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Wikis and the political process: Introducing WikiMeg
Meg Whitman, former eBay executive, is now running for California governor on the Republican Party ticket. Democratic Coalition group Level the Playing Field 2010 is trying to stop her — by digging up dirt, with the public’s help.
Opposition research (“oppo research,” in politico parlance) into possible skeletons in the closet is nothing new, but Level the Playing Field uses crowd-sourcing to do so. WikiMeg launched Monday, so give it some time to see what people turn up.
Some concerns, however, have already been brought up — and eloquently so — by a San Francisco Chronicle piece when the site launched and a write-up on TechPresident, and here too on CBSNews. Though the web site’s “welcome” message requests that contributors add to the information on the site in a “positive and constructive way,” especially because it is a partisan site, who is to say that it won’t just become a database of unfounded smears? (Or, as TechPresident Nancy Scola says, “a slime site.”) WikiMeg’s contributor guidelines do ask people to link to sources when possible — which should help on the verity issue, as long as people are citing credible sources — but also allows first-hand reports.
In saving money and time otherwise spent on research, and making volunteer contributors feel like more instrumental cogs in the political process, Level the Playing Field has come up with a smart product. Time will tell on how useful — and true — it actually is, but there’s potential here so keep an eye on it.
We also talked about crowd-sourcing in our Blueprints version 1.0, using TED’s Open Translation Project as an example of constituents (because we’re all digital constituents with allegiances and dependences, aren’t we?) volunteering toward a greater effort, in TED’s case, translating TEDTalks. While wiki-style research is not yet common in politics, there’s been several examples in “citizen journalism,” such as ProPublica’s “Stimulus Spot Check,” launched last summer.
How do you think crowd-sourcing should be used in politics?
Posted in: Uncategorized | Tagged:
You might be reading this on your iPhone
From an interesting study on a social-networking trends, released in the last week by web traffic trackers comScore, Inc. …
A new survey by comScore, Inc. shows that Facebook and Twitter access via mobile has grown by triple-digits in the past year. Via the release:
The study found that 30.8 percent of smartphone users accessed social networking sites via their mobile browser in January 2010, up 8.3 points from 22.5 percent one year ago. Access to Facebook via mobile browser grew 112 percent in the past year, while Twitter experienced a 347-percent jump.
Are you surprised, or not surprised? And what could that mean for us? Some thoughts after the jump.
Posted in: Uncategorized | Tagged: chatroulette, facebook, friending, Noam Cohen, The New York Times, things to read, twitter
Short-codes for “The Cove”: Mobile activism, Oscar-style
In a night of quote-worthy Oscar speeches, from Mo’Nique to “Music By Prudence’s” Kanye moment, activist Ric O’Barry’s short-code spoke louder than words.
O’Barry held up a sign that said “TEXT DOLPHIN TO 44144” when he and others involved in the making of ”The Cove” — a documentary about efforts to stop an annual dolphin hunt in Japan — took the stage for their Best Documentary Feature win at Sunday night’s 82nd annual Academy Awards.
Following O’Barry’s instructions signs you up for the film’s mobile campaign, connecting you to more information on the film, trailers, a petition against the hunt in Taiji, Japan, and other materials to promote “The Cove” and the cause behind it.
Some viewers watching on television might not have caught O’Barry’s message; the cameras cut away soon after he raised the sign above his head. The Academy Awards show producers, after all, are famous for trying to keep things short and on schedule — and relatively politics-free.
Posted in: Environment, Mobile, News | Tagged: Action, advocacy, community, documentary, film, Oscars, short-codes, The Cove
Trends that are Shaping Social Media in the Public Interest: Social Production/Mass Collaborating
Next in our series “Trends that are Shaping Social Media in the Public Interest” is Social production or mass collaborating, which occurs when large numbers of people work independently on a single project, often modular in its nature, to create a product of significant value and complexity. Wikipedia is probably the best known example on the Internet, but many more in almost every area of endeavor are being organized by individuals, organizations and companies.
This participatory, reciprocal service of crowd-sourcing has enabled organizations to tackle ambitious, large-scale projects, otherwise near impossible to do with just a staff and limited budget. As the motto to mass-sourced reporting service Help a Reporter Out (HARO) says, “Everyone is an expert at something.” While recruiting many people to pitch in to actualize a product is not a new idea, the examples we found in the past year highlight how new technologies allow projects of greater scale and ambition to become reality.
Examples include:
- This May, TED launched an ambitious, mass-sourced endeavor to translate TEDTalks into the world’s languages. Run from a platform by dotSUB, version 1.0 of TED’s Open-Translation Project launched with 300 translations in 40 languages, and 200 volunteer translators. To start, a handful of talks were translated professionally into 20 languages, but going on the project will be completely reliant on volunteers from Beijing to Beirut, who use a platform created by TED and technology partner dotSUB. As of this past weekend, there were TEDTalks in 58 languages, from 1267 translators providing 2907 translations. On the TED site’s translations page, there are charts that illustrate how many translations are in each language, and profiles of translators.
Architecture for Humanity is dedicated to “building a more sustainable future using the power of design,” which includes not-for-profit projects that range from schools in Uganda to skate-boarding-and-life-skills center in Afghanistan to community-designed housing in the American Southwest. Part of that mission includes its Open Architecture Network, an open-source platform where designers, educators and non-profit organizations who have volunteered their time and resources can share and comment on each others projects, and collaborate with each other.
- The power of crowds can also be seen in one aspect of PatientsLikeMe, a network of web communities where members are united by their chronic and terminal illnesses: the data that members provide is funneled to research institutions and companies, who then use the information to improve care and treatment for those diseases. Money that these partners pay for the data then goes toward running the PatientsLikeMe online communities.
Read the full Social Media Blueprints report and learn about the other trends that are shaping the use of social media in the public interest: Social Media Blueprints 1.0
Posted in: Uncategorized | Tagged: DotSub, HARO, masscollaborating, PatientsLikeme, TED, wikipedia
Trends that are Shaping Social Media in the Public Interest: Social Looping
Social looping occurs when organizations meaningfully connect people to the impact their participation (financial, social or political) has created for a cause and provide tools to inspire and enable those people to reach out and encourage their social graph to take further action.Why have online initiative such as charity: water, DonorsChoose.org and Kiva grown so fast and generated such brand affection? Effective social looping has a lot to do with it.
Supporters of a cause or charity want to know the destination of their donations, and non-profit organizations and donation platforms like charity:water, DonorsChoose.org and Kiva are answering that question with information and powerful storytelling and images. Furthermore, they are making it easy for their participants to share specific people and initiatives in need and the celebrate the successes along the way.
Examples include:
- Online microfinance platform Kiva.org posts on its website profiles of entrepreneurs, so lenders can see who they are donating to. There are also profiles of lenders in the community, and background information on the microfinance institutions that receive the donations and send them on to the entrepreneurs. Kiva also posts statistics and financial information online, with an explanatory section on “How Kiva Works”; and Kiva representatives say that there will be efforts for even greater transparency, including a contest for user-submitted videos about the Kiva model, after criticism that earlier versions of Kiva.org’s language suggested that lenders were indeed able to donate money to a particular entrepreneur (much like the “sponsor a child” charities of last century).
- Other fast-growing charities that try to illustrate where exactly donations are going include Invisible Children, a non-profit that spreads awareness about child soldiers in Northern Uganda, educational charity DonorsChoose.org, and charity: water.
- Invisible Children, for example, as part of its Schools for Schools campaign, blogs photos of schools being built thanks to donations from Invisible Children supporters.
- DonorsChoose.org posts photos and thank-you notes from the students whose classrooms received requested school supplies or were able to go on an educational field trip based on donations from the site.
- And on its web site, charity: water uses Google Earth maps to track progress of wells and other charity: project projects and their partners across the world.
Read the full Social Media Blueprints report and learn about the other trends that are shaping the use of social media in the public interest: Social Media Blueprints 1.0
Posted in: Trends | Tagged: entrepreneurs, kiva, microfinance, socialgraph, sociallooping
Trends that are Shaping Social Media in the Public Interest: Active Witnessing
Active witnessing occurs when individuals or groups share information and stories about important and often dramatic events through the use of digital tools such as cellphone cameras and social media utilities including blogs, microblogging (Twitter, Tumblr), and social media platforms and networks (Facebook, Myspace).
Active witnessing has been around since before the time of Homer and the Illiad, but never before have so many people been able to share so much information and experience so fast and to so many people. The substance, speed and scale of active witnessing are changing what is “news” and what grabs the world’s attention.
Active witnesses living in places characterized by oppression and violence are increasingly being targeted by their governments and opponents of free expression. But, the same social networks which help active witnesses get information out to the world are now mobilizing to protect them—letting their oppressors know that they are not forgotten.
Examples include:
- An Iranian Twitter user who went by the name “persiankiwi” became one of the most symbolic voices of the so-called Green Revolution during Iran’s contested presidential elections this year. Persiankiwi was frequently retweeted by followers and cited by the international press for his or her tweets that illustrated the increasingly dramatic events that followed the election, chronicling in 140 characters or less the heady atmosphere of citizens’ pro-democracy mobilization and the terror of violent government crackdown. When persiankiwi’s Twitter account fell dead after this June 24th tweet—Allah – you are the creator of all and all must return to you – Allah Akbar -#Iranelection Sea of Green—followers feared the same fate for its author, whose identity and fate is still unknown.
- Examples of the growing movement to memorialize and advocate for persecuted bloggers include the Mideast Youth Foundation’s March 18 Movement, which asks for an international memorial day set to the date of death of imprisoned Iranian blogger Omid Reza Mir Sayafi; another Mideast Youth campaign, “Free Kareem,” advocates for the release of an imprisoned Egyptian blogger.
- News aggregator and online advocacy site Global Voices; Vietnamese reform party Viet Tan’s campaign encourages supporters to petition politicians for a Vietnamese internet freedom resolution and to write letters to imprisoned bloggers; and action from journalists’ rights organizations like Committee to Protect Bloggers and Reporters without Borders.
- A long-established “active witness” network is Witness.org, a non-profit that empowers people to tell stories of human rights abuses through video technology. Inspired by founder Peter Gabriel’s 1988 Human Rights Now! Tour—where the musician brought along a Sony Handycam to document stories of people he met—today the WITNESS.org site hosts an online video-sharing community where members can upload videos, audio and photos. This initiative, dubbed “the Hub,” was prompted two years ago by the growing popularity of video and camera-enabled phones.
- Ushahidi means “testimony” in Swahili, a fitting name for a website developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the 2008 presidential election. Ushahidi has spawned Ushahidi Engine, a platform that allows people worldwide to set up personalized ways to gather and map news via mobile phone, email and the web.
Read the full Social Media Blueprints report and learn about the other trends that are shaping the use of social media in the public interest: Social Media Blueprints 1.0
Posted in: Trends, awards | Tagged: activewitnessing, advocacy, cellphones, facebook, greenmovement, iranelection, march18, Microblogging, mideast, myspace, persianwiki, twitter, Witness.org, witnessorg
The year that was: Significant events in 2009 that defined social media in the public interest
From the 350M active users on Facebook to the 75M active players for Zynga’s social game FarmVille — social media platforms and applications continued to grow to new levels of adoption and to feature new kinds of innovation and functionality. But, what were the most important developments and symbolic events/milestones in the use of social media for public purposes?
We made a list of developments featuring milestones and representative events large and small. What happened in 2009 that you found important and/or representative of an important trend? And, why?
Send ideas in and we’ll do an updated list before the end of the year.
January 20th
President Barack Obama takes office and is the first President to actively use social media as a part of his domestically and international communications outreach. During the Inauguration CNN and Facebook partnered to allow Facebook users to provide live commentary on the CNN feed. During the ceremony Facebook received over 600,000 status updates and CNN.com served more than 21.3 million live video streams.
March 28th
Earthhour.org (an initiative of the WWF) mobilized an estimated 4,088 cities in 88 countries to participate in Earth Hour 2009, ten times more cities than Earth Hour 2008.The goal was asking households and businesses to turn off their non-essential lights electrical appliances for one hour to raise awareness towards the need to take action on climate change.
April 17th
Ashton Kutcher beats CNN.com to become the first Twitter user to reach 1M followers and in turn donates 10,000 mosquito bed nets to charity for World Malaria Day (April 25).
Retail giant Target invites Facebook users to choose how it gives away $3M in charitable donations. For a short time, the company let Facebook users decide how to allocate this money to a list of 10 charities.
June 13th
The Green Revolution in Iran beginning on June 13th goes global faster, wider and longer because of courageous active witnesses in Iran and dedicated organizers leveraging social media around the world.
July 1st
July 1—later postponed—was the proposed date that all of China’s new computers would be equipped with filtering software, an issue that prompted international outcry about censorship and monitoring.
October 1st – 9th
Social game company Zynga launches virtual goods to raise money for causes. Zynga’s “Sweet Seeds for Haiti” initiative in its Farmville game generates over $830,000 for nonprofits in Haiti during the first two weeks in October.
October 16th – 18th
Through the United Nations Stand Up Take Action – End Poverty Now campaign more than 173 million people participated in the largest mobilization around a single cause. Events were organized and coordinated via Facebook, Twitter and the Stand Up’s interactive web site.
November 1st
Micro-lending leader Kiva.org crosses the $100M threshold of micro-loans provided to deserving entrepreneurs in only four years. Founded in 2005, Kiva.org has provided loans to more than 239,000 entrepreneurs in over 50 countries. Upwards of 573,000 lenders have given through Kiva.org, lending over $100 million at the end of October 2009 — an increase of nearly $60 million since the same time in 2008
Posted in: News, Thinking | Tagged: china, CNN, earthour, facebook, farmville, haiti, Iran, Malaria, micro-loans, mosquitos, obama, twitter, UN, zynga
Social Media Blueprints: Steal these Ideas!
With a wink and a nod to yippie culture jammer Abbie Hoffman who famously wrote Steal this Book in 1970 which went on to become one of the most widely banned and widely read books of its time – we at ThinkSocial want you to Steal these Ideas.
Luckily for causes ranging from education to health to the environment – many of you already are stealing ideas, language, applications and emerging best practices in social media for the public interest with impressive early results.
In the ThinkSocial Blueprint we just released with your help we have taken a first step at identifying the most promising developments in social media and are sharing the emerging lexicon and frameworks that can help all of us scale what is working well. In the coming days we will be breaking the report down and sharing specific concepts individually. This should help them be more digestible, allow us to update each concept with new developments, and stimulate more conversation and feedback.
Here is a list of all the ten concepts we will be featuring in the coming weeks:
- Active Witnesses/ Active Witnessing
- Social Loops/ Social Looping
- Social Production/ Mass Collaboration
- Social Alignment/ Social Aligning
- Social Transactions/ Social Transacting
- Flash Activism/Instant Mobile Organizing
- Internet Censoring and Monitoring
- Causecasting
- Open Government/ Open Source Government
- Leapfrogging & Digital Divide 2.0
We will also begin to more regulary share links to new developments in social media for public purpose — so if you have developments that you believe are important please share them.
Posted in: Case studies, awards | Tagged: Education, Environment, Health, report
Announcing ThinkSocial Award Winners and Release of Blueprints in Social Media for the Public Interest
Today we are very proud to announce the inaugural ThinkSocial Award Winners and also release Blueprints 1.0, a report detailing trends in social media for the public interest.
Winners of the inaugural 2009 ThinkSocial Awards are:
- Kiva.org: a peer-to-peer micro-lending web site, enabling entrepreneurs in developing countries to receive loans from lenders around the world.
- SocialVibe: helping brands direct a portion of their advertising budget into branded activities on social media platforms.
- The March 18th Movement: Mideast Youth seeks to expand the world’s understanding of bloggers as de facto journalists, and extend the protections normally accorded to journalists to all those who share information and stories of repression and corruption online.
A special commendation award is also being presented to:
- Amanda Rose: the founder of Twestival Global and Local, which is a concurrent series of offline events for charity, organized by volunteers in cities around the world via Twitter.
As part of the selection process the team at ThinkSocial has also prepared a report that provides a detailed analysis of each of the award recipients, together with a top ten list of trends identified following an extensive research phase. Highlighted trends from the report include:
- Active Witness/Active Witnessing: Active witnessing occurs when individuals or groups share information and stories about important and often dramatic events through the use of digital tools. Examples include long-established “active witness” network Witness.org, a non-profit that empowers people to tell stories of human rights abuses through video technology.
- Social Production/Mass Collaboration: Social production or mass collaborating occurs when large numbers of people work independently on a single project, often modular in its nature, to create a product of significant value and complexity. Examples include Invisible Children, a non-profit that spreads awareness about child soldiers in Northern Uganda, educational charity DonorsChoose.org, and charity: water, which uses Google Earth to track the progress of its projects.
- Social Alignment/Social Aligning: Social aligning occurs when institutions engage with their constituents, consumers or other important stakeholders through social media to identify and take collective action on shared goals—often goals with a public purpose. Examples of social alignment include retail giant Target who recently gave 5% of its profit, or about $3 million a week, to charity. For two weeks this past May, Target recruited Facebook users to help the corporation decide which ten charities would receive the “Bullseye Gives” funds and what percentage of the money the selected charities would receive.
- Social Transacting/Social Transactions: Social transacting occurs when people spend time or money online engaged in activities that generate financial and social value for causes. Social transacting is demonstrated in Zynga’s popular virtual farming game, FarmVille, where players can purchase certain charity-linked items with their virtual currency. Zynga’s “Sweet Seeds for Haiti” promotion, where 50% of proceeds benefited Haitian charities FONKOZE.org and FATEM.org, generated $487,000 for the charities.
Thanks to our Cochair Sponsors, Facebook, Meebo, Pepsico and the Loreen Arbus Foundation for supporting the inaugural ThinkSocial Awards.
Thanks also to the Surdna Foundation and Attention for their ongoing support.
You can download a full copy of the Blueprint for Social Media in the Public Interest 1.0 Report here: http://think-social.org/awards/blueprints
Posted in: awards | Tagged:
Announcing Facebook, PepsiCo, Meebo & Loreen Arbus Foundation as CoChairs for Awards
The ThinkSocial team is very pleased to announce that Facebook, PepsiCo, Meebo and Loreen Arbus Foundation have signed on as corporate Co-Chairs for the first Think Social Awards, which will recognize outstanding achievement in the use of social media for the public good.
The Awards and an accompanying report will be presented next week at the Paley Center for Media’s International Council (IC) Meeting November 19th and celebrated at an event November 20th that will close the IC Meeting.
The participation of these market leaders in social media and marketing as Co-Chairs sends a powerful message that business leaders support the important growth of social media for public purposes and recognize the value ThinkSocial is contributing to this emerging field.
ThinkSocial at the Paley Center for Media produces research, events and online experiences to advance the use of social media and emerging communications technologies for public purposes. Over the past two years the new communications platforms and applications collectively known as social media have taken center stage in the United States and the world’s democratic discourse and cultural life. Much as the rise of broadcast media transformed economic, political and social institutions and practices – the use of social media is creating new turning points across a wide range of human activity.
The Paley Center for Media, the Co-Chairs, and the growing ThinkSocial community are working together to highlight and support the people, organizations and entrepreneurial companies that are demonstrating truly innovative and courageous leadership in the use of social media for a wide range of public purposes.
To this end, on November 19th 2009, at The Paley Center for Media’s International Council Meeting, ThinkSocial will present Awards and release a report designed to share emerging best practices in ways that inspire and inform more people in the US and around the world to use social media for deserving social, economic and environmental initiatives.
A network of outstanding social media and public sector leaders has collaborated with the team at ThinkSocial to identify thirty-three nominations, which together represent powerful models for how social media can be used to address global problems. (An international focus was chosen for the first ThinkSocial Awards to correspond to the Paley’s Center’s International Council Meeting.)
The deserving submissions range from bloggers in Iran to micro-finance networks in Africa, to application developers and trainers operating in the US and in the developing world. All share the common thread of applying elements of social media for the public good.
Today, in addition to announcing the Think Social Co-Chairs we’re excited to also share the outstanding leaders from the fields of social media and social innovation who are participating as Honored Jurors. They include:
- Randi Zuckerberg – Facebook
- William Paley, Paley Center Board Member
- Uzodinma Iweala, Author Beasts of No Nation; Columbia Medical School
- Beth Kanter – Beth’s Blog
- Kenny Miller – EVP Creative, MTV
- Rob Kramer – Founder and CEO of PopRule
- Tom Watson – CEO of Causewired
- Catherine Geanuracos., General Manager, Live Earth
- Mahyad Tousi, Co-Founder at BoomGen Studios
- Ami Dar – Founder and CEO, Idealist
- Ian Schafer – CEO, Deep Focus
- Reza Aslan, Professor, Author No God But God, How to Win a Cosmic War
- Stephanie Agresta – Executive Vice President, Global Director of Digital Strategy and Social Media, Porter Novelli
- Colin Nagy – Partner, Attention
- Jamie Kantrowitz, former MySpace & MySpace Music executive
- Paul Meyer, Co-founder Voxiva
- Raquel Recuero, associate professor and researcher at Universidade Católica de Pelotas (UCPel)
In our next announcement we will share more details about the release of the report that will accompany the presentation of the ThinkSocial Awards. The report will feature profiles of the Award winners, analysis of the most important trends in social media for public purposes, and predictions about the developments in the field to come.
Thank you again for your continuing interest and support.
Posted in: awards | Tagged: awards, facebook, meebo, paley, pepsico
