Stanford Social Innovation Review

A Conscientious Cleaning Service On A Mission

I was waiting for the 14-Mission bus in downtown San Francisco the other day, and when it pulled up to the stop, something (aside from the woman who stepped off cuddling a chinchilla) caught my eye. The ad on the side of the bus was one I hadn’t seen before. “If cleanliness is next to godliness, then La Colectiva are angels” read the tagline, above which a group of five Latina women stood posing proudly—hands on hips or arms crossed—in a living room.

Upon doing a little bit of Internet research, I found that La Colectiva is a Bay Area cleaning collective of immigrant women formed by La Raza Centro Legal, which is a San Francisco-based legal organization dedicated to empowering Latino communities. The ad campaign, which launched in November of 2009, features portraits of La Colectiva members on billboards, transit ads, and bus shelters throughout San Francisco. La Colectiva worked diligently with advisory organizations such as UC Berkeley’s Labor Occupational Health Program and the San Francisco Department of Public Health over the past year to churn out this campaign.

In 2007, SSIR published an article called “Unselling Meth,” which details how the Montana Meth Project uses consumer-marketing techniques—primarily a very graphic ad campaign—to fight methamphetamine abuse. Seeing this bus ad for La Colectiva reminded me a little bit of the Meth Project because La Colectiva is using its ad campaign more to sell its mission than to sell its product. La Colectiva seeks to empower immigrant women by teaching about better working conditions, effective and safe cleaning techniques (including nontoxic cleaning supplies), and worker rights.

La Colectiva developed all of their messaging and strategy in close collaboration with the women themselves through a series of meetings over the past year. To date, La Colectiva has offered six “Cleaning with Safety and Dignity” trainings to a total of 120 participants. Additionally, a highlight of the year was the much-anticipated release of “Behind Closed Doors: Working Conditions of California Household Workers,” a report coauthored by the Collective with Mujeres Unidas y Activas and the DataCenter.

On November 11, the day La Colectiva launched its ad campaign in San Francisco, members organized a rally where fellow advocates of worker’s rights gathered to speak about their experiences and make their mission known. Here is a video of the event, where you can see Yesenia Perez, one of La Colectiva’s members, talk about the importance of communicating “poder y esperanza”—power and hope.

We are inundated daily with ads that communicate superfluous messages. I commend La Colectiva for communicating a message that is quite the opposite of that: poder y esperanza. 

Loreal Lynch joined the Stanford Social Innovation Review in 2007 as the publishing associate. She manages the SSIR Web site, blog, and social media outlets. She lives in San Francisco and received a Bachelor’s degree in Spanish from Tufts University.

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Twitter Diplomacy

Ever since young activists around the world started using Twitter and Facebook last year to organize massively successful pro-democracy protests against their governments—unemployed engineer Oscar Morales’ 30-day Facebook campaign that turned out 14 million against FARC in Colombia was the first such mass-scale effort—the U.S. State Department has been sitting up, taking notice, and reaching out to join the party.

In the days after last fall’s presidential election, President Obama’s social media team began organizing a nonprofit coalition of these cause-wired, global youth activists, inviting the most powerful to Columbia University last December for a conference cosponsored by Facebook, Google, MTV, and Howcast Media. The conference ended with the birth of the nonprofit Alliance for Youth Movements, and last March, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced plans for a second AYM conference, which was held a few weeks ago in Mexico City and focused on sustaining and strengthening the youth coalition as a focal point for the State Department’s new 21st Century Statecraft initiative. The agency¹s goal is twofold: engage with existing youth leaders using social media to wield “citizen power” in conflict zones around the world, and help nurture new online pro-democracy groups where none currently exist. In effect, it’s the State Department’s effort to create its own nonprofit youth presence as a way of extending its work worldwide.

“You come from different cultures and countries and speak different languages,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in a welcome video to the young activists attending the Mexico City event October 14-16, “but you all share a common commitment to engaging with the world, to using every tool at your disposal to bring people together to solve problems. And that makes you the kind of leaders we need as we work to meet the challenges and seize the opportunities of the 21st century.”  Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, who also attended the event, told conferees that he’s not working for the government but believes in helping citizen activists to use the social media technology he conceived in new ways.

AYM coordinator and State Department policy planning staff member Jared Cohen says the AYM initiative—aided last month by business cosponsors including Google, PepsiCo, Causecast.org, Facebook, MySpace, Univision Interactive Media, WordPress.com, YouTube, and others— is just getting started. “When we launched AYM last December,” Cohen said, “it was during the transition between the Obama and Bush presidencies. Now you have AYM continuing on with a President who was elected largely because of technology and a Secretary of State who appreciates the potential of technology to organize. AYM has become an illustrative example of 21st century statecraft, with the U.S. government acting as a convener, a facilitator, and a conceptual partner. We believe that AYM captures what civil society looks like in the 21st century. It’s no longer people sitting in office buildings working a bureaucracy. It’s people who emerge as leaders from the bottom up because they have access to these technologies and a government that wants to help them to be successful.”

Among the more than 40 youth leaders attending AYM 2009 were:

• Natalia Morari, 25, who used Twitter, email and text messages to help organize some 15,000 Moldovans to rally in the streets after the Communist Party in that country rigged a victory in Moldova’s April 6, 2009 national election. “When the results were announced the day after the election, with the Communist Party as the winners, so many of my friends said they wanted to leave Modolva; the country was in mourning,” she told AYM conferees. “A few of us met up at a café to talk about what we might be able to do and we decided to do a flash mob that night [in Chisinau, Moldova’s capital city].” Morari’s team used SMS to send the following message to their friends and family members, which got passed on: “If you believe your vote was stolen, if you did not vote for the Communists, come to the center of the city.” The protest succeeded over the course of the next few days and the protesters eventually succeeded in upsetting the Communist Party’s majority in parliament. Morari now leads ThinkMoldova, a platform to help young people in that country to have a voice in Moldova’s future.
• Veronica Nur Valdez and Felice Gorondo, ages 25 and 26, respectively, who are promoting the use of the Mobile Internet among Cuban youth. The two are cofounders of Raices de Esperanza [Roots of Hope], a U.S-based organization that works to empower Cuban young people, to organize for social change using social media. One initiative is called Cell Phones for Cuba, which collects used cellphones from the U.S. and donates them to Cuba. The group also is teaching youth how to evade Cuba’s Internet firewall and circumvent censorship. It also is supporting efforts by youth empowerment activists to write blogs that will reach people outside the country. “Technology has, without a doubt, helped us to reach a much broader span of people,” Gorondo says. “When we started, we were simply making phone calls to people that we knew, and relying on them to spread the word. Now, through social networks, we can spread the word through many different outlets.”
• Shubham Kanodia, a 14-year-old student in Mumbai, who launched and manages a Facebook group of more than 25,000 people to commemorate those who died in last November’s Mumbai terrorist attacks. The teenager launched his Facebook group on the day after the first attacks began, upon seeing that most of his Facebook friends were safe but were openly condemning the violence. He created his group to help the victims and the group continues as a rallying point for anti-violence initiatives in Mumbai.
• Janessa Goldbeck, director of membership at the nonprofit Genocide Intervention Network, who is using social networking to build the group’s student membership. Its GI-NET initiative, a social network launched last year, has been used to expand the organization’s reach to more than 40,000 people, including 1,000 chapters at high schools, colleges, and universities across the United States and in 25 other countries. The group began during protests against genocide in Darfur but has since expanded to create a student network that “seeks to unite students around the world in a permanent, anti-genocide constituency,” Goldbeck says.
• Deborah Loh, a Malaysian journalist who last year founded The Nut Graph, a news and analysis Web site that is playing a critical role in her country’s pro-democracy movement by covering pro-democracy demonstrations outside the government’s official purview. The site gave coverage to leaders of Malaysia’s grassroots Democratic Action Party, who on May 7 of this year used Twitter, SMS, and email to organize a national campaign and sit-in to protest the removal of pro-democracy members from the regional government assembly of Perak, Malaysia’s second-largest state. The Twitter campaign led to arrests of people who attended rallies in the streets of Kuala Lumpur, but the protesters were later released. The sitting government remains in power but commentators say its credibility has been compromised, in part due to media coverage.
• Elias Kuri, a cofounder of Iluminemos Mexico, who organized an anti-violence march on August 30 of last year that was joined by 2 million people in 88 cities across Mexico and in six other countries. Kuri said he organized the march at a time when many Mexicans were horrified by what was then the recent kidnapping and murder of 14-year-old Fernando Martí, the son of a businessman. “Does a march work to make change?” Kuri asked his fellow panelists. “We think yes because when people are angry they want to do something…The important thing was that we didn’t use traditional media to protest. We used the Internet, Facebook, emails, and people just went to the march. The authorities were sure we were going to fail. They didn’t believe the Internet could have so much power.”

The AYM conference, timed to roughly coincide to 20th anniversary celebrations globally of the fall of the Berlin Wall, triggered speculation in Mexico City and the blogosphere over how much difference the Cold War might have been were social media in use back then. At the conference, New York Times Mexico City reporter Elizabeth Malkin asked Moldovan Twitter activist Natalia Morari whether she thought Twitter would have helped to empower anti-Communist protesters — or, perhaps, been used instead by Communist dictators as an added tool of oppression. Modovan activist Morari responded: “It probably wouldn’t have taken everyone so long to fight back.” She cited The Berlin Twitter Wall, the city of Berlin’s new Web site that asks people around the world to digitally commemorate the fall of the Wall.  Since posting the site, hundreds of people have posted Tweets – hashtag #fotw—about pro-democracy and anti-democracy actions around the world. [Chinese authorities blocked the Web site just days after its launch October 20, but not before some 2,000 Chinese had used the digital wall to protest China’s censorship of free speech].

The Obama Administration’s statecraft initiative also has been introduced at other high-profile forums in recent weeks. Clinton’s Social Media Advisor, Alex Ross, told the recent PopTech conference on social innovation that he is launching a new social media initiative with Mexico-based NGOs and Mexican drug-trafficking authorities that aims to engage citizens in their war on drugs. “If you think of the last eight years of American foreign policy, it was about overpowering others in the world,” Ross told PopTech conferees. “[We want] to go beyond engaging government-to-government and to connect with people more directly.”
Ross then added: “…If Paul Revere were alive today, he wouldn’t make a ride; he would have just Tweeted and the lantern-hangers would’ve re-Tweeted.”

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.

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Does Generation Y Discriminate Against Baby Boomers? Or Is It the Other Way Around?

I was at a nonprofit event yesterday where I spoke to Amy, one of my dear blog readers, who is an older (Baby Boomer?) nonprofit leader. She said that she loves my work and advocacy for next generation leadership, but she feels I promote ageism on my blog with my focus on the younger generation.
Do I?
I posed this question to my Twitter fam last night. These are some of the responses I received.

• @rosettathurman Considering the fact that many #nonprofits leave their miniony jobs to Gen Y I would say that the system is ageist
• @rosettathurman Boomers have to get used to a new voice & platforms just for us
• @rosettathurman it’s important to be respectful, but more important to push the envelope. You can do both. You do.
• @rosettathurman I, with u. The greatest creativity will come from the Gen Xrs & Gen Yrs who are being denied jobs by the current #leadership
• @rosettathurman I don’t think your focus on Gen Y promotes ageism. It’s important for bloggers to write from their own experience.
• @rosettathurman Agreement or compromise b/w generations not the aim, understanding & progress 2 the nonprofit’s goals are.

The gist of most of the responses I received was that it’s OK to focus on a particular age bracket on my blog, which may be a little ageist to some people. But ageism is age discrimination.  And I don’t think I discriminate against Baby Boomer leaders on my blog simply because I try to empower younger people to lead. But I do think there was an underlying issue in Amy’s feedback to me: both generations still have not figured out how to talk about what we need from each other to be the best leaders we can be.
Amy was railing against the idea that all Baby Boomer nonprofit leaders don’t want/embrace change and are not supportive of Gen Y leadership. I don’t aim to make broad generalities when I speak of current nonprofit leaders. But I do believe we find truth in sharing our real experiences. I have to admit that the many young leaders who have shared their stories here over the past two 1/2 years point out situations where older leaders have not been supportive of them and many times have “blocked” them from leading. I’m not saying all Baby Boomers do that, but it is a common enough experience for many Gen Y leaders in the nonprofit sector that we can say it should be addressed.
It may be that we discriminate against each other. Many Baby Boomer leaders look at Gen Y like we’re their kids, while many a Gen Y person may scoff at the fact that their boss doesn’t know how to turn on the copy machine. Many other issues compound the complexity of intergenerational relationships and make it difficult to share leadership, including:

The rise of the use of technology for nonprofit efficiency: Gen Y is overwhelmingly more comfortable and proficient as a generation, but that does not mean Baby Boomers aren’t or can’t be. What bothers many young leaders is that their youth is only valued when technology comes up and their CEO wants to know how to use Twitter. For everything else, they are relegated to supportive roles.

Transfer of nonprofit knowledge: Many Gen Y workers feel that they could lead better if only they had an older mentor who would show them the ropes and teach them what they learned along the way. The problem is that few young people are finding those opportunities. May be the fault of the older leader for not reaching out or the fault of the younger leader for not asking for help directly.

Increased competition for nonprofit jobs: Older leaders are now competing with recent grads who are their kids’ age for good nonprofit jobs. Due to the economy, many older workers are not leaving the workforce as expected at a certain age. So now Gen Y is now being put in the position of supervising employees who are their elders. This is causing resentment on both sides. But the recession is hurting young nonprofit leaders, too.

Distribution of power: Even though Gen Y has more education than previous generations as well as ease of using technology, it does not equal to leadership positions. We are still not looked at for top management jobs because we’re “too young” and “inexperienced.” So while Gen Y can “discriminate” against Baby Boomers all we want, it does not translate into younger people taking over nonprofit organizations, no matter how you slice it.

While I do focus on next generation leaders on my blog, I am not at all saying that older leaders should not be equally valued. The problem for me is that for far too long, leadership has been defined in terms of age (over 40), title (CEO) & years of experience (a ton). My blog defies that by saying “Yes, young people can lead, here’s how we can do it and here’s how we can keep doing it better.” What some of my Twitter followers pointed out is that Baby Boomers have been the leadership focus for a long time and it’s now Gen Y’s turn to receive support.
And if supporting my generation is wrong, I don’t wanna be right.

Rosetta Thurman is an emerging nonprofit leader of color working and living in the Washington, D.C. area.  She holds a Master’s degree in Nonprofit Management and blogs about nonprofit leadership and management issues at Perspectives From the Pipeline.

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Open Source Altruism

In today’s inter-connected world some of the most innovative models for social innovation will become those that can modularize, “crowdsource,” and aggregate small tasks.  Philanthropy was once one-to-many in direction and amplitude, but today facilitated means of communication and synthesis Online are enabling many-to-many philanthropic models to become widespread and increasingly powerful.

Crowdsourcing is by no means a new concept, though its form has changed. Berkeley’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) began in 1999 with a screensaver download, SETI@home, a program that utilized idle CPU power to scan through radio telescope data in search of life beyond Earth.  By 2005 over 5 million unique users had downloaded SETI@home, and were contributing to the search.  In 2001 NASA created the experimental Clickworkers project to locate and categorize craters on the surface of Mars.  NASA was able to partition the mapping into bite-sized tasks, make high-resolution photographs of the Martian surface available online, and syndicate this task to 85,000 crowdsourced volunteers online.  Though each person performed only a few minutes of pro-bono work, in aggregate NASA was able to map and categorize craters on Mars, and achieve this with minimal error due to overlapped tasking and aggregation. Crowdsourcing critics exist, but as for NASA, perhaps Rawlsian “overlapping –crowd– consensus” through iterative tasking can minimize its downside risk.

Yochai Benkler, Harvard Law School Professor and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, writes on the “Networked Public Sphere,” and how secure relationships can elicit human behavior that deviates from homo economicus, and the assumed selfish actor.  Many examples, such as Wikipedia.org and Kiva.org point to the cooperative behavior of individual actors willingly collaborating in the pursuit of a larger goal, a digital application of what Benkler argues to be pervasive human behavior.  In the case of Wikipedia.org users donate their hard-earned time to edit the world’s most comprehensive encyclopedia, and on Kiva.org users pool money with others they don’t know to provide risky, zero-interest international loans to remote entrepreneurs. 

Thus, within a context of norms and trust, humans online will behave in coordinated ways, addressing collective problems through knowledge-constrained, coordinated individual actions.  Empirically, users do this for both social and remunerative compensation, but prolific communities such as YouTube are grounded in community rather than compensation.  Contrarily, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) has created a labor market for remunerated micro tasking, a platform in which “Turkers” perform Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) for pennies at a time.  Such platforms can both enable large-scale, syndicated problem solving not attainable through algorithms, and concurrently circumvent labor laws by offering compensation below statutory hourly wages.  New models are exciting in their application, and destabilizing in their misuse.

With rapid mobile penetration, and the capacity to cohere decentralized knowledge around coordinated tasks, the potential for networked philanthropy is growing.  Today over 85 percent of Americans carry a mobile phone, and an increasing percentage of them are Internet-capable.  To this end, a San Francisco-based start-up called The Extraordinaries has pioneered the iPhone application space by allowing users to donate their idle moments working toward the attainment of broad-based social missions.

Along with The Extrordinaries, organizations such as BRUTE Labs, are attempting to build platforms of “Open Source Altruism.”  Open source altruism is rooted in the prioritization of quick-win, modular ideas, packaged as “kits” in adoptable formats, and provided free of charge. The recent launch of Mchopa.com, a website featuring the Masai art of Gregory Mchopa, uses a fungible back-end infrastructure that will soon support a small business in Guatemala aiming to bridge the digital divide by selling computers to the poor.  BRUTE’s success is rooted in its volunteerism, its cross-functional competency in engineering and management, and in its emphasis on design.  The recipient of numerous design awards, BRUTE extends its reach by appealing to an appreciation of aesthetics, or “the substance of style;” Design empowers and facilitates communication.

Soon, one-to-many philanthropy will be supplemented by overlapping consensus, crowd-sourced, many-to-many social ventures that leverage the networked public sphere.  To the extent that design can help communicate ideas, new models can be fungible, open-source, and free, and that new platforms can convert networked individuals into micro-activists, social entrepreneurs can supplement hope with human cooperation.

Scott E. Hartley (Stanford, ’05) is a former Google.org Business Development Consultant and dual-degree MIA/MBA graduate student at Columbia University School of International & Public Affairs and Columbia Business School.  He writes on Internet & Democracy for the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.

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Technology’s Positive Impact on Human Rights

In a world where we post our trivia on twitter, incriminating photos on Facebook, and embarrassing videos on YouTube, can truly horrible stories of human rights violations still grab our attention? Our horror? And the shame necessary to drive change?

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.

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The Best Thing we can do for Nonprofits–and Ourselves

Have you seen Rick Cohen’s typically smart and on-target piece “The Worst Thing We Can Do for the Obama Administration”?  While he’s speaking about the nonprofit sector and its/our special-interest-group needs, there’s a broader point: that those of us who supported the President’s election because we share his basic principles and values should express that support by remaining independent and criticizing when necessary, rather than by becoming supplicants to or apologists for the people we put in office.  That’s an idea relevant to each and all of us as citizens.

The Nonprofiteer’s own version of this insight struck her while she was raging at news of the Administration’s refusal to investigate and prosecute allegations of torture.  Abruptly she realized she had two choices: struggle to construct a rationale for a constitutional law professor’s apparent indifference to violations of the Constitution, or struggle to make it impossible for such apparent indifference to continue.  So she’s now volunteering with the ACLU,  whose legal work contributed to the release of the torture memos and which is helping to orchestrate public pressure to bring to justice the people who violated our laws in our name.

Politics, it is said, is the art of the possible.  The citizen’s job is to define for politicians what’s possible, and to make sure that the definition encompasses everything that’s essential.

As nonprofit leaders, we know first-hand how much of what’s essential requires the government’s support.  But as Cohen says, our primary job is not begging for that support; it’s giving or withholding our own based on how well the government–our government–lives up to our ideals, and its own.

Kelly Kleiman, who blogs as The Nonprofiteer, is principal of NFP Consulting, which provides strategic planning, Board development and fundraising advice to charities and philanthropies. She is also a lawyer and freelance journalist whose reportage and essays about the arts, philanthropy and women’s issues have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor and other dailies; in magazines including In These Times and Chicago Philanthropy; and on websites including Aislesay.com and Artscope.net.

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Spinternet

In the mid-1990s, people began realizing the Internet would transform the world—but the prevailing wisdom at the time was that it would be mostly for the better. Last Friday, panels of thought leaders at the Skoll World Forum in Oxford agreed it’s time to take another look at that assumption.

Charles Leadbeater, a social entrepreneur and author of “We-think: the power of mass creativity,” said the Internet has, indeed, given more people access to knowledge [and will continue to do so, through such sites as Ushahidi, kiva.org, the new Wikimap Aid, and M-Pesa, a mobile phone-based money exchange service in Kenya]. It’s also clear, Leadbeater said, that the Web has begun to topple the top-down, Industrial Age way of managing people and projects into more level, lateral types of conversations, relationships and collaborative teams. “I also think the Web has huge potential to allow knowledge to be deployed in different ways which are not determined by profit,” he told Skoll conferees.

Panelists also agreed that the Web—particularly cellphone video-sharing—is empowering many people to hold their leaders accountable for bullying: Witness.org Executive Director Yvette Alberdingk Thijm shared citizen videos that her nonprofit either helped to produce or took viral on the Web in an effort to stop human rights abuses. This mobile phone video, about a California man shot and killed by police, led to the arrests of two officers after it went viral shortly after the incident. [Note the irony of the “danger” sign on the closing door of the subway train that appears at the end of the clip.] Another video, shot on a Flip video camera by Witness.org-trained Yemeni activists, showcases the six-year-old daughter of Yemeni journalist Abdulkarim al-Khaiwani, and her recollections of the day authorities broke into the family’s home, beat her father unconscious, and imprisoned him for his pro-democracy views. Witness.org uploaded the video and took it viral; a screen shot of that video, emblazoned with The Hub’s logo, was then published by an Arab newspaper. A public uproar ensued and led to the release of al-Khaiwani last September. “Once a story is out in the public sphere, it cannot be removed from public consciousness,” Alberdingk Thijm said. “The Web can help shift the dynamics of power.”

But citizens, beware. It’s getting harder to use the Web for social change. Challenges to the Web’s potential for democracy and freedom are growing quickly now, panelists agreed. “The enemy is getting just as smart in using these same tools to silence people yet again,” said Evgeny Morozov, a Belarussian journalist who is writing a book about censorship and the use of the Internet by authoritarian states.

Morozov cited a half-dozen examples of government and corporate “Net-cleansing”—including cases where companies are hiring “reputation cleansers” to bury Web references to poor corporate track records on Web search engines, while nationalist groups in Africa and the Middle East are using Google maps to mashup census data, so as to better pinpoint minority neighborhoods for targeting. Crowdsourcing also is being used by the governments of Thailand and China to drum up lists of Web sites and blogs critical of the current regimes; the Thai government, Morozov says, asks citizens to nominate Web sites to be blocked for content that offends the king; in China, a “50-cent Army” of some 200,000 or more citizens is paid to post pro-government comments on blogs critical of Beijing authorities. Morozov also says denial-of-service attacks are emerging as powerful tools for silencing political dissent in Georgia, Burma, Russia—and the United States. [During last year’s debate in California over the controversial Proposition 8, Morozov says, denial-of-service attacks were used by proponents of the anti-gay proposal to stem the ability of gay and lesbian nonprofits and political action groups to fight the measure.]

“We tend to assume the Net is going to be helping [civil rights advocates] and not the dictators,” Morozov says, “but repressive groups and regimes love the Internet, too, and are figuring out how to use it to control others.” When asked by moderator Andrew Zolli which side is winning—citizen civil rights activists or the dictators—Morozov said: “Both ends of the spectrum are expanding, but it’s very hard for me to deliver an argument that the Net benefits one political side more than the other.”

For more on the 50-cent Army and Internet censorship, see “Peep Show”, an August cross-post on SSIR from Cause Global about online censorship around the world. 

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.

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A Technology Revolution for Revolutions!

In the good ol’ USA it’s no surprise to anyone that the Internet has transformed power dynamics. In some respects, it took the Internet to push out the old guard and bring in the new—and the first minority president in the history of our nation. Obama had four times the number of Facebook supporters compared to McCain.  He also had 24 times the number of Twitter followers and three times the number of website visitors to his site in the final weeks of the campaign. Voters watched 15 million hours of Obama video on YouTube and his campaign regularly emailed approximately 13 million people and received of course half a billion dollars in online donations. The Washington Post termed this the “YouTube Presidency.”

The revolutionizing of revolutions is not only an American phenomenon; it has quickly become a critical catalyst behind collective action throughout the world. Interestingly these Internet savvy activists are using tools not designed initially or intended for these purposes, but they are powerful tools nonetheless with regards to social action, labor action and really any kind of collective action. In its article, Revolution, Facebook-Style, the New York Times reported recently about how these Web 2.0 tools have been adopted for Jihad but also to protest dictatorial leaders in police states. As the Internet improves at exponential rates, so too will the way it is harnessed for the sake of power and influence. It will be used for forces of good and forces of bad. 

Similarly the Economist wrote recently about how online protest spontaneously emerged after the Greek police shot a young boy, facilitated by an online-enabled self-organization.

Activism does not only affect those in political power, but also big business. In 2007, the first virtual strike was organized in Second Life and caused IBM’s CEO of Italy to resign and the workers to gain better terms in their union negotiations.  See the video below.

IBM Virtual Strike

Labor strikes, PR scandals and government regulation are all examples of non-market threats that are recognized as a major business risk in today’s economy. Billions of dollars are spent in this industry every year. As the nature of this threat transforms itself and grows more daunting with the adoption of new social software technologies and the saturation of internet penetration, business will need to react. Social protest and advocacy is evolving at a similar pace as well threatening those in political power. They will need to embrace this phenomenon as quickly as those without power.

Existing tools and future Web tools yet to have emerged are not going to be used only for insurgents trying to overrun those in power: a tool for revolutionaries. They are utilities whose fundamental value is to help crowds emerge into organized campaigns deployed as a force by the organizers, be it those in power or those seeking greater influence.  However, because crowd-sourcing is most effective when voluntary, those businesses, organizations or governments looking to do so better be in the right. They better have such great products and such good policies that their supporters and evangelists are willing to hit the e-streets. One more point for democracy!

Lloyd is the founder of Blitz Bazaar, a social network and campaign-management platform for a new class of young, grassroots changemakers organizing in a networked society.  In 2002, Lloyd founded and directed HelpArgentina.org, a pioneering organization of the online giving marketplace model.  He is a Fulbright scholar, Stanford MBA and a Williams College undergraduate.  He has contracted for Prosper, Ashoka, Endeavor, the UNDP and the Inter-American Development Bank.  Lloyd grew up in New York City playing soccer, ice hockey and has been seen teaching tango to Stanford football players.

He’s starting Blitz Bazaar because “there is nothing more exhilarating than building an enterprise that changes the world.”

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Causefest

Inspired by a sharp rise in the number of Facebook-organized political protests and mass demonstrations this year in cities around the world, dozens of youth activists from the U.S. and abroad met today at Columbia University for Day 2 of the Alliance of Youth Movements Summit—a first-time gathering hosted by Howcast, Facebook, MTV, the U.S. Department of State, YouTube, Google, and Access 360 Media.

Selected panel discussions—featuring many of the young people who organized these various mass-scale marches and civic actions in recent months—are being streamed live here. “We noticed a rise of movements all using social networking to fight extremism, so we thought now would be the perfect time to aid and help build momentum for those using online platforms to catalyze social change,” said Summit co-organizer Jason Liebman, the CEO and cofounder of Howcast. “All of these groups arose independent of each other. It was time to come together.”

Organizers also are using the two-day event to form a new nonprofit to unite global activists and to create a field manual that can be distributed to others about how best to affect Web-driven social change. Updated drafts of the manual can be viewed here.

Among conference highlights so far:

• Oscar Morales, a young engineer and founder of One Million Voices Against FARC, a Facebook group, discussed his use of Facebook to organize what many have described as the largest demonstration in Colombia’s history. Morales told conferees his success has proven that social networking can be used to organize citizen campaigns against oppressive forces all over the world. The February 4 protest used word-of-mouth campaigns over Facebook to repudiate FARC guerrillas and turned out more than 1 million people on the streets of Colombia—as well as smaller groups in some 200 other cities across the world, from Berlin to Barcelona, London, Madrid, Toronto, Dubai, Miami, New York, and others. “The Feb. 4 protest was a big slap in the face to FARC, who saw that its ideals were no longer supported by the people, and many members of FARC then started abandoning the group,” Morales said. “...Digital platforms are a means to social liberties…We proved that the digitally connected few can connect the masses.”
• Juan David Lacouture, the founder of No Mas Chavez, a Venezuelan group that originated on Facebook to oppose Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s policies, said his movement “couldn’t have started anywhere but on the Internet.” The group, which has some 80,000 members on Facebook, staged a mass protest on April 11 that mobilized some 2,000 people to visit Venezuelan embassies in 25 cities around the world to call for an end to terrorism and corruption in that country. The protest also brought thousands of Venezuelans into the streets to call for change. “Facebook lets us stay in contact with friends, relatives, colleagues, and people from our past,” Lacouture told conferees, “and it also helps us to express ourselves and carry our messages to thousands and thousands of people.” When asked if extreme left-wing or right-wing groups should have the same access to Facebook to organize, Lacouture said: “I don’t believe anything should be banned online. If an idea is not strong enough and you expose it for what it is, then the idea can be its own biggest enemy. Oppression is sustained by those who would keep bad ideas in the dark.”
• Gemma Olway and Sharon Singh, both 26, organized The People’s March Against Knife Crime in London on September 20, which drew 6,000 to a protest rally and gained the attention of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, other politicians, and the media. The group, formed in July, started as a Facebook group. “We noticed a lot of anti-knife groups already on Facebook but we wanted to unite them to say that enough is enough,” Singh told a Summit panel.
• Elias Kuri, a cofounder of Iluminemos, organized an anti-violence march on August 30 that was joined by 2 million people in 88 cities across Mexico and in six other countries. Kuri said he organized the march at a time when many Mexicans were horrified by what was then the recent kidnapping and murder of 14-year-old Fernando Martí, the son of a businessman. “Does a march work to make change?” Kuri asked his fellow panelists. “We think yes because when people are angry they want to do something…The important thing was that we didn’t use traditional media to protest. We used the Internet, Facebook, emails, and people just went to the march. The authorities were sure we were going to fail. They didn’t believe the Internet could have so much power.”
• Dustin Moskovitz, cofounder of Facebook, said the 40-and-older crowd is the fastest-growing demographic using the social networking site, a plus for the spread of social activism in the United States and abroad. “We started four years ago as a youth social network and now we are fighting that stigma,” Moskovitz told conferees. “In other countries where Facebook is being used, the average age is 45 or 50 years. Our fastest-growing [age] demographics in the United States are 40-plus and we expect that to continue.” Moskovitz acknowledged that Facebook groups are still “somewhat limited” in their ability to communicate to very large audiences but said the company is working to expand that capability. He also said Facebook is working hard to discourage al Qaeda and other terrorist groups from using social networks to advance their ideologies. “We work with law enforcement in many countries and we are going to fight people who try to repress free speech all over the world,” Moskovitz said. “We already work to expel anyone using Facebook for hate and violence. You can’t organize an al Qaeda group on Facebook and expect us to keep it up for very long.” Moskovitz did acknowledge, however, that there is a “fine line between harassment and free speech” and told conferees the company is planning to hire more people to help it handle site monitoring.
• James K. Glassman, Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in the Bush Administration, commended Summit organizers for trying to create what he called “a giant global conversation about how individuals can oppose violence and extremism and stand up for universal values of tolerance, freedom, justice, and social change.” He said U.S. government officials have arrived at the notion that the Net is “the locus of civic society” and that governments which don’t use the Net to support pro-democracy movements at home and abroad face a greater risk of being ignored by the people they are trying to govern. “What we face today, these threats to liberty and security, cannot be overcome by governments, alone,” Glassman said. “Only popular opposition can turn the tide. The forces of oppression and terror have little support but they do intimidate and frighten people into inaction. The Internet is a tool that will help people to overcome.” Responding to a question, Glassman said he is confident that the incoming Obama administration will continue the State Department’s policies of “Web 2.0 diplomacy.” Said Glassman: “I would expect the new administration to take this new approach and expand it, and if they do expand it, I hope they also will provide the resources to do so.”

Check out the two videos released to conferees today—How to Smart Mob and How to Be an Effective Dissident. Watch this space for conference updates.

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.

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Peep Show

For cause-wired advocates this week, there’s been no missing the irony of China’s Olympic slogan, One World, One Dream. The aggressive push by China’s 30,000 cyber cops to continuously monitor and control the information that citizen advocacy groups are able to send in and out of China is only boosting the perception of this year’s Olympics as a qualifying heat for one of the biggest contests of the coming decade—the battle between an expanding, cause-wired citizenry and governments around the globe who would block the free flow of information. (For a comprehensive overview of the battle, click here.)

Indeed, like the athletes competing for Gold in Beijing’s Water Cube, China’s censors have wasted no time showing off their speed and muscle: their moves to censor Twitter, crack down on video-sharing sites (both YouTube and a Chinese version of it called 56.com), and make it hard (if not utterly impossible) to load some Web sites such as Human Rights Watch and Reporters sans Frontieres from inside the Foreign Press Center remain firmly (and predictably) intact as of today.

But what’s happening this week in China, despite the widespread use of beefed-up, anti-censorship software by those would not be bowed, is more than simply an internationally-broadcast dust-up over who gets the last word (or the first online).

Internet censorship is on the rise in many countries, partly a reaction by nervous governments to the rapid and growing use of social media by citizen activists around the world. John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, says there has been a surge in the scale, scope, and sophistication of internet filtering. In the past five years, he says, “we have gone from a couple of states doing state-mandated Net filtering to 25.”

But there’s another big reason for social-change advocates to pay attention to Net censorship. The issue isn’t just about the type and number of Web sites accessible to Netizens at home and abroad. It’s also about what a free flow of digital information enables people to do. Social media, unfettered, change the way people in society organize themselves to get things done. Such things as mobile phones, Twitter, video-sharing services, and social networking sites make it really easy for people to self-organize into groups from the ground up rather than to be organized by others from the top down.

New media expert Clay Shirky, the author of Here Comes Everybody, a new book on the impact of social media on society, says this Net-driven social revolution (with a small “r”) won’t be occurring at the expense of existing institutions (like governments or nonprofits, for example). But it could, he says, provide compelling alternatives that may, over time, weaken them considerably.

And that’s mostly what’s making officialdom from Beijing to Washington really nervous lately: this Web-enabled shape-shifting is already starting to happen. “Newly capable groups are assembling,” Shirky puts it, “and they are working without the managerial imperative and outside the previous institutions and structures that bounded their effectiveness in the past.” (Quick—remember that panel you missed at the last Net conference you attended about the waning influence of government? Odds are, they weren’t talking about George Bush.)

For now, the information war has no definitive winners or losers: Governments, as seen in China this week, are winning some rounds; citizen activists are wracking up other wins elsewhere, as in Burma during last fall’s Myanmar revolt and again in May, after Cyclone Nargis. But Net activists fear that sooner or later, governments could get the upper hand—and they’ve been using China’s Olympian censorship efforts to get everyone into the pool. (Amnesty International’s new Uncensor Web site named July 30 a Day of Protest against Net censorship in China. The Uncensor campaign is a joint fundraising effort with an Australian Facebook Cause group and organizers hope the partnership will last well beyond the Olympics.)

Not sure you’re ready to jump in yet? Go ahead. Re-read your mission statement. Take it global. Welcome to the war.

Reprinted with permission from Cause Global

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.

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