Articles by: Jamie
About: Jamie
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: 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
