VOTE

Name: Stand Up Take Action (United Nations)

Nominated Category: Organization & Collaboration

URL: http://www.standagainstpoverty.org, http://www.endpoverty2015.org

Area: Advocacy, Action

About:

As part of the movement to achieve the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals to end poverty by 2015, millions of people on designated days each year have answered the “Stand Up Take Action – End Poverty Now” campaign’s call to “stand up and take action.”

Description:

Action events include rallies, teach-ins and community service days, in communities around the world. In 2008, 116 million people participating broke the Guiness World Record for largest mobilization around a single cause. And this year, between Oct. 16 and 18, more than 173 million people participated in events, details of which were coordinated via Facebook, Twitter and the Stand Up’s interactive web site.

On the site, a world map makes it easy to find events going on in your area, and the “action center” and “take action” sections have information on how to organize and register your own event, or join an existing one. There are also online actions, such as embedding a “Stand Up” widget to a blog or social network profile, and ways to “Get the Widget Out” and bring more attention to the cause on your blog; people who added the widgets were counted as part of the 173 million participants. Images of on-the-ground action events were broadcast by way of Flickr and YouTube, which you can also see in photo and video galleries on standagainstpoverty.org.

But with 2015 fast approaching, the Stand Up campaign says, no region is on track to reach its MDG targets for ending poverty and hunger, improving gender equality and making education universal. So the campaign continues to rally people around eradicating poverty and its root causes, emphasizing the MDG commitment at a time when the global financial crisis and developing climate crisis seem to have consumed most people’s mind. The campaign does so by keeping an active presence on Twitter, Facebook and Myspace, as well as YouTube and Flickr accounts. There’s a blog keeping track of action day activities around the world, as well as related news.

The Basics:

WHO: Stand Up Take Action – End Poverty Now

WHAT: A campaign where people around the world show solidarity in the movement to end poverty, as part of the United Nations’ Millennium Democratic Goals.

WHERE: Events are organized worldwide.

HOW to get involved: Follow the Stand Against Poverty campaign’s blog, or check it’s Twitter, Facebook and Myspace accounts for information on future action days.

What other people are saying:

UN Dispatch

Kaiser Daily Global Health Policy Report

U2 blog

The News Today (Philippines)

The Christian Post

VOTE

Name: Stand Up Take Action (United Nations)

Nominated Category: Organization & Collaboration

URL: http://www.standagainstpoverty.org, http://www.endpoverty2015.org

Area: Advocacy, Action

About:

As part of the movement to achieve the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals to end poverty by 2015, millions of people on designated days each year have answered the “Stand Up Take Action – End Poverty Now” campaign’s call to “stand up and take action.”

Description:

Action events include rallies, teach-ins and community service days, in communities around the world. In 2008, 116 million people participating broke the Guiness World Record for largest mobilization around a single cause. And this year, between Oct. 16 and 18, more than 173 million people participated in events, details of which were coordinated via Facebook, Twitter and the Stand Up’s interactive web site.

On the site, a world map makes it easy to find events going on in your area, and the “action center” and “take action” sections have information on how to organize and register your own event, or join an existing one. There are also online actions, such as embedding a “Stand Up” widget to a blog or social network profile, and ways to “Get the Widget Out” and bring more attention to the cause on your blog; people who added the widgets were counted as part of the 173 million participants. Images of on-the-ground action events were broadcast by way of Flickr and YouTube, which you can also see in photo and video galleries on standagainstpoverty.org.

But with 2015 fast approaching, the Stand Up campaign says, no region is on track to reach its MDG targets for ending poverty and hunger, improving gender equality and making education universal. So the campaign continues to rally people around eradicating poverty and its root causes, emphasizing the MDG commitment at a time when the global financial crisis and developing climate crisis seem to have consumed most people’s mind. The campaign does so by keeping an active presence on Twitter, Facebook and Myspace, as well as YouTube and Flickr accounts. There’s a blog keeping track of action day activities around the world, as well as related news.

The Basics:

WHO: Stand Up Take Action – End Poverty Now

WHAT: A campaign where people around the world show solidarity in the movement to end poverty, as part of the United Nations’ Millennium Democratic Goals.

WHERE: Events are organized worldwide.

HOW to get involved: Follow the Stand Against Poverty campaign’s blog, or check it’s Twitter, Facebook and Myspace accounts for information on future action days.

What other people are saying:

UN Dispatch

Kaiser Daily Global Health Policy Report

U2 blog

The News Today (Philippines)

The Christian Post

VOTE

Name: The Guardian and readers tweet around a gag order

Nominated Category: Collaboration

URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/oct/14/trafigura-fiasco-tears-up-textbook

Area: Media, Investigative Reporting, Wiki

About:

On April 1, 2009, The Guardian newspaper announced that its articles would from that point on only be available in tweet form. Experts say any story can be told in 140 characters declared the headline of the April Fool’s Day piece, whose total column inches would have taken a few dozen microblog posts to transmit.

Description:

Accompanying the story were highlights from the Twitterized archive of 188 years of ink included W Churchill giving speech NOW and Listening 2 new band The Beatles .

One can read into the prank a bit of snark regarding the hype around the microblogging platform. It’s been a weird year where Ashton Kutcher reaching 1 million Twitter followers before CNN was big news before its significance was eclipsed by Iranians Twitter-based reporting of unrest after disputed presidential elections.

But The Guardian, too, would make news for it’s innovative Twitter use just this month. An initial tweet by editor Alan Rusbridger “Now Guardian prevented from reporting parliament for unreportable reasons. Did John Wilkes live in vain?”, regarding a gag order on documents related to shipping company Trafigura’s 2006 dumping scandal started a chain of investigation by Guardian readers.

The tangling of The Guardian and Trafigura requires a lot of background: briefly, a 2006 mass dumping of toxic sludge injured and killed people in Cote D Ivoire; Trafigura paid the Ivorian government millions but denied that the company could have known the impact of the waste; and this past year, a copy of a scientific analysis of what might have been dumped fell into the hands of a Guardian reporter.

A court order prevented the Guardian from reporting on it, but the analysis found its way onto Wikileaks and then a member of Parliament asked about the case (mentioning the report) a few days later. Prompted by the Guardian, readers set off to find the Parliamentarian’s question, wide broadcast of which began a build-up of pressure that would finally force Trafigura to allow release of the report.

All told, the Guardian and its readers used quite a toolbox of old and new media methods to get the story out reading clues to what couldn t be printed in the print paper, sharing information by wiki, broadcasting big questions and reaching a big audience with Twitter.

Perhaps Noam Cohen best described the overwhelming buzz about social utilities in the New York Times account of The Guardian/Trafigura events:

There is a danger in overpraising a tool like Twitter at the expense of the words it amplifies in essence, extolling the chisel rather than Michelangelo.

In recognizing instances where Twitter and other tools has been used in innovative ways for good, it’s key to remember who s doing the deed: it s the person, not the platform. As has been said about other nominees in this awards program, the technology is one thing, but knowing how to harness it is another and the Guardian and its readers have certainly shown their know-how in this case.

The Basics:

WHO: The Guardian reporters and editors, and readers

WHAT: Using Wikileaks, Google’s SideWiki, Twitter and a strong news sense to get around a gag order in the Trafigura dumping case.

WHERE: The Guardian is in the UK. It’s readers are all over the world.

WHAT other people are saying:

New York Times

The Daily Green

Politics.co.uk

Editors Weblog

• Comment on this entry and tell us what you think. Who else should we be highlighting in this category?
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Learn more about ThinkSocial Awards here.

Thanks for your support and participation.

VOTE

Name: Betterplace.org

Nominated Category: Organization

URL: http://www.betterplace.org

Area: Collaboration, Advocacy, Action

About:

German foundation betterplace runs betterplace.org, a space where people who need support can connect with those who want to help.

Description:

Created in 2007 by two merged groups of people (betterplace and the former Platform.org) interested in how the Internet can further social good, what’s now known as betterplace.org forwards on 100% of donations. (Operating costs are covered by private supporters who believe in the betterplace mission.)

For individuals, organizations and corporations, better place connects those in need with donations in kind, of money, know-how and volunteering. Individuals and companies can search on the web site for local projects that they can contribute to. Individuals and organizations can request support and report on progress of projects, so their peers and supporters can keep in the loop.

To show how good a person or project is, persons and projects can vouched for by project visitors and advocates who have seen or participated in a particular project first hand. There are also local and international NGOs whether a slum-specific Indian NGO or something as big as Oxfam that are called project carriers, or trusted experts on the site. (This web of trust between helpers and those who need help is broken down handily here in the about us section on betterplace org. A feature that illustrates this web for all projects will be implemented soon.)

This may sound like a lot, but really all one needs to get a project on betterplace.org is a committed individual that will describe it on the web site and will report project progress on its project blog. Over time advocates, visitors, organisations, companies and supporters can form around the project, betterplace.org says. The more meaningful a project appears to people, the faster this web of trust will form and the more support you will get.

On the web site, when you scan through the different listed projects, you can see star ratings on each, as well as graphs that show fundraising progress. You can look at different projects as categorized by region (South America, Oceania, Africa, etc), by categories (education, health, food security, among others) and by fiscal type (non-tax deductible, or tax-deductible for German donors). You can also search members of the betterplace.org community to find particular individuals or organizations, and track what they’re doing through the dialogue section part of the web site where you can find the latest news and blogs posts on projects.

The Basics:

WHO: Betterplace Foundation

WHAT: Betterplace.org, a social collaboration space where people who need help and people who want to help can meet and keep track of projects for social good.

WHERE: Based in Germany, but with opportunities around the world and participants worldwide.

HOW to get involved: Sign up it s free. Then either submit a project or look for one. Follow updates on the betterplace blog.

WHAT other people are saying:

Business4good

Culture Matters

Die Zeit

20something investor

VOTE

Name: Africa Rural Connect

Nominated Category: Organization

URL: http://www.AfricaRuralConnect.org

Area: Non-profit, Advocacy, Fundraising

About:

Africa Rural Connect bills itself as a “global online collaboration space,” created by the National Peace Corps Association to enable its past and current volunteers — as well as any person living in, working in or simply interested in Africa — to share ideas and vote on each others’ ideas about tackling challenges in sub-Saharan Africa.

Here’s the bonus: one idea a month wins up to $3,000 of funding, and in November, the best action plan wins $20,000 — as well as the opportunity to meet with members of the development community who can actually help institute those solutions. It’s a smart way to keep returned Peace Corps volunteers, who are still interested in action and philanthropy, involved in the Peace Corps mission; and also involve outsiders who are interested in Africa (who can perhaps become future Peace Corps volunteers).

On the site, visitors can track the popularity of submitted ideas — currently, ideas about rainwater harvesting in rural Tanzania and mobile-enabled educational resources are up in the top 10 — comment on ideas, and keep up with NPCA via news updates. There’s an “NPCA Polyglot” blog that tracks ARC-related posts as well as information for the greater Peace Corps community. There is also an ARC Facebook group and Fanpage and active Twitter account.

Participating in the contest looks incredibly easy — as long as you can come up with the ideas. Run on a platform by Wegora, to submit or an endorse and idea (and you can do so for multiple ideas) just takes a few clicks. Since Africa Rural Connect launched in mid-July, it has acquired 8,000-plus active members (from 65 different countries), who have submitted 500-plus ideas. So far, as of mid-October, $18,000 in funds have been awarded for idea contest winners.

Seattle Times

Washington Post

VOTE

Name: Africa Rural Connect

Nominated Category: Organization

URL: http://www.AfricaRuralConnect.org

Area: Non-profit, Advocacy, Fundraising

About:

Africa Rural Connect bills itself as a “global online collaboration space,” created by the National Peace Corps Association to enable its past and current volunteers — as well as any person living in, working in or simply interested in Africa — to share ideas and vote on each others’ ideas about tackling challenges in sub-Saharan Africa.

Here’s the bonus: one idea a month wins up to $3,000 of funding, and in November, the best action plan wins $20,000 — as well as the opportunity to meet with members of the development community who can actually help institute those solutions. It’s a smart way to keep returned Peace Corps volunteers, who are still interested in action and philanthropy, involved in the Peace Corps mission; and also involve outsiders who are interested in Africa (who can perhaps become future Peace Corps volunteers).

On the site, visitors can track the popularity of submitted ideas — currently, ideas about rainwater harvesting in rural Tanzania and mobile-enabled educational resources are up in the top 10 — comment on ideas, and keep up with NPCA via news updates. There’s an “NPCA Polyglot” blog that tracks ARC-related posts as well as information for the greater Peace Corps community. There is also an ARC Facebook group and Fanpage and active Twitter account.

Participating in the contest looks incredibly easy — as long as you can come up with the ideas. Run on a platform by Wegora, to submit or an endorse and idea (and you can do so for multiple ideas) just takes a few clicks. Since Africa Rural Connect launched in mid-July, it has acquired 8,000-plus active members (from 65 different countries), who have submitted 500-plus ideas. So far, as of mid-October, $18,000 in funds have been awarded for idea contest winners.

Seattle Times

Washington Post

VOTE

Name: TED Open-Translation Project

Nominated Category: Collaboration

URL: http://www.ted.com/pages/view/id/287

Area: Non-profit, Service, Volunteerism, Language

About Open Translation:

TED — the non-profit first dedicated to “ideas worth spreading” in Technology, Entertainment and Design when established in 1984, and has since expanded to cover many more topics — is perhaps most famous for its TED conferences, and thanks to the Internet, its TED Talks.

Description:

For the past few years, selected talks, which feature everyone from Bill Gates to Bill Clinton, have been posted on TED.com for free–and captioned in English. Now the TED Open-Translation Project aims to translate and subtitle TED Talks for the people of the world who don’t speak English.

Released in May 2009, version 1.0 of the 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.

On its web site, TED calls the project, “one of the most comprehensive attempts by a major media platform to subtitle and index online video content. It’s also a groundbreaking effort in the public, professional use of volunteer translation.” While the folks at TED are the ones who push the final “publish” button, it’s the volunteer participants translating and subtitling in Greek, Hausa, Persian and Basque around the world that make this project actually work.

Currently, what’s available with the 1.0 version are subtitles on every talk (available in English and any translated language); interactive transcript (in English and any translated language); personalized pages within each translator’s member profiles that shows the translations to which a translator has contributed; and more.

Anyone can become a translator for TED – though your translation will ultimately be vetted and reviewed by TED before it’s accepted and published. You’re required to translate an entire talk, and within a month of assignment. And even if you’re not a translator, if you see a mistake in a translation or want to make a suggestion or comment, information on how to contact the translator and reviewer of a TEDTalk is listed in the “About this talk” section of each video. In version 1.1., TED.com will also allow members to post open comments that everyone can see.

Volunteerism isn’t always glamorous. You certainly don’t get paid – though translators are credited, recognized on the TED Translators page, and have special pages on their TED member profiles, listing translations to which they contributed. But, as TED puts it, “every translator will be taking part in our global effort to spread ideas and engage in global dialogue. We know from our current translators that there’s a huge satisfaction in bringing inspired talks to speakers of their own language worldwide.”

The Basics:

WHO: TED.com and volunteer translators

WHAT: Translating TEDTalks into the world’s languages

WHERE: All over the world, currently in 40+ languages

HOW to get involved: If you’re bilingually fluent, you may qualify to translate. All members can comment and make suggestions on translations, by directly contacting the translator. Having the TED Open-Translation Project means you can watch “an English talk, with Korean subtitles and an Urdu transcript.” Just think about what that would look like.

WHAT other people are saying:

Worldchanging magazine

Newsweek magazine

Sobel Media Post

Africa Unchained blog

VOTE

Name: TED Open-Translation Project

Nominated Category: Collaboration

URL: http://www.ted.com/pages/view/id/287

Area: Non-profit, Service, Volunteerism, Language

About Open Translation:

TED — the non-profit first dedicated to “ideas worth spreading” in Technology, Entertainment and Design when established in 1984, and has since expanded to cover many more topics — is perhaps most famous for its TED conferences, and thanks to the Internet, its TED Talks.

Description:

For the past few years, selected talks, which feature everyone from Bill Gates to Bill Clinton, have been posted on TED.com for free–and captioned in English. Now the TED Open-Translation Project aims to translate and subtitle TED Talks for the people of the world who don’t speak English.

Released in May 2009, version 1.0 of the 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.

On its web site, TED calls the project, “one of the most comprehensive attempts by a major media platform to subtitle and index online video content. It’s also a groundbreaking effort in the public, professional use of volunteer translation.” While the folks at TED are the ones who push the final “publish” button, it’s the volunteer participants translating and subtitling in Greek, Hausa, Persian and Basque around the world that make this project actually work.

Currently, what’s available with the 1.0 version are subtitles on every talk (available in English and any translated language); interactive transcript (in English and any translated language); personalized pages within each translator’s member profiles that shows the translations to which a translator has contributed; and more.

Anyone can become a translator for TED – though your translation will ultimately be vetted and reviewed by TED before it’s accepted and published. You’re required to translate an entire talk, and within a month of assignment. And even if you’re not a translator, if you see a mistake in a translation or want to make a suggestion or comment, information on how to contact the translator and reviewer of a TEDTalk is listed in the “About this talk” section of each video. In version 1.1., TED.com will also allow members to post open comments that everyone can see.

Volunteerism isn’t always glamorous. You certainly don’t get paid – though translators are credited, recognized on the TED Translators page, and have special pages on their TED member profiles, listing translations to which they contributed. But, as TED puts it, “every translator will be taking part in our global effort to spread ideas and engage in global dialogue. We know from our current translators that there’s a huge satisfaction in bringing inspired talks to speakers of their own language worldwide.”

The Basics:

WHO: TED.com and volunteer translators

WHAT: Translating TEDTalks into the world’s languages

WHERE: All over the world, currently in 40+ languages

HOW to get involved: If you’re bilingually fluent, you may qualify to translate. All members can comment and make suggestions on translations, by directly contacting the translator. Having the TED Open-Translation Project means you can watch “an English talk, with Korean subtitles and an Urdu transcript.” Just think about what that would look like.

WHAT other people are saying:

Worldchanging magazine

Newsweek magazine

Sobel Media Post

Africa Unchained blog

Jimmy Wales

JIMMY WALES
Founder, Wikipedia

Twitter: http://twitter.com/jimmy_wales

Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales, is an American Internet entrepreneur best known for founding Wikipedia.org, as well as other wiki-related organizations, including the charitable organization Wikimedia Foundation, and the for-profit company Wikia, Inc.

TS: How do you define the public interest of social media?

Jimmy Wales: When we think about social media and the public interest we should be interested in and concerned about quality and what roles different forms of social media play. It’s a very diverse topic.

TS: How do you at Wikipedia take the public interest into account?

JW: Wikipedia is fundamentally a charitable endeavor to create and distribute a quality free encyclopedia to every single person on the planet. And within our community there’s a very strong spirit that we should be concerned about quality, that we’re trying to conserve a culture that has a positive, helpful role for people and learning. Its fairly defined project as far as public interest.

TS: Are there any unexpected ways you’ve seen it used that you’re particularly proud of?

JW: It’s been interesting to see how Wikipedia responds to breaking news. It does a really great job normally at synthesising information from a wide variety of different sources. Pulling things together from all sorts of different places very fast. In some news stories it plays a crucial function.

TS: What other developments excite you?

JW: I’m very intrigued by video in the future. I think that it gets more exciting as we get to a place where people have access to the tools to create and edit video collaboratively and more people have faster internet connections that allow them to download and view it. When I see video today it looks a lot like the creation of text did in 1999. What I mean by that is that you have a lot of individuals doing individual projects just like everybody used to put up homepages and make these fabulous resources but as just one person. Maybe they’d write 20 pages of information about Thomas Jefferson with hyperlinks and pictures but they weren’t collaborating to make something bigger. And right now in video we see lots of people doing individual projects but very little so far in terms of larger groups putting together bigger projects. We’ve got a long way to go there, and I think that’s what we’ll see a lot of in five years.

TS: What do you think the greatest threats to the use of social media in the public interest are?

JW: To create goodcontent requires certain social norms and rules. It’s not just about software, it’s about people. Wikipedia as a community works really hard to generate social rules and norms and expectations and structures and institutions with an eye towards trying to create a very high quality. And while I’m proud at what we’ve accomplished so far we still have a lot of things to do. But the thing that seems to work is that spirit ‘ the idea that this is a medium that we’re trying to make into something important. You can have all the new software or technology in the world and if people are just using it to be idiots then it doesn’t really help with anything. I think that’s one of the key threats ‘ a failure to recognize that this is really a social phenomenon and that software can impede us or help us along but at the end of the day people have to get together and decide to do things in a good way.

TS: How do you build that kind of spirit?

JW: It takes a lot of work, a lot of talking, a lot of coaching, a lot of empowering good people and making it harder for bad people to participate. It’s 1001 different things but it’s no different from’ what we struggle with throughout all society all the time. How do organizations deal with toxic personalities? There’s no simple magic answer to that. If you’re thinking about some solution that has to do with cyberspace you’re going down the wrong path. It’s just about building good communities like it’s always been.

TS: Where do you see it in a couple of years?

JW: In my work I’m seeing people expand beyond the encyclopedia into the rest of the library. We’ve got a half a billion pages a month and growing very quickly. We’re still seeing a consolidation of the move towards real-time working in a semi-public fashion using things like Twitter and Facebook. The other thing is the globalization of the medium. Right now less than 20 per cent of what’s in Wikipedia is in English and in five years time that will be less than 10 per cent – because all the other languages are growing so quickly. And that’s really important, the idea that this kind of communication is going on world wide, albeit unevenly distributed because of broadband access. We should remember that the impact here is global.

TS: Do governments have a responsibility to consider that?

JW: Yes, of course they do, but I’d really caution against the one-after-another fad-ism of people suggesting governments or organizations should be doing X, Y or Z. Someone was joking online the other day that companies could reassign the people they hired to be in Second Life and have them move to Twitter instead because it’s the fad of the year. It’s perfectly fine if we see people in government who are using Twitter or blogging or on Facebook but let’s not get too wound up in that. The most important thing government can do is not interfere with the marketplace and really allow these kinds of technologies to develop.