Dan & Emma visit the UK's Environment Agency; a glimpse of the web 2.0 wave lapping at the defences of a large institution.

Punning their way through a heated session with the Press Office, our explorateurs explain Twitter using pen & paper (because the Gov blocks the internet) and debate the horror of letting the public have a say.

The moral of the story? "And so we find that social media provokes people to approach things differently; not just how they communicate, but how they organise stuff. Being authentic is the way to social media success. Mashing up public consultations and social media will end up looking more like thinkpublic's animation The story of co-design."

You know that moment when your CEO says "this social media stuff is all very well - but so what? How can you prove it's had any kind of impact?"

Well, let's say that evaluation is something that the whole of my campaign is rightly focusing on. And it turns out that the evaluation consultancy we're working with are pretty new to 'new media'. So, happily, they invited me over to their offices to help with a luncthime seminar on using social media for monitoring and evaluation.

Preparing for the seminar gave me a reason to read all those great Beth Kanter ROI posts i've been saving up :). You may be interested to read my conclusions so far at The Apollo and Dionysus of digital evaluation - and I'd certainly be interested to get your comments.

Maenad with tambour by Glamhag

"Another World Is Possible" - a slogan of defiance and hope, often on the face of overwhelming odds. At Social Innovation Camp we ask "What does that other world look like, and how can we use social tech to make it happen ?" Maybe you can't make it to the UK for December's camp :) but we could still build a team around your idea if you submit it here. The deadline for ideas is Friday November 7th!
For more background, catch up with the first camp here or watch the Social Innovation Camp idea explained by cardboard cutouts!

What happens when the social web collides with campaigning? How can we think about the new potential for advocacy? What happens when the cause escapes from the organizational box? is it something like Cloud Campaigning?

Social Innovation Camp - The Movie! You can almost smell the coffee and the over-heating laptops. Starts with credits to Netsquared for inspiration...

More backgound on the Camp at speed-startups for social impact and Live from Social Innovation Camp, the laboratory of buzz.

Social Innovation Camp happened this weekend, and it rocked.

Inspired by a mashup of netsquared, barcamps and seedcamp, it brought together a diverse bunch of hackers & social change activists to cook up prototype projects over the space of a weekend.

And it worked. People brought dedication, passion and skill. They had some fun. They went without much sleep.

Two things stood out for me; first, it proved (again) that the social web is a generative platform for social impact; and second, that it's possible to do events that go beyond talk and lead to real projects and social businesses. But of course, that's the business of netsquared as well :)

Our small organising collective is now recovering, er, aiming to help the projects sustain and grow. There'l be a lot of write-ups, inteviews, videos etc coming out of the camp - more of this later. In the mean time here's a flavour;

Posts by Bobbie Johnson, our embedded Media Guardian blogger:

• Kicking off
• Coding and barcoding
• Future me
• Designer - solve my problem!
• Help me work!
• I’ve got it, you want it
• Breakaway
• Show and tell
• And the winner is…

My late-night half-way analysis; Live from Social Innovation Camp, the laboratory of buzz

A view from Yahoo Developers Network.

All the feeds from our backnetwork (warning: includes tweets!)

Photos on Flickr.

Videoclips and mini-interviews by David Wilcox at Qik

YouTube videos tagged with “sicamp” and “sicamp08“ (mostly by The People Speak team)

"Teamwork, Quick!" by participant Huey Nhan

Enthusiasm from a sponsor (which is nice!) at Accelerating Social Innovation: lessons from SiCamp where Roland Harwood says "On of the big lessons for me of the weekend was how limited organisation can unleash ideas, which is counter-intuitive for many".

A moment of mashup scepticism from the old skool activist side of my brain: The Unbearable Lightness of Mashups.
But I haven't read through the N2Y3 Mashup Challenge entries yet and I know i'm going to be knocked out by their inventiveness and impact. Keep it real.
Dan

What connects Saul Alinsky, Egypt and Twitter? An alternative take on Best of the Nonprofit Social Web for 2007.

Categories include:

• 'best use of mobile to frustrate a despotic regime'
• 'best use of a sharing site to shock people out of apathy'
• 'best web-enabled ngo startup'

This year's Scrooge Award goes to YouTube for their shameful suspension of Wael Abbas's account.

Watch out for the BarCamp-like 'Social Innovation Camp' in London in early March 2008, with it's Netsquare-inspired aspiration to 'remix nonprofits for social change'. Hopefully some of the ideas cooked up there will make it to next year's 'Best Of...'

"What do you think is the return on investment (ROI) of the social web for nonprofits?" is Britt Bravo 's latest Net2ThinkTank question. It's a hot topic for nonprofits and companies alike because of the time soaked up by tending social networking sites, but I think there's at least three dimensions to social web ROI for nonprofits, namely metrics, the paradigm shift and the new enclosures.

metrics

Non-profits aren't focussed on a financial return but they have a duty to use donations effectively. So it's good to see initiatives like frogloops ROI calculator for social network campaigns, which uses the tried & tested perspective of email marketing to calculate value for money. Metrics may be harder for the social web but nonprofits would be unwise not to try it - in part because the social web also leading to greater pressure for transparency.

paradigm shift

Even when the return rates are low, nonprofits should be investing in social web experiments because they herald a paradigm shift in how people will organise to have a social impact. In Participatory Web for Development I described how an era of mass collaborative innovation will lead to new ways of tackling social issues. Either nonprofits take part, or they risk being left on the beach.

the new enclosures

The big feature of the web 2.0 boom is the way that value generated by users is being cashed in by the site owners. As I warned in social networking and social change, one consequence can be nonprofits getting booted out if they get too 'controversial'. Monetisation of the social web is often done in a way that ignores the mass of contributors and threatens it's nature as a kind of common ground. As well as making creative use of this space we'll need to find collective ways to defend it. Mass investment of time, creativity and content implies a return for the common good.

One of the things that energised me about last year's Netsquared conference was buzz of community activity around Drupal. i had already experimented with Drupal as a basic CMS, but at Netsquared I met Drupal developers who shared a passion for web activism, and social activists who wanted to use Drupal in cool new ways. Looking back, I can see that my experiences of advocating for open source in NGOs seems to have been leading up to the Dot Org Boom that Netsquared represented (see also the blog post Drupal and the Dot Org Boom). However, a comment from David Geilhufe points out that

across the landscape of all these NGOs using open source software, there is no real open source strategy. No strategy for: (1) Ensuring your organization does not bear the maintainence/upgrade burden of your innovations exclusively. (2) Leveraging other groups with similar needs to jointly produce and maintain functionality needed by all.