Oct

2011

28

Category:

Guest Post, Networks

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1 Comment

Top Ten Things We’ve Learned About Networks

Note from Beth: This week I’m live blogging the GEO conference, but since I can’t cover it all, I’ve enlisted an awesome live blogging team of grantmakers and others attending the conference who will share what they are learning in guest posts on this blog!    You’ll be able to learn in real time with grantmakers and engage in a conversation in the comments.   So, in the next few days expect a series of thought-provoking guest posts about networks, organizational effectiveness, evaluation, grantmaking, and philanthropy like this guest post.

 

Top Ten Things We’ve Learned About Networks - Guest post by Gabriel Kasper

The amount of knowledge and experience in attendance at last week’s Grantmakers’ Gathering on Networks was inspiring. So when Diana Scearce asked me to try to synthesize the learning at the end of the conference, I was at a bit of a loss. It didn’t make any sense to just stand up in front of the group and parrot the great things that all of the participants had been saying over the two days.

So I tapped my inner Francis Ford Coppola and decided to break out the video camera to make a short (but obviously masterful) video about the “Top 10 Things We’ve Learned about Networks,” using conference participants—the “people formerly known as the audience”—as the stars.

Gabriel Kasper is a senior consultant with the Monitor Institute, a social enterprise focused on philanthropy and social change that is part consulting firm, part think tank, and part incubator of new approaches.

Oct

2011

27

Category:

storytelling

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18 Comments

RIP: Rob Stuart, Godfather of the NpTech Movement

Rob Stuart shared my birthday, Jan. 11th.  We were both part of the 1-11-11 club.  But we also shared more than that – the nonprofit technology field.   Rob was the godfather.  The last time I saw him was in 2009 in San Francisco at the NTC – he attended almost of them from the time they were called the roundup.    I just learned that Rob passed away, leaving behind a wife and two daughters.  I’m shocked and saddened.

Back in the mid-1990′s – after 15 years of working the nonprofit sector, I got obsessed by technology and started working as the network weaver for an online network of artists called ArtsWire.   That’s when I first heard about Rob Stuart who at the time was  Director of the Rockefeller Technology Project, at the Rockefeller Family Fund. His projects included the National Strategy for Nonprofit Technology and the Circuit Riders Program.   I also heard there was a list serve for Circuit Riders where peers and colleagues provided support.

After meeting him at a conference, he added me to the circuit riders list – and thus started my career in the nonprofit technology sector because I could connect with my peers.  I had wanted to travel to Kansas City in 2000 to participate in the conference, but didn’t make it.   Finally, I was lucky enough to attend my first “roundup” in 2001 in Denver as the NTC was called in those days.    That’s where I met Holly Ross.  I got hear the legends in the nptech sector in the early days talk about their work and was inspired.

The photo above is of Rob Stuart in 1997 at a meeting in Montana to create a plan at what eventually became NTEN – thoughtfully documented in photos by Gavin Clabaugh and included in the nptech history wiki.

Rob, you will be missed.  Thank you for leadership and inspiration in the early days of our field – you are the godfather of the NpTech Movement.

Updates:

Official Obit

Richard Zorza post

Allison Fine suggested that we have a way to honor Rob – perhaps a NTC scholarship or Award for the craziest idea for the NpTech field and the winner gets the latest and coolest early adopter technology tool.

Oct

2011

27

Category:

Tips

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1 Comment

Idealware’s Nonprofit Social Media Decision Guide, Updated for 2011

Guest post by Laura Quinn

Idealware created the Nonprofit Social Media Decision Guide to help organizations like yours determine what results and benefits you can reasonably expect from social media, and to guide you through the process of identifying the right channels for different goals. To help you turn the theoretical into the practical, we included a workbook that applies what you’re learning to your own real-world needs. This year, we updated the entire guide with new research, additional sections on goals and strategies, and information about using social media for advocacy and fundraising.

Social media is a conversation the world is having. Your organization can’t afford to be left out of it. Let our Nonprofit Social Media Decision Guide help you find your voice. The following excerpt from it offers a brief look at how to clearly define the goals you hope to pursue through social media, and the specific audiences you’re trying to reach with them.

Defining Social Media Goals and Audiences

Social media often has two aspects. There’s an important listening aspect that helps you hear what people are saying about you online, and there’s a second aspect that includes hosting conversations. Through tools like Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, you can post information, encourage comments and get feedback.

Remember the social aspect of social media, however. Simply putting up a Facebook page or sharing a video on YouTube isn’t likely to do much good. It’s important to think of these social media channels as tools to communicate in a social manner rather than the end in and of itself—in other words, social media is a  journey, not a destination.

The tools you should use for that journey depend on what you want to accomplish and who you want to reach. Defining goals and audience is an often-overlooked step when it comes to social media, but it’s a critical one. You can’t effectively choose any communication tool without a specific understanding of what you want to accomplish.

The more specific the better. Many organizations enter the world of social media with goals that are too nebulous to measure, like “building awareness” or “spreading the word.”  It’s useful to think of the acronym “SMART” when defining goals, which helps make them:

  • Specific. They need to be detailed enough for you to determine whether you’ve achieved them or not. How will you ever know if you’ve finished “building awareness?”
  • Measurable: You should be able to quantify goals with a numeric benchmark.
  • Achievable: Make sure your benchmarks are realistic based on what you’ve accomplished in the past.
  • Relevant: If they don’t relate to your mission, it doesn’t matter if you’ve achieved them.
  • Time Based: Define the timeframe over which you’ll achieve these goals.

It’s also critical to know who you want to reach. Potential major donors are often a very different audience than alumni from client programs, for example, and it’s important to consider what they’re using and what types of communications each audience expects from you.

Different tools have different audiences. Facebook tends to be better at reaching those in and right out of college using it for personal reasons, while Twitter is likely to be more useful to reach older professionals. But more than the demographics of a particular channel, you need to know what channels your supporters and potential supporters are using. How do you find this out? Try asking them. Talk to your staff, board and supporters about the sites they use, or survey your community to find out.

You can download the entire Nonprofit Social Media Decision Guide for free at http://www.idealware.org/reports/nonprofit-social-media-decision-guide.

Laura Quinn is the Executive Director at Idealware.

 

Oct

2011

26

Category:

Guest Post

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4 Comments

RightsCon: The Promise and Peril of New Communications Technology

Guest post by Sam Gregory

This week in San Francisco, technologists and human rights advocates are meeting at the Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference (or RightsCon)to grapple with the realities of how we better manage the human rights implications of new technologies. It’s a complicated equation that brings together core human rights concerns about privacy, freedom of expression and freedom of assembly and the direct practicalities of real-life struggle with the ways in which engineering, policy, legal and design decisions are made by companies, or placed upon them by the jurisdictions in which they operate.

At WITNESS, we’ve been wrestling with the promise and peril of new communications technologies.  It’s a truism confirmed by the Arab Spring that Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are among the key new public spaces of activism. Yet as other people have commented these are more like shopping malls (which though they feel like public spaces are privately owned), than town squares – where freedom of expression and expectations of privacy are circumscribed by corporate terms-of-service.

Companies’ approaches to privacy or monetization of lack-of-it often seem to be at odds with long-standing assumptions that protect both vulnerable human rights advocates and ordinary citizens. And the circumstances under which user data is provided to governments, or human rights information and accounts are taken down from services are not always transparent. It’s become abundantly clear over the past year – through both successes and mis-steps –that the human rights implications of new technologies that requires thinking by companies and advocates, sometimes together and sometimes vigorously independently (as for example with the rich variety of autonomous media projects).

Access, the organizers of RightsCon, who work for digital freedom worldwide, consciously pitched this not as a human rights NGO conference. Rather, they hope it will be a meeting place where corporate policy, legal and engineering professionals can have the opportunity to understand the implications of design, policy, engineering and legal decisions they make internally on anticipated/unanticipated human rights use scenarios. I hope it will also be a space where activists and organizations from the human rights and civil rights movements can speak frankly about the choices that are being currently made, and their real-world implications for both dedicated human rights activists, but also the human rights of all users.

One core commitment that I’d like to see highlighted during this conference is how human rights values can be imbued into the design of technology spaces.  As I joked in a recent conversation with a colleague, human rights activists “are the 1%” but the issues we face are relevant to the 99% of other users.

A few years back a fellow activist asked how the Universal Declaration of Human Rights could be embedded into Web 2.0 and that phrase still sticks with me. At the very least, core human rights values and the practicalities of predicting and preventing human rights violations (for example, through human rights impact assessments) need to be baked-into product design and management. There have been significant initiatives in this area from groups like the Global Network Initiative but more momentum is needed.

WITNESS has coordinated a panel tomorrow on visual media technologies and their intersection with human rights. It is on at 11:15am PT tomorrow, October 26th and includes myself, Steve Grove from YouTube, Hans Eriksson from Bambuser, Thor Halvorssen from the Oslo Freedom Forum, and Sameer Padania.

The panel will raise questions that we write about in our recent report “Cameras Everywhere” that discusses key areas of challenge and opportunity at the intersection of video, technology and human rights. Some of those questions are:

  • What are the censorship and free speech concerns around video and photo tools and products? What are legitimate constraints on free speech under international human rights law?
  • Do you have human rights content on your platform? What are the solutions to handling this contentious content? What happens when you get politically-motivated take-downs of ‘objectionable’ human rights content?
  • Anonymity? The human rights reasons for and against it; the business reasons for and against it? What does anonymity look like in a video-mediated world?
  • How do you use privacy by design and privacy by default to address issues of visual privacy and visual anonymity? Reconciling privacy concerns with your business model.
  • Does your app use facial recognition? Understanding human rights concerns for the individual citizen and the activist.
  • What are the human rights implications and challenges related to live video?

If this post has piqued your interest, check out the RightsCon livestream here or on  CitizenTube’s channel. The conference will also be live-blogged by @krmaher on the RightsCon site, and there’s an active hashtag #rightscon which you can follow. I’ll be tweeting myself at @samgregory.

For additional recommendations on particular panels you might want to tune in for, here are recommendations from three trusted NGOs with networks with strong stakes in this discussion, from citizen journalism to civil liberties to video activism:

- Global Voices

- Electronic Frontier Foundation

- WITNESS

Sam Gregory

Sam Gregory

Sam, Program Director at WITNESS, is a human rights advocate, video producer and trainer. He speaks and writes frequently about the intersection of human rights, video and technology.


Oct

2011

25

Category:

Engagement, Guest Post

Tags:

2 Comments

A Revolution in Documentary Film

Note From Beth: Yesterday, I attended a convening called “Beyond Dynamic Adaptability” for arts organizations about cultural participation in the arts.  A hot topic:  How do artists and arts organizations engage audiences in the creative process?    One of the slides shared (from a study by the Irvine Foundation) presented a ladder of engagement for arts audiences – from receptive to participatory.     This revolution in artistic process is taking place across disciplines, including documentary films.    Will a networked approach to documentaries, particularly those that are about social change issues become the norm in our connected world?

 

Guest Post by Vincent Stehle

The recent passing of iconic protest singer Gil Scott Heron reminds us, as he so memorably sang, “The revolution will not be televised.” Perhaps not.  But it will be shown in documentary footage in pretty much every other format: in limited theatrical release, on DVD, in short clips on the Internet and even via podcast on mobile devices.

We are living in a time of noisy revolution on the streets, from Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park. But there is also a quiet revolution taking place in the field of documentary film. The system of making and distributing documentary films is changing rapidly. The creative process of making films is opening up and the outreach efforts to spark social change through documentary media are becoming much more dynamic and collaborative.

The most successful documentaries are having a significant impact on major debates and public policies, from environmental concerns to financial regulations. This year’s Academy Award winning film – Inside Job – is one of the most powerful descriptions of what went wrong leading up to the financial collapse of 2008. And runner up, Gasland, has sparked a powerful movement to restrain the unchecked expansion of “fracking,” the controversial natural-gas drilling procedure of hydraulic fracturing.

One notable aspect of the success of Gasland, which recently won the Emmy Award for documentary film, is the way director Josh Fox worked with grant makers at the Fledgling Fund to galvanize a movement that greatly amplified the efforts of traditional environmental groups. Together, Fox and Fledgling developed an intensive outreach strategy through more than 500 community screenings. They also created a website that serves up clips from the film, plus a wealth of supporting information backing up the provocative claims contained in the movie and myriad ways for citizens to get involved in their own communities.

Two powerful catalysts for change in the world of documentaries are Good Pitch—a collaboration of Channel 4 Britdoc Foundation and the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program—and the Producers Institute for New Media Technologies at the Bay Area Video Coalition. Good Pitch is an effort that brings documentary filmmakers together with a wide range of partners in distribution, financing and outreach for activism. And the Producers Institute is a 10-day workshop that brings together a select group of documentary filmmakers and technologists to create outreach and activism strategies using online and mobile tools for activism.

One of the most compelling products of the Producers Institute is a project associated with the award-winning film Granito: How to Nail a Dictator,  which depicts the genocidal civil war in Guatemala. In Granito, veteran filmmaker Pamela Yates returns to the subject of her first film, When the Mountains Tremble. Where her first film was a contemporary account of the Civil War in Guatemala, particularly the story of Nobel Peace Prize Winner Rigoberta Menchu, Granito is an effort to capture the history of the war through recollections and archival exploration. But that is only the jumping off point for the inquiry. At the Producers Institute, Yates worked with technologists to create Granito: Every Memory Matters – a mobile interface that will invite anyone who experienced the war in Guatemala to upload their own experiences and recollections for posterity. Every Memory Matters is expected to go live in January, 2012, when Granito is broadcast nationally on the PBS series POV.

In the past, documentary films were carefully crafted by the filmmaker in relative isolation and in complete control of the finished product. With a project like Granito, the film is only the beginning and serves as an invitation for everyone to share their story.

 

 

 

Vincent Stehle is a regular columnist for The Chronicle of Philanthropy and a member of the Board of Directors of Grantmakers in Film and Electronic Media.

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