Tweet. Meet. Give.
What better way to use your love for online than to head down to your local twestival event.
This year Twestival is going ‘Local’ in cities around the world tomorrow, Thursday 24 March 2011. Events for Twestival Local will raise funds and awareness for local nonprofits that organizers identify for having an incredible impact within their own community.
Emerging from the food & beverage coma that is Christmas and New Year I am feeling inspired for the year ahead. Thanks to @davidahood and the instigation of the social change collaboratory & this TEDx Talk by Peter Grzic from Oxfam, the following three questions have been circling the runway inside my head:
What do you care about?
What do you want to see change?
And…
What are you going to do about it?
I care about respect – for each other and the environment. I saw a guy get beaten up in Chapel st last night, and a man throw a cigarette butt out the window. I want this to change. So as my plans come to fruition for how I am going to positively impact those around me in 2011, and words like ‘masters in international development’, ‘hablar mas espanol’, and a ‘worm farm on my balcony’ continue to circle in my head, what are you going to do?
In the words of Margaret Mead, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has.”
DoGooder done and dusted.
DoGooder was a plug-in for your browser that replaced traditional ads on the websites you visited with ads that raised money for good causes.
Sounds great.
As GOOD put it so eloquently in a post written earlier this year:
Which messages would you rather see while you were browsing online?
Buy a Chevy Malibu! Get the New American Express Gold Card! Watch the Real Housewives of New Jersey on Bravo! Eat ReddiWip!
Or:
Ride your bike to work. Support urban farms. Fertilize your garden with used coffee grounds. Donate your old phone. Pee in the shower.
But after just over a year of business, the Canadian company, DoGooder posted their final blog post and announced “it’s been a good run, but today we are shutting down our service indefinitely.”
It was an interesting idea. To swap ads that a visitor sees on a website so they are presented only socially-minded advertising. They aimed to give 50% of their profits to charity, and keep the other 50%. Sounds like a feasible business venture. But they needed a large network of people running their plug-in to attract the advertisers, and make the business profitable. Unfortunately the demand was not there, and in the end it was lack of income that resulted in the network closing.
Why did people not use DoGooder?
– Felt they were stealing income from the site owners (by switching out ads, the income that would have been generated from click-throughs on the original ads would now go 50% to DoGooder and 50% to charity).
– Too hard.
– People like bad online advertising.
Whatever the reason, it is sad to see a charity supporting, socially-minded online business shut it’s doors.
If you didn’t have to do much, to do some good, would you? Hint: It would have taken 10 seconds and it was free.
Would you have used DoGooder?
This blog is usually a platform to voice all the positive ways that the online space is being leveraged to benefit society.
But @Melbourne_Muz brought this case of twittersphere injustice to my attention last week.
A woman in China was sentenced to a year in a labour camp for re-tweeting a message encouraging nationalist protestors to destroy Japan’s pavilion at the Shanghai Expo. (Check out the BBC article over here). Apparently her message was intended as a joke – but the Chinese government did not see it so.
As the BBC points out – this is a true example of how closely twitter, and all content online in general, is monitored by the Chinese government.
As the power of social media grows, so too must their worry and concern over how to control the individual voices & opinions it carries. An interesting space to watch indeed.
The first generation of hip hop in Myanmar hit the streets in the early 90’s, via the beats of Acid. A group of 4 guys who shifted a music scene that had been suffocating in Rock n’Roll for decades. They simultaneously provided a black market vehicle to voice political dissent for the youth of Burma.
The traditional structure of the Burmese society combined with the 50yrs of military rule are not a natural environment to embrace hip hop and the voice of freedom it carries.
Song lyrics are vetted by a censorship board for anti-government sentiment prior to being recorded, performances are regularly banned and artists have been arrested on political charges for being associated with the hip-hop scene. In short, avenues for music distribution are limited.
Enter the interwebs.
Thxa Soe – one of Burma’s leading hip-hop stars – and the underground group Generation Wave challenge the restrictions of the ruling military junta. An interview with Thxa Soe published in The Guardian earlier this year explains how he skates close to the edge of what is acceptable in the junta’s eyes, and his songs are regularly banned. The song titled ‘Water, Electricity, Please Come Back’ — an obvious comment on Rangoon’s inconsistent power supply — was forbidden. On a recent album, eight of the 12 tracks were forbidden. With bootleg copies of the album regularly seized by police, internet is the best medium of distribution. Even with limited and regulated access, the internet has helped spread the political messages wrapped within the beats of hip-hop.
Thxa Soe told The Guardian that he has chosen to stay in Burma, despite the risks, because he sees his voice as important in his homeland:
“It is very difficult being a musician in Myanmar. You are not free. You are always being watched, for what you say, and you are being told what you can say and what you cannot. [But] I believe music can change a country, not only our country, but the whole world.”
Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burmese_hip_hop
http://www.mizzima.com/news/inside-burma/1512-detained-hip-hop-singer-yan-yan-chan-released.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/22/burma-hiphop-resistance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burma
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2010/apr/23/burma-hip-hop-challenge-junta
You have it, you can share it. You need it, you can borrow it. Office space, accommodation, cars, books, videos, bikes, presentations, handbags, appliances…
Has all this real world sharing been sparked by the online sharing that is now second nature?
A study released last week, The New Sharing Economy, by Latitude Research and Shareable Magazine, was prompted by the surge in sharing startups driven by social technology.
“The rise of sharing requires us to use a new language where ‘access’ trumps ‘ownership’; social value becomes the new currency; ‘exchanges’ replace ‘purchases’; and people are no longer consumers but instead users, borrowers, lenders and contributors. All of this means businesses must redefine their role from providers of stuff to become purveyors of services and experiences,” says Neela Sakaria, SVP of Latitude.
The study found that people who were sharing online were also more likely to share physical items such as dvd’s, bikes, cars & books with strangers.
But this correlation does not necessarily transfer to an offline to online cause relationship. Perhaps people who are more likely to share in real life are encouraged to head onto the interwebs and share away. Rather than the online sharing activities “spurring” more offline sharing.
Or perhaps ‘sharers’ share wherever they happen to loiter – bookcrossing.com or Prahran library – and with an increase in social technology the opportunities to engage in sharing activities are everywhere.
In short. There is more sharing. Don’t fight it, just share it.
On Monday primary school kids from across Australia gathered at the State Library of Victoria.
The tweenhood from Northern Territory to Tasmania – “our future’s leaders” – came together in Melbourne for one hot topic: digital learning.
From all accounts you’d think they’d been invited to have playlunch with Justin Beiber, the excitement and enthusiasm was that palpable.
The event, ‘Listen2Learners‘ was the anti-thesis to the classic isolated, socially awkward child oft portrayed when we pair kids + technology.
Students showcased a range of awesome projects, from running their own radio station to preparing a cybersafety program for incoming primary students.
photo credit: Tania Sheko
The audience, a mix of business, government and community sector listened on as the kids demoed their creations. Many had to submit applications for their ideas, and defend their concept against the ‘tough questions’; all processes that exist in my ‘grown-up’ world at work. Learning to think critically through ideas to creation is a valuable lesson to be learning so early in the game.
Photo credit: Tania Sheko
Funnily enough, an old primary school bud Caz Pringle over at ThinkTank Media wrote a post this week which paints a drastically different image of kids increasing use of technology, the dark side…empty playground swings and a growing spawn of fat, geek kids.
Could we be incubating a whole generation of Cartman's?
Considering Caz is a fellow Gen-Yer and grew up with the big bad Internets, it’s a surprising and provoking change to hear this side of the coin voiced from someone so well-versed in the WWW. (It’s inspired this post in response, I didn’t make it to the Listen2Learners but I was determined to provide some quality social education examples to alleviate the anxiety of picturing a generation of South Park’s Cartman’s IRL…)
Back to the happy, glass-half full juice.
I’d like to think the future is in good hands. Moreover, we better recognise the present is already in the hands of 7 year olds.
My favourite example was kids from Prospect Primary School who became teachers, and schooled their ol’ teach and 69 other teachers in how to make movies.
“Using their experience in making films about animals for ‘zoo-tube’, these students set a challenge for adult learners – to learn movie making from scratch in order to make a one minute movie in one day on location at the Adelaide Zoo.” *
Empowering and valuable learning for the kids right there….and, Zoo-tube!
These kids are so cool for school.
Links
The city has been struck by an 8.2 magnitude earthquake. Homes have been destroyed. People are homeless. There is no food. People are dying. You are an aid worker. You can save lives.
This week Save the Children released the world’s first Emergency Response App. The game aims to give the player an insight into the decisions a humanitarian worker faces when deployed to a disaster affected area. A fun game with a serious message. Check it out.
I saw a presentation recently on a small Melbourne start-up kaggle.com.
Basically, kaggle helps organisations solve data-related problems via crowd-sourcing and competitions. These ‘problems’ aren’t the far-fetched conceptual ones you’d find in a stat textbook like ‘if Mary had 2X pieces of pie multiplied to the power of a rainbow…’
…although the main ingredients sound eerily similar: datasets, graphs, formulas, numbers….more numbers *eyes glazing over*…
WAIT!
Real world is calling and it would like your help.
Kaggle helps sort out the BIG, relevant issues. For instance, is there is a genetic link to how rapidly HIV progresses to full-blown AIDS?
A biochemist in the US was working on this problem, released the question and data sets via Kaggle and started receiving answers from all over the globe.
In the end, a mathemetician from a neighbouring state won the competition and came up with an awesome model to predict this (with no biochemistry experience at all).
Why wouldn’t you get the world’s best statiticians working against the clock to solve your problem, rather than just Bruce and the geek squad you currently employ?
At the end of the day, with unlimited submissions, the most accurate model wins and you get to keep it. The rest are kept hidden. So all seems fair.
What is neat is that Kaggle goes beyond the basics and incorporates a collaborative/community element too – there are forums to chat about the problem/competition, which opens up the opportunity for members to team up with others working on the same problem.
Anthony, the company’s founder, told us that they get a lot of University academics submitting theories/answers. For them, it’s far more exciting to be working on real-world issues than re-hashing old textbooks.
I couldn’t agree more. Power to the statisticians, throw out the books, there’s plenty of real-world problems that need answers.
Image via Wikipedia
“I keep saying that the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians”
– Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist
Well Hal, as much as this project rocks, only an Economist would say that.
Baby Teresa. A great online social business concept. For each onesie they sell, they donate one to a child in need.
So when you need to buy a present for a little tacker pop over to Baby Teresa & check out their cute onesies. Shop for the little ones with a good conscience, knowing that you are also helping another child who really needs it… without even leaving home.
Last week Baby Teresa featured on The Circle. Check out the episode below.
Sarah Försterling 