Recently, I’ve been particularly struck by the micro-communities that have been popping up during conferences, and the conversations that ensue via hashtags and @replies, and, as a result, I began to wonder how we could use those types of resources to continue the dialogue after those conferences and summits have ended.

This past August, I had the opportunity to travel to Japan for a 2-week seminar on Japanese and American remembrance / interpretation / commemoration of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  About 9 American students met up with over 30 Japanese students, and we formed small “peace families” of four, with whom we could discuss things more in-depth.  Even though there was no shortage of discussion with our peace families, conversation soon spilled over into the entire group, and spurred on by messages of taking action for peace (and nuclear disarmament, naturally), we were empowered to keep that discussion going, difficult as it may be at times.  If we can’t discuss those issues that we find so hard to bring up – the reasons for dropping the atomic bombs, for instance – how can we build a relationship of peace between our generations?

Enter Facebook. Once the two weeks were up, there was a mad scramble of friending on Facebook, and tagging of photos, but then things quieted down.  This was unusual, as we were never wanting for spirited discussion in Japan.

So I wonder: how can we keep these dialogues going? Social media, with its inherent immediacy and connectiveness, seems like the perfect outlet.  It is perfectly in place to take up those reins, spread the word and encourage action in a wider place than we ever could have imagined – in this case, cross-cultural collaboration on creating an international community of conscience.

So how best to create and facilitate this dialogue?  How do we use this framework of social media to promote action at home and abroad? How can we convince others through the sharing of our experience online?”

By 2011, the world population will reach 7 billion, one billion of which will be teenagers.  With this “youth bulge” comes great opportunity to seize upon the optimism and natural innovation of youth, aptly situated to tackle the world’s most pressing challenges.  Yet, without proper channels for meaningful engagement in society, we face a higher risk of conflict and instability – locally and subsequently globally.  Youth have notoriously been the driving force behind social change, but they are also amongst the first to take up arms or join populist movements.

In today’s world, we face what democracy scholar Larry Diamond poses as a “democratic recession,” with a rise in the number of failed states around the world and a degeneration of democratic systems that support free and open societies.  These threats of conflict call for fresh strategies both for democracy promotion and for youth empowerment.

Through the use of new technologies, youth have been able to open up political space in nearly every society around the world, no matter how closed. From Moldova’s Twitter Revolution, where they brought down the ruling Communist Party after years of terror and corruption to Iran’s Green Revolution to the ‘No Mas FARC’ movement that mobilized 12 million people around the world onto the streets in 200 cities using Facebook.  Technology is being used to create a broader platform for the citizens to see themselves as part of the political process and thus changing the way we perhaps define the democracy-promotion process. In essence, technology is democratizing democracy building, helping it shift from a traditionally top-down focus on institution building and elections to empowering local citizens to have a platform and an active role.  What’s more, it’s the younger generation who are at the forefront of using these technologies in groundbreaking ways and embracing these platforms, leaving us with a whole generation of newly engaged citizens situated to change the way we think about government.  With these platforms and the ability of the individual to express oneself in ways never before possible, it is hoped, that we can create the much needed avenues for youth to engage with society rather than add to its instability.

I’d like to propose a discussion that, fundamentally, is about the relationship between consciousness and conscience and social media’s (potential) roll in sparking both. It is one thing (difficult enough in itself) to raise consciousness about a given topic. Many people and institutions have become quite proficient at using social media tools to get people talking about important issues, and it is critical to start those conversations.

But it is another huge step to move from general discussion, and even expressions of emotion, on a topic to a personal investment—to something that breaks through the clutter of our inboxes and our everyday lives to really affect us. That, in essence, is when an issue becomes an issue of conscience—something that gnaws at us and compels us act.

There are two main areas I’d like to consider:

1) How to we take that leap successfully? How can we use social media to nudge people toward a personal investment in a social or eco-justice issue? How can we offer compelling narratives and information that equip people to fight injustice? What is the balance between trying to stir up a global movement and connecting people to local issues in their own communities?

2) Should we, as institutions or media producers, try to make this leap? What are the potential ramifications to our communities/audiences (visitors, users, etc.) and what are our responsibilities? Can we do so genuinely in 140 characters? How do we avoid causing fatigue and a sense of helplessness by dwelling on guilt or fear? And how can we deal with such emotions in a virtual environment?

I don’t have the answers to all of these questions, and I would be grateful to get some help thinking and talking them through.

Looking forward to meeting everyone on Saturday!

This session will be a look at the strategy of using online tools for social change.

I’ll be filling it with examples: How Kenyans in the midst of violent chaos used mobile phones to report attacks in real-time, ultimately helping to end the violence. How attempted revolutions in Madagascar and Moldova attracted the mainstream media’s attention thanks to constant online updates of people on the ground. How college students on MySpace and Facebook raised half a million dollars for Darfur.

Online tools comprising the “participatory web” offer groups a powerful way to empower supporters with ways to speak in their own voice. In the long-term, this means less focus on the organization and more focus on the movement, with individuals who know their voice matters and have seen the power of collective action. For museums and educational institutions, this may seem treacherous, but I believe it could lead these organizations to fulfill their deeper missions of social change.

Below, I sketch out some of the basic ideas for the session; I’ll leave the case studies for the presentation itself.

GRASSROOTS COMMUNITY ORGANIZING

One of the defining aspects of web 2.0 is social organization. People are constantly presented with their social circles in visual media: Facebook news feeds, MySpace top friends, Twitter updates, etc. In short, more people can see their network, in a much more literal way. This is especially true for young adults (currently Millennials) who might have social networks scattered across wide geographic areas and are less firmly rooted to a specific place through vocational, familial or other commitments.

Communities at the margins of society have always had a more visceral understanding of their social networks, which are often the sites of social change planning and strategizing — consider the role of black churches in the US civil rights movement, or gay bars and bathhouses in the early Stonewall era of the gay rights movement. So I don’t want to suggest that this phenomenon of a community visualized is necessarily new for everyone, but I think it is new for many folks in the mainstream of society.

The online “social web” — social networks and social media — allows people to organize their social connections, not simply to put them in order, but to connect and collaborate with others. Evite invitations and Facebook events are clear examples of this, as is Wikipedia.

Increasingly, the social web is teaching everyday folks how to be community organizers.

ORGANIZATIONS AND NONPROFITS: AMPLIFYING THE MOVEMENT’S VOICE

The question, then, is what role organizations and “professional organizers” (for lack of a better term) can play in this ecosystem.  The fact that more people are organizers, and that everyone can exercise leadership, does not mean that there is no role for the full-time organizer. Indeed, those with particular knowledge become more important than ever, passing on stories and lived experience, and sharing a pedagogy for cultivating new leadership. What fades away is the positioning of some people within a movement as “experts” to whom everyone looks for direction — and that has big implications for organizations.

Many nonprofits use social networks and online activism as a way to boost their membership rolls and donation levels. That seems less useful to me than focusing on empowering an effective movement — whether or not people donate to your organization or sign up for your newsletter. This isn’t to minimize the challenges everyone faces on how to support working for social change, both financially and emotionally. But it is to say that movements are bigger than any one nonprofit.

Only when the operational concerns are placed secondary to social change concerns do I see social change really being possible. It’s not a secondary outcome; it has to be the primary concern. And that’s true, in my opinion, whether you’re talking about online or offline social change.

What’s interesting is that this time around, there’s a significantly higher ability for activists to self-organize. The message to nonprofits from the past few years seems pretty clear: Stand in our way, and we’ll just go around you. The 2006 student walkouts for immigrant rights spread through MySpace without any “sponsoring” organization. As I explained in a presentation on social networks, when the Genocide Intervention Network first arrived on the scene, we found dozens of existing groups and networks already active — our objective was simply to connect them and provide them with effective tools for action. A participant in the protests over the Jena Six said, “I am so disappointed with the media right now. I live in Connecticut and I never even heard of this. Honestly if it wasn’t for Facebook, I still wouldn’t know.”

So the question really goes to the nonprofits and other groups using social networks and social media: What kind of social change do you want? And are you willing to help facilitate even if you don’t get credit/coverage/donations?

You need to let your supporters speak for you on social networks. The whole point of the social experience is the coveted “recommendation from a friend.” Forcing your members to send out only board-approved talking points won’t inspire much loyalty, and probably won’t be very persuasive to their friends. Nonprofits have to be willing to lose some of their message control in exchange for member loyalty and long-term movement building.

Further ideas on organizing and movement-building online:

• Finding the movement’s voice: Online social networks and social change (list of resources, including numerous blogs)
• Accountability Through Web 2.0: A Sudan Case Study (how “web 2.0″ could be driving a new model in “crowdsourced” high-level advocacy)
• Gurus Are Not Enough: A Call for Organizers and Organizing in Social Media
• Using Social Networks for Social Change: Facebook, MySpace and More

This paper builds on the limited body of quantitative work that has been done on how American religious institutions are using the Web.  It compiles data on how hundreds of different churches are using the Web and social networks such as Facebook to connect existing members and reach out to new members.  The focus of this work is not on “brochureware,” parish Web sites, mailing lists, and “Godcasts” that provide a one-way means for churches to broadcast information to parishioners.  Rather, this work examines how the Internet and social media are being used for many-to-many communication between parishioners and clergy.  This study reveals how the use of social media by religious institutions is influenced by the size of congregation and denomination. 

In addition to being used to foster discussion within a single church, social media are also being used to enable discussion between different faith communities.  Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affair has funded an undergraduate research project, led by Professor Michael Nelson and Sara Lichterman, a CCT graduate student, which is examining how social media can be used to foster interfaith dialogue.  While  the Bridging Bable project is only a few months old, early findings reveal both the potential and challenges of using Facebook and similar sites to bridge religious and cultural barriers.

Everyone in this group knows that we live in an age ever more cacophonous in it’s hypermediation. With so many messages, memes, channels, and platforms out there, many information peddlers and consumers feel more and more lost in the flood.

Correspondingly and perhaps paradoxically, with this new flood of information, groups like those we work for and care about have vastly more opportunity to share their work and the stories that drive them than in the past. Every institution, advocacy group and organization is now a publisher with a global platform and (potentially) massive audience.

Given these competing realities, my challenge to this group is thus:

In the era of social media, collaborative filtering and wiki-everything, how do we elevate the messages that matter above the Tiger Woods, Britney Spears and Cable News punditry of the world?

Put another way; how do we get citizens of the world the information they need, as opposed to just the information they “want”?

As an operating premise, I suggest we forbid ourselves from accepting a cynical view such as the broader public simply isn’t interested and we’ll never overcome fluff with the important stuff.  Cultural anthropologist Mike Wesch has  made the point quite ably that the distributed crowds DO GIVE A F@!K. I encourage you to check it out.

Also, for the purposes of structuring the day, I suggest that this proposal be grouped with Neal Johnson’s “The Impetus To Act” My reasoning for this being: If you A. Get the important messages to the public B. How do you make sure those messages have the tools needed to turn reception into action.

To get the creative juices flowing, here’s one tactic I’ve recently seen that worked to some extent:

- Work hard to find communities of tangential interest to your issue, and then push hard to break into them. For example, we have a “Conflict Minerals” campaign focused on the connection between illegal mining in eastern Congo and the violence that plagues that region. Because these minerals power many of our western consumer electronics, we’ve reached out heavily to the “tech geek” community, recently receiving coverage in Slashdot.

This fall, several students in a cross-cultural art and aesthetics class worked with a group of women that have recently immigrated to Waltham, Massachusetts to develop the first, “experimental” cell phone tour at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum. The women, students in a local ESL school, participated in several classroom sessions discussing some of the works in the Rose’s current show, and visited the museum twice to engage with the art and develop their responses and ideas, which they then recorded, in their native languages, as part of the cell phone tour.

Throughout the collaboration, the use of technology (such as a cell phone-based tour) and its ability to engage the women and their responses raised questions about the use of such technology as a vehicle for meaningful voice and agency at an (sometimes in accessible) institution, and in the educational process and engagement with the women. Our role as facilitators and people “in the know” at the Rose Art Museum raised questions about the transmission of knowledge, privilege and social positioning as it relates to developing and sharing knowledge at a contemporary art museum. I’m hoping to share the feedback from the women, some pieces of the tour, and address some concerns about accessibility that have been raised and either ameliorated or exacerbated by the experience.

At the Tenement Museum, we present the history of immigration to New York’s Lower East Side with the stated intention of using history as a tool to address contemporary issues surrounding immigration.  This mirrors the theory presented in The Presence of the Past that people look to history, or the past, for guidance in their daily lives and decision-making.  I find that visitors often get mired down in the powerful history at our site, begin romanticizing the past and fail to make a connection to the experience of contemporary immigrants or how this often polarizing policy issue is so extraordinarily relevant.  Can social media become an agent by which the museum fully realizes all aspects of its mission?  Can social media create and extend the museum as a safe space for dialogue and reflection about the complexities of contemporary immigration or other pressing social topics?  As manager of our young professionals group, I am especially interested in discussing how this demographic might be more meaningfully engaged in this and other conversations.    

Items for discussion:

Intersection of social media and social missions

Addressing controversial and political issues such as immigration in a neutral space

Creating a safe, complementary space where visitors can continue their exploration of issues addressed at the museum (including calls to action)

Engaging young professionals and encouraging dialogue and involvement – does this lead to membership initiative, fundraising, etc?

Challenges and obstacles to employing this framework

I would like to propose a roundtable to undertake the project of exploring social media’s potential for horizontal strategizing, desicion-making, and acting.

In order to explore this potential, we first need to interrogate the ways these communities reproduce existing zones of privilege and modes of domination and oppression as well as how they may create new ones.

By rooting these questions in the practices of the groups, institutions, and organizations we are all working with, I hope we can develop a strategy (and an ethic) of solidarity for the ways we participate in and employ social media and its tools for instigating change.

With the help of The National Archives and the US Holocaust Museum, Footnote.com digitized and published nearly 1 million Holocaust documents and photos in October (http://go.footnote.com/holocaust_records/).

In 15 minutes I’ll share a brief overview of how the project was done, issues encountered and show samples of content and contributions.

Some questions that will be addressed:

• Who is looking at Holocaust records what are they doing with them?
• With open and free access to these documents, has there been and abuse from contributors? How is abuse handled?
• How are new relationships between content partners (institutions) and platform providers like Footnote, Flickr and Google, etc working? Are these new partnerships resulting in a privatization of history?
• How are new interfaces to digitized content changing the traditional ideas of historical content and the role of institutions or researchers?

By drawing on recent experiences and research we will attempt to identify some near-term opportunities for private and public institutions in this dynamic and networked media environment.