-One project I am particularly interested in sharing- started today. I am the lead on an online workshop titled: The Reckoning: Understanding the International Criminal Court. We have over 700 participants signed up from over 70 countries. The workshop will allow interaction of participants with the films’ producers, scholars, Facing History staff, NGO workers and a variety of educators from around the globe. We will also be joined by special guests.  In addition to having the filmmakers with us for the duration of the workshop, we will be joined on particular days by the following: Ben Ferencz, Bec Hamilton, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, Doc Miller and John Bellinger III. You can join the site at www.reckoningworkshop.ning.com.

Facing History has an international online course, an ongoing online environment that connects students in Rwanda to students in Massachusetts (part of an ECA grant), and is planning another international student discussion in the spring around voting.

I think what could possibly be an interesting session is if I show some of these international online learning environments and we have a discussion around the following:

• What factors do you need to consider when opening an online learning opportunity up to a global audience?
• What are some challenges and how can they be addressed?
• What are some benefits of going global with online learning?
• How might we think of sharing best practices and combining learning and resources?

Among the many challenges facing institutions of conscience is the question of best methods to engage and mobilize a global constituency to raise awareness, learn and investigate facts, modify behavior and take action in order to prevent genocide, promote human dignity, etc. I am particularly interested in the role that mobile devices can play in such efforts. Because they are highly individualized, intimate, globally ubiquitous, and mobile, cell phones offer exciting opportunities and challenges for institutions of conscience.

It is now common knowledge that mobile devices are among the three objects which most people carry with them wherever they go. They have become indispensible to modern modes of communication. So-called smart phones are expected to make up the majority of the market by 2012 or 2015 in the USA (depending who you ask). Most people are already aware that mobile technology (combined with social media) has played an important role in human rights movements from Egypt to Iran to China as well as the United States, usually because the technology allows users to easily photograph or video capture events and upload to the Internet for a global audience. In addition, mobile apps are emerging that leverage volunteer efforts to tag photographs, provide data quality assurance, and contribute to or promote various campaigns via social media.

This session proposal seeks to explore how institutions of conscience can best exploit the unique qualities of mobile devices to raise awareness, promote action, and affect behavior change in a global constituency. Questions for exploration include:

1.
Because mobile devices are (were) originally designed for personal communication, what are best practices for institutions to use them without violating the personal space of constituents? What challenges and opportunities does this highly individualized and intimate technology present for institutions of conscience? What, if any, is the potential for creating a sense of connection, intimacy, and belonging?

2.
What opportunities for contributions of user-generated content are unique to mobile devices? What challenges do they present? What opportunities do they present?

3.
Mobile devices collapse our physical reality. We can “be” in multiple places at once, wherever we are. What are the implications of ubiquitous communication? Does this open opportunities/pitfalls for institutions of conscience? If so, what? For example, there was much discussion about the implications of becoming “a fan” of Auschwitz on Facebook. It just sounded odd. Are there implications for our particular institutions as we engage people in other highly personal, informal, and often unpredictable settings?

4.
As social media (Facebook and Twitter in particular) integrate with mobile devices, what opportunities for instantaneous and viral action emerge?

5.
Many venues have already demonstrated the potential of mobile devices and social media like Twitter and U-Stream to create blended virtual and live events. In a world where this capability is increasingly in the hands of the end-user, what potential is there for institutions of conscience? Can such content be readily integrated into Augmented Reality via mobile? And how can we exploit the immediacy of such content without sacrificing our reputations for authenticity and authority?

6.
Finally, how can mobile technologies best be leveraged to facilitate communication, understanding, and a sense of shared obligation between people in communities around the world?

On college campuses, LGBT groups, members, and their allies, are using social media such as Facebook and Twitter to communicate with each other, mobilize for events and rallies, and send information about homophobic speech and activities on campus.  At Virginia Commonwealth University, LGBT student groups have staged counter protests, organized very quickly to attend rallies, contacted each other to attend LGBT events and activities through social media.

Questions:

1. How can LGBT groups and their allies use social media to better mobilize, communicate, and prepare events on campuses and in college cities?

2. How can these groups use social media to conduct outreach and get the word out on events and activities to those not in their groups?

3. How can LGBT groups make better use of social media to educate allies, supporters, and others about their causes, events, and activities?

4. How can these groups connect to other organizations that teach tolerance and inclusion, work with issues of diversity, and conduct conferences and programming?

Over the past five-years my teaching and scholarship have been pre-occupied with the role of digital archives in post-conflict societies across sub-Saharan Africa. Much of my work focuses on the intersections between architecture, social justice, and human rights on the Internet. I have been working with the Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum, a small community-based museum in Soweto, South Africa, to help build a multi-media digital archive of their holdings, Soweto ’76 (http://www.soweto76archive.org). This work seeks to redress the role of women in the struggle against apartheid – particularly those women about whose historical agency we know so little.

There is the promise of new digital technologies, in particular the Internet, to promote a social justice and human rights agenda when coupled with the conservation of historic sites and heritage resources. The web allows marginalized groups to harness media rich tools for the retelling of traumatic events while promoting dialogue on pressing social issues. Through the creation of new community-based multimedia archives, the much needed documentation and preservation of these long silenced histories is becoming more widely available to a global audience.

The connection between archives and social justice is nowhere more apparent than in post-apartheid South Africa. Memory-keeping and archival practice remain highly contested despite the last decade-and-a-half of democracy and the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). For many, the TRC failed to adequately address the social, political and economic needs of its citizenry and instead sought to advance a more sanitized history of past events for the emerging “rainbow nation.” Archivist Verne Harris best describes the difficult transition (occurring between 1948 to 1994) from apartheid to democracy in Archives and Justice (2007). Harris writes, “Under apartheid, the terrain of social memory, as with all social space, was a site of struggle … in the crudest sense it was a struggle of remembering against forgetting, of oppositional memory fighting a life-and-death struggle against a systematic forgetting engineered by the government.” In Soweto, growing concern over the preservation of documents related to the liberation struggle of the 1970’s against apartheid has spurred new theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical questions over the making of web-based archives for local community-based township museums. I maintain that African digital archives can help to interrogate the conditions where life histories of human rights violations circulate, by examining those conditions for their “emancipatory potential and their capacity for instituting dialogical forms of historical consciousness between the testimony donors and possible communities of witness” on the World Wide Web (Feldman 2004). In developing a theoretical framework, Anna Everett’s recent work, Digital Diasporas (2009), is suggestive of the emancipatory potential existing in digital technologies. Digital technologies can act as mediators for those “other” communities of knowledge that have remained marginalized as the result of South Africa’s failed truth-telling policies, particularly for women.

Through an “ICT for liberation” I am seeking to understand the values and assumptions embedded in both the technology, and the community served by the technology (ie. the digital tools being developed, the use of interactive multimedia websites, etc.). Here I draw on the work of Michael L. Best, who has developed an interactive website for Liberia’s Truth Reconciliation Commission coupled with a model of community-based work with members of the Liberian diaspora in Atlanta.

Soweto ’76 seeks to address the ways in which the creation of new digital tools and archives can help to foster a social justice-based agenda for marginalized communities, particularly those in South Africa’s former all-Black townships. Soweto ’76 is a dynamic multi-media extensible web interface and toolset for the detailed study and conservation of historic resources in South Africa, using electronic multimedia to collect, preserve, and represent the stories and digital records of those students who took part in the Uprisings of 1976. Unlike other projects, Soweto ’76 seeks to link those struggle narratives with the physical spaces and places of under-recognized historic sites. The proposed interface may be used by other archives to help create a larger cultural heritage platform for historic resources across South Africa. We have already developed a “proof-of-concept” for a geospatial interface for Soweto ’76 and are currently in the midst of developing a three-dimensional, historically authentic model of the protest march route whereby users can access archival resources from its database. Soweto ’76 challenges our understanding of memory and the role that virtual heritage can play in providing justice and reconciliation. In the near future, we hope to develop Soweto ’76 into a collaboratively edited, peer reviewed, online database of historic sites related to the anti-apartheid movement.

Questions to consider:

Can digital technologies on the internet promote a truth and reconciliation process in post-conflict societies?

Can “websites of conscience” effectively promote a social justice and human rights agenda? How is that measured?

Is it even possible to portray the lived experiences of others through the Internet in a manner that is truly respectful of their personal narratives while also advancing a true reconciliation process?

What constitutes archival and memory-keeping practices in post-conflict societies?

How do we engage community in the archival process in post-conflict societies?

How do we develop new archival practices, research, and education that embrace diverse and/or long marginalized communities?

Proposed Session Summary: It’s the holiday season after all, and instead of a cookie exchange at the un-conference, I propose an idea exchange.  My session will be a time when we stop to think about the nuts and bolts of how Museums and Non-Profits use social media – sharing our own organization’s best practices as well as best practices we have seen, listening to other people’s great ideas, and networking with each other.  I will facilitate the session (provided the un-conference organizers will give me a flip-chart and markers, or a projector for my laptop), using the items below as a loose agenda of topics (please comment to add to the list of topics).  Attendees should bring plenty of ideas (and business cards!) to share.  After the session, I will take the ideas we discussed, formulate them into a presentation (that we all can – hopefully – make use of!), and distribute to the participants.

 Proposed Time: 90 minutes (but I would settle for 60)

 Proposed Format: Roundtable brainstorming discussion with marker/flip-chart (or equivalent), led/facilitated by Julie Brubaker, to discuss the items below and generate ideas and best-practices. 

 Proposed items/topics (please comment or DM me at BrubakerConsulting@gmail.com to add additional topics to this list):

1.  ORGANIZATIONAL PLACEMENT.  Where should the responsibility/ownership for social media reside in the organization so that the organization is successful in today’s technology environment?

•  
  • What is the role of a Museum CIO/DIT related to social media?
  • What is the role of a Museum marketing/PR leader related to social media?
  • How much does an IT department support when it comes to social media?
  • Who creates and governs the strategy for how to use social media to get your institution’s message out successfully?
  • Who creates the messages?

[It seems to me that no person wearing only one hat can do this – I think that it takes a village, to be successful.  But where do we find the time, the energy, the creativity?   How can we make it work?]

2.  STRATEGICAL ITEMS.  What are the best practices related to strategy and goals for how Museums and non-profits should use social media?

•  
  • What are your goals for social media usage and how are these goals achieved at your organization?
  • What is the return on investment (investment of money, time, resources) for social media usage?
  • What is the strategy for social media at your organization
  • What strategic themes are best practices (i.e. 1-way vs. 2-way communication, etc.)

[I wish every organization had the money, time, and resources that the Smithsonian has for strategic planning around social media (see http://smithsonian-webstrategy.wikispaces.com/Strategy+--+Themes).  But knowing that we don’t, what can/should/must we do now?]

3.  OPERATIONAL ITEMS.  How are Museums using social media effectively and efficiently?

•  
  • What platforms (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, LinkedIn, Wave, etc.) are used successfully and what are not?  Why?
  • What is the content, frequency, tone, and intended audience of the messages?
  • What are the best practices for mobile technology (related to social media)?  Web?  On-site/kiosk?  Etc.
  • What metrics are valuable and how should they be presented?
  • What policies are valuable? (see http://socialmediagovernance.com/policies.php?f=0)

4.  MAKING THE BUSINESS CASE.  How can we convince our colleagues, donors, sponsors, and directors that we should use social media, that we should use social media differently, that we should use more social media.

•  
  • Define today’s common objections and roadblocks
  • Define responses to objections and roadblocks

[Take a look at http://smithsonian20.typepad.com/blog/2009/03/web-t.html first so we don’t reinvent the wheel during this session]

5.  MORAL and ETHICAL RESPONSIBILITY.  When we use social media, what moral and ethical obligations do we have to our collections and to the public?  How can these coexist while allowing for free speech and also ensuring that the collection is properly represented?  How much time do we invest in this effort?  Should we edit the content? [I’ll share my story of curators vs. administrators during the creation of www.eol.org]  Anyone have experience with http://www.steve.museum/ (or similar) on this topic?

6.  GREAT IDEAS.  Discuss great ideas we have seen in action (we might need to complete this online together, after the conference).

•  
  • Partnering with vendors for publicity, in-kind support, etc.
  • Partnering with other organizations
  • Creating apps (see http://mashable.com/2009/09/03/facebook-good/)
  • Creating a revenue stream from social media
  • Funding for social media & projects (grants, etc.)
  • What else?

7.  RESOURCES.  Network with each other.  Create a list of websites that are good resources (perhaps together online, after the un-conference).  [I frequently use http://smithsonian-webstrategy.wikispaces.com/Strategy+--+Themes, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTJ8u2HGtrs, and http://socialmediagovernance.com/ ]

Iran Election 2009: First Real Time Revolution that simultaneously showed the brutality of the State while demonstrating problems of Mass Media delivering multiple and simultaneous (and some incorrect) messages. How Did Social Media help change the media message and what was the result?

Using the 2009 Iran Election as a case study in real world, 24 hour Internet tools and platforms fomenting change and encouraging open spread of news, information and Truth.

Three major questions:

1. Why were social media tools such powerful instruments of change?

2. What happens in real time Internet exchanges where veracity of identification is paramount and there are known intelligence agents penetrating these networks with specific intent to cause harm?

3. In 24 hour real time age, what should be shown, and or archived and what should be discarded?

What did we learn from this recent demonstration of the true power of social media tools in unleashing both people’s voices and the Truth.

How can educators tap into social networking as a legitimate, innovative educational tool?  Policies vary between states, as well as districts within states, between public and private educational settings and children who are home-schooled, regarding responsible use of internet tools.  Legal liability, in addition to well-founded concern for the welfare and safety of students in a school’s care, barricades all but the most basic access to the internet in most schools.

As a public school teacher and USHMM  Museum Teacher Fellow, I grapple with my own access to resources in the classroom, including everything from e-mail to images, twitter, facebook, and youtube,  as well as how to support other teachers in myriad contexts with the same concerns.  In designing curriculum for the interactive installation, From Memory to Action: Meeting the Challenge of Genocide, this concern has been important, particularly as it pertains to students writing and following through with their post on the pledge wall and accessing saved data online. 

This dilemma also has created roadblocks for supporting online networking for after school activities, such as our STAND chapter.  How do we create an online presence when most districts prohibit/discourage teachers from sharing an online presence with students (as stated above, with reasonable cause)?

Regarding the institutional side of this discussion, I like Dan’s posted question as a topic:   “How can the design of these online presences reflect the responsibility and liability of the organizations and their members?”   In this setting, a conversation between designers and users could prove fruitful. 

Looking forward to hearing thoughts and ideas!

I’ve been to unconferences and barcamps before; in fact, I’ve run a few myself. But judging from the content on this site, and given the problems using this Wordpress installation, I’m worried that a week from now, a bunch of well-intentioned people are going to be scratching their heads wondering what we’re doing in DC for a Saturday, and we’re going to spend most of the day of the unconference trying to hammer out some common purpose, instead of pursuing that common purpose, because so far the organizers of this event haven’t been very clear about what is going on.

To wit, as best as I can tell from reading the posts on the site, there is no “convener” of this unconference. Who is curating the participants and the content frame? It’s a complete mystery to me.

Second, as best as I can tell, there are several staffers from the Holocaust Museum who are interested in getting feedback on their ideas for incorporating social media into their work–be that membership development or interactive features of the exhibit experience–who have posted session proposals. That’s all well and good, but based on their proposals I’m being led to think that this “unconference” is more like a way for the Museum to get a bunch of free/smart (those two words may not belong together) advice and feedback about how to proceed with its social media efforts. Some of the other proposals posted look like they’d be very useful in an academic discussion of social media and social change, but are they appropriate for this day? Will we be invited to apply the “vote with your feet” rule of unconferences and leave or avoid sessions that don’t interest us? (And again, that gets me back to to the “who is the ‘us’” that are coming question.)

I see two problems that need addressing. First, someone from the Museum really needs to step forward and more clearly project a frame around this encounter. Who is coming to the meeting and why were these attendees selected? What are you concretely hoping to get out of the day?

Second, we need some clarification of what it means to you to “use social media for social good.” Which social good are you hoping to focus on? Here are some possibilities:
-the social good of raising money for the Museum
-the social good of improving the Museum’s web presence
-the social good of engaging Museum visitors in doing something about genocide and racism
-the social good of getting more traffic to the Museum’s website
-the social good of opening up the Museum’s processes to a more collaborative, open and participatory approach (in tune with the way the web is empowering individuals to be co-creators of meaningful content and action)
-the social good of connecting people to each other in positive dialogue
-the social good of enabling people to directly confront racism where they encounter it (online or off)

Personally, I am most interested in learning about how the internet is changing institutions with a social mission, like the Holocaust Museum, and also in discussing how we should think about the problem of racism and anti-semitism online–where both hate speech AND positive speech is easier.

I’m sorry if this post injects some frustration into the work of the people planning this meeting, but I’d much rather be a fly in the ointment now and have a better event a week from now, than say nothing and suffer…

Micah Sifry

What do we mean by “action”?  There are more than a dozen entries in the Dictionary.com definition of the word. Two of them stand out for me:

ac-tion [ak-shun]   -noun

–An act that one consciously wills and that may be characterized by physical or mental activity.

–The causation of change by the exertion of power or a natural process.

So how do we effectively promote “conscious acts of mental or physical activity” in those who merely read, listen, or watch social media and are content to shake their heads in silent sympathy? How do we enable those with leadership skills to take charge and “cause change” in the context of technology-mediated social participation scenarios?

The great 19th century journalist, women’s rights activist, and transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller, once said, “Today a reader, tomorrow a leader”. I will introduce the Preece/Schneiderman “Reader-to-Leader Framework” (http://aisel.aisnet.org/thci/vol1/iss1/5/) which posits four potential levels of social media participation: Reader, Contributor, Collaborator, Leader. The framework is designed to model a problem whereby achievement of strategic goals for user participation in collaborative media exercises is limited by our ability to influence users to participate at increased levels of responsibility and activity. And most relevant to our problem as purveyors of collaborative technologies, Preece and Schneiderman describe potential usability and sociability factors that may exert positive influence on users to engage with the collaborative media at increasingly higher levels.

After introducing basics concepts I’ll engage in a discussion of how the framework might be used to analyze our collaborative media efforts, set measurable performance goals for our social media programs, and extend the model with domain-specific usability and sociability factors.

Looking forward to a fruitful meeting of the minds!

Neal Johnson, Intranet Manager, National Gallery of Art

Hello, everyone. My name is Dana Weinstein and I’m the Membership Director at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. I’m very much interested in exploring and dialoging about the integration of social media into our membership program – specifically, from a fundraising standpoint. Potential discussion areas are:

What does a member brought in by social media outreach look like compared to a traditional membership donor? Demographics. The average direct marketing responder is in his/her 70s; what does a member brought in by social media look like? Initial giving potential. Will the social media fan/follower make a donation, and if so, how much will he/she give? Long-term profitability. How often, and in what amount, will the social media member donate?
What kind of stewardship/Membership levels should exists for a social media donor? Should there be a special type of membership for someone brought in by social media outreach (different or the same as traditional members?). Benefits. How do we reconcile new membership type with traditional membership benefits (lapel pin, certificate), since data collection is different (might only have individual’s email address)? Should a member brought in by social media receive specialized benefits, such as Applications for smartphones with Curator’s Corner, podcasts, Twitter, Facebook bundled package or “First Look” at new exhibitions/collections via ushmm.org

Should a non-money fan or follower be considered a type of member? Conversion. How do we convert a non-money fan or follower to a member?

How should success be measured? What are appropriate metrics? Expectations. What are acceptable expectations for “social media members”? Growth of #’s? Donate $? Recruit others? Spread org’s message? Is monetary component necessary for success? Is it even realistic to have financial goals for social media recruitment? Are some metrics more important than others and what do they tell us? (i.e. on Twitter—what’s most important? Click thru rates, RT’s, # of followers)

What should the fundraising communication and touchpoints be with them (fundraising-wise)? Ongoing dialogue/Communication stream. What is appropriate # of times to ask for monetary donations?

Data collection/accuracy concerns. Database. Crucial in traditional fundraising. Post office verifies and systems out there to find members who move, etc. Social media is self-reported. Accuracy? What happens when email/account changes? Cross-channel. How to find if living in other parts of organization database to integrate messages? Data Capture. How to capture more data to share across databases? Does it make sense (with differing demographics) to have universal database?

What’s Next? What happens when one media falls out of fad? And another one comes along? Time investment?