(note: You can look at the slides and text here; video will be posted as soon as I get it.)
A week and a half ago, I received an email asking me if I'd be willing to do an Ignite talk for the March 4 NYC event, part of Global Ignite Week. If you're not familiar with Ignite, here's the deal: You have 5 minutes to give your talk; you create a PowerPoint presentation to go with the talk, but here's the kicker: You must do 20 slides, and the slides will advance automatically every 15 seconds. Talk about creative restraint inspiration! Not only is it an amazing challenge and a great place to flex your speaker muscles, but the Ignite platform also reaches far and wide into multiple communities, and can be a huge opportunity to reach lots of audiences with your message. Was I up for it? Sure.
Then the panic set in. Oh my God, what I have I signed myself up for?
This was shot in June 2009 in Toronto for GetInvolved. It was a really fun conversation with the producers… I talk about free-for-all organizing, how influence is changing, the importance of authenticity–and I start the first Twitter Anon meeting, to boot.
The devastation that Haiti is facing after the earthquakes and aftershocks from yesterday is flooring. That a country already so hard hit by utter economic and political distress could be nailed with such a fierce disaster is emotionally wrenching for many of us. And lately, when we're hard hit, we take to social networks to work out our pain and find a way to manage it.
There are several opportunities we have at hand, and before I run off to a morning meeting, I wanted to address some of the ups and downs of dealing with disasters via technologies. The biggest thing we need to be aware of right now is the role our own egos play in these situations. We have a desperate need to feel useful in situations that make us feel helpless, and the ease with which we can share our thoughts and stories amplifies ways we think we're being helpful when we're dealing with emotionally charged material. We need to be aware of our impulses and sort out what's good and what's not so good. Here's my take:
Getting the word out, the good stuff. People have been passing along word from the Red Cross, Mercy Corps, Yele and other organizations on easy and fast ways to donate money to relief efforts– especially via txt message. You can send a text message on your phone, for example, to 90999 with the word HAITI, and that will donate $10 to the RedCross' fund. The charge will appear on your next phone bill.
The abilitiy to read and see news coming from inside Haiti via everyday people, like many other situations recently, is also fascinating, and incredibly powerful. We aren't reliant on potentially corrupt or broken information structures (like government news agencies, for example) to find out what's happening in real time.
Getting the word out, the challenging stuff. The other side of the ability to share information quickly and easily is that the potential for the spread of misinformation is high. We aren't physiologically equipped to deal with highly charged situations via new technologies, in many cases– our brains are built to rely on a variety of cues to filter and respond, and those cues are often missing when reading updates on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere.
Because we've established trust with the people that we communicate with online, we automatically assign that trust, or authority, over to situations that don't necessarily warrant it. Because I generally trust my friends to post smart/thoughtful things, the urge to repost what seems like important information from them in times of crisis without verifying it first is high. We have to change this behavior, and look for ways to establish authority of sources (without falling back on old models of only giving institutions like news orgs and governments the authority) and to verify what we share before doing so.
I wrote about this a whole bunch in Share This!, and I'm going to post those sections this afternoon when I return. Stay tuned…
UPDATE: The relevant sections from the book are now up. Start with "Stop, Drop and … Think."
On Saturday, I gave a the closing keynote talk at Organizing 2.0 here in NYC, a one-day conference designed to bring together labor folks, community organizers and netroots people to work on strategies for integrating online and offline organizing. A fun time was had by all! Here's the video (thank you, Sum of Change!), and below are my notes from the talk.
As I mentioned on Twitter, it's just getting too hard for many of us to keep track of all the awesome conferences that happen every year. I've missed so many this fall, even ones happening in NYC, just because I hadn't done any curation. Conferences can be a drag, but as a freelancer/consultant/author without a formal organizational structure, they're often where I make the best connections and have the most fun with my colleagues.
So! An early New Year's resolution: I'm gonna try to get on the ball for next year. Already thinking of SXSW, Allied Media Conference, US Social Forum, Personal Democracy Forum, Women Who Tech, America's Future Now, NonProfit 2.0, NTEN and more; what do you recommend in the social tech, media, politics, activism, and social justice fields? Conferences & unconferences, big 'n' small. Leave 'em in the comments (links to conferences would be helpful), and I'll publish a big list in the next few days.
I admit it: I'm a complete pushover for slapstick humor. And today's meme on Twitter, #unseenprequels*, has me in stitches. The idea: take a movie and slightly alter the title to come up with its prequel, which no one would have ever, ever paid to see. Hilarity ensues.
My favorites, in no particular order:
@Bryce1984 The Lambs That Wouldn't Shut Up #unseenprequels
* Wondering what the deal with the # is? That's the marker for a "hashtag" on Twitter. It's how Twitter users easily add or denote a keyword, allowing everyone else to either find or refer to a topic easily. Search for all #unseenprequel tweets!
For Share This!, I'm trying to cover and answer some of the most common hesitant feelings when it comes to people getting fully on board with the social networking movement. If you're not active already, what are the questions you need answered, or the fears you have? For those that are in deep, what do you hear from the people around you who aren't?
Also, I'm doing a series of "Yeah, But…" sidebars to help answer questions. What are your "yeah, buts"?
Here are the fears and yeah-buts I've heard most (in no particular order):
I don't want people to know about my private life
I like using social networks to maintain my personal relationships, but I don't like blending the professional stuff in with it
I feel like I have to get everything right/perfect before I join an online conversation (most often with blogging)
I don't have time for any of this stuff.
Yeah but… the corporations/government are gathering so much info about us.
… everything moves too fast. I can't keep up.
… media/journalism require money/investment. Social networks can't replace that.
… these social networks are all closed/walled gardens. Why don't we all do something open source?
Maybe one more question, for intermediate and advanced folks: If you could look back at your pre-social-networking self and offer one piece of insight or wisdom, what would it be? Is there anything you wish you'd known before you joined into social networks?
Leave everything in the comments below; I'll let yous know which ones make it into the draft and the final versions of the book.
(note: You can look at the slides and text here; video will be posted as soon as I get it.)
