It's time to meet Ginny Simmons, a speaker at Forum One's seminar next week, Blogging and Policy Organizations.

In previous posts, I've previewed our other three speakers: Time's Christine Gorman, Education Sector's Kevin Carey, and Michael Edson of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Ginny is the lead blogger for the ONE Blog, which is the blog for the ONE Campaign. We've all seen the white bracelet adorning celebrities' wrists in TV ads, on bus signs, and on talk shows. Behind the bracelet is a growing network of connected activists, working together to spread a salient policy idea: One percent of the U.S. Budget for fighting global AIDS and extreme poverty.

The ONE blog is one of the threads that ties these activist to this policy idea. But when veteran blogger Ginny joined ONE as its Online Organizing Coordinator in 2006, there wasn't much enthusiasm for the blog. Many felt that it was too time consuming and frought with risk.

Today, it's a key component of ONE's efforts. At our event, Ginny is going to tell us how this transformation happened. It's an interesting story loaded with many practical lessons.

One of the underlying themes of Forum One's seminar on blogging next week is the diversity of blogging models. Blogs are still new enough that we all still hold a lot of preconceived notions about a blog's format, purpose, and content. We hope the session will stimulate creative thinking about how your organizations can extend and redefine the blog model into new ways to connect and communicate.

Michael Edson of the Smithsonian American Art Museum will be talking about EyeLevel, which definitely breaks the mold.

When setting up what was to be the Smithsonian's very first blog, Michael had to field a lot of questions from skeptics. They asked, why in the world would an art museum -- particuarly one that was shuttered for renovations at the time -- invest in blog-style communications? The justification of the opportunity is at the center of Michael's story.

Recently, EyeLevel proved its value by providing a channel for responding and framing an unflattering report on the Smithsonian and several of its museums including SAAM. Today, one of Michael's primary messages to doubters is: "By the time you need a blog, it's too late."

To hear the rest of the exciting story, you'll just have to come hear it for yourself. I hope you'll consider joining us.

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Blogging
Web Executive Seminar
Forum One

With just over a week before Forum One's next Web Executive Seminar, Blogging and Policy Organizations, it's time to meet another speaker. I previously introduced you to Kevin Carey. Now, let's meet Christine Gorman, a health and science journalist for Time for over 20 years.

From 2005-2007, Christine blogged for Time's Global Health Update and she now she has her own blog, Global Health Report. As a veteran-journalist-turned blogger, Christine has a unique perspective on the role of blogs within the new media landscape.

At our event, she's going to discuss her experiences and how nonprofit blogs will play an important communication role as the mainstream media's central influence wanes. While at Time, she found that her blog became an important way for her to connect with people interested in similar global health issues, explore new topics, and germinate story ideas for Time Magazine.

Particularly useful will be Christine's tips on how policy bloggers can capture journalists' attention. While a successful organization blog may command hundreds or even thousands of readers in its own right, there's still no substitute for having your blog linked from a major media site where your posting can gain additional exposure to thousands of additional readers.

Christine's talk is sure to be a facinating presentation. There's still time to register. I hope to see you there.

[promo!] We've updated our own ProjectSpaces web-based team workspace with some nice new features, and I was real pleased to see a few blogs posts about it, such as at KillerStartup.com

Why it might be a killer:
ProjectSpaces is filled with options and features for collaboration, whether it be for small groups or larger organizations. The user-friendliness is definitely a factor in attracting users, as its level of control.

And also a mention over on "Michael 's Thoughts", Michael Sampson's very interesting blog about collaboration, effectiveness, and productivity.

The new feature I think is most interesting is the ability to allow users to comment on any type of content, documents, events, etc. We heard interesting discussions at our October 2006 Online Community Summit about how online collaboration/community is increasingly associated with content - i.e. photos, video, documents, and not limited to being on "community" sites. I think the analogy for online workspaces is to enable discussions to happen everywhere - associated with documents, events, people, etc - and not limited to the "discussion forum."

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ProjectSpaces
Collaboration

During the NTEN conference that I blogged about a few days ago I went to a session with Charles Best of Donors Choose, which is a site that allows individual donors to fund small projects proposed by public school teachers. Lately I have been coming across a quite few of these, where a site links private donations with those who need financial support. I had lacked a term to call these types of sites, but of course the smart people I met at NTEN already had a term for these. Some of the terms that were discussed were eBay philanthropies, philanthropic marketplace... but my favorite was one that David Weinberger blogged following his plenary at NTEN: P2P philanthropy where P2P can mean peer to peer or better yet person to person (whether or not he coined it I don't know).

Here's a round up of some Person to Person Philanthropies I have come across lately:
* DonorsChoose: As mentioned above.
* DonorsCamp: Attesting to the fact that good social entrepreneurial ideas are contagious and subject to replication, CJ Foundation (CJ is one of many Samsung affiliates) in Korea lifted (interestingly, with willing consultation from DonorsChoose) the DonorsChoose model and transplanted it in Korea. The twist is that DonorsCamp actually matches one-for-one every donation that comes through the site.
* Kiva.org: Kiva links facilitates micro-loans to entrepreneurs in developing countries, "empowering them to lift themselves out of poverty." The payback rate to date on the loans are apparently 100% according to their FAQs.
* GlobalGiving: According to their site: "GlobalGiving connects you with grassroots charity projects around the world. We ensure that 85-90% of your donation gets to local project leaders within 60 days. It's a direct connection."
* Modest Needs: I heard Charles from DonorsChoose mention this site at the NTEN conference. According to the site, "Modest Needs is a registered charity that works to stop the cycle of poverty before it starts for low-income workers struggling to afford emergency expenses like those we've all encountered before: the unexpected auto repair, the unanticipated trip to the doctor, the unusually large winter heating bill."
* Propser.com: Where there are philanthropic and non-profit needs, there will also be for-profit needs. Prosper.com is where you can submit a business proposal and have you loan funded in whole or in part by many private lenders, which end up being a lower interest rate and/or larger amount than you would typically get from a bank.
* Cytogether: Cyworld is a wildly successful social networking site in Korea. It has a philanthropic counterpart where you can donate Cyworld's currency, "acorns", to your favorite philanthropic organization. The site is a little more than a P2P philanthropy in that it also is a community and links volunteer needs and opportunties. From what I can tell, most of the prominent non-profits operating in Korea seem to have a profile page on the site.

Interestingly (or maybe obviously) DonorsChoose, Global Giving, Modest Needs and Prosper.com all have investments from eBay founder Pierre Omidya's foundation - Omidya Network. Their portfolio page is a very interesting list, more like a who's who in web/technology innovation, which include many organization I have a personal interest in - Ashoka, KaBOOM! and Linden Labs (aka creators of Second Life).

(Note: this post was originally published 4/11/2007 in Forum One's User Experience & Design blog)

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) is doing some fun experimentation posting its videos on YouTube. Now, everyone and their cousin has posted videos on YouTube, right? (See this team competition from our Forum One 2006 retreat.) But for a government agency, posting content on such public social media sites is navigating in uncharted waters.

Joe Flood of NOAA's Ocean Explorer program wrote about NOAA's experiences in using YouTube, in comments he shared with a Federal web managers mailing list, and he agreed to let me post his remarks on this blog.

What I think are some key takeways:
-These videos are just an amazing way to get people excited about the very cool work and the mission of NOAA.
-Social media policy for the Federal government? It's a real gray area (opportunity, right?!)
-Pilot project: they started it as a pilot, and built support and the comfort-level in their program before launching it formally.
-Why YouTube? Ocean Explorer already has a great web site with lots of video, so why bother with YouTube? The answer is eyeballs: i.e. 27,000 views in the month of March.
-Interactivity: for the videos they posted on their YouTube channel, they they turned off the "comment" feature to avoid what would probably be a lot of messy issues. Too bad - but probably a pragmatic first effort.
-YouTube tools! YouTube has some great tools for creating your own channels, "guru" accounts, etc.


Here's Joe's note:

"I think a lot of government web sites are wrestling with these (online social media) issues, since advances in technology have outstripped policies which were created long before the advent of social media. I can share with you the process we went through on Ocean Explorer (oceanexplorer.noaa.gov), the site that I manage, when we first started looking into YouTube.

"The mission of Ocean Explorer is to chronicle underwater exploration efforts funded by NOAA's Office of Ocean Exploration. Staff at sea send us daily logs, photos - and short videos. Adding these videos to YouTube made a lot of sense to us, because we could reach a larger audience than we could just through our site. Plus, since most of our videos are in the public domain, several of them had already been uploaded to YouTube by the general public.

"We first decided to try YouTube out ourselves as a pilot project. We created a channel at www.youtube.com/profile?user=oceanexplorergov and populated it with several of our videos. The objective of this pilot was to familiarize ourselves with the community and how it worked. Also, we wanted to see how much use our channel would get - was this worth our time? After a month, we decided that it definitely was. Our channel got a great deal of traffic (we have some really cool videos) and YouTube was very easy to use.

"Our next step was to get buy-in from the program that we work for, the Office of Ocean Exploration. We conducted a "YouTube Summit" during which we hashed out all the issues related to having our videos on YouTube. Prior to the meeting, I had the participants in the meeting create user accounts on YouTube. I sent them a homework assignment, asking them to bookmark videos, add comments to a video, subscribe to a channel, etc... The purpose of this homework was to get people to understand how YouTube worked and get them comfortable with it.

"During our "YouTube Summit" we literally clicked through all the sections of our YouTube channel and talked about what we were comfortable with, what we weren't, and what could be a problem. The result was not official policy but rather a set of Operating Principles for how we would operate the channel:

"Access: we would make as many of our videos available on YouTube as possible because it fits in with our mission to inform the public.

"Comments: we turned off the ability to comment on our videos. If people post inappropriate comments and we delete them, we could be accused of censorship. (This was a tough one but social media brings up a lot of issues and requires some compromise.)

"Security: we follow our department's security regulations.

"Privacy: we don't collect users personal information so there were no privacy issues.

"Branding: we're going to add the Ocean Explorer URL to the end of our videos, so people know where they come from.

"Reporting: we'll report monthly stats on how the channel is doing.

"We've had a good amount of success in YouTube. In March, our videos were viewed more than 27,000 times. I think the biggest battle is getting people familiar with how these services operate. Once people use them, the sense of fear and distrust tends to go away. My overall advice would be to involve the program you work for and get them to understand how social media works. IMHO, there's no denying that social media is the direction the web is going in, it's what the public wants, and therefore gov't web sites should respond.

-Joe"

Joe Flood
NOAA Ocean Explorer


= = =
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NOAA
Ocean Explorer

I am in a presentation including the Executive Director Ashoka's Changemakers program, Charlie Brown. In discussing how to use technology to achieve his organization's mission, he made the following critical point in a nice, succinct way (close to a quote):

It's not about technology - its about appropriate technology... Its about human behavior...
What do people actually need?

Well said. Don't churn on what system or vendor you are going to use or what trend you are going to follow until you understand what your users need and want and how you can align that to your mission. Once that is in place, worry about the human dynamics, inside and outside your organization. These dynamics are what will govern success or failure.

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07NTC

So I am here at the 2007 Nonprofit Technology Conference listening to David Weinberger, co-author of Cluetrain Manifesto (also www.evident.com and www.johotheblog.com) and other important treatises on the modern world. First of all, this guy is a riot and one should see him speak. His message is familiar, yet worth considering again, because the ways of the internet require a different perspective in order to truly use it for influence.

Weinberger's main thesis: the internet is ours, meaning the general public. It is fundamentally different from the broadcast model in which we lived for many decades until the late 1990s. The old way was about central control of information and packaging it so it is digested in a prescribed way. The internet is about users creating their own views of what is important, interesting, and inter-related and sharing those views. Tools like tags, comments, and so wikis mean one cannot control information. And they shouldn't try.

Here is a great example Weinberger gave. Look at two similar services for allowing users to rate content, one from USAToday.com and One from Digg.com:

USAToday presents only a thumbs-up - you can only say their piece is good, not that it is bad. Digg is built around people both submitting articles that they think are good and suggesting they are not good. Thus it presents a thumbs-down. Digg allows a more complete discussion around a piece of content, and thus it is more valuable.

Many groups trying to influence policy and change behavior still tend to live in the old model. They want to control the message or closely manage what users do to conform to their program. This is a flawed strategy online. As Weinberger notes, look at everyone's favorite example, Wikipedia. Unlike its centrally-controlled peers, Wikipedia present all the dialogue that went in to creating each article, including cases where content is in dispute. It is this willingness to tell how article may be wrong, however, that makes the site more credible. It embraces fallibility, and fallibility is human. To pretend content can't be wrong will actually lower a content owner's credibility. Online, organizations must set some ground rules but then trust their communities of supporters to do the right thing. In many cases the results will not be as planned, but they might be much more powerful in different ways than expected.

One other example Weinberger used was blogs. He pointed out how an example corporate blog was packaged and internally focused, antithetical to the typical true blog, which is largely driven by links out. Many organizations are still focused on keeping people on their sites. True blogs work because they trust that if they send users away to something useful, those same users will return later to see where else the blog will point them. Provide a valuable service, and users will return; try to control them, and they will quickly find another place where they have their newly expected freedom.

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07NTC

Its safe to say that we're all firm believers in open communications and collaborative tools. But organizations have some fear and trepidation in opening up and trying something perceived as risky. I think the main fear is rooted in "losing control" of a message, without understanding that your are actually part of a two-way conversation with your audience. And even if you choose not to participate, people will still go on talking about you. So, its refreshing for me to read how the American Cancer Society made the leap and has slowly changed to taken advantage of new tools to become more accesible and collaborative. Its noteworthy also in that this change was not mandated from the top, but evolved and spread throughout the ACS as its staff began internally using tools like flickr, del.icio.us, and blogs. Blogging played a key role in reaching out to supporters and keeping them engaged with ACS events. The whole post on Personal Democracy Forum is worth a read, and I'll pull out my favorite quote here to whet your appetite.

Unlike most traditional organizations, according to Erin, the senior staff of ACS ultimately decided that they "werent going to freak out about what people said about them." And since so much of the posting is done by volunteers, such as the event site on Flickr, ACS organizationally is not responsible for what gets posted. In other words, the more ACS lets go, the more successful the cancer community becomes by participating and owning their cause more.

The post also suggests that any organization can begin by scanning to see what people are saying about you. Are you doing that already? If not, why not?

Can a policy organization use a mere blog posting about the 2007 NCAA Men's basketball to influence the editorial board of one of the nation's largest daily newspapers?

Kevin Carey of Education Sector proved that you can.

Kevin's recent posting on athlete graduation rates of the tournament teams led to an editorial in the Washington Post. The editorial bemoaned an athlete graduation rate of only 38.5 percent among the tournament's Sweet 16 schools.

Kevin Carey, a policy wonk at Education Sector, writes for their Quick and the Ed blog. In his posting, he listed the camp