That said, I’ll be interested to see how this rolls out.  Although it’s early days, I wonder how they have found working with the culture of government – which is often so very different from the culture of a tech startup.  Ultimately, this initiative is going to have to do some culture shifting – simply combining the raw ingredients may not yield the desired results.

And – where’s Code for Canada?  As the protests against the centralization of power in this country build online, a little online transparency might be a good idea for the PM right now…

I presented about the possibilities for social media and how it was changing the way we play – as well as the way we act as citizens and witnesses. Since my presentation consisted only of screen shots, I airily told everyone not to worry or take notes, that the links for everything I was talking about would go up on my blog. I made it sound like this would happen within about five minutes, might even be up by the time they got home.

And a geologic age later, here it is! So let’s talk about serious games, and how it could make us better citizens. Thanks to everyone at the conference who was kind enough to chat about this in person.

Plague: You can check out and report to Ushahidi’s H1N1 (swine flu) map, a crowdsourced way to track unverified citizen reports of the pandemic. In British Columbia, the provincial health authority is using Twitter to try to push out information about H1N1 to a confused public.

Hurricanes: Ning is a customizable social networking site highly recommended for non-profits suffering Facebook fatigue, and The Hurricane Information Centre and associated wiki are a great case study of how flexible Ning can be as a platform for moving info out about your cause. These pages are entirely volunteer informed, and a fantastic source of local information on where to get information such as where evacuations are happening, and hurricane preparedness.

Earthquakes: A mash-up is when data from two web pages are combined into one place – among their many uses, they’re a great to visualise large amounts of data.  For example, in this mashup real time data about earthquakes from around the world is visualized on a map so that it’s easier for users to see where earthquakes are happening and how big they are.  If seeing this sort of thing makes you nervous, why not get inspired for the big one by practicing with The Great California Shake Out? In the largest virtual earthquake drill ever, nearly 7 million Californians participated on and offline in October 2009. Using information from the site, they all practiced preparedness by reacting on the appointed day exactly as if an earthquake had hit their state (local media helped with the drama by broadcasting realistic updates over the website) Afterwards, they posted their photos and stories about the experience – you can check them out here.

Snowstorms: As winter gets underway in the Northern Hemisphere, expect to see more snowstorm reporting tools. Snowbird, a project from a group of University of Waterloo students, uses Twiter and Google Earth to visualize snow fall reports around the world. Though it’s meant more as a way for people interested in snowfall measurements to quickly broadcast information to the web using Twitter, it’s easy to see the implications of creating sites where people can update information about their climate – sounds like a powerful tool for raising awareness about climate change if we ever heard one.

Have you got better sites to add to this list? Please leave your links in the comments or email us at editor@netfornonprofits.org.

Their Institute for the Humanities is holding a conference on Oct 15-16 called Witnessing the World: New Possibilities for Citizenship and Social Change. If you’re in Vancouver, please come! Specifically, Channing will be talking about play and the internet, and how saving the world can be serious fun.

(She is only slightly nervous to be doing this in a context where some of the best non-profit advocates will be up there talking about how they’ve dodged bullets as part of their dedication to social change…)

Want to be a part of the conversation? Throw us a comment or email us at editor@netfornonprofits.org. Here are some of the questions we’re thinking about for the session, and we’d love to hear what you have to say:

• What can you witness on Facebook?
• What kinds of social justice is social media good at? And what’s it less useful at?
• Can a memory be a meme? Can a meme change your mind?
• How does social media change the way people witness to history?
• How important is a concept like fun when it comes to social justice?
• Is play a way of activating witnessing? Is it a way to activate citizenship?
• The internet is bad at “forgetting” (stuff gets posted, and it stays posted till you take it down – and that might be never) How does  this kind of perpetuity change the way we remember?

Here’s their description of their conference:
In its simplest form, witnessing involves observing and reporting by a single person of a single act, but on a broader level it can involve documenting human rights abuses or discussing civic issues in popular media. With the rise of new social media, the ubiquity of cameras and the explosion of visual monitoring techniques (from temperature scans to iris recognition machines), the dynamics of watching have dramatically altered how we engage as actors, as viewers, as bystanders and as witnesses in social life. In a series of sessions comprised of journalists, academics, artists and activists, this conference – one in a series of events sponsored by the SFU Institute for the Humanities as part of its Imagining Citizenship initiative – features four interactive sessions to explore aspects of new relations between witnessing, social justice and citizenship.
Channing is part of a panel session called Witnessing Cities  from 11-12:30 on Friday, Oct 16 at Harbour Centre.

The Green Party seems to have a pretty good handle on things – nice website with lots of useful tools and information, good presence on Facebook.  Looks like they’re using Drupal behind the scenes –  nice to see some open source support…

The Liberals also have a solid website with various media, and an interesting approach to encouraging “digital activism” through social media: you can sign up to use your Facebook profile or your blog to promote their cause.  They also have an “Open Platform” section of the website, that allow you to participate in surveys, web panels, social networks, digital “town hall meetings” and policy forums.

Like the others, the NDP are using multimedia effectively on their website, with fresh videos and photos available on a frequent basis.  Facebook? Check.  Twitter? Check.  Like the Liberals, they have a system to recruit “Rapid Responders” who use their social networking tools to push the party. 

Based on all this, I’d say that the Obama-riffic campaigns in the US have left their mark here in Canada.  Web presence and social media are definately being given some priority this time round. 

But the real test lies in who has tweeted most recently.  As of right now, it looks like the last tweet from the the Liberals was 13 hours ago; from the NDP, 15 hours ago;  the Greens, 22 hours ago.  Tsk, tsk, gang.  Pick up the pace!  I want to know what you had for breakfast!

Original Photo: Flickr user eirickso (CC 2.0) license

A new draft curriculum for primary schools in England gives teachers more freedom to decide what’s interesting for their pupils … and brings YouTube and Twitter to schools. The question is: who will be the teacher?

British newspaper The Guardian just had a first look at drafts for an upcoming reform of English primary schools’ curriculum and they’re saying that the proposed curriculum would “mark the biggest change to primary schooling in a decade”. Why? Well, for one thing, it slackens the reins of obligatory subjects to offer teachers greater freedom in what they teach – that’s already a revolution in education. But the real stunner is the introduction of modern media and web-based skills into the curriculum.
British students are to study the use of the internet, in particular social media. When they leave primary school they should – according to the draft – be “familiar with blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia and Twitter as sources of information and forms of communication.” The not-so-secret added value — apart from watching music videos online — is that the kids will also be learning to use social media for networking and research purposes. There’ll also be less entertaining aspects, such as spell checking 101 or learning to use spread sheets to manage budgets.

Entertaining or not, what I wonder is exactly who is going to teach the children how to use Wikis, to build blogs, find interesting podcasts and make the best out of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube? Many teachers are not exactly embracing new educational methods, let alone new technologies. Although half of teachers (in the UK) believe in the merits of such tools, one fifth don’t feel competent to teach children in Web 2.0 applications, while a quarter of them are worried (and rightly so) about kids revealing personal info on social media sites. In the end, only one fifth of teachers use Wikipedia and only five percent YouTube as a resource in their classrooms.

At the other end, children are younger and younger when they start using the internet. And they learn fast and intuitively. When I went to programming classes in tenth grade or so, about half of my fellow students knew twice as much as our teacher about it. (Unfortunately, I wasn’t one of them.) The question is: does this mean that we should just leave social media out of classrooms, because teachers are unable or unwilling to teach them and the kids will learn them anyway themselves?

I’d say no, because what usually will fall short outside of school and in the anonymous sphere of the internet are things like the respect of personal rights, children’s safety, scrutinizing the reliability of information. There’s also a balance to find between using the internet for more than entertainment and for more than mere passive consumption on the one hand and one-way self-expression on the other. So the task I see for teachers is not so much the technical aspects, but some underlying principles for the use of the internet, about which not only children but everybody might still have to learn a bit.
What is your opinion? Will teachers be able to catch up with the internet and social media? Do you know any teachers who embrace new technologies and use them in class? What do teachers need to communicate if they teach their pupils in the use of new media applications?

What? You’ve never heard of her?

Ada Lovelace was born in 1815, and she wrote the world’s first computer programs for the Analytical Machine, a device invented by Charles Babbage.  Women’s contributions to tech aren’t talked about enough – today is aimed at changing that. You can read more about Ada Lovelace Day and its organiser Suw Charman-Anderson, as well as join the challenge yourself here.

To participate, today we’re telling you about a woman who made a huge difference to the way we think about non-profits and the internet.

Ok, we know we talk (rave) about Jane McGonigal all the time. She’s a self described game designer, futurist and games researcher.  MIT Tech review pegged her as one of 35 innovators changing the world for her groundbreaking work in alternate reality gaming.

The reason we think she’s so fascinating for people working on technology and non-profits? Because she creates games that motivate people to take a stake in them and work together on solving the game. She motivates people to tell stories. And she’s into being playful for the sake of playful (she was one of the organisers for the San Francisco flashmobs) but she recognises the power that play has to change the way we think… and she’s using that power for good.

I used to worry that games like the one’s she’s worked on were too addictive – she’s designed games that were so immersive, people had trouble  distinguishing the game from reality (think I Love Bees, or The Beast).  I wondered who had time to play these kinds of games. I was freaked out by the hive-mind aspect – I knew that groups of players had proved collectively smart enough to solve problems her team had estimated would take a month to solve in just one day.

But then I thought about the implications these characteristics have for social change on the internet. Getting people to pay attention to a problem without being overwhelmed by it, and motivating them to work together on a solution are the keys to changing the way we handle problems.  And Jane is working hard on developing this angle: you can check out her recent projects that had an explicit social change edge at World Without Oil (where players pretended we’d hit peak oil – and then survived without it) as well as the non-profit game  Superstruct (a future predicting game that played with the idea of using grassroots solutions to solve big problems).  I have a feeling Ada and Jane would have gotten along very well – check out the other women who are changing technology at the FindingAda mashup here, and keep tracking Ada Lovelace day as it moves around the world!

The New York Times asked 200 people in an unofficial poll what their hopes were for the Obama administration. But it’s how they represented that information that’s really fun: they combined cloud tags, ‘liking’, podcasting and their original poll into ‘I hope so too.’ To use it, click on any of the speech bubbles (tags) hanging over the group – you’ll hear the voices of the people who responded to the poll. If you agree with them, you can click ‘I hope so too’. You can also regroup the speech bubble tags by using the tabs to get an idea of which are the most popular.

This is a really appealing and pretty way to combine several types of media into a tool that makes you want to linger. It made me wonder what would happen if a platform was kicking around to make this kind of feedback or participation ubiquitous. What if your organization could poll its community about the issues it works on or the mission it’s working on, and receive multilayered feedback? Hope something like this is out there? I hope so too.

Meanwhile, I’m interacting with Obama in a slightly different way this week: I’m headed to the New Media Conference in Warsaw this week, hosted by the US Embassy in Poland. Joe Rospar (the director of New Media for Obama’s campaign) is going to be speaking there, and I want to hear from you before this Friday about any questions you have for him – I’ll try to ask him for you!

Email us at editor@netfornonprofits.org, or simply leave a comment at the bottom of this post.

Still – have you heard of “social media visualization?” This a rapidly growing subset of network visualization and modeling – that is, trying to make sense of the mountains of social tracks we’re all leaving on the internet.

There’s a great article in the magazine Seed this month – which, by the way, is another terrific recent find – which discusses how social researchers have never had access to “live” data on how people interact.

Want to see how people are move around a city when a disaster strikes? Plot their Twitters and track their cellphones. Want to see how disease spreads? Look for people typing “flu” into Google, and plot their locations on a map.

A small-scale, but beautiful, example of this can be seen in the software of Christopher Baker. He created a killer app to map every email he’s ever sent – it’s a little obsessive-compulsive, but also fascinating.

And if you’re really serious, check out the 3rd International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. It’s not all visualization stuff, but pretty amazing ideas. The full papers aren’t posted, just enough to give you a taste.

So, what does this have to do with your nonprofit? Imagine being able to map and track how your donors interact with your organisation, and with eachother, in real time. I’m actually working on a tiny version of this: taking our donation data and placing it on a map, so that we get a sense of what effect locality has on our membership. But what if we took it further – what if, like Christopher Baker, and mapped all the emails between staff, donors and volunteers? We could see where the nodes are, the connectors and hubs who hold our social network together. At the very least, like Nolan, we could create some great art. What do you think? Have you come across any great social media visualization tools?

Well, first, check out the latest series of Doonesbury strips. It’s funny because it’s true!

In a similar vein, read this little piece. The assessment here is: it was cool when Wonkette was twittering about the latest DC gossip. Now that aging Congress members are posting about their standing committees on soybean production – not so cool.

The real issue is that Twitter has now achieved a critical mass of public awareness. This isn’t good news if you’re into being ahead of the curve. But it’s great news if you want to communicate with a big increasingly, diverse crowd online.

ps. Don’t get the “jump the shark” reference? Go here and learn this useful meme…