In the middle of the Ecampaigning Forum, I'm trying to turn my notes about Monday's "pre-ECF" session on Social Actions and the Change The Web contest into a blog post. Peter Deitz presented his vision on making opportunities for social activism available on the web, and together with Janelle Ward, Thiago Carrapatoso, Romina Oliverio, George Irish, Amy Sample Ward and Jonathan Waddingham, we looked at 8 of the submitted application for the Change The Web contest (deadline for submissions is this Friday!). Here are my notes of the discussions we had.

Social Actions for Facebook

Great appeal, could be promoted by an organisation to their Facebook constituency. Good presentation in search results, maybe more narrowed down would work better. Adding the "favicon" of sources as "bullets" to the list of promoted actions may be nice. Add promoted actions to your news feed so that friends can "share" and "like" those actions ("share" now leads to share the application, but several of us don't like to add apps to my profile. Perhaps use the "redirect" mechanism in Facebook so that the Facebook toolbar is on the top of the page you and up, makes sharing easier too. Perhaps show the number of clicks on an action (is available in the Social Actions API?)

Social Actions for twitter trends

We had some concerns hether it should be a "destination site" (who would go there?) or should be a widget? Maybe just a widget based on specific topics? It might be nice to combine it into a service, so that when a topic I care about is trending, it will post a tweet on behalf of me? Or maybe send a tweet with an action for a trending topic? (This kind of adds to the "trending spam" that seems to emerge already, so not sure if it's a really good idea). Or maybe combine this with something like cloud.li (makes a cloud of words you tweeted) with added actions?

Social Actions WordPress Widget

This plugin selects the actions to present based on the tags of the post (the plugin from Social Actions selects words from the whole page content). We liked the presentation with the emphasis on the action type. Although in our little groiup, Wordpress also turned out to be the most-used blog tool, it might be relatively easy to clone this plugin into also a Drupal module?

Charity Meter

It mentions taking Open Social as a starting point, so we're curious to explore more of the opportunity for this one (we didn't quite see the Open Social aspect yet). It could also take the Facebook to a higher level. The idea of promoting things is generally shared, but not everyone would like to see the "dollar value" on it too (some would like to, others would be scared off, maybe this is related to cultural differences? So it would be great if it not only shows donations, but all kinds of social actions. And maybe it can then also suggest next actions for you based on your "action profile" (whether you're more into giving or loaning money, volunteering, petitioning, etc.)

"Take Action" Button

We generally liked the button. We gathered a couple of suggestions for the pop-up. Maybe it could contain a link to "more actions like this", or "previous/next" or "see another" options. A "share this" box may be nice too. Perhaps it also would be nice to have a few variations of the button, for instance with the Social Actions logo? Our main concern for this application right now, is that it is relatively hard to install. Perhaps it would be possible to deliver it as a Wordpress plugin as well? Or make it more like a bit of javascript or code that you can more easily paste into a page?

SocialActions iPhone application

Yes we need an iPhone application :-) Bringing actions to your (i)phone is obviously interesting. It would be great if those actions would be actions that you can do from your phone, or close to where you are. TheExtraordinaries are building a similar tool. It would be really great if it also works with "social networking" features, for instance find friends in the same March? Also, it would be great if what you contributes to a "bigger picture" somehow, as a form of crowd sourcing. An example that was mentioned: safe bicycle routes. By using the GPS on your phone and cycling a route, you can then upload it as a "safe route", and make it part of a bigger map and route planner.

SocialActions Search for Firefox

Right now, it adds a search engine. It's powerful in its simplicity, but we had some discussion on who would use it (not everyone uses the search box). We discussed some additional features mainly, like a toolbar in Firefox, or a sidebar application with opportunities around the page you're looking at (like the Knowmore addon for Firefox.

Search for Social Actions

Peter already explained how Social Actions will be working on their search interface, so seeing this submission kind of felt like a great start for that. Especially the idea of having permalinks for searches is good, and it would be great if the search engine could be tailored and made available as a widget, for instance to put actions around "Earth Day" on a web page, or allow people to search "human rights" activities on your site. The RSS feeds on search results is great too. It would be great to add keyword highlighting to the results.

Thanks!

That's it. Thanks for all the submitters of applications, and all the participants on Monday. I really got a better sense of what Social Actions is, and could grow into. (We had a conversation about Open Actions at the following Ecampaigning Forum, but need to write that up still.)