Ashoka-Lemelson Fellow Howard Weinstein is on a mission.  “250 million people in the world need a hearing aid, yet only 6 million are sold each year, mainly to people who can afford $1,000 - $15,000 US.  This is a huge shortfall, and Howard is trying to do something about it.  His organization, Solar Ear, is making desperately needed hearing aid technology affordable to the world’s poor.

People of the Butterflies by Arto Teräs

Some of the most exciting conversations happening this summer are the discussions occurring among organizations that are preparing to take their work, projects, and events to the next level. What's really admirable is that across my favorite organizations - teams are having these discussions out loud and inviting feedback from you - the community!

This seems to be a slow summer - although I think under-the-surface it's more of a transformative one. Check out some examples to see what I mean - and then Join the Conversations!

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Social media doesn't mean you do less organizing — it means you (can) do it better, or at least differently. You still have to use all the old skills of coalition-building, strategic planning, creative social action, managing relationships and preventing burnout. None of that goes away just because you're engaging with people on Facebook instead of in town halls.

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Crossposted from Rootwork — feedback welcome!

In the past two days, posts began popping up on Twitter with the tag "#pman" — short for Piata Marii Adunari Nationale, the largest city square in the capital of Moldova. Students were organizing:

Ever since yesterday's announcement that Moldova's communists have won enough votes to form a government in Sunday's elections, Moldova's progressive youth took to the streets in angry protests. As behooves any political protest by young people today, they also turned to Facebook and Twitter to raise awareness about the planned protests and flashmobs.

Writers like the one above initially characterized this as a "Twitter revolution," modeled in the real-time use of Twitter seen during the G20 protests, election monitoring and crowd-sourcing the location of a certain torch when it was passing through San Francisco. (Thus a little different than the traditional nonprofit use of Twitter.)

It's certainly exciting to see technology being used in ways that amplify and extend the impact of movement organizing. I think it's easy, however, to misread the technology as the cause of the movement rather than as simply a tool of it.

Fire, for instance, was a society-changing tool. Its revolutionary potential, however — cooking food and thus making it more digestible, nutritious, and lasting — was only realized through its strategic use.

Some people, awed by the fire, seem to confuse it with the food. This is represented most clearly by Jon Pincus, who writes:

Twitter is a strategy.

He cites a number of campaigns that have used Twitter in successful ways as evidence of this claim. To me, though, this simply shows that Twitter can be an effective tool for a given strategy — but that's not automatically the case.

Consider this: Why did organizers execute a given campaign on Twitter and not, say, Identi.ca, FriendFeed, Jaiku or Ping.fm (similar microblogging services) — or, for that matter, through Facebook statuses or MySpace bulletins?

There's a tendency to collapse the strategy and the tool — to attempt to feast on the fire itself. To say, "This is what we want to accomplish, and, hey! there's a tool that does that!" — and then equate the tool with the strategy. But they're still separate thought processes and separate stages in developing a campaign.

It appears that Twitter was a good tool to use in the cases Jon cited and I mentioned above. But if organizers limit themselves to seeing Twitter as a strategy in and of itself — without considering the strategy apart from the tool — they risk overlooking ways to run a more effective campaign on other platforms, or augmenting a campaign using multiple platforms.

Worse, organizers risk giving supporters feel-good activism that quenches their desire for social change without actually moving the movement closer to a concrete goal, or putting any pressure on powerholders.

The strategy always comes first, and then you figure out which tool fits. The alternative? A forest fire.

Political pamphlets, phone trees and jam-the-faxes must have seemed like strategies in and of themselves when each technology first came out. But a campaign that didn't begin with a strategy to deploy those tools in an effective way wouldn't have been successful.

The "real-time coverage" use of Twitter, in the style of TXTMob, can be effective, and can even form part of the organization of a protest, as it did in the case of the Olympic torch. But that's not a strategy or even a revolution — it's simply street-level news. And in the case of Moldova, the organizing was happening elsewhere:

In fact Twitter did not play that big role. The story is quite simple — young and active bloggers decided to have a flash-mob action, lighting candles and 'mourning Moldova' because of Communists victory, which nobody recognized due to the multiple violations before and during the campaign. They agreed on the time and place of the action through the network of Moldovan blogs (blogs aggregator blogosfera.md), and social networks like Facebook/Odnoklassniki, etc.

In other words, the most effective tools to execute the strategy in question — organizing opposition to the regime and making it visible to other Moldovans — didn't include Twitter.

When Jon writes about Moldova (on the Progressive Exchange email list), he says:

It’s really good that the Moldovan students didn’t organize this revolution via Friendster or LiveJournal (which is still a platform for choice for many users in Eastern Europe). If they did, they would never have gotten as much attention from the rest of the world.

This perspective is an example of collapsing the strategy and the tool. More specifically: Getting attention from the rest of the world is not automatically the objective of any given social change movement.

Most social change organizers know this. There are moments when you want to focus on building awareness and/or getting media attention, but that's often not the primary focus of the campaign. In the case of the Moldovan students, it could be that what was most needed was a way to get organizers to identify and strategize with one another — in which case Twitter would have been a very poor (or at least fantastically blunt) tool.

Such perspective is possible only if you think of Twitter as one possible tool, perfect for use in some strategies and rather ineffective in others. A near-religious belief in Twitter (or any technology) as a strategy leads to a narrowing of the actual strategy — getting the world to pay attention becomes the goal, because, hey, that's what Twitter can be effective at doing!

In this case, organizers might have gotten attention from beyond Moldova with a few dozen Twitterers, but failed at their primary goal of making opposition to the regime visible to other Moldovans.

As Alan Rosenblatt writes, different technologies have different ideologies, and tools that are more "inherently democratic" like Twitter can be used as tools within a strategy that empowers people to a much larger degree than one-way media like television. That doesn't negate the fact that the strategy — the reason for the campaign itself — must be laid out first.

Begin with your campaign's strategy — the food you want to eat. Then determine which technologies will best cultivate the fire within your supporters to achieve the social change you seek.

Hi, I am a new member to this list. Yesterday, I posted an article in my blog on the relationship of social and technological change. The article reflects on the fact that in recent years, the speed of technological change has by far exceeded the speed of social change. In human history, great technology breakthroughs such as the printing press, did go hand in hand with social change (e.g. the appearance of protestant churches, and the discoveries of Columbus). The latest technology changes such as the Internet in general and the social web in particular have hit an unprepared world. Those who use these new technologies wisely, gain a competitive advantage in whatever their mission is.

When: Tuesday, July 8thth, 5:30pm-7:30pm
Where: Workspace (400-21 Water Street) Vancouver BC
Price: FREE!
RSVP: Facebook, Meetup

As everyone has mentioned, picking just a few selections from the excellent proposals to nominate for the NetSquared Technology Innovation Fund is very hard, given the quality of the proposals — I can't imagine anyone will be voting for fewer than 10!

I helped to develop the Genocide Intervention Network's proposal — An Anti-Genocide Community: Building the Political Will to End Genocide — and thus one of my ten votes will be going to that project.

I had a few qualifications in building my list — criteria that encompass our own proposal:

• At least half of the projects I nominated would be located in the Global South, because of the large divide that already exists between technology in the Global North and the Global South — and NetSquared's position to help alter this.
• The projects I nominated would be grounded in community concerns or community initiatives. For me, that is broad enough to encompass a "community" of human rights workers or even, potentially, nonprofits. But I wanted to see a demonstrated need for the technology or service.
• Needless to say, the projects I nominated would be involved in innovative community-building and/or social networking. A number of projects seemed like very worthwhile charities but outside the scope of this particular conference/fund.

Location

I'm planning to be in NYC on June 27-28 for the Games for Change Conference and am wondering if any other net2 folks attending ...?     So far, npmarketing blogger will be there as well as some folks discussing Games for Social Good at Omidyar. 

The program looks fantastic and the mix of people is also diverse.  And, while looking through the program I found noticed that Nelson Layag from Compasspoint is presenting on "Educating to Mobilize the Masses."   The description is:

Leda Dederich who juggles two projects, ScoutSeven and dotOrganize talks to us at the Northern Voice blogging conference & Netsquared North in Vancouver, Canada. She helps social change organizations & campaigns utilize tools effectively to accomplish their goals.

This video is part of NetSquared's video profile series. You can subscribe to this RSS feed with your favorite video catcher, such as iTunes, Democracy or FireAnt.