Date: Thurs September 9th
Time: 2 pm PST, 5 pm EST, 10 pm UK, 11pm W. Europe for 2 hours
Location: #4change on Twitter
Topic: Developing a core community of #4change network weavers & builders

The background to this week’s topic

During the slow month of August 2010, the #4change chat team announced that we’d been thinking about a transition which moves us away from branding #4change as a specific monthly twitter-based chat, toward a branding of #4change as a model that represents what a loose but structured network of people are doing with social media tools to advance social change.  We invited you to a #4change chat on Twitter to brainstorm with us on Co-creating a Network of #4change chat events.

A small group came out for an initial exchange of positive ideas, and then the core #4change old guard connected once more to hash through where we are at and where we would love to see the #4change network concept go. That we were not able to capture the August #4change chat until after it had slipped into the lifeless land of “older tweets are temporarily unavailable,” strongly validates the one of the main conclusions that the core #4change team arrived to in our last call.

Concluded: Whatever we do with #4change from this point forward will require core community engagement in the planning.

In the lead up to this week’s #4change chat, I am reaching out with intent to folks who have expressed an interest in the future of the #4change network. Please review the latest #change crew thinking on “a plan” below.

I hope to see you on Twitter at the usual time on Thursday, 9 September  (2 pm PST, 5 pm EST, 10 pm UK, 11pm W. Europe for 2 hours) for a chat with the #4change hashtag to further build on these ideas. Please post your suggestions for 140 character questions to guide Thursday’s chat in the Comments section.

4 Change Futurist Chat / Strategy

4 Change Network Strategy

Vision (Focus on Tech as Change Catalyst?)
A microblog chat network. An aggregator of microblog chat from, of, around and relating to 4change, change chats, change, changemakers and people for change. Does it have to be related to positive social change and technology, or just social change?

Concluded: Public virtual events about social change at a specific time, all listed in a specific virtual space

• How would a chat qualify to become part of the network?
• How would they fit?
• How would we vet / what is the vetting process?
• What about the chat that aligns to 4change?
• Does it need to be about technology and social change?
• Engagement metrics / interest?
• Alignment statement?
• Consensus? Add ur thoughts.
• What is the value proposition?

Infrastructure

• WordPress
• Drupal
• Joomla
• Other suggestions?

For the microblog chats:

• Twitter
• Identica
• Yammer / yammer communities
• Cover it live
• Skype

Please join us, Thursday 9 August to get involved in shaping and fleshing this exciting plan out further together. See you then!  Please post your suggestions for 140 character questions to help guide our discussion in the comments section below

Details:

Date: Thurs August 9th
Time: 2 pm PST, 5 pm EST, 10 pm UK, 11pm W. Europe for 2 hours
Location: #4change on Twitter
Topic: Developing a core community of #4change network weavers & builders

As Amy Sample Ward mentioned in today’s announcement of the new Community Building Chats she’s hosting,

The #4Change team that has managed/supported/hosted the monthly chats for over a year now has recently come to a very interesting transition phase – there are quite a few options on the table and many directions that we could take, including a partnership with Internet4Change. I’m really interested in what happens next, and not just because I am part of the team but also because I think we can be a case study in ourselves of the changing landscape and processes of online collaboration. I want to keep these chats associated with the #4change network so that more people can find and participate, we can more directly share across other topics, and these chats can stay bundled together with anything/everything else that comes next in the growth and evolution of #4change, whether as part of the larger Internet4Change or not. Exciting times!

I joined the #4change team in early 2010, at a time when the transition phase had perhaps already started. I’d been actively participating in the monthly #4change chats whenever I could for a while, and no – of course it hadn’t slipped by me that I have owned a domain intended since 2002 for someday housing the kind of dynamically generated and very practical information about using the internet for social change that the #4change chats produce. I think it was Tom Dawkins, at that time known to me as the (long overdue) strategist behind Ashoka’s social media presence, who first tweeted me with the idea of joining the #4change crew “behind the scenes”.  Amy was also very encouraging when I met her face to face for the first time in London in January, as were others on the #4change crew who reached out with encouraging tweets & DMs.

Needless to say, I was thrilled and honored to jump in. Apart from some interesting potential to maybe explore with regard to Internet4Change, I was also excited to learn about the collaborative systems and processes that the #4change crew was using to co-create the monthly chat event together. All in all, so far, I can honestly say it’s been a really tremendous learning experience.

Working with the likes of social media & social change brains like Amy Sample Ward, Tom Dawkins, Todd Pitt, Morgan Sully and Edward Harran on thinking about where the highest value of the #4change chat lies, the kind of space that the #4change hashtag has come to occupy in our tweetstreams, and what it might come to represent in the broader world of micro-blogging events has been exciting – even if we don’t yet have all the answers. What’s clear is that there is a shared desire among the original #4change crew to move beyond thinking about #4change as a product, and start understanding it as a model for participatory online learning in the social change space that is worthy of serious thought toward a sustainable replication strategy.

There are essentially two parts to the challenge of figuring out next steps for the #4change chat concept:

1. the real-time operational part, of convening, planning & hosting global #4change micro-blogging chat events that are really useful to participants, and
2. the content capture strategy part, of making sure that the practical information the #4change chats produce is as accessible and useful as possible to others in the future.

Our starting point is the real time operational part, where one of the first burning questions is WHO will be convening, planning and hosting #4change chats in the future.  What we’d most love to see happen in response to that question is that folks who have been following the #4change chat space will step forward to claim a small piece of this current transition’s success.  What we in the #4change crew foresee in loose terms, as Amy wrote, is the development of #4change as an umbrella-like network of connected, regularly scheduled micro-blogging chats about social change, hosted by people with a particular interest in the theme they are convening the chats around.

• Amy Sample Ward will be hosting a regular monthly #4change chat on Community Building.
• Christina Jordan (that’s me!) might be hosting a monthly #4change chat for Social Enterprise start-ups
• Todd Pitt (@zerostrategist) has been thinking about what a semi-regular #4change chat about Web Strategy would look like
• Which #4change related topic would YOU be willing to host a chat about on a monthly or semi-regularly scheduled basis?

Ideally, we are imagining a #4change network that’s able to co-create & effectively cross-promote a calendar of #4change participatory global learning events that are led by really passionate people using a range of micro-blogging tools, from Twitter to CoverItLive to Skype, to others that offer a sharable archive of our real-time interaction.

In terms of topics that are covered through the #4change network chats, possibly merging with Internet4Change invites exploration of a broader territory, beyond the lines of social media and social change per se. What I hope we will learn more about together under the #4change umbrella is how the larger resource that is the Internet – in it’s many social, economic and communicative facets – can be navigated and used to help co-create, promote and implement real world social change.

So what do you say? The #4change door is open to those who would like to join us in taking the micro-blogging chat concept to another level.

• Is there an area of your work online for social change that you feel passionate enough about to regularly share and harvest some crowdsourced wisdom on?
• Can you think of 3-4 specific chat topics that you would be willing to schedule with the #4change network over the coming months?
• Are you interested in working with us to build a system for knowledge sharing that spreads the practical info that’s shared during the #4change chats to as many people who need it as possible?
• Alternatively, would you like to join us by associating an existing monthly chat you run with the #4change network?

If so, then please get in touch @ChristinasWorld!

Meanwhile, we’d love some initial feedback to this new direction in the mix, as we continue to think about taking these ideas forward. If you have loved participating in the #4change chats in the past, then please join us in the August chat TOMORROW to begin a discussion about co-creating a #4change network into the future. Tom Dawkins and I will be there to co-host an early exploration of what the #4change transition could mean for you.

Details:

Date: August 12th
Time: 2 pm PST, 5 pm EST, 10 pm UK
Location: #4change on Twitter
Topic: Co-creating a network of #4change chat events

In the wake of South by Southwest in Austin, and in anticipation of some exciting social media and social change gatherings coming up on the 2010 events calendar, we thought it  could be useful to explore How Social Media Can Enhance Events as the topic for the March #4change chat.

I’m excited! Not only is this a topic that I personally want to learn more about, but it’s going to be my first time as part of the #4change collective to co-host a chat, together with Tom Dawkins (@tomjd). #Gratitude in advance for your patience, as I find the right groove!

Some pre-chat food for thought:

My new Mac’s thesaurus offers several alternative terms we could use instead of enhance:

enhance (verb) increase, add to, intensify, heighten, magnify, amplify, inflate, strengthen, build up, supplement, augment, boost, raise, lift, elevate, exalt; improve, enrich, complement.

Most of us would probably agree that social media indeed can enhance offline events, but does it always? For whom?  The thesaurus also tells me the antonym to enhance is diminish. Can social media also diminish offline events?

There are so many tools we can use to try and enhance offline events. What we hope to explore in Thursday’s chat is how.

#4Change March Chat Questions:

1. What’s the potential benefit of using social media to cover events? For whom?
2. What makes a good events coverage strategy?
3. Are there examples of specific events that really did the social media piece well?
4. Which Social Media tools are best suited for covering live events?
5. How does online reporting affect the experience of participants at an event.
6. Is it possible to imagine online participants actually engaging in offline events remotely through social media, or will there always be a disconnect?
7. How can the continuation of conversations held at live events best be continued online? Is it realistic or unrealistic to expect that they will?

Join the Twitter chat:

If you want to contribute to the conversation, you’ll need to have a twitter account (it’s free).

• To follow the conversation (whether you are planning to contribute or not), use http://search.twitter.com or another application to search on Twitter for #4Change
• Jump in to the conversation by adding #4Change to your Twitter message
• Feeling brave? Check out TweetChat – it’s a great application that integrates with your Twitter account and makes chats more fun! You can turn it off after the chat.
• Please introduce yourself in 1 tweet at the start or when you join in

Details

Date: March, 18th 2010
When: 2 – 4 pm US Pacific Time, 5 – 7 pm US  Eastern Time, 9pm – 11pm London, UK (NOTE: check your local time carefully, as the US changed to daylight savings time earlier this week)
Where: Twitter (search for  #4Change)
Topic: How Social Media Can Enhance Events