NCMR: Ideas From Smart People
by Brian Reich | 8 Jun 2008, 2:00am
The panel about organizing the social web at the National Conference For Media Reform, I presume, was designed to deliver guidance about how to mobilize the millions of citizens who are online around a larger cause, or at very least a series of smaller causes with some focus and measurable impact. It did not. The luminaries on the panel didn’t seem to want to take responsibility for directing action on that level. They seemed almost embarrassed that they were being put up as models of how to act. I wasn’t expecting that.
(Disclosure: Free Press, the organization sponsoring the National Conference For Media Reform, is a client.)
Even though they didn’t really offer any thought on the subject of the panel, the smart people who were invited to speak did offer some interesting ideas and projects to follow. They did so in the context of two important questions. Here they are:
1) Name a specific example of real social change that has happened as a result of these social technologies. The answers included:
- Raising money for women in Darfur
- One Voice movement in Palestine
- The Obama Campaign
- The work of the Sunlight Foundation (and Change Congress)
- Opposition to Sinclair Media keeping an anti-Kerry documentary from airing in 2004
- Save the Internet
I’m not sure any of those have achieved any significant social change yet (in fact when I twittered about the reference to Save The Internet a friend wrote back “What, did they achieve Net Neutrality when I wasn’t looking?” A fair point). Still, these are the closest thing we have, I think, to examples of how to get past boasting about a big email list or millions of signatures on a petition that doesn’t impact anything.
What’s missing? Well, Craig Newmark noted that “The community we are talking about is pretty small. We have to break out of the echo chamber, reach thousands and millions more people” if we really want to have an impact.
2) What is the next big thing, the technology that will change things forever? The answers included:
- Schmap.com (a widget that automatically updates statewide polls and similar)
- The IamProgressive widget on Facebook
- Twitter (not super new, but a good model for immediacy and one-to-many communications)
- SecondLife (again, not new, but the overall metaverse and opportunity to use virtual worlds to learn, teach, engage and similar)
- MagicActsofKindness.com (a social action effort promoted by the Harry Potter Alliance)
- And, a really cool project to promote the summer tour for the band, Harry and the Potters. Its called “Unlimited Enthusiasm” and used all sorts of online and offline techniques, in unison, to deliver interesting information
That’s it, that’s all I got out of the panel. But that’s a pretty interesting list, and some new projects and ideas to follow. So, I’ll take it.
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: From the Trenches NCMR2008
