Tagged: Twitter RSS

  • amysampleward 6:43 am on August 10, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Amnesty International, , , International, , , , Twitter   

    August #4Change Chat: Opportunities for Collaboration 

    The next #4change chat is this Thursday – I hope you can join us!

    Details:

    Starting the Conversations

    Unfortunately for me, I will unable to join the chat this Thursday; so, I’d like to offer some conversation starters now to get you thinking of questions, ideas, and stories you want to share!

    Here are some questions to consider:

    • has your organization found new collaborators (other organizations, companies, networks, etc.) for your work via social media use/presence?
    • have you reached out, either as an individual or an organization, with opportunities to collaborate to others you only connected with via social media? why?
    • what issues are unique to collaborations of this type?
    • what kind of reassurances (and what are the mechanisms for providing them) are unique to parties entering collaborations via social media?
    • how could collaborations enabled or maintained via social media be more or less sustainable than traditional tools/outlets?

    And here are some examples to consider:

    • SocialActions – a great example of social media powering the sharing and aggregation (and thus the collaboration and partnership) of social action opportunity portals all over the world
    • Amnesty International, Red Cross, and others – organizers working globally/locally have changed the way they campaign or operate now that they are really in the same space (online)
    • Journalism – writers are now using their social media platforms (whether it’s Twitter or Facebook, or even the newspaper’s comment-enabled websites) to collaborate with witnesses, locals, and experts for their contributions to the story

    Join the Conversation

    1. If you want to contribute to the conversation, you’ll need to have a twitter account (it’s free).
    2. 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”
    3. Jump in to the conversation by adding “#4Change” (without the “”) to your Twitter message

    Rules for #Change Chats

    1. #4Change will be structured around a series of questions which all participants can respond to. Send your questions to @tomjd without the hash tag (to keep them out of the stream) to have them considered.
    2. Introduce yourself in 1 tweet at the start or when you join.
    3. Stay on topic!
    4. Stay cool.

    Join us for the chat this Thursday – looking forward to discussing the role social media play in collaboration!

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  • amysampleward 3:09 am on July 16, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Global Community, Hashtags, Lessons Learned, , Twitter   

    Lessons Learned: Using Twitter for a Global Conversation 

    Over the last few months, we have seen Twitter serve the global community by playing an important role in communications – whether it’s finding new friends (#FollowFriday), or telling the world about your government/election/political state (#IranElection), whether it’s having a conversation together (#4Change), or non-linearly replacing your RSS feed.  What do those # mean? That’s part of the key to success when using Twitter for a Global conversation. Using hashtags lets you mark your message as pertaining to a certain topic, then automatically include that message in a stream with everyone else’s that include the same hashtag.  Using Twitter search or other tools, you can watch news and updates about the election in Iran by using #IranElection; or, find interesting people to follow and connect with using #FollowFriday to peruse the recommendations that pile up on Fridays.

    There are many opportunities to see hashtags in action!  There are also more and more opportunities emerging for people to coordinate global conversations that happen at the same time, instead of disconnected over time (still tied together via hashtag).  I am part of the planning team working on the monthly chat series behind #4Change.  There is also a Twitter-based chat starting up for consultants who work with social benefit organizations.

    I wanted to share some of the lessons I’ve learned from my involvement with organizing Twitter chats.  I’m looking forward to your ideas, too!

    1. Build a landing pad

    It is helpful to have some place where you can send people interested in your topic or chat that haven’t participated before – whether it’s a website, a blog, or just a separate Twitter account.  If you have a landing pad somewhere online where you can refer people and provide information about your chats, your group, or your purpose in more than 140 characters, it will save you a lot of extra tweeting!  Plus, it will provide a natural and obviously place to aggregate your content, thoughts, updates, and promotion of the chats.

    2. Brainstorm lots of questions but pick a few

    It seems obvious that people using a communication tool like Twitter, and then electing to participate in a large-scale public chat would not require much prodding to keep conversation going.  But, it is actually just this reason that it’s more important to pre-select your questions.  Twitter chats are slower moving than you’d expect because everyone is waiting on the Twitter search to refresh with new posts.  It works best to have 3-5 questions selected ahead of time and shared with a core group of chat leaders or guides.  This way, there is a group of people helping keep the conversation on track, focused on one question at a time.  Otherwise, the group can quickly and easily splinter off to other topics using other hashtags, after all, that’s what Twitter enables all day, every day.

    3. Consider your time

    If you really want to pull in participants from all over the world, it’s important to consider what time you are holding the chat.  It’s also important to consider how long you want the chat to be.  Knowing that Twitter based chats are slower in development and pace than something like a live web chat, you don’t want it to be too narrow of a window, but you can only hold people’s attention for so long as well.

    4. Narrow your focus

    #4Change or #NPCons (nonprofit consultants) seem like pretty obvious topics. But coordinating a conversation would be far too difficult without a specific topic for that chat because the possibilities for questions or specific ideas within those two general topics are endless.  For example, recent 4Change topics have included using competitions for social change and Twitter as a political/revolutionary tool.  This also means people can identify ahead of time any resources they want to share during the chat and if they are interested in the specific topic of the month or not.

    5. Invite your audience

    If you have your topic for the month picked out, you may have some experts, prominent thinkers, or maybe organizations/companies/ groups that are known for working in or with that topic that you want to explicitly invite to participate.  Ensuring that fresh voices participate is important – we could all talk to the same group of people without organizing a public conversation.  Promoting the chat widely via Twitter and other social networks is a great way to find more participants, too.

    6. Never underestimate the technology

    I already mentioned that Twitter-based chats aren’t as fast-paced as live web chats or some other technologies.  But, you also have to remember that Twitter isn’t in your control!  If the server has a glitch, if there’s scheduled maintenance, or if search tools lag, then your Twitter chat will dramatically suffer.  This happened during the July #4Change chat and caused us to call the chat off half-way through as search was 15 minutes behind and many participants’ messages weren’t showing up at all.

    7. Participate!

    #4Change:
    If you want to learn more about the #4Change monthly chat series, visit http://4change.memeshift.com  The next chat topic will be announced there and on Twitter using #4Change.

    #NPCons:
    Join the first #NPCons chat this coming Tuesday, 21 July, at 1pm US Pacific time.  These chats will be monthly, on the 3rd Tuesdays, at 1 pm Pacific.

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  • amysampleward 2:56 pm on July 7, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Organizing, Revolt, Revolution, , , Twitter   

    4Change Chat: Revolutionary social media – social tools for revolts, protests 

    The next #4change chat has been announced and I hope you can join in!

    Details:

    • Date: Thursday, July 9 (moved to July, 23rd – today! – same time)
    • Where: Twitter (search for #4Change)
    • When: 5 – 7 pm US Eastern Time
    • Topic: Revolutionary social media: Exploring social tools for revolts, upheavals & protests

    Why are we doing this and why would you want to join? Great questions:

    Social media is becoming a key driver of social change, allowing for the dissemination of new ideas, the formation of new communities and coalitions and the realization of new efficiencies and reach by existing social change groups. Throughout the world activists, organizers and non-profit professionals are exploring how best to use these tools, and sharing the results using the tools themselves. However these conversations are less international and therefore less effective than they could be.

    We have so much to learn from each other. From new forms of political campaigning in the United States, experiments in e-government and civic participation in England, from the fight against internet censorship in Australia and New Zealand and from start-ups in Canada and France. And beyond.

    We need a platform for light-weight, easily-organized and openly accessible conversations involving people from numerous countries. Twitter, I believe, provides us with such a platform.

    When do the chats take place?

    Chats are on the second Thursday of each month between 5-7pm US Eastern Time (GMT-4).

    Who is leading and participating in these chats?

    #4Change was initially proposed by Tom Dawkins (@tomjd) in Washington DC who is joined by Todd Pitt (@zerostrategist – Washington DC), Morgan Sully (@memeshfit – Oakland, California), Natasha Judd (@tashjudd – London, England), Edward Harran (@edwardharran – Brisbane, Australia) and Vibewire (@vibewire – Sydney, Australia).

    But the #4Change chats are open to everyone interested in discussing social media’s role in social change! Don’t be shy about joining—that’s one great thing about an open, public chat like this, you can follow along silently until you have something you want to say and no one will know :)

    How can you follow along or join the conversation?

    1. If you want to contribute to the conversation, you’ll need to have a twitter account (it’s free).
    2. 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”
    3. Jump in to the conversation by adding “#4Change” (without the “”) to one of your Twitter messages

    Are there any rules for #Change Chats?

    1. #4Change will be structured around a series of questions which all participants can respond to. Send your questions to @tomjd without the hash tag (to keep them out of the stream) to have them considered.
    2. Introduce yourself in 1 tweet at the start or when you join.
    3. Stay on topic!
    4. Stay cool.

    Join me for the chat this Thursday – looking forward to discussing the role competitions play in social change!

     

  • tomjd 10:01 pm on June 29, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Ashoka, Lemelson Foundation, Socentchat, , Twitter   

    Another Twitter event: #SocEntChat 

    In addition to instigating the #4change chats I have also been involved in establishing another monthly twitter-based conversation for social entrepreneurs, their supporters and partners called #SocEntChat. Having just written this post for SocialEarth I thought people visiting here would also be interested in knowing about it:

    Twitter is proving to be an incredibly powerful tool for entrepreneurs, activists and researchers to share their stories, ideas and causes, building tribes of followers who can help them in their missions. #SocEntChat uses Twitter as a platform to bring these people together, convening monthly real-time forums to help identify promising initiatives and techniques, connect with possible allies and partners and share knowledge and insights.

    I initiated #SocEntChat (short of Social Entrepreneur Chat) as part of my role as Digital Marketing Strategist at Ashoka, an international citizen-sector organization founded by Bill Drayton, often called “the father of social entrepreneurship,” which seeks to create an Everyone a Changemaker world. After 28 years of supporting leading social entrepreneurs in over 70 countries and building infrastructure to support changemakers we see an incredibly important part of our mission as convening social entrepreneurs and their supporters to help accelerate change.

    So the question I asked myself as I launched our account @AshokaTweets earlier this year was, how could Twitter help us further this mission? After having been inspired by the success of the weekly #Journchat discussions, which focus on how technology is impacting journalism and PR, we made the decision to use our networks to host an equivalent monthly event for social entrepreneurs. Nathaniel Whittemore, social entrepreneurship blogger at Change.org agreed to be my co-host and the first #SocEntChat was held in April to try and capture the learnings from the Skoll World Forum. Since then we have covered Social Entrepreneurship on Campuses and Green Entrepreneurship. You can read the transcripts here, here, and here. You can also read the reflections from David Strelneck, coordinator of Green Initiatives at Ashoka, on the last #SocEntChat here.

    We have been thrilled by the response and the quality of the conversations help so far. Despite the severe length limitations of Twitter the discussions have reached a surprising depth, whether in considering how new voices could be heard at the Skoll World Forum, how to better connect students and off-campus communities or the best role for Government in fostering green innovation.

    This Wednesday from 4-6pm US EDT (GMT-4) we’ll explore the exciting possibilities of Mobile Innovation, a week after Ashoka and the Lemelson Foundation co-hosted an event in Nairobi Kenya on this topic. Innovation in the use of mobile technologies for social change are leaping rapidly ahead, whether in the form of The Extraordinaries use of smart phones for volunteering, using SMS to share the daily price of goods at market so that rural farmers in Africa get a better deal or mobile phones being used for banking in the absence of more traditional  financial infrastructure.

    I hope you’ll join us!

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  • amysampleward 1:44 am on June 26, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , Twitter   

    4Change Chat focused on Competitions for Social Change 

    June 11 was the June #4Change chat.  These monthly online discussions take place via Twitter – participants add to the conversation by tweeting messages and using the tag #4change; this lets people follow the conversation, whether they have a Twitter account or not, by following the tag #4change on search.twitter.com. This month’s topic was Challenges and Competitions for Social Innovation.

    You can see the recap of the chat here.

    The main 3 questions for this chat were:

    1. How can challenges/competitions be used to discover, support, and accelerate social change projects and solutions?
    2. What are the different types of competitions and which work best in driving change?
    3. How can challenges support collaboration btw projects?

    We are pulling together some of the key takeaways and would love to hear from you if you watched or participated, or even if you didn’t (you can read the transcript from the chat and add your thoughts, too!).

    Two key takeaways from Morgan and two from me include:

    • the potential for future collaboration with other projects should be put into the judging criteria
    • competitions can surface stories and causes that might not otherwise get any attention
    • when creating a competition or challenge, it is incredibly important to be clear about the context (who is involved, who is targeted, what the ideas will be directed towards, etc.)
    • there is a real interest in creating a compendium of competitions and their characteristics (I’ll be helping us wrangle this one and providing more details and opportunities for the community to start creating the compendium soon!)

    Share your takeaways, read the transcript, and more!

    Read more about #4Change, the Why, How and Who behind the monthly conversation series.

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