Peter Deitz is a Montreal-based micro-philanthropy consultant and the creator of Social Actions. By way of aggregating social change campaigns from nearly 20 social action platforms, Social Actions purports to make it easier for an Internet user to be connected to their cause of choice.

With May fast approaching, Deitz is staring down the barrel of an extremely busy month. He will be attending Philanthropy’s Vision: A Leadership Summit, which will be put on by the Council on Foundations. There, he will be live-blogging the Next Generation Sessions, where Kiva, Donors Choose, and other “usual suspects” will discuss how technology will factor into the future of philanthropy. He will then head to Sweden, where Social Actions is a finalist for consideration in the prestigious Stockholm Challenge. Later in the month, he heads to San Jose for the NetSquared Mashup Challenge, where Social Actions is also a finalist. Finally, he will be hosting a two-day workshop about micro-philanthropy following the NetSquared Conference.

He spoke with us recently about how Social Actions came about, what it is up to now, what brought him back online after writing it off for four years, and where he sees the off and online activism intersecting now and in the near future.

Why is a site like Social Actions necessary?

I started writing about micro-philanthropy a year and a half ago. At the time there were six platforms doing this work and each had a similar mission. Then there were engaged and socially conscious platforms popping up nearly every other week. Social Actions serves as an attempt to bridge the gap between these platforms. The project attempts to free the content from the platform on which it was created in the hope that the people most likely to engage in the specific campaign will do so given the opportunity.

Right now, we’re building an open API [application programming interface] to get this done more effectively. We will be working with third party developers to get widgets out there that will sift through the campaigns and actions so that the user can find the right platform on which to take action. We want to tear down a lot of the walls that separate platforms and we want to make actionable content easier to find. Right now if you want to get involved and you go online, you wouldn’t know where to start. If you were to start by Googling an issue, you’d get flooded non-actionable content as well as a few actions from the platforms participating in Social Actions. The API would be meant to streamline that process a little better.

Did you start with the present model for the site in mind or is that something you eventually worked towards?

I can’t say that the current form of the site is what I was thinking of from the start. I kept going off on different tangents and as one gained traction, we would continue to go into that direction. It’s not the most strategic way to proceed, but we will try stuff out, move forward and backward, find what works and doesn’t and we move forward accordingly. We’re not coming at it from a business structure and we don’t have an advisory board. Sometimes we spend weeks working on something. And when I say we, I sometimes mean just myself. And if things don’t go well, I sometimes have to abandon that component.

What brought you to care so intensely about micro-philanthropy? What informs your current activism?

I have been involved in various ways with social change movements for a while now. My activism, and I don’t want to turn people off with that word…

It’s funny. On the blog, we’re trying to figure out how to not turn people off by the term. Maybe 2008 is the year for changing perceptions about it. Well, maybe not, considering all of the organization around the Olympics.

Right. The word “action” is now a very popular term. Since action is now a term that we can use more publicly, activism might also become more acceptable.

I came from a background of working with Quaker organizations. I have been involved with the Quakers for the last ten years. I am not myself a Quaker, but I went through a number of Quaker summer camps and I went back as a counselor. I then started to do some online consulting for Quaker organizations. Again, while I am not a Quaker, if you look at the underlying value structure of the Religious Society of Friends, there are a lot of similarities with the the social action communities that are emerging online.

From 1999 through 2003, I went totally offline. I abandoned my computer and grew my hair long and I essentially became a hippy. I looked at the Internet and started to think that all it was good for was the creation of commercial websites and monetizing the system.I wasn’t interested in that. What brought me back was the 2004 U.S. presidential election.

Ah. The era of the born again Internet activist.

Exactly. I wanted to get involved with the presidential election in some way, but I was based in Canada and I had no intention to go back to the United States to lobby for a particular candidate. Instead, I started Voices Without Votes, which was run with an open source content management system. It invited citizens to send letters to US voters via the site. They were encouraged to explain how US foreign policy affects their own country. It was a success and we collaborated with other sites and created a blog called The World Speaks. That whole process was a thirteen month endeavor and it got me excited about doing online activism. This year the project is sponsored by Reuters and run by Global Voices Online.

What made what you saw happening online [in 2004] compelling enough to bring you back into the fold?

I just wondered what good we were doing offline. In 2003, I was in Toronto protesting the war in Iraq. We had all of these people who were having demonstrations and we got nowhere in the process. Offline in North America, you can protest all you want but it brings nothing. And all this time, there was Howard Dean out of Vermont and he was building a viable candidacy online. He was creating a plausible challenge to the initiator of the war that we were all against. It was a fundamentally different and interesting experience. It wasn’t as much about anger as much as it was hope. When stuff happens online, reporters can’t change numbers of attendees the same way they can at rallies. Our impact is undeniable.

And when Dean lost, what were your thoughts about the overall process?

A lot of us came out of the 2004 election disillusioned. I retreated to New York and I worked as a tech consultant for a human rights organization for two years. For me, it took a year and a half to to move forward. But I got bitten with the creativity bug in 2006, and started building Social Actions..

What do you consider some of the potential limits to what can be accomplished with online action?

There are, of course, demographic issues that bring up questions about whether or not tech movements are fully inclusive, especially for those who don’t have the time to go online. We do have to be aware of that. But I don’t think we should think of action in terms of on or offline. The most exciting developments are in the intersections of the two. The tech realm and SMS capabilities are blurring the lines. There are a number of ways in which things are changing.

Where is Social Actions headed in the next year?

My main goal is to move from being a one man operation to making it into something that is financially sustainable. I would like for us to build a team of people working on the project. We just put together an open “unbusiness plan”, or whatever you want to call it. We outlined several directions, one of which focuses on Social Actions existing as a meeting place for people interested in peer to peer social change. We want to host conversations in which people are able to talk about impact, assess platforms and best practices, and discuss why we are doing what we are doing and what it all means.

We also want to work on the API, of course. The fee structure for participating platforms will favorthe most efficient platforms. Finally, I will be forming a consultants cooperative, where we would be able to pay talented folks for non-billable work. I’d like for this to work with companies and organizations who want to get involved in peer-to-peer social action s in some way, and also to put it to work for innovative grand making programs using these platforms.

The amount of time that has been spent in terms of getting things going is sort of unbelievable. I didn’t think that I would play this roll, but connecting people seems to be what I do most these days, and that is great fun. There is something to be said about doing what you do best. I spent so much time on this aggregation project — I spent 12 months trying to build it myself. I am not a programmer or designer. I was trying to build manageable site. And in the fall, I realized that this isn’t where my skills are the strongest so I started to work to establish relationships with people and to bring them together. i could focus on building the API through someone else’s experience, not my own. Now it is getting along quite well.

-Filed in Uncategorized