"However, in light of recent world events, it's a shame that the cause the tech community has chosen to rally around is that of Twitter's instability."

You want to do something for earthquake victims? Stop reporting on news only the tech community (read: a very small percentage of all the people) is interested in and go to China to help the people there, adopt orphans, etc.

Or, if you like your job even after all these recent events, you could stop being hypocritical and let people spend their time on what they think is important, even if it's not always charitable!

Oh, and btw: What's the use of Twitter's awesome instant fundraising capability when it's offline?

Thanks for all of the information - I found it doing my morningly news-run for http://makesomethinghappen.net/ and I will surely be linking it there.

I think that I understand where Sebastian is coming from. Why so angry? Firstly, it is difficult to stomach a comment that shoots down one's opinion on the basis of their stance on Twitter. Telling someone that you simply don't respect their opinion is really a backwards way to connect or to get them to hear what you are saying. However, moving beyond the venomous nature of the comment's opening, it appears that both comments are in agreement. Sarah appears to wish that the tech community would rally around something bigger than itself, no?

Further, straight up going to China and helping is just part of a greater effort to give a hand. "Help" and "engagement" is a multi-dimensional process that does not only include physical aid. Awareness is certainly important, and as Sarah notes, leveraging social media is an important way to do that.

The rest of the message seems somewhat confused and non-linear. I hear Sebastian's frustrations, but taking them out on people who are trying to help while inserting opinion here and there seems unnecessary.

Thanks so much.
.a.

Thank you for these examples however, they may hopefully inspire many to go out and act for social change.

for more info contact sean@hoopassociates.co.uk

We have created an Amazon WebStore where all commissions go to deliver education and safety to promising young women from Mozambique.

On the site, we also sponsor incredible female entrepreneurs in emerging nations through Kiva.org.

I encourage everyone to learn more about these great causes at my blog!
Thanks everyone!

Social media users can make a difference for those in need.

Here's a cool project that might help out your brother-in-law. Mapping Africa tourism routes is different, but it may share some similarities

http://www.changemakers.net/en-us/node/5619

Obviously, with no little amount of bias, I am very proud of what SocialVibe.com's members have done to help charities over the past couple of months, and we are only at the tip of the iceberg. People inherently want to do good and have that spark. Social media is going to pour gasoline on the spark. I, for one, am very excited to see what happens next.

You've given me some great ideas for action, as well as a future blog post to help spread the word.

Well done, Sarah.

I still don't get the Twit-out reference but I'm glad you focus on the tech community's efforts to rally around socially relevant causes on social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn (I'm the Community guy at LinkedIn).

http://tinyurl.com/3pu8ou

Thanks for shining the spotlight on these efforts. And, of course, so glad to see my friend Jeremiah's efforts in this space too.

You should also check out World Changing (a platform of world chanding ideas) and UnLtdWorld ( http://www.unltdworld.com ) and online platform that connects thousands of social entrepreneurs around the world.

I like to draw a parallel with the success of micro-credit in conventional economics. For instance, when Muhammed Yunnus founded what became the micro-credit & the Grameen Bank movement in Bangladesh, it was from his analysis that “the poor aren’t poor because they lack skills. They’re poor because they aren’t allowed to keep the fruits of their labour”. Which sounds kind of Marxist, except that his response is to create a bank that offers the appropriate technology (in the form of financial products appropriate to the poorest in Bangladesh), the necessary institutional infrastructure (the Grammen Bank itself), and the appropriate methodology for the consumption of the institution's services (the practice of forming “lending circles”). You need all three pieces, but the result is that in poor women in Bangladesh (for instance) being able to successfully consume financial services that allow them to compete successfully in free markets. It’s game changing - and no Marxism Required! (It’s a great story, I’d recommend his book “Banker to the Poor).

I’d argue for a parallel analysis applied to Good Causes competing within attention economies. What if we can extend Mr. Yunnus’ analysis and conjecture that “The poor are poor because their voices aren’t heard" – or at least, not heard in a way that really matters.

Where Mr. Yunnus had to innovate technology, infrastructure and methodology to get past the barriers that made traditional financial services inaccessible and irrelevant to the poor, I advocate that the way to frame the problem of using social media for change is not about simply how to more widely distribute information on Good Causes. We need to instead look towards innovating the technology, institutional infrastructure, and methodology around the production, dissemination and consumption of social media that can allow these voices to heard, not because we’ve played the Good Cause card, but because these are interesting people with interesting stories that can compete successfully for our attention in their own right.

Mr. Yunnus advocates that Access to credit be a human right. The parallel in an attention economy is of attention as a Human right. Except that one's own attention is as much a human right (demand-side economics), so short of some kind of Stalinist nonsense, you can't really tax people's attention and redistribute it to the poor (*). Following Mr. Yunnus' example the alternative is to develop the technology, infrastructure, and methodology and allow the voices of the marginalized to compete within the realities of the market, such as they are.

The potential I see for Social media isn’t to charitably give the marginalized more of our attention any more that Mr. Yunnus’ solution is about charitably give the poor money, and there are several ways in which social media has the potential to be utterly game changing in this, perhaps even to the extend that Mr. Yunnus’ innovations in the financial sector have proven game changing.

Not an easy thing to do. Constructing media that successfully communicates across such a great distance, with the realistic budgets of the kinds of organizations placed to facilitate, is a major challenge, and there's a *lot* left to innovate.

But it’s this potential that has brought me to the social media space, and why I read Read Write Web, in the first place. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understanding these dynamics in recent years - how organizations produce media on Good Causes and how people consume it. And from this I’ve developing an open source Flex ( + Drupal, Facebook etc) based social media content framework that pushes in this direction. I’d flog it shamelessly except that it’s not released yet. (The “Subaltern Engagement Platform”, Semi-private alpha next week however: alpha [at] subalternproductions [dot] org).

Interesting article, and discussion – it’s all a part of the puzzle of what to innovate next.

Ian,
Subaltern Productions

http://mikecane2008.wordpress.com/2008/05/22/what-echanges-will-high-oil-prices-bring/

Isn't that what you wanted? Going mainstream?

My compliments for taking time out to write something that's not the norm on this blog.

Ya'll just made an insta-fan out of me.

-preetam

the benefit for the consumer is you get great stuff (often at decent value) and it all supports good causes. you can search by geo, cause, or "red sox tickets".

never pay retail again!

Social media users can make a difference for those in need.

www.ooyes.net/blog

Peter
http://webshopinabox.peter-tashjian.com/WebShopInABox.htm

Otherwise, great post.

We are actually hosting our annual conference later this year - http://mobileactive08.org -- and are looking for great people who are visionaries and innovators in this field to submit their ideas for sessions and showcase products and projects.

If you are one of those 'social mobile' visionaries and innovators, we'd love to hear from you. Please check out the Call for Your Expertise at http://mobileactive08.org.

And thanks again for the excellent summary of social media for social good!

Best, Katrin, MobileActive.org

You should check them out.

When we talk about using this tool to impact change, we need to remember just how close that change needs to take place.

In 60 hours, college football fans raised over $20,000 dollars for disaster relief. More details are here: http://www.fanblogs.com/charity/007552.php and here: http://www.fanblogs.com/charity if you are interested.

http://www.justmeans.com

I posted some thoughts on how existing fund raising using face to face techniques is very limiting

http://szikszai.blogspot.com/2008/05/pressure-selling-techniques-and.html

- particularly in three ways

1. The person representing the Brand for the charity is not aligned to the charity - they are doing it for personal gain. Hard to build a connection with this.

2. It is a high pressure sell which does not connect the donator to the charity

3. My estimate is that at roughly 15% of the first year's donation is considered 'Cost of Sale' and does not go to the Charity. Hopefully there aren't residual payments.

I see some threads that could be tied together to make existing social networks really make a difference - but I don't think anyone has nailed it yet.

I am interested in working with Aid / Charity organisations to see if we can find another way for this to happen.

www.palosoloproject.org