On this day, June 9th, 2008, the news brings to our attention smartmobs for news participation, the turning of cameras on Fox News, adhering to “the Wiki-Way” and more.

• Protests and YouTube politicking: a case study.
• Citizen journalism turns the camera on Fox, O’Reilly
• Civil Society emerges from quake rubble.
• Smartmobs for News Participation (featuring the spectacular Peter Deitz!)
• The Wiki-Way: Barack Obama and the Wisdom in Crowds.
• More on South Korea and on and offline beef protests.
• Strength in numbers mustered to end “atmosphere of violence.”
• Obama’s campaign = “Dean 3.0″
• Mobile Phones and Environmental Activism, together forever.
• And finally, how many charisma points are needed for the Internet to work in your favor?

-Filed in News

We are liveblogging from the NetSquared Mashup Challenge. Here, you can keep up to date with all of the amazing work and outreach that is being leveraged and imagined with the help of tech-innovation. Stay tuned here for all of our updates from the conference (and be sure to keep an eye on our Twitter feed!

Wednesday, 4:53 PM - Social Actions came in third place. Know More came in second. And the winner of the NetSquared Mashup Challenge was… [drumroll] Ushahidi: Mapping Reports of Post-Election Violence in Kenya!

What a great conference. Expect to read more about many of the featured projects and how the folks behind them are engaging volunteers and activists in the coming weeks.

Wednesday, 2:47 PM - I told Billy Bickett that I wish that the American democratic system was much more like the one that NetSquared uses. In exchange for ongoing education, engagement, and eventually voting, the participant is rewarded with networking opportunities, beautiful weather, hardworking facilitators, and ice cream at every turn.

Wednesday, 2:26 PM - Voting!

Wednesday, 1:47 PM - Talked with Rob Miller of Open Planning Project about the importance of effective communication. It is important to recognize the needs of the people you connect with, he says, citing Marshall Rosenberg, the creator of Nonviolent Communication. Even when someone is coming at you aggressively about the things that are annoying or irritating them, being able to hear what they are saying and connecting with them by effectively recognizing your mutual needs makes engagement a more valuable process.

Wednesday, 1:34 PM - The name tag as conversation starter.

Talked for a bit

Wednesday, 11:49 AM - A sage-like Peter Deitz presents Social Actions, an aggregator and API. Social Actions needs an evangelist, he says. He also needs developers. They’re aiming at sustainability: I don’t want to be asking money forever.

The Social Actions interface searches through all of the campaigns across the board of social platforms such as The Point, Kiva, Six Degrees, The Point, and many others. Further, “We want to put citizen sector on par with the private sector.” See our interview with Peter here.

Wednesday, 11:37 AM – YourMapper explains that when it initially decided that they would put crime statistics online, they somewhat expectedly found some push-back from local law enforcement. It took an “in” with the local force and a lawsuit to get their hands on this information.

Wednesday, 11:02 AM - Blair Golson of Participant Media blogs about the Second Life seminar that I was unable to make it to. The best line from his post is this, hands down: “Try to grok the meta-ness of this scene.”

Wednesday, 10:56 AM – Tom Inhaler (left) from KnowMore discusses their Firefox extension. He discusses their precarious relationship with American Apparel, how they hope to keep monitoring corporations balanced, and how sometimes their company profiles (McDonald’s) sometimes mysteriously go missing. He explains that they don’t exist to facilitate specific sorts of activism, but to provide the opportunities for people who might then be inspired to take action. An audience member: “When I take a look at your site, all of the ratings make me feel bad about participating in the economy. How do you avoid perpetuating feelings of disenfranchisement?” Joe’s joking response: “I just want to start out by telling you that I am a huge fan of disenfranchisement.” The audience bursts into laughter.

Wednesday, 10:54 AM - Justin Massa discusses how MoveSmart likely won’t be used to further perpetuate gentrification – “People have been doing a pretty good job gentrifying neighborhoods without us.”

Wednesday, 9:27 AM – Ben Drexler talks quite articulately about the Genocide Intervention Network, Darfur Scores, and how they are working to use web tools, lists, and widgets to put pressure Congress-people to get tough on genocide. On their second year as an organization, he says in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek fashion: “The terrible twos are worse for nonprofits than they are for little kids, let me tell you.”

Asked why they don’t use a pre-existing scoring tool like Capitol Advantage, Drexler suggests that it is because Genocide Intervention Network needs a greater scope of analysis than is available on Capitol Advantage. Goldbeck says that branding is very important to them. They would like to attain political clout similar to that which is held by the NRA or the Sierra Club. Herein, to increase capacity and care about anti-genocide, they find it necessary to build their own infrastructure.

Wednesday, 8:40 AM – Milling around, waiting for the conference to start back up. Justin Massa of MoveSmart introduced me to the DJ-duo The Hood Internet and some other table is talking emphatically about Stuff White People Like.

Tuesday, 5:15 PM - Funniest moment of the day:

Speaker – Who here is working with a non-profit that has a Facebook page and a strategy? Attendee – We have a page, but we have no strategy.

Tuesday, 3:41 PM – Vinnie Lauria and Kristine Molnar lead a fantastic discussion about how nonprofits can use the Internet to leverage and increase donations. Check out a longer recap here.

Tuesday, 1:39 PM - Over a terrific lunch, I had a great conversation with Jamie Hartman of the Taproot Foundation, Greg Baldwin from VolunteerMatch, Ben Rattray of Change.org, and Vince Stehle about facilitating/concentrating on different paradigms for matching volunteers with organizations (converse to doing so the traditional, other way around). How do we match people who want to volunteer, but don’t know when or how? Is it possible to archive/categorize skills and match those with organizations accordingly? How do you make folks who don’t have bigger skill sets feel like the only kid in the sandbox when they are not picked to participate in seemingly dynamic projects? Thoughts?

Tuesday, 12:05 PM – Janessa Goldbeck, Director of Membership at the Genocide Intervention Network, presented the Anti-Genocide Action Tracker, which scores members of Congress based on their position and action on Genocide issues. One might be surprised to find that former Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo received an A+ on his stance/voting record.

The point system is gathered by several workers who are based in Washington DC, monitoring each Congress-person’s stance. They have made available a widget that processes a user’s IP address and informs them of their congressperson and also informs users on their social platform(s) of choice when important legislation is pending. It is interesting, she says, because it is a product that is applicable to almost any issue.

Also, see great interviews with Goldbeck at blogher here.

Tuesday, 11:58 AM- Nicolas Kardas of Microsoft gives a speech, but it sounds much more like a commercial for Microsoft products. Need to attract new visitors? Use this product!

Tuesday, 11:18 AM – Michael Metz of Cisco talked about the popular resistance to corporate/nonprofit media and outreach in his address to the conference. 137 million households have put themselves on do-not-call lists. They believe in their peers before anyone else. 81% of the people buying our products aren’t listening to our messaging. When they’re ready, however, they’ll engage.

Some approaches that have worked for Cisco include options to IM with company representatives and providing short videos for folks who come to and use the site. Don’t bother and pester people, he suggests, but be ready when they want to engage. Stop bombarding them with outbound marketing. And when they’re on the site, take a look at their cookies and what they’ve been looking at online and then market accordingly.

He explains that his wife says that it is sort of creepy, what the company does with user info. She feels like someone is looking over her shoulder at what she’s looking at. When he tells her that it is simply like listening to his users more closely, this puts her at ease.

Tuesday, 10:04 AM - Representatives from each project just gave a 2 minute synopsis of their presentations. Each project appears to be unique and interesting; many are utilizing mapping in new and useful ways. There are also a few projects focused on holding Congress more accountable and there is one interesting eco-rating project. Michael Metz from Cisco is awestruck by the range and scope of projects, he says.

Tuesday, 9:50 AM – Vince Stehle opened the conference by speaking about how NetSquared and the projects here are representative of the importance of working to more efficiently democratize philanthropy. Technology is generated with user-generated content. Organized philanthropy will play an important role in the development of the social web, he said, but sustainability is contingent on an organization’s/individual’s/campaign’s ability to support donors.

Tuesday, 7:32 AM – Being in Santa Clara for the first time is very much like strolling a walk of fame for dorks. You find yourself excited to see the offices for Yahoo, Cisco Systems, Ebay, and all of these other companies whose products you grew up immersed in. It feels silly to admit this, but with these corporate brands having been so omnipresent in my young life, it’s hard not to think that being here, as late as it is to finally make it out this way, is really cool.

Talking with the guys from Squarepeg (pictured above) about who—corporations like Nike or small software folks on the ground—will ultimately have say over kinds of information (shoe sizes/styles and/or willingness to volunteer) will be shared in a post-2.0 is surreal. The conversations happening here are helping to shape the scope of how people will use the web to make good things happen in very near future.

It has been amazing to talk with various folks and representatives of various Mashups who are tackling the ways in which information is now stored and used. The stages of understanding this whole point-o transition will only be graspable in retrospect, but watching the stages unfold from the point of the “2.0″ declaration is watching evolution in action. How will we better motivate people to move forward, organize around issues, and leverage their consumer practices against corporate irresponsibility? We hope to have a better sense as the day unfolds.

Monday, 9:32 PM - Having already spoken with Laura Welcher of the Long Now Foundation, Justin Massa of MoveSmart, Tom Inhaler and Eric Cooper of Know More, Blair Golson of Participant Media, Isaac Holeman and John Wagner of Squarepeg, and many other folks in the field of making stuff happen, I already feel exponentially more enlightened than I was when I arrived to the conference a few hours ago. From challenging corporate messaging to archiving every known language, the ways in which these people are leveraging the Internet is both inspiring and constructively challenging

Monday, 5:46 PM - Today I arrived in San Jose. Rather than finding and paying for a hotel room, I hunted a room down using Couchsurfing, where I found a great place downtown. This is my first time using the site, and I have been looking forward to using it since friends told me about their admiration for the service over a year ago. I am staying a big house with a handful of students/sustainable farmers who have been generous enough to share their space/car with me. The experience is already much better than one based at a hotel, as when I arrived, one of the housemates had his parents over and they were blackening sardines on the grill. We sat outside and drank homemade wine and ate and talked about how things were for them back home, back in the day.

-Filed in Ideas, Uncategorized

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