VIDEO: PdF 2010: Can the Internet Fix Politics? Sharing Is Daring
Read the text and see the slides at the full presentation page.
Posts tagged with 'Share This!'
An overachiever’s guide to prepping for an Ignite talk
(note: You can look at the slides and text here; here’s the video.)
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?
[read the rest of this post » ]
Crowdfunding: the new black? Or the scourge of the earth? You decide!
Though it’s been eight months since I actually launched the crowdfunding for my book (and then wrote about how it was going), it seems to have kicked up a new firestorm of discussion over the past weekend. Much of it began on Twitter; then a few people wrote up blog posts covering it. I only discovered the discussion after it was well underway (evidently I’m difficult to track down online, and not much of a conversationalist anyways, heh), so the last few days have been spent correcting factual errors and offering catch-up insight as to why I believe so deeply in this model. I’m hoping now to sum up a few of the arguments I’ve made elsewhere, but moreso I’d like to pull back and look at some big picture issues.
For background, here are the series of posts that sum up the first discussions on Twitter, and subsequent responses:
- An argument about crowdfunding, Quiet Babylonian
- Crowdfunding & Micropatronage Part 2, Quiet Babylonian
- Crowdfunding books, PD Smith at Kafka’s mouse
- Is ‘crowdfunding’ really the way ahead for author advances?, Michelle Pauli at The Guardian UK’s Books blog
There seem to be two sets of argument made against crowdfunding in much of the discussion I’ve seen: one, it reveals the funding seeker as a shameless self-promoter and snake-oil salesperson; two, it destroys the ethos of publishing either by allowing publishers to never have to produce advances again, or by allowing just any ol’ work to be produced without blood/sweat/tears.
[read the rest of this post » ]
Disaster + social networks = opportunities to help and need for thoughtfulness
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.“
Talk: How Sharing and Storytelling Will Change the World
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.
Picking a cover for “Share This!” and the hilarity of how friends know me
I’m running a poll to help me and my publisher choose a cover for Share This! — go take it! Here are your choices…
BK wanted me to add a “how do you know the author” question to the survey, so of course, my friends decided to have a wee bit of fun. Here’s a roundup of my favorite response so far (with necessary comments from me in italics):
- She’s a pal.
- From the bar
- The series of tubes
- In college, we were making beds for the football team NY Giants. ask her. (true!)
- We share an ex-boyfriend, ha ha.
- It’s complicated, but I’ve been a fan for years! (See: “We share an ex-boyfriend.” No kidding, there’s more than one)
- We went to psychic healer school together.
- She designed my site, and saved my life. (check is in the mail, Alice)
- I am her indentured servant (You are? Where’s my dinner, muppet?)
- Schmoozing
- I mistook her for Jill from Jack & Jill Politics (true story, Cheryl.)
- We met in in jail. Or was it the Army?
- Her very favorite Uncle out of all her uncles living in NC (there’s just one)
- Hair bleach and naughty conversations
- Osmosis (not far from the truth, on the Bowery)
UPDATE: More funny friends have chimed in…
- From a movie set, it’s a long story (god help us, this one)
- secret president of her fan club (that check is going in the mail now)
- Sister; knew her before she got a sense of humor :) (thanks, bro!)
- friend/dog scratcher/chef (need you FT, see “indentured servant” above)
- great serendipity (the meaning of life, after “42″ of course)
Quick announcement: my book has a title! Here it is…
Domesday Books by electropod on Flickr
Some of you were around Friday evening when I put it out on Twitter and Facebook, but wanted to get a chance to share it with the rest of yous after a busy weekend. Hurray! The official title of my book is…
Share This! How You Will Change the World With Social Networking
Many folks participated in the surveys that brought us to this point, and I just want to thank you again for all that. I’m super-psyched!
More about the book:
- Book deal announcement, with a description of what I’m doing
- My fundraising appeal
- A report on how the crowdfunding is going
Crowdfunding ‘n’ friendraising: notes from the trenches of book project support
As it turns out, my chutzpah in asking my colleagues and friends to help support me while writing my book this summer was a pretty good thing: to date, I’ve raised about $6500 through small and large donors, and even gotten $100/month in pizza from the fabulous Two Boots Pizza here in NYC. This led to Publisher’s Weekly doing an article about the crowdfunding part of the project today (thanks, Wendy Werris!), and has inspired me to jot down a few thoughts about how it’s been fundraising for my own book.
Help me write my first book (#feeddeanna)
As you may have heard, I’ve signed a contract with Berrett-Koehler to write a book about social media this summer. But! I need a tremendous amount of support — monetary, moral and otherwise — to get it done in the super-fast timeframe that I’m working within. Can you help? Here’s the email that I sent out to all my friends and colleagues. Please use the ChipIn to the right, or click here to make a donation.
Update, 7/13/09: Two things. There’s a post on my progress and thoughts here, and also, to reflect the offline donations I’m getting, I’m now gradually lowering the goal of the ChipIn.
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Friends, colleagues, clients! Lend me your ears…
I’m writing you with some exciting news that makes me very happy. I just signed a contract from Berrett-Koehler publishers to write a book I’ve been imagining for a long time. But it’s going to take some very hard work on my part, and I hope you can help me succeed.
Identity crisis: How much should I share on social media?
As more people are jumping into the social media river, many are wondering what they should share online — specifically, where are the boundaries between personal and professional behavior in this brave new world, where we’re all able to peek into the windows of our friends, family and coworkers.
I talked in pretty simple terms about some different approaches in “The non-fanatical beginner’s guide to Twitter.” With this post, I’m going to flesh out some of the nitty gritty and help to answer some of the tougher questions.
It used to be said with one of the very first popular online social tools — email — that you shouldn’t write anything in a message that you wouldn’t want to appear in the New York Times. Few people ever followed that rule, thank goodness. How boring would our lives be if we all subjected ourselves to Grey Lady standards of information sharing?
Nowadays, new tools make it easier to share as much of ourselves as we want, and especially if you’re just getting going, it can be difficult to know what’s okay to post and what isn’t. A flat-out easy beginner’s guidepost comes from the illustrious Susan Mernit, who told participants in a workshop we led: “If you’re wondering whether you should post something or not, you probably shouldn’t.”
Read my book
- Coming June 2010
from Berrett-Koehler - About the book; Table of contents
- Publisher's page
- Pre-order: Amazon, Powell's, Barnes & Noble, Indiebound
- Become a fan on Facebook
- Follow book news on Twitter
