This is a storified curation of most of the panels I saw at SXSW 2013, in reverse chronological order. Next time, I’m going to break these up into individual panels, and hang those on a master file of linked storified stories. It’s difficult to navigate a long piece like this by paging through until you get back to the panel you wanted. These served as notes for my wrap-up blog, Clay pots and shards of Google Glass.
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Category Archives: Digital Culture
SXSW 2013 Storified
Filed under Digital Culture, sxsw
Tweeting from the clouds: new Boeing 777 is Digifriendly
Posted this on their Facebook page:
Dear American Airlines,
I’m flying from Amsterdam today to SXSW in Austin in one of your spankin’ new 777s, and just want to say THANK YOU for the wifi over the Atlantic, and for the promotional price of… FREE. You should keep it that way! Any marginal income you might get from a $19 pass would be peanuts compared to the goodwill and preference you’d get from people like me who live online. I’m plugged into a 220v socket so my MacBook’s battery isn’t racing the clock. I’m tweeting from 30000 feet about what a great experience this is. Please, please, keep it that way!
I can’t remember the last time I was seriously excited about an airplane. OK, the Wifi was slow of course, and cut out over the Arctic Circle, and the promise of iPod recognition and USB thumb drive media access on the USB didn’t work. The airport maps are unreadably detailed with no zoom function. The Stewardess told me there’s a system for seat to seat SMS-like communication that’s not implemented yet. And among the bugs yet to be worked out in the plane itself, seat 33C sticks out into the aisle as part of a 3 seat row behind a two seat row, making for tricky meal cart navigation. Ow. OW. Ow.
But the moment when I really felt like I was in the Matrix was on exiting the plane. You look out on a sea of seat-back screens and realise that every one is displaying a different steward or stewardess. Nice touch.
Filed under Digital Culture
#DeTox: Unfinished business
Don’t bother reading this blog. Just watch this video. Share it. Send it. Like it. Comment on it. Get it on as many screens as possible.
And now that you’ve done that:
Back in the 70s and 80s, Greenpeace ran campaigns to drive toxic production out of Europe and North America. In those days, we pushed for government legislation and intra-governmental agreements to stop things like the dumping of titanium dioxide in the North Sea, factories that turned rivers red or blue depending on what dye process was running, and pipes that simply ran wastewater into whatever waterway was handy, contents often unknown and unmonitored by any government agency.
This was a nasty piece of work. Allied Chemical in New Jersey had found a loophole and was dispersing waste through a freaking SPRINKLER SYSTEM to avoid prohibitions on land burial and river disposal. Their solution effectively did both, but was entirely legal. Under arrest from left to right: Lisa Bunin, JR Yeager, Marc Gottschalk, Brian Fitzgerald, Kelly Rigg
Thing was, while we succeeded in clearing up rivers across our homelands, we drove an awful lot of those processes and factories to China, India, and Mexico. Unfinished business! Team #Detox at Greenpeace have picked up the job, however, but with a #PeoplePower twist that illustrates a pretty big shift in Greenpeace strategy and the battlefield on which we engage across the last 30 years.
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Filed under Activism, Digital Culture, Greenpeace
I love the Curiosity Rover, and unconverged Comms at NASA
Here at the secret mountain laboratory of Greenpeace International, we set out some time ago to integrate our digital communications with our traditional channels. I’d set up a “web team” back in the early 00s which originally had a mission of slinging HTML onto a website, but which over the years had become responsible for our YouTube channel, social media, online photos, the press section at www.greenpeace.org, and eventually all things “on the internet” — despite the fact that we had a video unit, a press desk, a photo desk — all doing distribution by traditional channels. When Inge Wallage came on as our Comms Director, she spotted the fact that it was time to converge: digital was no longer the backroom add-on, it was an integral part of all our communications.
This is probably a common phenom in the evolution of many communication departments over the last decade, but every now and then I see evidence of that old left-hand right-hand problem where you can really tell that one part of an organisation just didn’t get the memo that it’s 2012.
Take NASA. I am so in love with whoever is tweeting on behalf of the @MarsCuriosty rover, currently my favorite inanimate object on twitter. (Though I’m also highly appreciative of The Fake iTunes 10 icon, and @MyToaster).
Who wouldn’t love the cheeky, clued up vibe coming from the Martian surface?
Today’s wake up song: “Digging in the Dirt” by Peter Gabriel. Because no song says “Digging in the Regolith.” <sigh>
@MarsCuriosity
Curiosity Rover
A River Ran Through It. I found evidence of an ancient streambed on Mars, similar to some on Earth http://t.co/wfbpp7BW
@MarsCuriosity
Curiosity Rover
Road trip! I covered 32 meters of open Martian road yesterday (sol 38). Every long drive needs a soundtrack. Any suggestions?
@MarsCuriosity
Curiosity Rover
Sadly, the one I thought the best was actually from a parody account, now closed:
“Nasa just upgraded me to IOS 6 — apparently I’m in Norway.”
Yesterday we get the news that our intrepid traveler became the MAYOR OF MARS ON FOURSQUARE!!! I just find that brilliant and awesome, and I see the news spreading on Twitter faster than a dust storm on Phobos.
Of course, the younger folks at JPL and NASA knew it was news, so I imagine someone woke up a press officer in NASA’s traditional media department and carefully explained what Foursquare was so the Space Agency could issue this release:
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Filed under Digital Culture, Digital Issues
Cyborg Anthropology
Amber Case is the original Cyborg Anthropologist. These are my somewhat disjointed notes from a great talk.
Ambient location and the future of the interface.
The future of the interface is that it will disappear — reducing our unnatural actions #AmberCase #sxlb #sxswi
@Swankins
Nicola Swankie
Filed under Creativity, Digital Culture, Net Culture, Uncategorized
Patterns, moustaches, games
SXSW began with a disappointment. My all-time favorite SXSW presenter, Kathy Sierra, was ill and unable to present on “Gamification and the battle for the user’s soul,” which I dearly would have loved to have seen. Kathy was influential in making me think deeply how Greenpeace could move from an engagement offer of “Join us because we rock” to “Join us because we’ll make YOU rock,” and is profoundly wise about things ranging from user interface design to hacking the reptilian brain’s attention centres to Icelandic horses.
The day got better, though, with three rocking good sessions.
“Brands as patterns” tackled the question of how to transition from the “Mad Men” days of advertising and PR in which a brand was established with a rigid handbook of rules about what it stood for and the key to establishing it in the public mind was simple repetition in as many broadcast media as possible. In the era of Social Media, the suggestion went, a brand isn’t owned by a corporation, it’s an interaction, an interface, a series of transactions — in short, a pattern. Implication: corporations no longer own their brands, they create them through that interaction, by what they do, not by what they say. Which, of course, goes a long way to explaining why a contradiction between those things, exposed, becomes a terminal velocity Social Media Meltdown. It also explains the leverage that activist groups now have against corporate ill-behaviour: their reputations have been democratized.
“reptition in context in digital world makes, brands unresponsive and out of step with the audience”, Marc Shillum #patterns
@Shearmans
Sarah Shearman
Why patterns? Unique moments and patterns drive brands forward & define our identity. #patterns #ATSXSW
@bekahlockner
Bekah Lockner
Yes! #patterns #SXSW familiar patterns are easily recognized even with variations (like misspelled words)
@sazzollini
Sandy Azzollini
RT @brianfit: In the social era, a brand is a relationship and interface, an interaction: not repeated, controlled consistency. #patterns
@SuziDafnis
SuziDafnis
“Can growing a Moustache Change the World” was a “hugely popular in a tiny room” session, in which Movember founder Adam spoke about how an idea for a fun social event — growing a mustaches in November and shaving it off December 1st — transitioned to a cause (raising money and awareness around prostate cancer) with 450 dudes in Australia to the world’s biggest cancer fundraising event bringing in 117 million last year. Significantly, the idea was born in a pub. It was run by marketers and businessmen, not policy wonks. In fact, the biggest cancer charity in Australia turned them down when they pitched the concept — whoops. This was a wide-ranging, intimate (we were crushed) conversation which hit lots of buttons. Some big takeaways below.
Love it. The idea of Movember came to be over beers in Australia. Beer fuels creativity! #sxswmovember
@nikki_little
Nikki Little
Movemebr was started by four friends. Proof that small things can make a huge impact. #sxswmovember #health #causes
@createthegood
Create The Good
Prostate cancer kills as many as breast cancer, but there is far less conversation about it. Movember started that awareness. #sxswmovember
@caseymars20
Casey Hushon
Majority of donors raising money for Movemebr the first year were women. #sxswmovember
@createthegood
Create The Good
Movember raised $117 million and is the largest prostate cancer supporter. But it’s really about the awareness it’s raised. #sxswmovember
@caseymars20
Casey Hushon
“Even more important than the money we raised were the conversations we started.” #sxswmovember
@MovemberAustin
Movember Austin
Brilliant. In Canada 300 of the NHL pro players grew ‘taches for #Movember — and every male in Canada watches hockey. #sxswmovember
@brianfit
Brian Fitzgerald
“how do you tell the difference between a Mo Bro and a hipster?” “December 1″ heard at #SXSWMovember #SXSWMO
@Movember
Movember
bkgd of the movember staff is not non-profit, but things like business, marketing, tech. gives them an edge/diff perspective #sxswmovember
@adr512
april
“We want to be known as the organization that changed the world & cured prostate cancer”-@adamgarone #sxswmovember
@knowinsky
Kelli Nowinsky
“Superbetter” brought Jane McGonigal back to the stage with a strong reposte to the Colbert line “Am I really going to lie on my death bed regretting that I didn’t play more video games.” See my blog of a previous Jane Keynote for her original premise, which was roughly that gaming is statistically demonstrated to have so many benefits, we should be encouraging and our kids to do more, not less of them. (Up to a point, that is — there is an addiction threshold where benefits collapse). For today’s talk, she took the five most common regrets that researchers have identified as consistently expressed by the terminally ill, and systematically made the case that the right kind of games address every one of them: I wish I hadn’t worked so hard; I wish I’d spent more time with family; I wish I’d kept up with old friends; I wish I’d been who I wanted and not someone’s expectation.We then all played her game, Superbetter, which is designed to create micro tasks which will improve four key performance areas of your life. By Jane’s calculation, I will live 7 minutes longer for having spent that hour in her seminar. I think I just blew my extra time making a video of the queue at sxsw.
“we are moving from the pursuit of happiness to the happiness of the pursuit” #SXSWi #superbetter
@mosejames
Mose James IV
The opposite of the word virtual is not real. It means essence, possibility. Its opposite is “actualized.” #superbetter #sxswi
@brianfit
Brian Fitzgerald
#superbetter part of a new trend in games that @avantgame calls “actualizing games”- games that help us actualize our potential
@RCCNinc
Raccoon
RT @MattaMediaGirl: A visual interpretation of Jane McGonigal’s talk about gaming & app #Superbetter #sxsw http://t.co/eKDO7Dzn
@nattergraeme
natalie graeme
Jane McGonigal’s brave cat mnemonic for what we need to unlock potential. #sxswi #superbetter http://t.co/4Ad6Dl0U
@brianfit
Brian Fitzgerald
Filed under Digital Culture, Net Culture, Uncategorized
SXSW: Digital Gummy Bears, Zotz, and Jolly Ranchers
It’s the best candy store you can imagine, if you have a sweet tooth for big ideas, new apps, the subversive nature of technology, and the human and social implications of the Digiscene Era. It’s SXSW in Austin, Texas.
I’ll be doing my best to consume as much of the intellectual energy here as I can, and capture it in random snags. Here’s some of the software that’s helping me.
Apps I can’t do without at #SXSWi: Blackbird Pie plugin for WordPress: make tweets pretty when you blog ‘em. http://t.co/k6hLlgxM
@brianfit
Brian Fitzgerald
Boxcar! Essential. Pings my phone when any number of triggered events I set up happen involving any of my social media. I asked it to give me a nudge if I get a new follower on Twitter, or a message on Facebook, which I can configure to be as attention grabbing or quiet and retiring as I like.
Now, ADD the power of IFTTT (If This then That) to Boxcar and you can create your own information robot which scans the horizon and tugs at your sleeve when something important happens. IFTTT allows you to put together recipes, bit like Yahoo Pipes for Social Media but simpler. IF someone posts a mention of the word “Greenpeace” on Reddit, that turns up in my MetaReddit RSS feed. IFTTT monitors that feed, and whenever a new item appears, sends a notice to me via BoxCar. It can also monitor for mentions of the “Zombie Apocalypse” and I also use it to archive my tweets to Evernote (searchable!!!), ping me when anyone comments here on my blog, and email me Gizmodo’s iPad app of the week.
Hashable lets me keep track of who I meet by simply entering their twitter handle on my phone. Once in, I have a geotagged reference of where we met, we can exchange vCards, and tweet the meet to the rest of our networks. Supergreat.
And I’m trialing a whole heap of new stuff which looks good including three apps that do a possibly creepy, but cool thing of alerting you to the common interests of people in your geographic vicinity, or who have checked in to the same venue with Foursquare. Who’s in Starbucks now? Sonar will tell me, AND will tell me how I’m connected to the people there by analyzing my Foursquare, Facebook, and Twitter networks. Highlight will do the same thing, but only if someone else has the Highlight app. Glancee is a variation on that theme, but is prettier and a bit spooky in how deep it mines your social graph to find common interests. It reports, for instance, that I might want to have a chat with X here in the conference centre because he likes Vonnegut and I like Pynchon, we both use HootSuite, and we’ve both listened to songs by Regina Spektor recently. Well, it’ll certainly break the ice.
I got better results from Sonar than Highlight on the way over simply because it’s tied to FourSquare and doesn’t require building a critical mass of audience that have a new app. Highlight told me it would let me know when anyone interesting came by, but stayed quiet in my pocket while Sonar and Glancee let me know that other people in the airport lounge also followed Mashable, liked the New Yorker magazine, lived in Amsterdam, and had been to my local Bagel & Beans.
Localmind also looks good: allows you to ask questions about local conditions from local experts or people present in a place when you ask. I used it to query the condition of the badge line at the convention centre last night, but it’s more geared toward “Where’s the best sandwich in this neighborhood” kind of persistent information. Nice interface, great mapping of your vicinity and the conversations that are going on about it.
One or more of these is going to go BOOM the same way Twitter did in 2006 — but the SXSW crowd is uniquely suited to this kind of vicinity software. It’s a hive mind of early adopters who share a lot of interests.
So much to see and say. I’m experimenting with Storify’s AUTOMAGIC blogging of SXSW, which will be capturing stuff I put out via Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc and doing that Storify thing of making it all Timeliney and pretty. First installment is here, we’ll see how it works.
Filed under Digital Culture, Net Culture
SOPA: Corporate censorship threat to online activism
If you don’t know what SOPA is, you should look it up. While touted as a piece of US legislation designed to curtail piracy, it has the potential to allow corporations to censor online activism as well.
In a nutshell, SOPA will enable corporations to effectively shut down websites that they believe are infringing their copyrights and trademarks. All they have to do is file notice (not prove to a court, but simply file notice) that their copyright has been infringed to a service provider, such as the one which registers the name greenpeace.org on the internet, and that entity has 5 days to take action to end service. If in fact there was not copyright infringement, the service provider is immune from lawsuit by Greenpeace for taking the site down or suspending any other services.
In effect, the law says that Copyright infringement is so great a crime that Corporations can play judge and jury, presume guilt, and possibly infringe civil rights, free speech, and privacy in the defense of their interests.
They can demand that search engines and social networking sites block access to the targeted site, (which will impact websites outside the US as well) and that payment services and advertisers cease doing business with the accused site. A previous provision, that internet service providers block access to the site through the domain name system, has for now been removed from the bill: a good thing, perhaps, but not if it means a better chance for the rest of the bill’s draconian measures going through.
So what’s this got to do with activism?
What happens when Amnesty International features Shell’s logo in a call to action against human rights abuse in Nigeria? What happens when Oxfam publishes a picture with the Starbuck’s logo on their website to protest that company’s action against fair trade coffee in Ethiopia? Well, it so happens that trademark infringement is part of the bill as well — and that is an open invitation to corporate abuse of SOPA/PIPA to silence critics.
At Greenpeace, we’ve managed to put some pretty serious political judo moves on some mighty corporations by leveraging their own intellectual property against them. Whether it’s spoofing VW’s most expensive superbowl ad of all time, jamming the Exxon logo, creating a Kit-Kat ad that illustrates the rainforest destruction inherent in palm-oil production, or putting up a look-alike Apple.com website, we’ve rigorously exercised our right to free speech in freely speaking out against corporate abuse of the environment. We use their own language, their own marketing, their own strength against them.
Thing is, while court case after court case has agreed with us that parody is a protected form of free speech, the Corporations at the pointy end of our Social Media attacks tend to disagree. Exxon/Esso took us to court in France over alleged copyright infringement of their logo when we did this to it:
Kit Kat famously failed when they attempted to have a video featuring their brand removed from YouTube for trademark violation — hundreds of our supporters reposted the video on other sites and their own Facebook profiles. Eventually, YouTube’s lawyer’s intervened and the video was restored.
Under SOPA, YouTube *itself* could have been shut down for hosting our Kit Kat video. Facebook could have gone dark when supporters posted our videos. Greenpeace.org would have gone dark worldwide. And Kit Kat owner Nestle never would have been compelled to revise their policy on palm oil procurement, a move which has struck a major blow to an industry which is mowing down orang-utan habitat in Indonesia to plant palm trees.
You can imagine our corporate targets twiddling their fingers and intoning “yesssss, that would be wonderful: Smithers, buy some votes, quickly.”
Which is why you need to oppose SOPA/PIPA. If you are a US citizen, write your representative. If you live outside the US, sign this petition. If you want to do more, check out these suggestions from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Filed under Activism, Digital Culture, Digital Issues
Coming soon to an iPad near you: Greenpeace Images
We’ll be putting out our first iPad app soon from Greenpeace International — a drop-dead gorgeous image slideshow featuring some of the great (even award-winning) photography that has been captured by our snappers. I’m really excited to see this go out: it’s a very simple concept, developed very quickly, but it takes advantage of the iPad’s simplicity as a multimedia viewing device, the elegance of its gesture system, and the really gorgeous way it can display full-screen images.
I’ve been playing around with the iPad for some time now, and it took me a while to appreciate it for what it is, rather than trying to get it to be what it’s not.
It’s not a PC. I don’t find it all that useful even for email or any typing-intensive work. As a touch-typist raised on a mechanical Underwood typewriter, I like that tactile response of a keyboard. I SLAM when I type. When the iPad came out, I looked at the big size of the keyboard and thought “Oh goody: no more iPhone thumbing! I can type!” But you can’t, really, with a touchscreen, unless you teach yourself to hover over the screen. No F-J key bumps for rest position feedback, no clack and compress when you tap. Not good enough.
And of course, it ain’t a phone. My iPhone has taken over as my camera and my music player and my current book largely on the merit of being with me all the time. The iPad isn’t pocketable, so it’s out of the running for anything that requires ubiquitous presence.
The iPad is a replacement for the book, the magazine, the TV: at all three of those functions, it excels. Vanity Fair? New Yorker? they’re actually cheaper to download for me than pay Amsterdam prices for the sliced-tree versions. I’m currently reading Cory Doctorow’s “For the Win” in the iBook reader, and it’s actually easier for me to read than a conventional book — type size adjustable, brightness scale. And the form factor is close enough that I can take the iPad pretty much anywhere I’d take a conventional magazine or book, whether it’s curled up on the couch of a Saturday, in a café over a foamy Cappucino, or, yes, the reading throne.
With an App called Air Video Server I’m able to watch any films I have on my Mac remotely, streamed in real time, to the iPad with a full control set. So if the kids are watching “Very Odd Parents” I’ve got my own personal screen to catch Jon Stewart on from my iTunes library.
So as a media consumption device, full points. And some of the experiments that Wired and a few other print publications are running with new ways to experience magazine content with a sound-and-vision capable device are really brilliant and promising greater things. Interactive infographics? Bring ‘em on!
It’s not entirely useless as an office tool. It’s great, of course, as a mobile news reader: at our morning updates at 10am in the Greenpeace office I’ve got a full RSS feed of Greenpeace mentions in the press at my fingertips. And it’s handy as an extra screen in meetings, keeping a reference document open on the iPad for reading while taking notes on the Mac. I can also extend the screen of my Mac onto the iPad with an app called Air Display, and that’s a nifty way to add a fifth space to your Spaces app or share a live digital photocopy of the document you’re looking at with a colleague.
But the future of the tablet, I’d suggest, is more along the lines of the Hithchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: it’s an interactive information and entertainment system, not a workhorse, and the units it elbows in on are not the PC or the phone, but the TV and the bookstore.
And, of course, it’s GREAT for looking at award-winning pictures from the front lines of environmental activism. Watch this space.
Filed under Digital Culture, Greenpeace
Watching Obama at the Whitehouse via Facebook
It was great to see Obama saying some very strong stuff about BP, the oil industry, and the future of energy in America last night. It was great to see him defer further permits on offshore oil drilling, not so great to see him fail to ban drilling in the Arctic altogether.
But what was best was sitting in a noisy balcony at the Whitehouse press room with a bunch of pals heckling, cheering, and throwing popcorn. At least, that’s what it felt like.
I watched via the Whitehouse App on Facebook, where the live broadcast is accompanied by a live chat stream. Even cooler, I found it via a link onwhitehouse.gov itself, which I considered a very clued-up move by the POTUS’s webbies. Next press conference, check it out. Invite your friends. Grab some action links from Greenpeace or other activist sites and kick them into the chat flow. This is the stuff democracy is made of.
Filed under Digital Culture, Environmental Issues
3 great tools for monitoring your site’s Twexyness
Oooh, how cool is that. I just coined an as-yet unused adjectivalization — perhaps the last?– of a twitter term! Ahem, now back to our regularly scheduled post.
Want to know what people are tweeting about your site? Of course you do. And you can do that by plugging your site’s url into the absolutely wonderful Topsy, which unpacks short urls and so knows when you’ve been tweeted by a bit.ly or an ow.ly or a j.mp link, and has lots of added benefits like being able to filter by “influential” tweeters and letting you check out the tweet juice of individual tweeps.
And I mentioned some time ago a Chrome extension called Twitter Reactions which shows you, while on a page, what’s being tweeted about it — bringing the live social conversation to that static html page.
But today I found Twitter Pulse — fantastic. It shows you the most tweeted pages on a site for the last 24 hours, 7 days, or all time. What’s the Twexiest page on YOUR site?
Trending heavily in the last 24 hours to become the number two link for all time on the Greenpeace International page? Whale Trial Pledge — our action in support of the unfairly persecuted (for so says the UN) Junichi and Toru of Greenpeace Japan, facing charges for exposing a government scandal. Shown YOUR support yet?
Filed under Activism, Digital Culture, Digital Issues
10 questions to people-power your activist campaign
Over the weekend, I was lucky enough to hang out with a fine bunch of rabblerousers. We talked about movement building, and the kinds of things that make some campaigns successful in attracting big, unruly crowds, and the kinds of things that turn those big, unruly crowds into game changers. We workshopped a set of questions worth asking if you want to gather a storm crowd and generate some lightning.
1. Can you tell the story of our campaign to a 7 year old? Who are the bad guys? How are they vanquished? Who saves the day? Even better, can you describe our campaign in a tweet?
2. I support you. Why do you need me? How can I make a difference? How can I be part of the story? How can I bring it into my own community? How can I make my friends care about it? What have you got for me to do that’s more than a petition and less than getting arrested? Are you willing to let go some of your control, and let me have some responsibility?
3. Have you got objectives for which large numbers of people are going to be essential? How will we make a difference?
4. What are your key moments? When can people intervene and make a difference?
5. How are we a threat? How do we provoke the pushback that creates movements — where Goliath goes after David, when Gandhi or Mandela or Rosa Parks got thrown in jail?
6. Can we reach the decision makers directly? If not, what are the leverage points or power constituencies that we CAN reach that have the ear, or some other part of the anatomy, of the decision maker?
7. What makes our campaign cool and sexy? What makes it witty? What makes it hilarious?
8. How can we get others to carry our message? Who are the Third Party Validators who can say exactly what we say, but won’t be dismissed by the people we need to sway?
9. What parts of our work can others do better? What part of the work are we uniquely suited to do? How do we focus on those things, and let others do what they do best?
10. How do I know that others are involved? How do we create the sense of collective, of community, of movement? What are the signals by which we recognise each other, where are our gathering points, where are we counted?
Filed under Activism, Digital Culture, Greenpeace, Popular
What I do? I lead an interpretive dance troupe of digital creatives
Beth Kanter is one smart cookie:
Interpretive dance, is when a dancer (or dancers) often improvising (though sometimes it is choreographed) a dance to another medium. Technology adoption is part choreographed, part improvisation. The point of that Hinchliffe makes about best practices for adoption of Enterprise 2.0 (or social media for inward facing work) is that there aren’t any best practices. You have to improvise!
According to Hinchcliffe “Organizations are unique, and operate in very different ways and therefore what may work for one business may not work for another.” And if you’re talking about organizations working together with other organizations, that is also unique.
So, we should try to avoid at all costs asking this question first “What tool should we use?” Stop thinking that adopting social media or social software or online collaboration tools is a matter of selecting a tool off a menu. There is a process that requires understanding the space between the tools and the people and having someone who knows that space so well they can an interpretive dance between the technology and the users.
Beths Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media: The Interpretive Dance of Social Media Adoption.
Filed under Activism, Digital Culture
Austin Greenpeace frontliners, and my backpack
I gave a presentation to the Greenpeace Frontline folks here in Austin this week. Frontliners are the folks who go out in the street recruiting new supporters and talking about the solutions that Greenpeace stands for. It’s a job much like the first one I had with Greenpeace, as a door to door canvasser. So I was more interested in what they had to tell me than what I had to tell them — anyone who has ever done this kind of work knows how valuable the beat on the street is to knowing what’s resonating and what’s not.
Happily, many said that global warming and energy issues were way up on the agenda of what people were supporting them for. Less happily, it was also the subject on which they were getting the most grief. This is Texas, after all, oil country, where the big SUV has a loyal following. But more generally, even people who support Greenpeace were worried about were the lifestyle changes that Global Warming might mean.
Filed under Digital Culture, Environmental Issues, Greenpeace
