Some of the 12 speakers presenting at the TED-style event—held at The Hub (a co-location work space in King’s Cross in central London)—spoke eloquently about the nature and importance of serendipity. Entrepreneur Gary Bolles called this “a moment in time that can be essential for all of us to reconsider how to upgrade the impact we have on the world or how we can spread the influence of what we do in our lifetimes. Perhaps it is an opportunity for all of us to do more.”

But not all speakers urged a gentle embrace of the circumstances that had brought them (yours truly, included) together again. Larry Brilliant, the American physician and director of the Skoll Global Threats Fund, said there is a strong relationship between the volcanic eruption in Iceland and climate change—“not the kind you think” but a relationship caused, instead, by the fact that “we don’t know (much) about a lot of very important things” including science.

“...Right now, the single most important thing the world faces is climate change,” he said. “It is the exacerbater of issues of war, water, population growth, pandemics and policy.” Despite this, he said, “science is under attack from a new generation of Luddites, of climate deniers ... while the science about volcanoes is uncertain, one this is certain: we need more—not less - science. We need more and better scientists and we need to fund science better to create an entirely new cadre of scientists and new staff to help us address and tackle the problems of the 21st century.” Thanks to the rapid evolution of information technology, he added, humans—for the first time—can see environmental problems earlier, though “we still don’t always know if what we’re finding is going to be a smaller or a bigger problem” down the road.

Brilliant suggested that “maybe there’s a reason we all are here together tonight. We are going to witness, over the next few days, the interplay between science and policy as every King and President calls the Prime Minister (UK) complaining that their son or daughter is stuck in London; we’re going to see an interplay of all of those things antecedent to the great global threats that we face. We are going to learn, if we haven’t started to already, that we are all in this together. There is no rich, no poor in this. We’re all grounded, equally.”

Brilliant concluded his remarks with the admonition that “everything we will learn from science is going to help us. Science is the set of headlights by which we steer this ship. We need to fight for science because we are going to need every tool we can muster to deal with the problems we are going to face in the future.”

Among other highlights of TEDxVolcano:

• Matthew Bishop of The Economist said Goldman Sachs’ problems and the failings of Wall Street serve as reminders of the complexity of today’s world. “The world has changed; a whole paradigm proved to be faulty and the practitioners of it couldn’t see that the world had changed,” he said. “The lesson here, the challenge to this moment, is to think: ‘What changes are there that we are missing because we are just carrying on as normal?’” Bishop also asked what could be done to improve the quality of public debate over the tough and complex issues facing the world. “There is a moment now in our history that says if we rise up and think big enough, we can come up with a much more intelligent public discussion,” he said. “We are really going to need it, and if we don’t have it, we’re all in big trouble.”
• Travel news correspondent Peter Greenberg, on his way to Heathrow to do a stand-up report for CBS on the continued cancellations of flights, predicted the volcano would have greater impact on the economy than did 9/11. “People cannot fly but cargo cannot fly, either,” he said. “Today, in Kenya, 400 tons of flowers are rotting and have to be thrown away. For every day we are not flying and air cargo is not flying, documents are still not being delivered, medicines are not being delivered, human organs for transplant are not being delivered ... the economic impact is going to be huge.”
• Cara Mertes of Sundance spoke about the leveling effect of nature. “I thought I was clever enough to figure out a way home but none of us were clever enough because we’re all here,” she said. “Money doesn’t matter, either. You can have a private jet but that just means you might die alone. So now I realize I’m in an alternate reality. To understand it is to see patterns in things, so I started thinking about what the pattern was here—and here’s what I think: the Earth is talking back. And I think the Earth is saying, ‘You people are not listening.’ What it is actually saying is that we have a really big problem on our hands with the current levels of human disruption. We are getting a sneak preview of what would happen with climate collapse. It’s a peaceful sneak preview. Nobody died to tell us what we have to go through, right? But what will happen when serious cataclysmic events start happening across the planet?” Then, recalling a speech by environmentalist Paul Hawken earlier this week at the Skoll Forum, Mertes said: “We don’t live in an historical moment but in a civilization moment. This is a generation that has to decide if we’re even going to have a civilization.”
• Jeff Skoll, founder and CEO of the Skoll Foundation, and Sally Osberg, the director of it, both read poems they wrote on the trip down from Oxford. Osberg’s riffed on Robert Frost’s Fire and Ice; Skoll’s had a lighter feel to it, ending with the declaration: “Damn the volcano; let’s have a ball.”
• A performance by singer Susheela Raman
• A showing of the short video, Pixels, by Patrick Jean

Watch this site for further coverage, as long as I’m still in London.

Marcia Stepanek is Founding Editor-in-Chief and President, News and Information, for Contribute Media, a New York-based magazine, Web site, and conference series about the new people and ideas of giving. She is the publisher of Cause Global, an acclaimed new blog about the use of digital media for social change. She also serves as moderator and producer of New Conversations for Change, Contribute’s forum series highlighting social entrepreneurs and new trends in philanthropy.

Kudos to Commongood Careers and Building Movement Project for bringing social entrepreneurs together for a chance to network; with job demands it’s always tough to take the time to get together.  These two organizations are holding four such breakfast events. The other three have already taken place in New York City, Boston, and Washington, DC. The purpose of the events is to discuss nonprofits’ collective opportunities and challenges as well as the role “human capital management strategies” will play in their organizations this year.

Attendees are answering a brief survey on their organizations’ budgets, plans, and 2010 challenges. Survey results will be available on the Commongood Careers website in late February. Early results were handed out at our gathering – and comparisons between the Bay Area and the other three cities were intriguing.  (I don’t know how statistically valid the data is but the results were fun to look at nevertheless.)

Across the country, respondents said that a “significantly increased focus to secure gifts from high net worth individuals” was their number one funding goal in 2010, but the response was much higher from Bay Area nonprofits than from nonprofits in the other three cities.  Also according to these preliminary results, in order of priority, after high net worth individuals, Bay Area nonprofits were going to look for corporate partners second, and foundation grants, third.  In the rest of the country, all of these funding sources had about the same priority.

The San Francisco gathering included a panel discussion, and several panelists echoed what the survey data showed. BUILD in particular has been successful in changing its mix of funding to have more of an emphasis on individual donors. The social entrepreneurs on the panel were Suzanne McKechnie Klahr (BUILD), Louise Davis (Peer Health Exchange), and Jill Vialet (Playworks). These three panelists kept up the enthusiasm in the room by sharing their recent impressive successes and their growth plans for 2010.

The fourth panelist was Anne Marie Burgoyne (Draper Richards Foundation), who shared her insights from working with so many Draper Richards grantees (full disclosure: Draper Richards is one of the Stanford Social Innovation Review’s funders). Anne Marie commented that it didn’t surprise her that Bay Area nonprofits had a higher focus on pursuing individual donors given the wealth in the region. She also noted that she has seen that foundations are pulling back and choosing to fund what’s safe. As for corporate funding, Anne Marie said she is observing more partnerships and fewer dollars. She ended by encouraged nonprofits to pass by the “shiny pennies” on the road and stay focused on mission and their organizations’ strengths.

Overall, James noted several surprises he had from the survey: that most nonprofits expected their budget and program levels would expand this year and that government was fairly low on the list as a source of funding.

How about your organization?  Do you plan to grow your budget and programs this year? What funding balance are you aiming for (looking at individual donors, corporate funding, foundation grants, and government support) and has that balance shifted this year? Is the Bay Area a funding anomaly?

Ms. Ridley joined the Stanford Social Innovation Review in 2006 as publishing director. Previously she was group president at CMP Media, where she ran a division of technology publications, events, and websites. Ridley is also founder and board chair of Friends of Timboni Feeder School, a nonprofit that supports a K-5 school in Kenya. She holds a B.A. in political science from the University of Connecticut and a Masters in International Management from the Thunderbird School of Global Management.

In her introduction to the series on her blog, Rosetta writes, “I love Black History Month because it reminds me of how far we still have to go in this country in terms of race relations and giving everyone a fair chance to take part in the “American Dream.” How far we still have to go before Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream of social justice and economic opportunity for everyone will be realized. Fortunately, there are countless leaders out there who are continuing to address so many aspects of social change.” The SSIR is proud to publish some of their stories.

If you run in social justice philanthropy circles, you’ve probably heard of Erica Hunt, President of the Twenty-First Century Foundation in New York. What you may NOT know is that Erica Hunt is also a marvelous poet.  A woman after my own English major, free verse-loving heart.

From the Twenty-First Century Foundation website:

Erica Hunt, a leading expert on Black social justice and economic issues, was a Senior Program Officer with the New World Foundation, before joining 21CF in 1998 where she has led new work in the field of Black philanthropy. During her tenure, 21CF has sought to strengthen Black giving and community-based philanthropy through donor education; grant making through donor-advised funds and special national initiatives; and applied research to document trends in Black philanthropy and community impact. Under her supervision, 21CF has grown from an all volunteer organization, to a premier national $8 million public foundation. Hunt holds a B.A. in Literature from San Francisco State University, and is a past Fellow in the Duke University/University of Cape Town Center for Leadership and Public Values. She currently serves as a participant to Diversity and Effectiveness in Philanthropy; the International Working Group on Philanthropy for Social Justice and Peace; and Rye Collaborative National Progressive Foundations. Her past professional leadership affiliations include: the New York Regional Association of Grantmakers; National Center for Black Philanthropy, and the Coalition for New Philanthropy. Hunt, a published author of numerous articles and essays on Black philanthropy, was the 2008 recipient of Spelman College’s award for National Community Service.

From the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania:

Erica Hunt works at the forefront of experimental poetry and poetics, critical race theory, and feminist aesthetics. She has written three books of poetry: Arcade, with artist Alison Saar, Piece Logic, and Local History (Roof Books, 1993). Her published and forthcoming essays include “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics” (The Politics of Poetic Form,, ed. Charles Bernstein), “Parabolay” (Boundary 2), and “Roots of the Black Avant Garde” (Tripwire, forthcoming). Hunt’s poems can be found in Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women (ed. Mary Margaret Sloan), Iowa Poetry Review, and the Virago Anthology of Women’s Love Poetry. Hunt has also worked as a housing organizer, radio producer, poetry teacher, and program officer for a social justice campaign. She is currently president of The Twenty-First Century Foundation which supports organizations addressing root causes of social injustice impacting the Black community.

See also: A complete audio archive of Erica Hunt reading her poetry hosted on the PennSound website

Photo credit: BMoreNews.com

Rosetta Thurman is a writer, speaker, professor and consultant working and living in the Washington, D.C. area.  She holds a Master’s degree in Nonprofit Management and blogs about nonprofits, leadership and social change at rosettathurman.com

Called America Reimagined, the conference featured more than 50 artists, writers, musicians, technologists, and social entrepreneurs—all of whom are creating or leading bold new civic, economic, technological and cultural initiatives in the United States. The sessions were designed to explore how major forces are reshaping the idea of America, its government’s contract with its citizens, its brand, and its role in the world. “The thing about the kinds of moments we are living in right now is that they are often filled with conflicting and confusing signals,” conference curator Andrew Zolli said in opening remarks.” Is it possible for us as a country, economically and technologically, politically and culturally, to reinvent ourselves?”

Radio host Kurt Andersen, the author of Reset, a book about America’s uncertain future, was the first to consider the question, describing the last 25 years of American life as years in which Americans have been “guilty of magical thinking.”

We took Peter Pan too seriously; we took Bob Dylan’s lyrics too seriously.  We committed to never growing up and we didn’t. I mean, when did adults start celebrating Halloween? When did people over 12 begin eating ice cream with mashed up cookie dough in it? When did adults start wearing blue jeans and sneakers all the time and watching cartoons? Most decades end after a decade, but the 1980s—until last year’s financial meltdown—just kept going, and kept going, and kept going.

The point: America has always moved back and forth between economic booms and busts and between the right and left politically. But this moment in time is different, Andersen says. “It’s a time when all of these cycles are shifting dramatically and simultaneously; when complacency is forced to end; when outdated structures are being inevitably and necessarily challenged, and when change is rapid and difficult to predict.”

But Andersen, like many of PopTech’s other speakers, was optimistic. Andersen said the current economic crisis “is actually a great opportunity for reinvention and for getting ourselves as individuals and as a nation back on track.” If reinvention is to occur, however, it will be catalyzed not by today’s present leaders as much as by the amateurs in society, young people and “new-thinking baby boomers” in the grassroots—people unafraid to take risks, think creatively, and see the world through the lens of possibility.

“This isn’t the end of the world,” Andersen said. “But the ‘80s are over. I’d like to think we’re just waking up.”

Among other highlights so far:

• Alec Ross, a senior social media/technology adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, told conferees about the ion’s 21st Century Statecraft initiative, uses social media to help nations and leaders empower their citizens and each other. “If you think of the last eight years of American foreign policy, it was about overpowering others in the world,” Ross said. “[We want] to go beyond engaging government-to-government and to connect with people more directly.  If Paul Revere were alive today, he wouldn’t make a ride; he would have just tweeted and the lantern hangers would’ve retweeted.” Ross said he is launching a new social media initiative with Mexican drug-trafficking authorities that aims to engage citizens in their war on drugs.  He described that one of the biggest problems in this conflict is that people fear retaliation if they help out law enforcement.  “So I went [to Mexico]…and we met with NGOs and with Carlos Slim and we came up with a little system where people are able to email or text gang activity.” The system anonymizes their emails to prevent retaliation, and the government can use these tips to respond more quickly, and keep people informed about what’s happening in their anti-drug efforts. “This is just Chapter One of how we can use technology in statecraft.”
• James Fowler, the author of the recent book, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, told conferees that humans—like birds and schools of fish—also tend to act in communities of purpose and suggested that online social networks will amplify these natural social tendencies. Humans have always lived in “webs of humanity,” Fowler said, and within these Webs, such physical traits as obesity and behaviors such as smoking tend to spread like viruses. In other words, there is a kind of swarm mentality in social networks, and those people closest to us can affect our behaviors more than we might like to admit. But there is an upside.  When individuals engage in positive behavior, this also can have a ripple effect on the actions of those of their social networks.  “I recently lost five pounds,” Fowler said, “to influence those I loves to do the same. Just think about it, by changing your own behavior, you truly can change the behavior of others.” Social media can help humans influence their communities and have a large positive impact on the world.
• Erica Williams, a 20-something Washington, D.C.-based activist working to help broaden the civic engagement of her peers, urged the older PopTech crowd to put away their stereotypes of her generation. “Call us what you will, the MTV generation, Millennials, the ‘us’ generation,” she said, “but we are not bored or disinterested; our world view is different.” At some 300 million strong, she added, today’s 18-27 year olds “have the opportunity to re-brand civic engagement” and reinvent politics. “My generation doesn’t like traditional politics,” she told conferees. “We are the most ethnically diverse generation that America has ever had. We are post-racial. We came up at a time with 9-11, fighting two wars and a gap between the haves and have-nots that we haven’t seen since the Gilded Age—and a “me” generation that was many of our parents. So we distrust ‘politics as usual.’ It hasn’t worked.”  In the absence of top-down reform, Williams said her generation will always work beyond traditional avenues to get things done, bypassing candidates who don’t deliver, and mobilizing young people directly. “We are re-branding what it means to be politically engaged,” she said.
• Malaysian singer/songwriter Zee Avi, discovered on Twitter, performed several songs she wrote, her fresh lyrics and full-sounding acoustic guitar underscoring the influence that American popular culture has had on the rest of the world. At one point during her performance, PopTech attendee and Personal Democracy Forum cofounder Micah Sifry, tweeted favorably: “Zee Avi, Malaysian singer, sounds like she’s from Northampton, Mass. Is world getting too small?”

Marcia Stepanek is Founding Editor-in-Chief and President, News and Information, for Contribute Media, a New York-based magazine, Web site, and conference series about the new people and ideas of giving. She is the publisher of Cause Global, an acclaimed new blog about the use of digital media for social change. She also serves as moderator and producer of New Conversations for Change, Contribute’s forum series highlighting social entrepreneurs and new trends in philanthropy.

As a professor of introductory anthropology at Kansas State University, Wesch says he has a “front row seat” from which to watch new cultural trends emerge from the youngest adult generation, and for the past two-and-a-half years, Wesch has been inviting his students to help him analyze the vast YouTube community.

After trawling through mega-gigs of content, watching hours of videos and posting videos of their own, Wesch says, he and his students “are finding that the same conditions of ease and anonymity that enable people to get snarky online” can also encourage them to participate in meaningful and collaborative new projects. In fact, he’s discovered that YouTube and social media can mitigate the cultural tension between teens’ conflicting needs for independence and community by offering them “connection without constraints.” What looks like narcissism and individuality is actually a search for identity and recognition, Wesch told the digerati attending this week’s Personal Democracy Forum in Manhattan. “In a society that doesn’t automatically grant identity and recognition, you have to create your own.”

Wesch says he’s hopeful that social media will ease the “narcissistic disengagement” of many young people and encourages them to be more politically and civically engaged. Already, he says, some heroes have emerged—including the anonymous YouTube character who filmed himself giving hugs to strangers in the streets, and One World, the person who wore a Guy Fawkes mask and used his anonymity as a platform for collaboration, asking people to write messages on the palms of their hands and to hold them up to their Webcams for sharing. Millions of people shared this way, mostly about the need to love one another and to look beyond themselves.

“When I’m using a Webcam,” Wesch explains, “I’m not talking to you, I’m talking to it. When you’re Twittering, you’re not talking to me, you’re talking to it. Or when I’m on Facebook, I’m not talking to you, I’m talking to it.” The point, says Wesch: When communicating face-to-face, people bring many different versions of themselves into a conversation based on the context of that conversation. “But when you’re sitting in front of a camera, or twittering to hundreds if not thousands of people in a community who you cannot see and who cannot see you, you don’t know who you are talking to or when or in what context, and so [communication via social media] it is forcing a kind of context collapse—a deeper level of self-awareness not present in simple, everyday conversation. People can get deeply self-reflective on YouTube and confessional…and reveal things they would otherwise refuse to reveal, even to their family and close friends.”

Wesch urged the journalists, techno-geeks, business developers, and academicians attending the PDF conference to start thinking of YouTube as a new kind of public sphere, where new types of conversations and forms of communication can occur. “The YouTube debates [during last year’s presidential election] were flawed in that they allowed TV to dictate that conversation,” Wesch says. “We have an opportunity, on YouTube and with other social media, to create a whole new groundwork for the way these [civic] conversations work.”

Wesch then challenged attendees to help the culture move away “from its current state of ‘whatever, I don’t care’ ...to one in which we can say ‘I care, let’s do whatever it takes by whatever means necessary.’”

Wesch connected: attendees stopped tweeting long enough to give him a standing ovation.

For more about Wesch and his observations about the cultural signifiance of social media, see the lecture he gave last summer at the Library of Congress.

Marcia Stepanek is Founding Editor-in-Chief and President, News and Information, for Contribute Media, a New York-based magazine, Web site, and conference series about the new people and ideas of giving. She is the publisher of Cause Global, an acclaimed new blog about the use of digital media for social change. She also serves as moderator and producer of New Conversations for Change, Contribute’s forum series highlighting social entrepreneurs and new trends in philanthropy.

And when the perpetrator of the crime smiles and waves at the camera during the act, does their “You know that I know that you are watching while I get my 15 seconds of fame” attitude make a video game of the whole episode?

Trevor Paglen, author, artist, journalist and experimental geographer, opened the Conference on Human Rights, Technology, and New Media at Berkeley on May 4th with these powerful questions.

Trevor’s controversial and thought-provoking pessimism about the continued success of the mobilization of shame to change policy and practice was offset by the good news throughout the rest of the conference–examples abounded of technology’s positive impact on human rights.

Some of these examples are:

• Trevor’s now famous photo of a CIA black site provided evidence of a secret government detention architecture. Using public records, mapping visualization, GPS systems, interviews, and dogged determination, Trevor tracked down the location of this site and took the controversial photograph.
• Yvette Alberdingk Thijm of WITNESS described how their program empowering locals to document human rights violations in film has actually reduced voluntary recruitment of child soldiers in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and has contributed to the prioritization of this issue at the international level. With today’s video and internet technologies, anyone can be a witness and documenter.
• David Sasaki of Global Voices described the many internet tools he uses to build an online blogging community of over 150 voices from the developing world covering issues that mainstream media often ignore. Internet applications such as Google groups, Google reader, Google docs, delicious, wikis, basecamp, Doppler, freshbooks and mind42.com makes it easy to build and maintain their virtual community.
• Judith Dueck of Huridocs detailed the database and search capabilities they provide to allow massive amounts of victim, perpetrator, and event data to be mined. Standardizing the structure and vocabulary of human rights turns the tons of boxes of data into actionable information for stopping the violations.
• Peggy Weil of the USC School of Cinematic Arts gave a fascinating example of raising awareness of torture through an immersive experience in Second Life. Working with Nonny de la Pena, her team created GoneGitmo, a Second Life experience that takes a viewer’s avatar through the experience of Guantanamo. Depending on how closely you identify with your avatar, the experience of being bound, head-covered, and interrogated can be quite terrifying.

Rather than feeling technology and media weary after seeing gadgets worthy of James Bond (the BUG4GOOD mobile device was especially cool), rather than seeing games and social networks as corrupting influences on our youth, these technologies and media made me feel optimistic.

For collection of information, we have modern technologies such as satellite images, GPS, GIS, and ubiquitous phones, cameras and SMS. For simplifying analysis, we have data visualization, DNA analysis, collaborative online conversations, and data mining, for example. And for promoting awareness we have fun technologies such as games, films, and multi-media campaigns.

So we can use social networks not to expose personal embarrassments but to expose crises. We can create communities for sharing stories of trauma not gossip. And we can create learning and immersive experiences for deeply feeling and walking in someone else’s shoes rather than avoiding reality. And perhaps then we can drive the change that is needed.

This sounds like a Web 2.0 to embrace.

Gina Klein Jorasch Gina Klein Jorasch is currently Senior Advisor to the Center for Social Innovation at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Gina was a founder or early-stage executive at five for-profit tech start-ups, all of which had successful IPOs or acquisitions, and a founding board member for two nonprofit startups.