The Blog Stump

Just helping out my old mate Denis Moriarty from Our Community spread the word about Giving Week.  He says:

(1) Watch Julian Morrow’s very funny Giving Week clip
Watch the Chaser’s Julian Morrow’s 60-second video clip – not as controversial as some of his stunts but stunning nonetheless – http://www.givenow.com.au/julian_morrow
(2) Sign up to our free monthly giving newsletter
GiveNow News is filled with inspiration and ideas about how we can make a difference in the world we live in – sign up by entering your email address here – http://www.givenow.com.au/news/signup
(We are aiming for two million Australians to be signed up for this newsletter … so don’t be the odd one out)
(3) Check out the new-look www.GiveNow.com.au  giving website
This is the only place where you can make any number of donations to any number of causes (there are 1500 Australia-wide to choose from) that will be receipted to you at tax time. There are others ways to give too – from blood to bikes; clothes to corks.
 
All of this has been brought to us with the support of the best alliance partner we know – Westpac.

And one more plea:  Please send this around to everyone you have ever known or listed in your contacts – two million is a lot of people to reach … but you can help us.  
 
Happy Giving Week and sign up today for the newsletter!

Andrew Denton brought us that ironic song in 1992 to satirise one of the more depressing aspects of our occasional cringe factor as a nation. Having returned from there on my most recent trip, there are many reasons to feel envious of our cousins across the ditch but I’ll mention a nonprofit sector one here. While we as a nation have mucked around for years playing ‘will we-won’t we’ on some sort of industry regulator/support mechanism, the Kiwis have just got on and done it with their Charities Commission - Komihana Kaupapa Atawhai . Yes, it lacks perfection, like most things in life, and its progress has been slower than many had hoped. However, now they’ve broken the back of the major registration phase they are looking to do some very progressive things with that data and look at how they can support the sector more effectively. I know our Productivity Commission people have been over for a chat. Let’s hope they were listening well. After all, gee, if we can’t beat New Zealand ….

There’s some potentially great work emanating from the Gov 2.0 Task Force .

According to its website:

“The Taskforce is made up of policy and technical experts and entrepreneurs from government, business, academia, and cultural institutions. Its work falls into two streams. The first relates to increasing the openness of government through making public sector information more widely available to promote transparency, innovation and value adding to government information. The second stream is concerned with encouraging online engagement with the aim of drawing in the information, knowledge, perspectives, resources and even, where possible, the active collaboration of anyone wishing to contribute to public life.Importantly, the Taskforce will not just provide advice. It will be able to fund initiatives and incentives which may achieve or demonstrate how to accomplish government 2.0 objectives.”

Disclosure statement: My organisation, Connecting Up Australia, may bid for projects within the fund initiatives and one of the Task Force members, Lisa Harvey, is a member of our Board.

Well, Senator Conroy has finally unveiled his “Digital Economy Future Direction Paper” and (surprise, surprise) not a single mention of the nonprofit sector in 103 pages.

He calls this a ‘roadmap for Australia’s Digital Economy Future’ but for the nonprofit and charity sector it’s simply a dry gulch. In over 100 pages the nonprofit sector, employer of over 600,000 Australians, gets not a single mention. We can only assume that Senator Conroy and the Government don’t regard Australia’s 700,000 nonprofits, of whom 35,000 are employers, as worthy of any consideration.

We see digital capacity programs for government, for business, for education and seemingly every other interest group and no doubt all very worthy. We see $43b to build a national broadband network. But we don’t see a single cent for a sector that accounts for over 3% of Australia’s GDP. Before the last election Senator Conroy told the nonprofit sector he supported their technology aspirations. Instead we have seen this Government systematically disengage itself from the sector from the moment it came to power and that’s simply not good enough.

These are the organisations that care for children, support the unemployed, look after the aged, protect the environment, run thousands of sports clubs and offer services in all the other areas that hold our society together. When volunteer hours are included, they contribute more to Australia’s GDP than the mining industry. Yet the Government obviously sees them as totally unworthy of participating in the digital revolution.

Good morning! My name is Doug Jacquier and I am the CEO of Connecting Up Australia. It’s great to be here in Sydney and may I personally welcome all our delegates, speakers and sponsors, especially those who’ve travelled great distances and invested precious time and money to be here.

For those of you attending Connecting Up for the first time, here’s some brief background. Our nonprofit organisation, CISA Inc, now trading as Connecting Up Australia, has been operating for over 28 years and over the past six years we have been expanding our national profile in bringing information about technology to Australian nonprofits. Some of you will be familiar with our web-based ICT Resources, which you can link to simply at ConnectingUp.org where we will have podcasts, videocasts, photos and follow up from this conference.

And of course we hope that everyone here is aware of our DonorTec and TechSoup New Zealand technology donations programs, which we operate in partnership with US nonprofit TechSoup Global, bringing technology donations from global and local IT companies worth over $40m to over 3,000 Australian and New Zealand nonprofits in the past two years.

This is the sixth annual Connecting Up conference and the second we have conducted outside Adelaide, as part of our continuing commitment to a national profile. For the past three years we’ve added the Australian Community ICT Awards to the conference program and we’re delighted to see the number of entries double this year.

Last year we were delighted to see broadband emerge as a key Federal election issue and we awaited with great interest the universal roll-out promised. As you all know, we’re still waiting but at least the National Broadband Network is now a funded plan, albeit with a less than satisfactory outcome for those in regional and remote areas.

On the optimistic assumption that we will eventually be ‘Online and Off to the Future’ via something other than the current fraudband, this year’s program continues to be heavily weighted towards asking whether we are there yet when it comes to Web 2.0 or the social web.

I note in passing here that for the first time ever we have not had a single dollar of support from either the Federal or State Government for this year’s conference. We’ve had a Senate inquiry into regulating the sector, there’s the Henry review under way into the sector’s tax arrangements and now the Productivity Commission is reviewing whether the Federal Government is getting sufficient bang for is buck from the sector. In amongst all that, a select group of not-for-profit agencies is negotiating a proposed Compact with the Government on our behalf. I encourage all organisations to have their say in these various processes.

The bottom line out of all of that is that if you are waiting for governments to help you develop your capacity then your funding strategy may as well consist of buying lottery tickets.

Couple that with the greatest economic crisis we have faced since the Depression, created by the greed of those least likely to want to pay their taxes, to say we have a challenge before us goes beyond the level of understatement.

So what can we do, especially when it comes to looking towards what technology might have to offer?

I’ve recently returned from visiting a number of nonprofits and companies serving nonprofits in the US and Canada, courtesy of funding from Equity Trustees, and I want to share with you some of the insights I gained there. I am doing so because I think it is likely that the trends we are seeing there will rapidly evolve here.

The headlines for me read something like:

1. We have to face a future where Software as a Service and cloud computing, where applications sit on someone else’s server rather than in your office, will become increasingly prevalent. This will bring with it dilemmas of trust and privacy protection that will challenge the very foundations of what we understand to be the internet.

2. Online fundraising and campaigning will continue to grow in importance. If there was ever any doubt about that, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign finished that debate forever

3. We need to become skilled purveyors of social web technologies and to employ and upskill accordingly.

4. Organisations can no longer rely on the support of passive lists of supporters and donors. They will need to create and nurture a genuine community of supporters, which will open them up to being ‘steered’ in directions they may never have imagined and which may be disruptive to their thinking.

5. We will need to build alliances with like-minded nonprofits and with business, rather than looking to governments for support.

6. The Boards and staff will need to broaden their vision of the possible and become far more entrepreneurial in their activities. Simply having a good cause will be far from enough.

7. We need to find ways to be constantly noticed and quoted in decision making circles and challenging to the status quo.

8. We need to get a whole lot better at assessing ROI, especially when it comes to measuring actual behavioural change from our interventions and providing tangible evidence of our value.

OK, so what does that all mean in practice? Let me share some of the goodies I brought back in my showbag. (The links to these will be posted on the conference website.)

www.good2gether.com A connect to cause widget that links media stories to relevant nonprofits in the local area

 

MaRS www.marsdd.com in Toronto, Canada, is a multi-disciplinary innovation centre housing innovation projects in health, technology, education, transport, finance etc, as well as social innovation.

Center for Social Innovation  http://www.socialinnovation.ca/about

This social entrepreneurship incubation centre houses literally dozens of ventures and provides hot-desking and meeting facilities for a myriad of smaller operations. It has multiple funding sources and makes a modest surplus for re-investing in the sector.

Canada Helps - Toronto

Canada Helps www.canadahelps.org , who are the local equivalent of Network for Good in the US, in that they are a charitable giving portal. They have some 84,000 charities listed and around 6,000 are registered to access their services.

Scott Case, Chair and CEO, Malaria No More   www.malarianomore.org    , and Chair, Network for Good www.networkforgood.org  - New York

Essentially Malaria No More’s objective is simply that, eradication of malaria as a disease affecting humans, which is achievable with current knowledge. Their biggest hurdles initially were setting the right ambition (measurable goal) and dealing with widespread ignorance of the issue, especially since it mainly occurs out of sight in Africa and Asia. They have had to engage heavily with key players in the medical, government and corporate fields, as well as actively fund-raising..

Two key take-aways from our discussion were:

-         Your web presence needs to be handled by a dedicate full-time ‘evangelist’ for your cause who is expert in social web strategies (not necessarily the technology behind them) and someone who can marshal a small army of similarly dedicated volunteers to help spread the word through their online networks e.g Facebook.

-         All nonprofits (and indeed the sector overall) need to be researching their effectiveness (not efficiency), not just because that’s what funders want to see but because it is our responsibility to ensure we are not just creating feel-good jobs but actually making a difference.

 

Allison Fine, Senior Fellow at Demos www.demos.org  - New York

Demos is a non-partisan public policy research and advocacy organization founded in 2000. Allison’s work concentrates principally on building value through social networks . She is the author of Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age and she is working on a new book with Beth Kanter.

She believes strongly in the need for greater accountability and transparency in the nonprofit sector and, like Scott, wants to see more concentration on measuring effectiveness. She also advocates the employment of staff with highly developed networking skills and, sees the need for a dedicated social media coordinator to ensure the ‘weaving’ of organisations’ strategies into the broader sector’s collective efforts.

 

While we’re discussing the web’s ability to in fact enhance, rather than detract from, face to face local action, check out Meetup http://www.meetup.com/about/ as a tool to assist in this process.

 

 

Jonathon Peizer, President, Internaut Consulting  www.internautconsulting.com  , Chair of AspirationTech http://www.aspirationtech.org/  and one-man band behind  Capaciteria www.capaciteria.org  - New York

Capaciteria is Jonathon’s heroic attempt to pull together the most comprehensive resource directory possible for the US nonprofit sector and he has done a magnificent job of encouraging others to constantly add to it to lighten his load. 

 

www.missionfish.org  - Washington DC

MisisionFish vetts charities for ebay in US and UK  and we’re discussing bringing this to Australia.

 

Ilive.at  www.Ilive.at – Washington DC

How neighbourhood maps should be.

 

SXSW (South By South West) Interactive conference – Austin, Texas

For anyone interested in social media and the breadth of what’s on offer this is simply breathtaking, if not a little intimidating.  http://sxsw.com/interactive/talks/schedule .

 

 

http://www.lifehacker.com.au/ Part technology guide, part productivity tool, Lifehacker aims to help you organise your workday and maximise your playtime.

  

The Future of Social Networks – Charlene Li – Thought Leader (now there’s a title) – Altimeter Group

Her paradigm is that in the future social networks will be like air. (Clouds and vapour kept springing to mind.) Essentially her thesis is that the future social web will centre on the individual, via something like Open ID, which will pull together all the various versions of ‘you’, which will be shared on a ‘need to know’ basis that you will control. She argues for a new social algorithm, mediated by levels of closeness and permissions. The most worrying aspect of this model is that she argues that ultimately we have no choice but to subscribe to ‘In Google We Trust’ as the search platform for this Brave New personalised World and it will happen because it will be driven by money. Yikes!

 

Social Media Nonprofit Return On Investment (ROI) Poetry Slam

Highly entertaining and instructive panel exercise on how to measure ROI on social web-based campaigns, based on nonprofit case studies, and judged by an expert panel, and all done in poetic form. The most original and effective workshops I’ve been to in many a year and achieved in the graveyard shift of 5pm. Chaired by Beth Kanter in grand form and case studies from Danielle Brigida - National Wildlife Federation, Wendy Harman - American Red Cross - National Headquarters, Carie Lewis - The Humane Society of the United States, and David Neff - American Cancer Society. Some brief notes from Carie’s presentation should suffice here:

-      An email address is worth $3 p.a. to a fundraising org

-      Therefore building long term loyalty is the ultimate measure of the success of a campaign.

-      They set up systems to track from contact through to donation.

-      They raised $650,000 from one campaign alone that used social media exclusively.

Key measurement tools used by all included Technorati, Radiant 6, Feedburner, and blog back-end tools. New social media sharing application to me: Utterli http://www.utterli.com/u/get_started

Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business – Jeff Howe – Wired Magazine

Author of the book Crowdsourcing. He described how ‘amateurs’ have fuelled crowdsourcing and described phenomena like:

http://www.istockphoto.com , with some ‘amateurs’ making up to $20,000 per month

www.ebird.org.au which has revolutionized ornithology

http://www.innocentive.com/ which outsources scientific problem solving to the crowd, with a 30% success rate. Best insight of the session: the person furthest removed from the expert area is the most likely to crack the problem.

www.threadless.com where T-shirt designs are submitted, voted on, and then made available for sale if chosen

 

How Social Networks Are Killing the Revolution – Panel

• Steve Swedler - Gangplank
• Jeremy Tanner - @Penguin
• Todd Huffman - BIL Conference
• Shannon Paul - Detroit Red Wings (professional hockey team)

At last, I thought, some dissenters, but relatively tame in the end. They defined ‘the revolution’ as changing actual behaviours rather than just building lists. They say simple Facebook, Twwitter etc numbers don’t necessarily translate to action because:

-         It provides a false majority view, though sampling bias

-         It simply creates bigger silos of people who already agree with each other

-         It generates noise vs action

 

They noted that the Obama campaign brought people to the internet for the first time so they could help, not that the internet caused them to help. They warned in this context that the digital divide is far from closed, even in the US, and the internet is no different in that on the net some people are still more equal than others.

Their recommendations:

-         Base your position on facts and information, not emotions

-         Use feedback effectively, especially when it contradicts your view

-         Keep a retro view of social networks in mind i.e. think real people doing real things – break the loop of mere conversation

-         Use mobile applications

-         Make the message actionable

-         Make the intermediate steps transparent

 

Elisa Camahart Page – CEO and co-founder of BlogHer Inc

 

Elisa’s thesis is that blogs are mainstream, addictive and trusted. In fact more people are reading blogs than are downloading music and this has caused a measurable timeshift in the way people are using their reading/viewing time (at least in the US). Despite this, non-blog-readers remain generally distrustful of blogs. Obviously her examples come from their research on the perspective of women but she believes the following applies generally i.e. that blogs are changing the way people deal with life’s pressures and challenges. She also believes it will change the way history is written because now the lives of ordinary people are there to be mined for their experience of events.

  

Using Social Media to Accelerate Sustainability

Panel:

• Emily Gertz - Change.org
• Jon Lebkowsky - Social Web Strategies
• John McElhenney - Clear Green Technologies
• Rob Reed - Max Gladwell

Their starting point is that sustainability depends on knowledge being facilitated by social media and gave the following examples:

WorldChanging http://www.worldchanging.com/

350 campaign http://www.350.org/

Bright Green Living Wiki http://www.socialtext.net/brightgreen/index.cgi

My Herefordshire http://www.myherefordshire.com/

World Date Center for Climate http://www.mad.zmaw.de/wdc-for-climate/

Sustainable South Bronx http://www.ssbx.org/

Max Gladwell http://www.maxgladwell.com/

All powerful stuff on saving the planet.

John Kenyon

The Hartford Foundation for Public Giving’s “Strategic Technology Program” that he will be doing the workshops for this year: http://cli.gs/P6ZRz1  Under this program, nonprofits can get grants of up to $25,000 to have opportunity to participate in a Technology Strategies for Nonprofit Leaders workshop , have support from a Technology Circuit Rider/Technology Consultant to develop of a technology plan, and then be eligible to apply for a Strategic Technology Grant for technology needs established in the plan.

 

 

All exciting stuff, to be sure, but just more noise if it doesn’t lead to action. So what is Connecting Up Australia going to do to adapt to these trends?

 

For starters we’ve already begun to re-vamp our web presence to make it much more your space than ours and to provide opportunities for you to create an online forum for networking, have a go with tools such as flickr (to share photos), blogs (to listen to and share ideas, information and have conversations), you tube channel – to share your stories – what your organisation is doing and online communities to create your own group with a common interest e.g. Web fundraising OR regional youth services or, or or. Each group can email members, has an rss feed to alert members of new entries, has a blog to post ideas, conversation etc.

 

We’ve just completed our second national survey of how nonprofits are using technology and you can download the reports and use Are We There Yet? online benchmarking tool.

 

We’ve been a sponsor for Genevieve Bell’s Adelaide Thinker in Residence project and we’ll be sharing her anthropologist’s view of web technologies in the near future.

 

We’re investing significantly in a comprehensive online listing of nonprofit organisations and their resourcing organisations and ensuring its accessibility to an increasingly mapped and mobile world and to the social web’s rapid evolution. This includes working with Google.

 

We’re re-vamping our websites to make them inviting centres of ongoing dialogue and thinking User Generated Content (UGC).

 

We’re upgrading our skills in web usability, especially in mobile contexts

 

We’re drawing on the considerable experience held within TechSoup Global in developing powerful online communities, including recruiting highly skilled volunteer moderators.

 

We’ll become a high level adopter of Community First, a set of aggregation tools being pioneered at TechSoup Canada . This tool is an online social network, which acts as a de facto RSS feed of everything TSG is doing online (from YouTube channel, Friend feeds to Facebook to Flickr to Second Life to Twitter etc).

 

We’ll be encouraging greater involvement from Australia and New Zealand developers in the NetSquared conference and the various Challenge programs leading up to it. This could include scholarships to attend the conference and/or a mini-Challenge series here leading up to the ‘main event’.

 

We’ll continue to grow the technology donation program in Australia and NZ and develop a strategy for engaging and supporting nonprofits in Pacific nations such as Fiji, the Solomons, Papua New Guinea etc

 

We’ll serve up more greens. We’ll be sourcing and offering environmentally responsible and sustainable goods and services suitable to the sector (as well as get our green act together internally).

 

The theme for all these moves is to listen and to build our community with you together. You will be shaping our future. You will be designing the next Conference. You will be driving the agenda on what information is important to you and your organisation. And you will be the ultimate arbiter of whether there is a place for us in your increasingly overloaded information world.

 

We don’t intend to fail you and if we do it won’t be for the want of trying.

 

Thank you

 

PDF download of this speech available.

… out of the loop on all that’s current and relevant to the nonprofit sector’s technology future. If you’ve been out of town for 6 months or so you mightn’t have caught up with the fact that the Connecting Up 09 conference is on in Sydney from May 11-13.  There’ll be a veritable shirtload of speakers from around Australia and New Zealand giving you the latest drum on all things important, along with a bunch of likely types from the US with a thing or two in their kitbag to liven up the party. (I remember one brought over a mandolin one year; that’s now a compulsory knock-out question on the pre-visit interview we do with potential guests.) We look forward to seeing you there but if you can’t, we’ve got all sorst of fancy doo-dahs in place to share the content (and the love of course; there’ll be lots of love in the room I’m told), including this new-fangled email thingy that’s for the birds apparently. Anyway, excuse me now, I’m off to put my flares into the cleaners and to practise being a twit (that’s enough out of you at the back).

… otherwise why would I return so soon after having left (much though I admire dear SF). You can’t leave behind what you never had, so it mustn’t be my heart. Oh yes, I remember now, our partners at TechSoup Global are having a bit a knees-up (they solemnly call it a Summit) for the now 22 partners around the world and I have been dragooned to the cause.  Having resigned myself to what’s left of my fate, I turn on my radio (yes, and it’s not made of bakelite, smartypants) this morning to hear the swine have got the flu and their sneeezing it all over the bit of the USA I’m heading for. Indeed some of our staff are already there, in mortal and present danger it would seem. We’ll try not to bring something back for you.

OK, back home now and as we head into our organisation’s annual strategic planning cycle, how do I extract the wheat from the chaff from the the literally hundreds of ideas that have passed in front of me in the past few weeks? Oh, and how do I also include the thousands that I have stored away in files and eamil directories for use at this very moment? The bottom line is I can’t, no matter how well tagged and ordered they are.

So I try to build around themes, pressure points for us at the moment, the GFC (Global Financial Crisis) - will it or won’t it have this or that effect claimed for it, budgetary and resource realities, daring to dream, but most of all, trying not to repeat mistakes. Simple really

In amongst the process, I keep being niggled by this quote from the Coen brothers movie of Cormac McCarthy’s novel ’No Country for Old Men’. There’s a scene where the disillusioned Sherriff (Tommy Lee Jones) goes to visit his retired lawman uncle and receives this advice from Uncle Ellis: “You can’t stop what’s comin’. Ain’t all waitin’ on you. …That’s vanity.”

While I take on board the sagacity of working with reality and the limits of what little change anyone can reasonably expect to achieve in a complex world, there’s a part of me that wants to rise up on its hind legs and protest: “But surely the wisdom of accumulated experience and cool-headed observation has role to play?”

And then along comes Old Reliable, Jakob Nielsen, to assure me that despite all the Twittering and goodness knows what else noise out there, email and e-newsletters still rule in people’s real online life and RSS is a mess, which my curmudgeonly old bones have been telling me for a long time.

So you can’t stop what’s comin’  (so relax Facebookers, Twitterers et al - I do actually get it) but I think there’s still room for the ‘vanity’ of looking what’s comin’ in the eye to see if it blinks.

Finally, the cool homicidal maniac in the aforesaid novel, Anton Chigur, contributes this conundrum: “If the rule that you followed brought you to this place, of what use was the rule?” Damned if I can get that out of my head either.

The sun finally burst through with a vengeance today, leaping to 80F, and notably lifting spirits. There’ll be some wild old parties tonight (not including me of course). To provide some context for the earlier rain, it hadn’t rained here before that for 18 months and last summer they had 21 consecutive days over 100F.

Grokking Bloggers: It’s About Love and Underpants

Elisa Camahart Page – CEO and co-founder of BlogHer Inc

 

‘Grock’ apparently means “understand, appreciate actively and profoundly, fully comprehend; also, to think about, listen to, play, or contemplate something or someone with full love and understanding, even ecstasy”, according to the Urban Dictionary.

 

Elisa’s thesis is that blogs are mainstream, addictive and trusted. In fact more people are reading blogs than are downloading music and this has caused a measurable timeshift in the way people are suing their reading/viewing time (at least in the US). Despite this, non-blog-readers remain generally distrustful of blogs.

 

Obviously her examples come from their research on the perspective of women but she believes the following applies generally i.e. that blogs are changing the way people deal with life’s pressures and challenges. She also believes it will change the way history is written because now the lives of ordinary people are there to be mined for their experience of events.

 

e.g.

Diabetes Mine http://www.diabetesmine.com/ Dealing with a medical condition

Lora Lee’s Looney Tunes http://loraleeslooneytunes.com/  Grief

Matt, Liz and  Madeline http://www.mattlogelin.com/ Grief

My Mom’s Blog http://mymomsblog.blogspot.com/ An 83 yr old blogger

Simply Recipes http://elise.com/recipes/  Started as a way of dealing with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, this blog has made Elise Bauer very rich

Hurricane Disaster Direct Relief http://gracedavis.typepad.com/katrinablog/ Grace Davis’ response to Katrina

 

In closing she reminded us of the bravery of people in China that write blogs they can never see on the web because of local censorship.

I can’t tell you about the underpants bit; this is a family blog.

 

Using Social Media to Accelerate Sustainability

Panel:

• Emily Gertz - Change.org
• Jon Lebkowsky - Social Web Strategies
• John McElhenney - Clear Green Technologies
• Rob Reed - Max Gladwell

Their starting point is that sustainability depends on knowledge being facilitated by social media and gave the following examples:

WorldChanging http://www.worldchanging.com/

350 campaign http://www.350.org/

Bright Green Living Wiki http://www.socialtext.net/brightgreen/index.cgi

My Herefordshire http://www.myherefordshire.com/

World Date Center for Climate http://www.mad.zmaw.de/wdc-for-climate/

Sustainable South Bronx http://www.ssbx.org/

Max Gladwell http://www.maxgladwell.com/

 

All powerful stuff on saving the planet.

Bruce Sterling – Visionary in Residence – Wired.com

Packed 1,000 seat house for this eminence grise of the technology world, who is apparently very well known through his science fiction writing and technology journalism. Highly entertaining but clearly a man deeply saddened by the death of book publishing as we knew it, the disappearance of journalism as a profession, the loss of vehement arguments about newly released vinyl records, and the growth of the global micro-brand, where single things achieve absurdly disproportionate attention. He believes (and he was clearly baiting his audience here) that people are too busy Twittering to know what they think about anything and meanwhile corporations are data mining their Tweets to sell them more things. He described us as ‘the people formerly known as the audience’ (those older will recall ‘The Artist Formerly Known as Prince’). He believes that in the future connectivity will be a sign of poverty and eventually mobile applications emanating from developing countries will bounce back to dominate the developed world’s mobile activities. All this delivered while drinking beer, and eating potato chips and exotic Italian biscuits, to demonstrate that he couldn’t have house parties anymore because the invitees would Tweet their ‘list’ to come along, thus destroying any sense of real connectedness in the gathering. ‘Unique’ seems hardly adequate to the occasion.

 

Check out the ’Only in Austin’ picture I’ve posted on Flickr and join the caption compeition.   http://www.flickr.com/photos/35861669@N08/

 

Making Whuffie – Raising Social Capital in Online Communities – Tara Hunt

Whuffie = social capital = reputation and making connections (strong and weak), influence, getting access to resources, reciprocity, trust. Whuffie is the currency of online communities. Hardly startling stuff.

 

Sunday Keynote Interview

Fivethirtyeight.com was one of the biggest winners in the 2008 November election, successfully predicting the Obama landslide. BusinessWeek columnist Stephen Baker talked with Nate Silver, the man who’s statistical analysis powered the site. Interesting but hardly riveting. Here’s a graphical representation by Marilyn Martin.

 

Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business – Jeff Howe – Wired Magazine

Author of the book Crowdsourcing. He described how ‘amateurs’ have fuelled crowdsourcing and described phenomena like:

http://www.istockphoto.com , with some ‘amateurs’ making up to $20,000 per month

www.ebird.org.au which has revolutionized ornithology

http://www.innocentive.com/ which outsources scientific problem solving to the crowd, with a 30% success rate.Best insight of the session: the person furthest removed from the expert area is the most likely to crack the problem.

www.threadless.com where T-shirt designs are submitted, voted on, and then made available for sale if chosen

 

He sees the need for a new word for those who take this very seriously but don’t do it for the money and he suggests ‘pro-ams’ – somehow I think golf beat him to it.  However a really engaging and all too brief presentation.

 

How Social Networks Are Killing the Revolution – Panel

• Steve Swedler - Gangplank
• Jeremy Tanner - @Penguin
• Todd Huffman - BIL Conference
• Shannon Paul - Detroit Red Wings (professional hockey team)

At last, I thought, some dissenters, but relatively tame in the end. They defined ‘the revolution’ as changing actual behaviours rather than just building lists. They say simple Facebook, Twwitter etc numbers don’t necessarily translate to action because:

-          It provides a false majority view, though sampling bias

-          It simply creates bigger silos of people who already agree with each other

-          It generates noise vs action

 

They noted that the Obama campaign brought people to the internet for the first time so they could help, not that the internet caused them to help. They warned in this context that the digital divide is far from closed, even in the US, and the internet is no different in that on the net some people are still more equal than others.

 

Their recommendations:

-          Base your position on facts and information, not emotions

-          Use feedback effectively, especially when it contradicts your view

-          Keep a retro view of social networks in mind i.e. think real people doing real things – break the loop of mere conversation

-          Use mobile applications

-          Make the message actionable

-          Make the intermediate steps transparent

 

Some people challenged them at the end for using the very tools they were condemning, when  these were basically designed to make money, and asked why they weren’t advocating open source products. They argued the point was not the tools but the outcomes but left the doubters unconvinced. More power to them for stripping some of the emperors’ clothes away.

 

 Finally check out the SXSW Web Awards winners.