Why should we behave politely, act respectfully or show good manners?, it asks. Because it it matters, comes the answer from the site called, appropriately, Because It Matters.net

For the citizens of southwest Florida, civility matters because it improves quality of life by increasing civic participation, civil discourse and social capital. The Gulf Coast Community Foundation of Venice, Fla. offers these simple keys:

– Respect others
– Think positively
– Pay attention
– Make a difference
– Speak kindly
– Say thank you
– Accept others
– Rediscover silence
– Listen
– Keep your cool

Because It Matters is an old-fashioned site that many would consider low-tech, simplistic and overly earnest. The ten keys to civil behavior is a code of conduct that might be taught in grade school — something that the politicians and pundits here in Washington might understand.

I am excited to announce the launch of a new project that we are calling WeThink.

What is it? WeThink is a conversation about innovation and the future — an effort to explore new ideas and promote solutions to the challenges that our society is facing.

What’s the big deal? If you follow our work here at all, you’ll know that We Media is a movement – a concept – that helps explain how we know what we know, who we trust, and how we learn. It’s about power of the community. We Media is part of the infinite quest to harness the power of media, communication and human ingenuity for common good. And, well, We Media changes everything.  We Media changes the way we innovate.  We Media changes how we create, sustain, and grow successful ventures. We Media enhances the structures, models and economies that support human communication, interaction and achievement.  And through that, We Media challenges us to review our existing ways of operating, break apart our established structures, and re-build our approach to the future.  These changes impact all of us, and they are forcing each of us to find new ways of thinking about… well, everything.

What are you talking about? I have this crazy idea that we need to re-think the way we create, support, and sustain ventures.  We need to re-think how we innovate.  What we are doing isn’t working anymore – not as well as it should – and we need to try something different.  That means re-considering what kinds of companies and organizations are needed today, in response to the massive changes we are seeing in our society as a result of the influence that technology and the internet are having on our culture.  That means re-structuring how ventures, both for-profit and social in nature, are funded and managed.  That means re-assessing what success looks like for new companies and organizations, as well as re-considering how we measure progress of existing organizations against our needs in society.  And that means re-building the whole infrastructure of innovation… from how we teach it, promote it, cover it in the media, what skills we value, who gets to serve as gatekeepers, and more.

How will it work? Over the next year we will collect and share new ideas, highlight different approaches, ask tough questions, and propose solutions. We will lead a new and different kind of discussion about innovation. Everywhere we go we will be looking for new issues to discuss and new ideas to consider.  Everyone we talk to or encounter is invited to contribute their experience or perspective to help power this effort.  And all those ideas and suggestions, approaches and solutions will be shared.  They’ll be posted online.  They’ll be open to feedback.  They’ll be mashed up with other thoughts.  At the end of a year, our plan is to pull together a ‘solutions book’ that helps to support, and sustain, a vibrant and game-changing discussion going forward.  The rest we will figure out as we go.

The first few ideas and questions will be posted in the next several days.  So, stay tuned — the fun is just beginning.

Net-enabled social tools have enabled new models for grassroots activism and community building, and they have changed how we function in society — how we communicate globally and locally, how we form ties and how we organize and connect. What’s tricky about deploying social media today is not access to the technology, but the knowledge of how to deploy it across multiple platforms.

Meanwhile, social networking is getting down to business. Organizations across all sectors seek to harness Web 2.0’s intense consumer engagement and reach.

Download the report – Part 1 (PDF)

Download the report – Part 2 (PDF)

Social Citizens BETA is a paper commissioned by The Case Foundation in early 2008 to help bring attention to the ways that young people are using new, social media to affect social change. The notion of young people as “Social Citizens” comes from the intersection of several elements: the 70 million plus Millennials or Gen Y (15-29 year olds) who are the largest living generation and having a quiet but profound impact on society, the panoply of social media tools in which they are fluent, and a culture, as I wrote in the paper, that is marinating in social causes. This combination results in an enormous number of idealistic, passionate, active, digitally fluent Social Citizens who are changing the world one Tweet, one ping, one Facebook update, and one political campaign at a time.

Download the report (PDF)

Ushahidi, which was named a “Game Changer” at last year’s conference, is utilizing digital mapmaking technology and social media to map and verify vital information in Haiti. Ushahidi plots key information on a Google map of Haiti: makeshift hospitals, locations of survivors and people still trapped and reports of unstable bridges. The map helps rescue workers locate and track of survivors, as well navigate the dangerous landscape of destruction.

The Extraordinaries, one of two winners at the Pitch It! Competition at last year’s conference, applies facial-recognition technology to finding missing people in Haiti. Since we first posted about them last week, our friends at The Extraordinaries have worked around the clock with the State Department on a coordinated technology effort to support relief efforts in Haiti. From its Earthquake Support Center, accessible by computer and the mobile Internet, The Extraordinaries’ facial recognition technology enables relief workers and family members to match faces of missing persons to images from news reports across the Internet.

“We’ve had over 31,000 image tags submitted by thousands of people, in three days,” founder Jacob Colker told us. “ We’ve also had over 640 searches queried by families looking for missing loved ones. NBC, ABC, CNN have all run stories about our efforts.” Watch the videos.

The project has also spawned a stream of information from users in the Extraordinaries growing social network of volunteers.

From a situation room at Tufts University, ten Ushahidi volunteers are working 24/7 finding, evaluating and posting relevant information on digital maps. The maps are categorized for emergencies, threats, logistics, and missing people.

Information submitted to the site via outside users are checked by the volunteers to ensure legitimacy (posts designate whether information is verified on unverified). Patrick Meier, Ushahidi’s humanitarian response and crisis mapping specialist, told the MIT Technology Review that the process could be automated in the future by the group’s Swift River platform, a predictive tagging, program that will try to cross-validate crowd-sourced information by comparing reports from texts, Twitter, news feeds, YouTube and other sources.

Like The Extraordinaries, Ushahidi has set up as social network, Crisis Mappers Net, which has become a communications channel for state departments, NGOs, and people in the technology and public health sectors. Ushahidi is also collaborating with Instedd’s GeoChat, another map-based communications platform working with the Emergency Information Services (EIS).

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Anyone can post photos of a missing person or loved one, tag and sort images for matches in a database, and deploy facial recognition software (coming) to make a match.

The UN Climate Summit revolves around whether or not the world’s national governments can agree to goals, rules and meaningful collaboration to prevent the planet from overheating. The climate story involves science, statistics, economics, business, finance, diplomacy, governments, laws, politics – a perfect storm of journalistic complexity married to the dark arts of spin and power – with monumental consequences. More crudely, I’m also curious about what’s really going on in Copenhagen. A two week conference? Seriously?

The climate talks are important. So is the public’s understanding of them.

What’s extraordinary about the news and views coming out of this year’s climate summit isn’t that they are social, multimedia or online. Of course they are. That’s expected.

But we’re also seeing, clearly and on an unprecedented scale, the chaotic and competitive clash of interests among our news and knowledge sources. Meaning: Among ourselves. Murdoch vs. Google, or vs. Sulzberger, is quaint, and the old bloggers vs. journalists trope from the earliest We Media debates seems like baby talk compared to the Dupont vs. Coke vs. Greenpeace vs. GE vs. Microsoft vs. Save The Child vs. Guardian vs. News Corp. vs. Chevron hailstorm that’s raining down on us from Copenhagen this week and, soon enough, from everywhere about everything. Now it’s everyone vs. everyone.

Copenhagen illuminates the rising tide of everyone as media – We Media in its deepest, most difficult sense – and the challenge and responsibility we’ll face to curate and judge the truthiness of news as fog – enveloping us in a shroud of data, images, stories, information, misinformation, disinformation.

With the exception of Google, the connected society isn’t shaking out or slowing into something stable, predictable and manageable. Our systems are not resolving around a small set of institutions that will dominate the others, and us. It’s exploding into something expansive, radical and challenging – a roiling kettle of voices, interests, angles, interpretations, recommendations. Some may be bigger, some louder, some better financed, some familiar, some obscure – but they’re all in there, boiling.

Take a tour of assorted signals for news, information and commentary about what’s going on in Copenhagen this week. Take your pick first from your favorite news providers, whoever they are. You could, for instance, get your fill from The New York Times, The BBC, The Guardian, or get closer to the action with Denmark’s Politiken. Want news with a green tint? Try Treehugger, Grist or 350.org. Or get a blogger’s perspective, or follow #cop15 updates on Twitter.

It turns out the universe of news and knowledge is expanding. This is encouraging and should give hope to out-of-work journalists, idealistic journalism students and news doomsayers who think the downfall of traditional media means the downfall of news. It doesn’t. The breadth of choices and voices reveals the scale of investment possible around news and knowledge – and also how news and knowledge is inextricably linked with movements, causes and advocates for actions that could bring about positive changes for the world.

But they also reveal the caution, care and critical judgment we’ll need to apply, as individuals, to ensure we trust our new information partners, and the wide-open field for innovation that might help us precipitate the fog of news into a narrower stream of knowledge.

Here are four other outposts that, when considered as a group, illuminate the expanding universe of news.

• Hopenhagen: Sponsored by the UN itself, funded by Coke, DuPont and other corporate partners, produced by Participant Media (the company that brought you Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, with, at last count, more than 1.8 million online “votes” for a successful climate conference. It’s also nearly identical to …
• tcktcktck: Claiming 11 million + signers of a different memo urging world leaders to do something “ambitious, fair and binding” about climate, and funded by 200+ partner organizations, such as Greenpeace, Amnesty International, World Wildlife Fund and Union of Concerned Scientists. Despite the different coalitions of backers, the similarity to Hopenhagen is striking. Both sites have the obligatory Facebook and Twitter streams and background briefings on what the Copenhagen conference is all about. Both sites are offered in multiple languages. Both present the story of Copenhagen as a call to action.
• The Climate Pool: This is a curious experiment in global, social news distribution, albeit entirely in English, orchestrated by 20 news agencies, including The Associated Press, Agence France-Press, The Canadian Press and Russia’s Rianovosti. It consists entirely of a page on Facebook, where stories from all the partners stream for easy sharing and discussion by anyone who declares themself a Fan of the site. (Disclosure: The AP is a strategy client and a global partner of iFOCOS. But I wasn’t involved with building this particular experiment). It’s a news feed – something you might cobble together on your own with an RSS reader, with the added value (and ugliness) of being within Facebook. The Climate Pool illustrates a more social and collaborative approach to news distribution – far less obsessed with the brand or destination web sites, more obsessed with aggregation from multiple sources, and distribution and conversation through social networks.
• Consequences by Noor: Rather than drawing attention to the people and action (and carbon footprint) of the climate summit, photo agency Noor tries to tell the story of climate itself through a series of visual essays produced by a world-class team of photographers. The subjects include: a massive pine beetle kill in British Columbia, genocide in Darfur, the rising sea level in the Maldives, Nenet reindeer herders in Siberia, Inuit hunters in Greenland, a looming crisis in Kolkata, India, coal mining in Poland, oil sand extraction in Canada and the deforestation of the Amazon Rainforest by Brazilian cattle ranchers. Sponsors included Nikon, Greenpeace, Oxfam and the Press Photographers Association of Denmark. The work was also featured in a series of photo galleries published by MSNBC.com, where I first saw it. Here social networking and chatter take a back seat to traditional values that have become rarer in a world of perpetual status updates – and shrinking investments in news: craft, viewpoint and images that convey the weight of change. For all the glitz, calls to action and social verve of Hopenhagen and tcktcktck, this speaks to me most clearly, most poignantly.
]]> http://wemedia.com/2009/12/15/copenhagen-the-future-of-news-has-arrived/feed/ 4 http://wemedia.com/2009/10/28/hyper-local-media-the-4th-branch-of-gov2-0/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=hyper-local-media-the-4th-branch-of-gov2-0 http://wemedia.com/2009/10/28/hyper-local-media-the-4th-branch-of-gov2-0/#comments Wed, 28 Oct 2009 22:53:54 +0000 Ben Berkowitz http://wemedia.com/?p=4744 SeeClickFix has been sitting in the cross-hairs of two very hot buzzwords recently: Gov20 and HyperLocal.

Both movements are being brought on by the great disruptor that is the Interwebs and both movements are faced with similar questions: What does it mean to have more participants? What value do those participants have and is the value of the original participant (journalist and public official) compromised by greater participation?

At the intersection of Gov and Media is Media’s responsibility to hold government accountable.  The way that responsibility is enacted shifts as Media is forced to be more resourceful and Gov is forced to be more transparent.  As the organism of traditional media is weekend financially by the growth of on-line news one of Journalism’s key functions, being a check on government,  faces a disruption as well. When more and more reporters are losing their jobs how can media properties maintain their function as a 4th branch of government?  Less Journalists means less people doing the investigation and collecting the news. This means that if media wants to continue to hold gov accountable they have to stay resourceful.

Below is a case study of how SeeClickFix is being used by Hyper Local Journalists to maintain their role in a Gov20 world.

Our Partner Doug Hardy, at the Journal Inquirer, has been using a SeeClickFix Pro account to acknowledge and track issues like speeding, downed power lines and unsafe pedestrian areas in the Hartford, CT region. Not only does the Journal Inquirer embed the SeeClickFix map, but Doug also follows up on issues himself and makes sure that they are being listened to by officials.

The Journal Inquirer introduced SeeClickFix to much of the Hartford region adding a layer of accountability to local gov that previously did not exist. Doug now uses the citizen reports to scoop stories on issues like traffic safety and other community concerns.

This kind of accountability has more back-up than a pen and a delivery route though. Doug’s new posse is a crowd of users that can speak and vote publicly on the issues he is reporting. Doug can not only report on the issue but he can display the raw data of citizen voices on SeeClickFix.

In East Hartford, CT it appears that this new form of accountability is quite effective at creating fixes. Doug was kind enough to let me post his article(The Journal Inquirer is participating in another experiment: a Paywall) on East Hartford and SeeClickFix below.

SEECLICKFIX: Problems getting solved in East Hartford
By Doug Hardy
Journal Inquirer
Published: Monday, October 26, 2009 11:52 AM EDT
Some good things have been happening as a result of your reports on the SeeClickFix portion of the Journal Inquirer’s Web site. Three issues have been solved recently in East Hartford, where Mayor Melody A. Currey and public works personnel have taken an active approach and decided to monitor SeeClickFix for your reports. This is a good thing for everyone, as you’ll see below.

“EH Citizen” reported that there has been a deer crossing sign covered in graffiti for more than five years on Oak Street near Farnham Drive.

“It’s an eyesore and you can’t even see the photo on the sign in an area where deer often cross to access Porter Brook. Is this fixable?” EH Citizen wrote, adding that the town had been notified years ago but the sign had yet to be scrubbed clean or replaced.

Fortunately, the East Hartford Public Works Department has built its own watch area on SeeClickFix — which you also can do for free if you want to get involved in solving problems in your community. Within 15 days of reporting the graffiti online, EH Citizen returned and posted this message: “Thanks so much this issue has been fixed. The sign was replaced and looks great now! Thank you!”

You can thank East Hartford for being on the ball. We didn’t need to ask on your behalf. Meanwhile, across town at Main Street and Silver Lane, the pedestrian crossing signal was reported to be too fast, leaving slow-moving folks at risk.

“For pedestrians and bicyclists crossing Main Street at Silver Lane, the time from when the icon turns white and the audible beep starts is barely 10 seconds,” ROC wrote. “This is a wide street, and even on a bike you barely make it. This traffic light should be lengthened so people can cross without fearing for their lives. It’s called a crosswalk for a reason, should favor the crosser.”

After suggesting that the state Department of Transportation be contacted directly, within about a month ROC reported that the signal time had been lengthened appropriately. Kudos for your effort, ROC.

A third issue that was closed in East Hartford was reported by Bob Hobbs — a dead tree was menacing the power lines on Bodwell Road near Burnside Avenue. He provided a photo. Hobbs posted the issue directly on East Hartford’s Web site — which is always advisable if you want anything to get done — and got a response from Public Works Director Billy G. Taylor:

“The tree is privately owned,” Taylor wrote. “Consequently, the town cannot simply lawfully remove it. Under authority given to me by town ordinances, I sent a letter to the owner of record ordering the tree’s removal. The letter has just been returned by the USPS marked ‘undeliverable.’ Having never removed a tree on private property without delivering the owner the notice required by ordinance, I do not know what authority I have to remove it. In any case, the Public Works budget is insufficient to allow removal of trees on private property and I do not have the authority under the town charter to overexpend the budget.”

So no progress there. Town records list three names on the property card, but I was told all three were renters.

Then we got some help from Jon Searles, an East Hartford resident whose brainflation.wordpress.com blog describes him as both a concerned citizen and chairman of the 6th District Committee of the East Hartford Republican Town Committee. He also is a Town Council candidate in the municipal election.

Searles either reported the tree directly to Connecticut Light & Power himself or he found an existing report. He provided a report number for CL&P’s Web site, and we then found that the utility company visited in September and noted that the tree was “overhanging the lines,” But the report then said, “RESOLUTION — No Trouble Found.”

Based on that, it didn’t look like CL&P was going to take action.

But about two weeks ago — and after more than 20 comments and e-mails between residents, town officials, and myself — Hobbs reported that the tree had been cut back and the lines were no longer threatened.

Somone had taken it upon themselves to chop off the top of the dead tree. Whoever you are, thanks for helping to improve the community.

Doug Hardy is an associate editor of the Journal Inquirer. He can be reached at dhardy (at)journalinquirer.com or 860-646-0500, ext. 305.
This is a true testimony to the magic of a system that allows for open communication and collaborative problem solving around public concerns. You can really see how media, industry, government and private citizens can work together to improve their communities:

]]> http://wemedia.com/2009/10/28/hyper-local-media-the-4th-branch-of-gov2-0/feed/ 0 http://wemedia.com/2009/09/16/onewebday-a-toast-to-the-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=onewebday-a-toast-to-the-net http://wemedia.com/2009/09/16/onewebday-a-toast-to-the-net/#comments Wed, 16 Sep 2009 21:13:23 +0000 Andrew Nachison http://wemedia.com/?p=4282 The internet is a wondrous anomaly, a technical and creative achievement grander than the Tower of Babel, an infinite tangle of knowledge, ideals, data, entertainment, beauty, trivia, terror, news, noise, hubris, despair. It’s a cultural blender, a mixmaster archive crammed with visions, twits and everyday things.

I’ve been thinking about the net, and its vastness, in anticipation of OneWebDay on Sept. 22. That’s an informal, loosely organized global celebration of the World Wide Web. This year the organizers are trying to focus attention on policies that can make the web available to more people. You can find a variety of events, meetings and parties in cities around the world, or organize your own, on the OneWebDay web site.

This year I’m supporting the effort as a OneWebDay Ambassador. I hope you’ll find a local event, chime in, or simply think about whether OneWebDay makes any sense. I’d like to know what you think of it.

Me?

OneWebDay, if it matters, can raise awareness of important policy issues – like Net Neutrality and the Digital Divide – that aren’t on most people’s minds every day. If the only people who care about OneWebDay are the ones who already care about those issues, then the day is pointless.

The name of the day itself has me thinking about the paradox of the networked culture. The web is hardly unified, the people who use it certainly aren’t, and as much as our assorted digital networks may connect us, they also divide us. I’m not sure I’d want it any other way.

I love the web and the idea that we may use it to carve a path toward a better future for more people. I also love the competitive market that has encouraged entrepreneurs to imagine new uses for the web, some of which may be part of the formula for a better future.

But I don’t know that the web will get us there – or, really, that the web, one for all and all for one, is as worthy a cause as earth, or Earth Day. Some days I need to turn off the web, tune out, drop out. I never feel that way about the planet – and don’t need a special day to think about it.

OneWebDay is a paradox. The web seems boundless, endless, limitless, but really it’s just vast, overwhelming and confusing. It doesn’t know everything, or everyone. It doesn’t go everywhere. Some people don’t use it, billions can’t, and while that’s a tasty social and business challenge for policy- and market-makers, it pales against life-or-death challenges like lack of clean water, hunger and infectious diseases – all of which are symptoms of what economist Jeffrey Sachs calls extreme poverty – the deepest, most desperate kind of poverty. I’d like to see amazing wireless broadband networks everywhere – but not before there’s a decent water supply, shelter, food, vaccines, education and peace on the ground. I don’t want the web to be used for better war reporting. I want it to be used to stop wars.

Maybe a better, faster, cheaper, vaster web will help us achieve these things – I’m encouraged by projects like Charity:Water and Twestival; by code-saavy activists like those from the Sunlight Foundation, which uses technology to shed more light on how government works; and by daring, on-the-ground digital media makers like those from Witness, who use video and photography on the web to document and oppose human rights abuses.

Yet the web, so vast already, deep in insight, full of promise, also churns in a great race for dominance and control. So, today, Google dominates online search and advertising built around it; Paypal dominates online commerce and transactions; Facebook dominates social networking and photo sharing; Twitter dominates microblogging; and governments vie for control of the Internet itself – and access to whatever anyone may say or do with it. Key telecom companies and governments dominate the unseen wires and fibres that pump all our data from one place to another, and devices that can monitor and filter what we say, what we see.

The net is at once open and vast as well as closed and constrained by physical limits, economic inequities and unseen forces.

This paradox of the net is at the heart of a movement of policy and tech activists who have been talking about the Digital Divide since the early days of the web. The divide, rarely mentioned in business settings, is about haves and have-nots, and in the digital culture access to the network is a bright line of political and economic division, much like access to clean water, education or a safe, secure home. In the U.S. and other developed countries, access of some sort is now widespread – at least 63% of adult Americans had some sort of broadband at home in 2009 – and that’s far less than the 95 percent who have access in South Korea.

Where ever you live, the quality of your web access – in terms of speed, convenience, freedom and the sophistication of users – remains unequal. China has the world’s biggest online audience, but the Chinese Internet, like other forms of media, is monitored and controlled by government censors. Twitter may have helped us keep up with riots in Tehran this summer – but we’re hearing less now about the trials and punishments of arrested protesters. I’m thinking about them as OneWebDay approaches.

The genius of the web has always been the hyperlink – the way we point from one idea to the next. That simple notion, coded 20 years ago into a language that both computers and people can understand, spawned a torrent of technical and social innovation – truly a creative explosion that not only redefined business and culture but gave rise to a new canvas for creativity itself. The slogan of the blogging platform WordPress captures that spirit: Code is Poetry.

I’m thinking of OneWebDay in those terms, as a vast experiment in collaborative art. Artists help us understand the world, challenge perceptions and shine light on our inner lives, on the most personal and subjective perspectives of the human experience. A few are celebrated. Most toil in obscurity. In some ways it feels like the web has turned us all into performance artists. Some of us know it, some don’t.

Seen in that light, OneWebDay seems well worth a toast. Its promise remains limitless. I can’t wait to see what’s next. The Digital Renaissance has only just begun.

]]> http://wemedia.com/2009/09/16/onewebday-a-toast-to-the-net/feed/ 0 http://wemedia.com/2009/05/08/how-about-world-press-freedom-every-day/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=how-about-world-press-freedom-every-day http://wemedia.com/2009/05/08/how-about-world-press-freedom-every-day/#comments Fri, 08 May 2009 14:34:41 +0000 Andrew Nachison http://wemedia.com/?p=4012 There’s a media and technology feeding frenzy in Washington. Failing U.S. newspapers are looking for a bailout from the government; nonprofits, telecoms and policy wonks are scrambling to have their say and get their piece of the economic stimulus action – a few billion dollars – to expand broadband networks AND create more content and services to justify it. Talk about sharks and chum. Meanwhile, in case you missed it, Bizjournals reported on the poorest and wealthiest cities in the U.S.. It takes seven families in Camden, New Jersey, to match the median household income of one family in McLean, Virginia. A 25-year-old war in Sri Lanka is said to be winding down – but the government there won’t let journalists into war zones to see for themselves. So we observed, quietly, fleetingly, remotely, another World Press Freedom Day this week. One day of freedom and remembrance for the dead seemed somehow – sad? prophetic? – against years of decline, layoffs, bankruptcies. Who’s on the local freedom beat in your community? Simple question, no? Makes you wonder why the world’s press doesn’t champion freedom every day. Ah, right, because some days there’s other business to attend to.
]]> http://wemedia.com/2009/05/08/how-about-world-press-freedom-every-day/feed/ 0 http://wemedia.com/2009/04/29/the-new-connectedness/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-new-connectedness http://wemedia.com/2009/04/29/the-new-connectedness/#comments Wed, 29 Apr 2009 18:25:31 +0000 Brian Reich http://wemedia.com/?p=3979 Technology and the internet have given us greater control over our own media experience – what information we get and share, how we spend our time, and to whom we are connected.  We are more diverse as a society, more informed as individuals, and more involved as communities.  So what?

This morning I read a column from Media Post about Heather and Mike Spohrs, whose daughter, Madeline, passed away suddenly of respiratory syncytial virus, complicated by her premature birth just 17 months earlier.  My wife, Karen Dahl, and I spent a couple of hours the other night, after reading about their story on a blog, reading the twitter updates and blog posts that detailed Madeline’s illness and watching videos and slide shows remembering her short life.  My wife cried.  I ran upstairs to look in on our 17-month old son, Henry, who was sleeping, and put my hand on his back to feel him breathe, just because I could.


The column was about marketing, but the larger message was that social media gives us the power to change the world — something we have been talking about in the context of WeMedia for years.  But more than anything, social media reflects the way we are as people.

As the author, Kristi Faulker, noted:

Let there be no more doubt that the on-line community is, in fact, a community in the truest, human sense. Social media is the uber-gathering space — better than a beauty shop, supermarket, diner, church, pub, firehouse, school, and town square rolled into one. The scale of Facebook or Twitter is global. Yet, when a human story touches our hearts, we react as intently as we would to a crisis in our own neighborhood.

But she also identified a major challenge that comes up in the context of marketing, and really how organizations communicate generally:

As marketers, we seek to quantify the power and penetration of nascent social platforms. What percentage of the target audience is engaged in Twitter? How many women 34-55 are on Facebook? How many eyeballs does this blog get compared to that one? And for heaven sakes, what’s our ROI?

Too many organizations look at social media only as a tactic, another channel, or an opportunity to expand their relationship with the audience for the purpose of increasing sales.  All of those things are true about social media — these new tools and communities that form through them have seemingly unlimited potential from a branding and marketing standpoint.  But if that is your only focus, or your only understand how what social communities online represent, you are missing out on quite a bit.  And by missing out, I mean you are failing to recognize the reasons why people join these communities in the first place, what their expectations are for how the companies and groups they engage should act, and their desire to have an impact in the world that is larger than just one purchase or action.  Not only will that limit what you can achieve from a branding and marketing standpoint, in short time, it might take you out of the conversation completely.


When I forwarded the column to my wife, a nonprofit professional and part-time marketer, she wrote back “If only more companies did TRUE good things to take advantage of the communities they could SERVE instead of just using their ‘good’ deeds to SELL stuff to us. We’re not just connected, we care and we’re not idiots who can’t see through to the true intentions.”

As usual, Karen said it better than I ever could.

Take heed marketers (and everyone else) – you have more tools and opportunities available to you in a connected society than ever before, but more is expected of you as well.  Everything about how you operate, communicate, educate, engage, and activate people must change.  You must change as well, on the inside.  Don’t believe me?  Keep doing what you are doing… I’ll be here waiting when the audience figures you out.

]]> http://wemedia.com/2009/04/29/the-new-connectedness/feed/ 0 http://wemedia.com/2009/04/28/yenza-the-voice-of-inspiration/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=yenza-the-voice-of-inspiration http://wemedia.com/2009/04/28/yenza-the-voice-of-inspiration/#comments Tue, 28 Apr 2009 18:56:34 +0000 Yvette Sierra Praeli http://wemedia.com/?p=3827 Czerina Patel is an inspiration. She spreads energy when talking about Yenza, a project about connecting people, building awareness and supporting change. “Yenza means ‘make’ or ‘do’ in Xhosa and Zulu languages”, said Czerina. She returned to work in South Africa -her birthplace- after a radio journalism career in New York.

“Czerina explained that believes in the power of giving people a voice, and that this is essential to making democracies work.

When we meet at We Media Miami 2009, her project reminded me of how many people and communities need to express by themselves in Latin America; they need a voice in their efforts to built a democratic world.

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]]> http://wemedia.com/2009/04/28/yenza-the-voice-of-inspiration/feed/ 0 http://wemedia.com/2009/03/14/the-girl-effect/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-girl-effect http://wemedia.com/2009/03/14/the-girl-effect/#comments Sat, 14 Mar 2009 16:49:22 +0000 Dale Peskin http://wemedia.com/?p=3835


My daughter Amanda took the above photo in Nepal. The picture on the right is of my new granddaughter, Elizabeth Jane. I thought of them as I discovered The Girl Effect, a project from the Nike and UN Foundation that stunned global leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

The big idea: unlocking the potential of adolescent girls in all parts of the world could have tremendous social and economic impact.

Two flashpoints for the consideration of every father and grandfather: (1) For every development dollar spent, girls receive less than one-half of one percent. (2) A woman or a girl will reinvest 90% of their income on family, a man 30-40%.

The Girl Effect is the powerful change that occurs when girls have the opportunity to participate in their society. Starting now, “Learn, Change, Share” joins the lexicon of We Media’s “End of Apathy.”

Watch the video that is spreading the story.

]]> http://wemedia.com/2009/03/14/the-girl-effect/feed/ 0 http://wemedia.com/2009/03/05/what-makes-us-rich-an-agenda-for-smart-capitalism/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=what-makes-us-rich-an-agenda-for-smart-capitalism http://wemedia.com/2009/03/05/what-makes-us-rich-an-agenda-for-smart-capitalism/#comments Thu, 05 Mar 2009 19:26:56 +0000 Dale Peskin http://wemedia.com/?p=3752 At last week’s We Media Miami conference we introduced an agenda for smart capitalism in the New Now. Our economic stimulus package: reboot capitalism with a fresh look at people, outcomes, connections and creativity. We also presented a better balance sheet for companies and organizations to express their stories and report results.



20th Century capitalism was dumb: unfairly distributed, mortgaged and borrowed, destructive to communities, toxic, shallow, filled with air, and ultimately unsustainable. It came crashing down in the lost, first decade of the 21st Century.

21th Century capitalism must be smarter. We must grow and create a new economy by making capitalism attainable, equitable, resilient and sustainable. To achieve this we must make all citizens smarter, healthier, happier, and wealthier. Capitalism must be accessible to all. We believe that media, technology and a connected society – the Power of Us — are the mechanisms for change. Our agenda:

Income to Outcomes: Economics that merely measure financial numbers represent a weak story. We’ve learned the hard way that it’s the wrong story: a misleading mythology, except to the quants among us. The new story: tangible human outcomes and an authentic value proposition. The right outcomes drive the new income. The old question: Are we richer today than we were yesterday? The new question: What makes us rich?

Transactions to Connections: Creating a marketplace for transactions is so 20th Century. Control access, distribution and flow of goods, services and information. Thrive by dominating or controlling the channels. What happens when almost everyone has their own channel, their own marketplace, or free and immediate access to one? The flow becomes the currency. The quality of connections becomes the differentiation. 21st Century capitalism is powered by the quality of connections. The goal is not merely to trade, but to amplify connections and community, co-create and collaborate.

Products to people: Dumb capitalism is powered by capital seeking the lowest cost of production. It disappoints with products and services that meet the lowest expectations – or unrealistic ones — or occupy the shortest shelf life. Smart capitalism empowers people to seek the capital to create, invent and innovate. It rewards skill, dedication, execution, craftsmanship and service – people investing in people.

Productivity to creativity: Creativity is hard to measure, manage and model, so the quants focus on productivity instead. The result is dumb: we’re producing more and more of the same stuff and its worth less and less. Smart capitalism focuses on economic creativity, because creativity establishes new value, instead of just shifting the old value around. So smart growth is creative, not merely productive.

Many We Media participants embraced the agenda, which has brewing for some time. Leaders attending the World Economic Forum in Davos addressed these and other ideas with considerable disagreement. Several participants at We Media, as well as members of the We Media Community, have suggested that the original agenda was extreme.

We’ve modified some of the original language at We Media for clarity of intention. For example, “outcomes, not income” has become “income to outcomes” as a way of expressing the transition from dumb capitalism to smart capitalism, rather than implying — either incorrectly or inadvertently – that income no longer matters. Of course it does; as capitalists, we’re all for income. The point is that in 21st Century capitalism, income will derive from tangible, human outcomes. The same thinking applies to the transitions in transactions/connections, products/people, and productivity/creativity.

We’re looking to the creativity and connections of people for more advanced outcomes around the agenda. Send us your thoughts and ideas. Smarter is a better choice than the dumb legacy we’ve been given.

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