Media Maven: Mobile Matrix of Change Presentation 9/17/09
4th Annual Media Maven Lunch: Mobile Matrix of ChangePresented by Lauren-Glenn Davitian, davitian [at] cctv [dot] org
September 17 2009
See:
http://delicious.com/lgdavitian/strategiccommunications
http://delicious.com/lgdavitian/npvt
1. Summer Reading
http://www.goodreads.com/
- Digerati mathematical profiles that quantify human behavior used to predict participation in public life and consumer culture.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digerati
Alistar Cooke dispatches on foundational events of the 20th Century
http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/C/htmlC/cookealista/cookealista.htm
How to Raise $10,000 with Email
http://www.madelinestanionis.com/writing_email_book.html
Musicophilia by Oliver Sachs, reports the foundational effect of music on our brains
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPRW0wZ9NOM
Two Stand Out:
Every Man Dies Alone - Hans Fallada -
resistance in 1943 Berlin against Hitler in the form of 168 post cards.
The Otto and Anna Quangel of Fallada’s novel are stand-ins for real-life Berliners, Otto and Elise Hampel, a working-class couple who conducted a postcard campaign for more than two years at the height of Hitler’s power, after Elise’s brother was killed in the war.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/books/review/Schillinger-t.html
Most recently, Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirkey
I'd heard him speak at the NTEN conference but did not get around to the book until now
http://socialreporter.com/?p=516
http://blog.ted.com/2009/06/clay_shirky_how.php
2. An Event that has Already Happened
Have you noticed the explosion of social media workshops in and around Burlington alone?
We are in the midst of what Malcolm Gladwell describes in the "Tipping Point" connectors + sticky idea + moment in time are converging
Clay Shirky advises us not to look at this as "technological change" but an event that has already happened.
What is that event? Today's internet/ media convergence lowers the cost of coordinating group action.
In this period of time, all businesses are media businesses.
What does that mean for us? As citzens and community leaders it means we have to rethink how we do business.
The Trust Agent guys (Chris Brogan and Julien Smith) agree that we are in a revolution where media extends the reach of human relationships, but remind us that, with the exception of the broadcast age (100 years old), we've been talking in small groups for thousands of years.
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/thinking-about-trust-agents/
Relationship building is what we know how to do, in all of us in this room are "connectors" with a larger than usual number of contact: that is deep ties within our communities of interest and geography AND across groups - because it is when we reach out of our groups and cross-pollinate that we are able to come up with new ideas and ways to do things.
3. The Architecture of Participation
Clay Shirkey spends his book describing what Tim O'Reilly calls the "architecture of participation"
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/articles/architecture_of_participation.html
The "Former Audience" (Dan Gilbert) are now Producers
Controllers of the flow of information must now shift to Convenors of communication.
Those of us who are so good at building social capital in the real world
can now extend our reach and influence if
we become adept at building social capital in the online world.
In this way, we gain the capacity to convene and move groups from:
sharing to collaborating to collective action a/k/a
shared awareness, shared creation, shared responsibility
attention, awareness, influence
This becomes possible when the tools become transparent - no longer worry about how it works and we are able to make it extend our reach and influence.
Examples:
The Iranian Election - An overview of the social media tools and filters that brought you the news.
http://mashable.com/2009/06/14/new-media-iran/
Nonprofits Healthcare and Social Media
http://www.slideshare.net/kanter/nonprofits-healthcare-and-social-media
Souktel - Changing Lives one Message at a Time
Souktel is a combination of two services -- JobMatch and AidLink. The name comes from "souk," the Arabic word for "marketplace," and "tel," or "telephone. Although at least 80 percent of people in Palestine have access to mobile phones, most people have Internet access only in cafés or public places, said Jacob Korenblum, co-founder of Souktel. "Getting information about medical care, jobs, and food bank services can be difficult," Korenblum said that at least 2,000 people use the service each month and the service has about 8,000 total users. In the past year, JobMatch has connected about 500 people with jobs. Users tend to be between the ages of 18 and 25, and the system recently expanded to include internships and volunteer opportunities. In June, about 170 people found jobs using Souktel, but the service’s success is partially reliant on the economy.
Engaging Constituents with Mobile Polling -http://mobileactive.org/howtos/engaging-constituents-mobile-polls
Mobile Focus on Africa http://www.mediafocusonafrica.org/portal.php
Prior to the Kenyan elections in December of 2007, the Media Focus on Africa Foundation (MFAF) asked its constituents some tough questions.
Should politicians accused of corruption be prevented from vying for political seats? Is tribal identity more dominant than the identity of being a Kenyan? Can voting still deliver credible results after the chaotic party nominations and bribery? The questions were advertised on television, radio shows, and newspaper advertisements. Thousands of Kenyans responded to the polls via SMS on their mobile phones, helping to bring issues of voting and civic participation into the national conversation.
MFAF advertised the polls on a talk show, a youth program, a popular drama series, the Internet, and on twice-weekly full-page ads in a national newspaper. The group also sent out SMS messages with the current week’s question to people who had responded to the poll the previous week. According to Linda de Kooning, a media consultant at MFAF, the objective of the polling campaign was to make the television programs more interactive and use the responses as input for upcoming shows.
Rapid Response
http://mobileactive.org/areaofpractice/Health
http://www.rapidsms.org/case-studies/
RapidResponse is a m-health platform built on RapidSMS developed for the Millennium Villages Project with support from the UNICEF Innovation Group. RapidResponse uses SMS text messages to facilitate and coordinate the activities of health care providers in the field. These are usually lay community health care workers who tend to provide the majority of patient care in many developing countries. Using simple text messages, the community health workers are able to register patients and send in health reports to a central web dashboard that allows a health team to closely monitor the health of a community. Powerful messaging features help facilitate communication between the members of the health system and an automated alert system helps reduce gaps in treatment.
Other examples: Emergency Response in Somalia, Tools for Commmunty Health workers, Nutritional Surveillance in Malawi, Famine Food Distiribution Management in Ethiopia
The tools become revolutionary once they become commonplace.
When the tools become transparent, revolutionary things can happen.
This means we can expect great things from the next generation.
4. What Digital Youth Have to Teach Us
All of this made me think about young people and the media ecology that they live in, which is different from those who are older.
Their habits of mind and practice are necessary for us to understand if we want to understand how the future is going to play out.
danah boyd completed a three year study for MacArthur and has a great deal to tell us about this next generation and how to interact and work with them.
http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/book-conclusion
Contemporary social media are becoming one of the primary “institutions” of peer culture for U.S. teens, occupying the role that was previously dominated by the informal hanging out spaces of the school, mall, home, or street. For most teens, social media do not constitute an alternative or “virtual” world (Abbott 1998). They are simply another method to connect with their friends and peers in a way that feels seamless with their everyday lives (Osgerby 2004).
Friends Count: The central drive for youth media behavior is "friendship". The fact that these friendship-driven practices are so widely distributed in youth culture functions as a driver for a kind of bottom-up universal-access agenda. See: http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/book-friendship
The Range of Media Tools: Youth produced media: These include personal and amateur media that are being circulated online, such as photos, video blogs, web comics, and podcasts, as well as derivative works such as fan fiction, fan art (http://www.fanart-central.net/), mods, mashups, remixes, and fansubbing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fansub).
Collaborative platforms such as gaming used for killing time (http://www.neopets.com/) hanging out and, often, working together Final Fantasy http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/index.shtml
While teenagers have many choices when it comes to which media they use to interact with one another, two large social network sites—MySpace and Facebook—captured the imaginations of millions of U.S. teenagers in the years 2004–2007. Not all teens frequent these sites (Lenhart and Madden 2007), but social network sites became central to many teens’ practices. This form of networked public allowed broad peer groups to socialize together while other social media such as instant messaging (IM) and mobile phones allowed teens to interact one-to-one or in small groups. All of these tools can be used for a wide variety of different purposes, but what we witnessed during our study was that the dominant practices for most youth were friendship-driven and exhibited the genre of participation that we have described in the previous chapter as “hanging out.”
Shape of Communications: Although the underlying social values may be shared intergenerationally, the actual shape of peer-based communication, and many of its outcomes, are profoundly different from those of an older generation. We found examples of parents who lacked even rudimentary knowledge of social norms for communicating online or any understanding of all but the most accessible forms of video games. ....It is important to note that these kinds of engagements do require parents to invest in some basic learning about technology and media, and we believe issues of differential participation and access may be just as important for parents as they are for kids.
Implication for Public Life: Just as amateur sports leagues are predicated on a broader base of participation than professional sports, hobby groups and amateur media production lower the barriers to active participation in networked publics. At the same time, kids can still find role models and heroes in these smaller-scale networks, but they are much more accessible than the pros, where the aspirational trajectory is distant and inaccessible. Success and recognition in these niche and local publics can be tremendously validating, and they mark a pathway toward a more civic and participatory stance to public life.
While this is something that requires additional research, we believe that some of the most promising directions for encouraging online civic engagement begin from youth-driven bottom-up social energies, an ethic of peer-based reciprocity, and a sense of communal belonging, rather than from a top-down mandate of adult-directed civic activity.
More robust public debate on these issues that involves both youth and adults could potentially shape the future of online norms and literacies in this space in substantive ways.
"Participation Gap" - A digital-divide agenda focused on technology access does not address what Jenkins and his colleagues (2007) have called the “participation gap.” The more complex and socially contextualized skills of creating digital media, sharing information and media online, socializing with peers in networked publics, and going online to connect with specialized knowledge communities require both high-end technology access and social and cultural immersion in online worlds (Seiter 2007).
Informs the work we do and also the work YOU do: Ongoing, lightweight access to digital-production tools and the Internet was a precondition for participation in most of the networked public spaces that are the focus of attention for U.S. teens.
Examples: (Above)
5. Network Solution: Common Good Vermont
Of course this had me thinking about our work at CCTV and, in particular, our most recent undertaking: Common Good Vermont.
Common Good Vermont (CGVT) is a people and web-based network that enables community and non-profit leaders to access their collective knowledge, build partnerships, solve problems and achieve long term social benefit for the people of the state.
We have to be able to answer the questions:
You do this through the ideal combination of Promise, Tools and Bargain
What can we accomplish together?
What is the best way to get it done?
What's in it for you?
During the spring meetings road trip to nine communities, we talked to more than 300 board, staff and consultants and we identified key issues of the sector to guide the program design:
- nonprofits and their staff/ board are highly connected across geography and sector
- we rely upon each other and our national networks for technical assistance and know-how
- time is limited and it is sometimes hard to know who to trust outside regular networks
- there is a demand for reliable and trusted knowledge, vetted resources, tools, advice that is easily consumed
- nonprofits feel that board effectiveness and sustainability are two of the key issues facing the sector
- there is a need for convenors (who cross networks) to strengthen ties within AND across networks (after all that's where all the best ideas come from--and makes emergence possible).
- face to face networking opportunities are esteemed, these are considered to be the "highest bandwidth"
http://www.cctv.org/news/common-good-vt-road-trip-results
This said to us that we were on the right track with the original proposal: Common Good Vermont (CGVT) is a people and web-based network that enables community and non-profit leaders to access their collective knowledge, build partnerships, solve problems and achieve long term social benefit for the people of the state. Back to
The Promise - your modest participation will make it better for everyone--you'll strengthen your ties, open your network and improve your "know how"
The Tools - use filtering and ranking tools that tame the fire hose of news and information
The Bargain - your modest contribution of time will result in a resources that is more valuable than the sum of its parts
Familiar Tools: We have to begin with familar tools:
List Serve - Common Good Vermont Group
http://groups.google.com/group/common-good-vermont?hl=enThe name of the game is now filtering:
Social Media Tools:
http://www.facebook.com//CommonGoodVT.org
And start to think about how we can reach out to those who take mobile use for granted:
Broad Texter - Alerting People
http://www.broadtexter.com/
Tagging and Filtering: And address this issue of trusted, easy to consume resources through tagging and filtering:
Alltop News - http://nonprofit.alltop.com/
Socializer - Aggregator of Social Bookmarks
http://ekstreme.com/socializer/
Social Stream
http://www.hcii.cs.cmu.edu/M-HCI/2006/SocialstreamProject/socialstream.php
http://www.hcii.cs.cmu.edu/M-HCI/2006/SocialstreamProject/Socialstream_demo.mov
Google Wave
http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html
Rapid Response: And provide easy to use tools that enable collaboration and collective action:
Yes Men - Group Event
http://www.facebook.com/search/?q=yes+men&init=quick#/group.php?gid=2503816463&ref=search&sid=559266393.1349151360..1
http://newyorkbigevent.com/
Tweet Funnel - Coordinating Social Networking
http://www.tweetfunnel.com/blog/twitter-uses/twitter-news-organizations-journalists/
6. Wrap If your head is spinning that's a good thing.
But let's remember: At the core, relationships remains our business.
Let's close with a little bit from Seth Godin:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/07/index.html
The future belongs to those who take the present for granted - Clay Shirky