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).

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″