four-times-weekly video blog in which he summarizes the site’s reporting on issues of the day in a real-person voice (i.e., sans the usual network news bombast).

Obama Girl returns

Political satire is flourishing too. Obama Girl, played by actress Amber Lee Ettinger, has become a hit factory for Barely Political. In her latest star turn, Ettinger is graphically inserted into a coffee-shop booth with Clinton, pleading with her to find her inner Obama Girl. “Can you see it’s hopeless?” Obama Girl sings breathily. “It’s becoming Obama Nation. Is there any chance you’ll back off, so he’ll get the nomination?”

Even solo video-makers working at home have a shot at a real audience. Lee Stranahan, a graphic artist for Access Hollywood who also makes his own videos, lucked into a paying gig with Greenwald’s Brave New Films after a campaign-related comedy video of his struck a chord. His November video riffed on the news that Rudolph W. Giuliani had spent taxpayer money to protect his former mistress, now wife, Judith Nathan. “I ended up doing it in five hours. I sent it to TPM — I was an avid reader — and to one or two other sites I liked.” Marshall liked it and posted it. The video ended up with 117,000 views on YouTube and more elsewhere.

Political video creators agree that there’s no recipe for viral success but that having a group of loyal viewers doesn’t hurt. “If we post a video on our front page, we are pretty much guaranteed that about 10,000 people will view it,” Marshall said. If it works as viral video, “it will take off.” While Fox clips like the Rev. Wright segments go viral on YouTube regularly, independently produced right-leaning video is harder to find. Greenwald pointed out that the right “does have clear overt control of certain primary media — Fox and the radios” so has less need for indie outlets. What’s more, he suggested, “they’re much more top-down. . . . You can’t drive a top-down message on the Internet,” because videos are re-cut for response videos.

Marshall added that “the resurgence of progressive media has come online, largely, I think, because progressive media was so dead in the water for so long” that they had to find a new platform.

Conservative commentator Michelle Malkin, who runs a vlog called Hot Air, also attributed the gap to the more contentious Democratic primary. “There’s not much going on on the Republican side,” Malkin said. “So it’s natural that there’s this disparity where most of the videos you’ve seen are targeting Democrats.”

And so: Ghostbusters. It’s not the campaigns or their surrogates that are producing the dominant election images anymore. If you miss the likes of Willie Horton and the Swift Boat crew, they’re easy to find on YouTube.

–

“Networks are present everywhere. All we need is an eye for them.”

- Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Physicist

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Dear Friends, Granville Sharp may not be a name with which you are familiar. Sharp was a musician and attorney who lived in London and who, in 1765, began an unlikely campaign to abolish slavery. Fueled by his experience of representing a 16-year-old slave who had been beaten and left for dead by his owner, Strong was moved to fight the prevailing social acceptance of the (mis-)treatment of some human beings as the property of others. For 18 years he led a tireless campaign, making little progress, and then he reached out to the Quakers. Tapping into this marginalized but nonetheless robust religious community of some 20,000 people living throughout England, Sharp was finally able to create a significant platform and catalyze a movement that successfully rendered slavery illegal in England in 1833. For authors Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, the story of Sharp’s partnership with the Quaker community is an illustration of the power of networks to spread an idea and mobilize people on its behalf. In The Starfish and the Spider, Brafman and Beckstrom write of numerous examples of the proven ability of networks to spread information, activate people, build resilience, and influence decisions. Their book joins a growing body of work echoing Barabasi’s words – networks are indeed everywhere, and they merit both our attention and our intention. Here at the Interaction Institute for Social Change we are paying attention to and setting our intention based on what we are learning about network theory and its application to social change. We are designing and facilitating the work of social change agents who are intentionally tapping, activating and building on their social networks to create and implement effective strategies for action. For example, In a small urban community, organizers and residents are creating an open network to better offer services, create opportunities for connection, and foster spaces for self-organized social and political action. A foundation has initiated a network mapping and building process among nonprofit leaders by funding a fellowship program to intensify connection, trust, and relationship while fostering previously unexplored possibilities for collaborative action and innovation. A partnership of philanthropists concerned about environmental issues is looking to build and connect to a network of stakeholders that can pool resources, create shared visions, and ratchet up their impact. Grassroots activists, scholars, and funders concerned about the state of US foreign policy have created a network that convenes itself and shares resources in order to reframe peace and security issues and regain lost political relevance and effectiveness. At the heart of IISC’s methodology is our commitment to tapping the power of participation and in the collaborative principle that we should all be participants in the decisions that affect our lives. The freedom of decentralized networks and the emergent power in self-organized systems are clearly taking our field in a new and exciting direction. We are integrating these lessons into our work with multistakeholder change efforts, organizations, schools, and communities, and into new versions of our Facilitative Leadership® and Facilitating Change™ workshops. It is also our goal to build a new training experience for “network weavers.” IISC has a deep belief that we must take our change efforts to scale in order to confront the global crisis that is at hand. And we believe that our change efforts must be rooted in an unlimited love for one another and the planet. Network building not only takes change to scale but by necessity prioritizes the building of relationships of trust. These two factors are what is needed to realize the extraordinary potential of the new world we must and will build together! Please stay tuned, and as always, feel free to send us your thoughts and reactions. And thank you for your continued good and important work in the world. Sincerely, Marianne Hughes March 2008 Visit IISC’s website to learn more about us!

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p.s. In addition to The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, we recommend the following books about networks, network theory, and network building:

Net Work: A Practical Guide to Creating and Sustaining Networks at Work and in the World by Patti Anklam

Theory U: Leading from the Future as it Emerges by C. Otto Scharmer

Inside-Out: Stories and Methods for Generating Collective Will to Create the Future We Want by Tracy Huston

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!

Sure, you may say, “Millions of people start new blogs every day, why bother?” or “What’s going to make yours different?”.

Well, I’ve been thinking about how blogs serve as a useful platform for socializing and sharing on the “Social Web”. First, blogs create a space where I can have a dialogue with folks interested in the same things. Plus if I’m trying to get out the word on something, I must abide by “share and share alike” and help post content that others want to share.

I also think this blog will help me further flesh out and explain the vision and mission of Aquifer Media, my new consulting biz. I plan to compile and share information on social networks both inside and outside Cyberspace and how we can use them to create a better world.

I’m starting slowly and want to post only TWICE a week to start. We’ll see how it goes.

So stay tuned! More information is on its way!