social media

On Civic Engagement... read more »

• Volunteering and high levels of civic engagement have helped certain communities weather unemployment with greater ease. The National Conference on Citizenship has created a report based off of U.S. Census Bureau and the Department of Labor Statistics. Working with neighbors in one’s community resulted in a decrease of .256% unemployment. The report calls on community and business leaders to foster a local discussion in their community on civic engagement.
• This follows a new study where social change was found to be a priority for Americans. Walden University and Harris Interactive conducted a survey of 2,100 people and found that 85% believe that their individual actions can effect social change and more than 50% plan to engage in creating social change in the future.

We are pleased to have Marc Smith as August's featured partner.  Marc specializes in social network analysis applied to social media. He leads the Connected Action consulting group, and is a co-founder of the Social Media Research Foundation.  We met Marc earlier this year when we attended a workshop on mapping social networks with NodeXL sponsored by the Community Foundation for Monterey County.  We were impressed by the power of the NodeXL tool, and also by Marc’s ability to explain network analysis concepts and make the information relevant and compelling.  When we had the opportunity to work with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation on a social network analysis project, we immediately thought of partnering with Marc to leverage NodeXL and his expertise in the area to help analyze Twitter networks.  We are thankful for Marc’s valuable contribution to the project and look forward to working with him in the future.

In talking about patterns of connections, Marc says it best:

Almost everyone is connected to someone else, but not everyone is connected equally.  The study of patterns of connections, called network analysis, is a way of understanding the dense webs of links, ties, and relationships that surround each of us.  In a world of social networking services, mobile devices, and persistent connections to data networks, we now live connected to one another in a way that is historically unique.  Network analysis is a method for measuring and visualizing these patterns to find the key people and groups within them.  

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• As we have watched events in Egypt unfold in the recent weeks, we have to be amazed by the incredible connective technologies that have helped to spur this historic revolution.  According to Marcia Newbert of Edleman Digital, we are witnessing a communications revolution as well as a political one.  She points out and discusses several points that suggest social media has had a very significant impact on unfolding events.

• The book, The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to Drive Social Change, argues that “small, well-coordinated acts can lead to big change.”  Applied to events in Egypt, this means a lot of people coordinating and conversing on a basic platform – the internet – can lead to a monumental revolution.   Forbes.com publishes an interview it had with the authors of The Dragonfly Effect, focusing on current events.

• Meta-Activism Projects posts a framework for examining the role technology has played in contributing to activism in Egypt.  The seven activist uses of digital technology include: documentation, synthesis, resource transfer, co-creation, mobilization, broadcast, and protection. 

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On Business and Creating Shared Value...  read more »

• Groupon, a multibillion dollar company that offers highly discounted goods and services to its users, has roots in social entrepreneurship.  The CEO, Andrew Mason, began Groupon around the same time that he started The Point – an initiative based on the concept that people will take social action if a certain number of people also agree to take the same social action.  The two projects have now combined into what Mason terms G-Team. In Mason’s words, “Every G-Team campaign connects you with enough people to achieve something awesome that you couldn’t have done alone.” 
• Despite its efforts to engage in corporate responsibility practices, business has been under fire in recent years because it is believed to be prospering at the expense of the broader community.  According to Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer of Harvard Business Review, the way to resolve this is not to embark on more corporate responsibility ventures, but instead to create “shared value.”  The authors write that shared value, which is defined as creating economic value while also creating societal value by addressing community needs and challenges, "is not social responsibility, philanthropy, or even sustainability, but a new way to achieve economic success.”
• A new finding by StaffShare states that a business’s staff retention “improves when skills are shared,” meaning that redundancies can be reduced if a “shared talent pool is developed” and employers learn and share the talents of their employees.

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• Valdis Krebs, the Founder and Chief Scientist at orgnet.com, shares his thoughts on “thriveability” and on social network analysis (SNA).  SNA – the "mapping and measuring of relationships and flows between people, groups, organizations, computers, URLs, and other connected information/knowledge entities” – either supports or constrains cultural, organizational, and individual change.  It is the structures that maximize emergence, learning, agility, and adaptability that prompt positive change by properly preparing people for the unknown, Krebs says, while “highly homophilious networks” will only hinder us.  Leadership, also, and emerging ideas about different types of leadership, are prevalent and encouraged in networks.
• Weaving, “an intentional practice of helping people connect to information, opportunity, each other and, most importantly, their own personal power," is propelled by institutional “helping” spaces.  In a powerful blog post, Bill Traynor of Lawrence CommunityWorks Inc., explains the importance of creating these spaces and methods by which to do so.

On Race and Unity… read more »

• Using the “No Wedding No Womb” program as an example, Mikhail Lyubansky makes the argument that racial injustices need to be addressed at a systematic or structural level rather than at an individual level.  NWNW is a program that encourages black women not to have children out of wedlock.  It does not promote abstinence necessarily, but instead relies on statistics to show that children are much more likely to succeed when they have “physical, financial, and emotional protection,” which they are more likely to have if their parents are married than if they are not (or than if they are being raised by a single parent).  Lyubansky argues that the message of the program is positive, but it addresses the wrong issues.  Rather than focusing our efforts on helping black women to make the best of the current (unfair) situation, we should be focusing on changing the system to resolve current inequalities.
• In South Dakota, 2010 has been dubbed by many as the “year of unity.”  The purpose of the year of unity is to acknowledge and appreciate the contributions American Indians have brought to the state and, ultimately, to get their land returned to them.  In a blog post on Race-Talk, Tim Giago writes about the necessity of bringing unity to South Dakota and also recaps some of the major gains in the past 20 years regarding ending racial injustices.
  

On Community Transformation and Engagement... read more »

• We know that cities and communities are constantly changing and we often attributethe change to economic factors (think Detroit) or specific circumstantial or environmental factors (think New Orleans), but a blog post from nuPolis argues that there are intentional cultural factors that lead a community to change as well.   According to the article there are three dynamics – shared vision and goals, social engagement, and systemic improvement – that, if unleashed, have the potential to fundamentally change a community.  It is by unleashing these cultural components that communities can address issues such as economic capacity, poverty levels, and increased interaction with a larger region.

On Networks... read more »

• Networks accumulate power based on their breadth of reach in every direction, inciting complexity and fluidity.  It is difficult, sometimes, to look at a network and wonder if it is not a “random field of chaos,” but while networks do not play by the rules (they can’t because they are cumulative and self-organizing) there are laws that networks abide by.  Networkweaving blog looks at the four key components of networks and devises formulas for how to achieve each of these.  The four components are: luck, innovation, influence and network growth.

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On Nonprofit Collaboration...

• The objection to nonprofit collaboration has always been that “we’re all competing for a limited pool of resources.”  This is true, Debra Askanase of the Community Organizer 2.0 blog states, but it is also true that cooperation makes that pool larger; collaboration brings in more traffic, clients and funding sources which benefits nonprofits and their causes.  We are in a new world in which coopetition (cooperative competition) is becoming the norm.

On Learning, Networks and Communities of Practice... read more »

• Nancy White of Full Circle Associates asks for feedback on her proposed idea of ‘triangulation.’  She defines triangulation as “a practitioner’s experience using external networks to leverage learning and outcomes within organizations and institutions.”  She explores such themes as collaboration, community and technology.
• A paper, Communities of practice: Linking knowledge, policy and practice was recently published by Overseas Development Institute.  The paper focuses on basic characteristics of communities of practice and explains their growing importance (especially in international development).  It also suggests ways that organizations can implement and support their own communities of practice.