I have been a fan of Amanda’s for some time through her fascinating appropriate technology for development design work with @RedButtonDesign, that she has written about at http://www.unltdworld.com/ and on her blog. To learn that such a brilliant young development technology designer is also so naturally social media savvy really heartens my faith in the ability of our online systems to bubble the right people to the top. Amanda Jones is definitely a #socent name to watch in the international development arena. She’s a powerhouse, whose heart is in the right place.

Here’s a clip of an Earth Awards interview with her I found, to give you just a hint of Amanda’s capacity for vision beyond the realms of social media. Taking time out to engineer and execute the Oxford Jam webbed strategy was really a side gig for her, and I think she did a heck of a job.

Amanda and the rest of the Oxford Jam event team (especially Ben Metz and Alise Kertley) pulled their co-created event concept together in about 6 weeks time. Amanda shared with me that she would have rather had 12 weeks so she wouldn’t have had to completely  (and controversially) drop all of her design work to do it.  In her view 8 weeks would have been ideal to execute a full social media push. That rush aside, Amanda was able to articulate which parts of their online strategy had worked really well, why other parts had not worked so well, and what remained to be done.

Step 1. Set up a basic online event space – had to exist somewhere online before anything else (Success!)

• registered the domain name
• Created 1 black & white and 1 color logo.
• quickly put up a site easy to edit that could hold diverse kinds of content. Amanda chose a simple 2 column wordpress that could easily grow with all kinds of content embedded in it.

Step 2. Open social media channels for pre-connection (Success!)

• Created an Oxford Jam twitter account
• forge behind the scenes alliances via twitter (cross-tweeted w/local media, OxfordTube transport, & other regional audience channels)
• create a delegates list on twitter
• Built a Facebook group + event + fanpage.
  According to Amanda, a facebook event gets google-indexed, a fanpage is viewable when people aren’t signed in, and a group is the easiest way to scale quickly, so there are good reasons to do all 3.  (Hmmm… As I write this I am wondering how exposure through fanpages will change as a result of Facebook’s change this week that allows people to “like” your page instead of “Become a Fan.”)
• Create a Linked In group: this became a great channel for recruiting high quality contributors

Step 3. Set up a wiki for live event content capture (not so successful)

The OxfordJam wiki was a great idea that fell a bit flat, due to a number of unresolved issues within the team. Apparently, to have or not have an event wiki was a point of some contention among the core OxfordJam crew. Amanda shared that “more bravery was needed to get people to actually use it.” I didn’t fully understand what the heart of the team’s fear was surrounding participants use of the event wiki, but I do know that presenters didn’t receive links to the editable pages until 2 nights before the live event, and there was very little prompting at the event for anyone to add systematically to the wikispace. (See my thinking on ways we might address that for next year, below).

Step 4. Set up post event content harvest (Success remains to be seen)

Here’s the part of our conversation where I personally learned the most from Amanda’s plan. How I wish I had done this after the #ned #socent event in February!

• set up google alerts to harvest blogposts
• be sure to keep twitter delegates list current as their content surfaces
• create a composite RSS of delegates blogs

Step 5: Create & maintain content re-seeding channels (success remains to be seen)

I have to mention here that when I asked Amanda about how she would use the social media and wiki content to perpetuate the event online, she hadn’t yet formalized her thoughts about it. Immediately, though, she whipped out a piece of paper and made herself a quick list of things to do:

• send out a newsletter that includes blog reports written by participants
• keep pushing the twitter delegates list
• use the wiki for continued learning
• hold a tweetup (twitter chat) a few months down the line

So there you have it from Amanda Jones behind the scenes. I haven’t shared all of her secrets – there was actually a place in my notes where I’d written “be sure to” and didn’t finish the sentence.  I so appreciated and enjoyed the time Amanda took to walk through all of this with me, I felt like a puppy dog lapping up her words. My saving grace in getting coherent notes down at all was that Amanda herself was so clear in her thinking.

Interestingly, the part of the social-change-event-media-strategy “nut” that I personally seek to crack, is precisely the event content capture that the OxfordJam wiki failed to deliver. It felt to me as though some of the issues around which the production team broke down  were about control over the kind of content that would be posted. As a participant and an ally to the team I’ve been chewing on this some since leaving the event space, and can think of two ways that wiki capture could be structured for next year:

• We could keep the patchwork feel of the OxfordJam event alive online by framing the session host’s task more broadly, to include online content production. Enable and encourage the session facilitators to think about the web content that they can plan to create  in advance of their sessions, and task them with following through on producing that content as part and parcel of their session leading responsibilities.
• Or maybe…  we could also define what kind of effective uniform web content all sessions will aim to capture for the wiki, and build wiki-posting tasks into the participant experience with lightly structured content format prompts (a photo of written flipchart notes, notes from 2 participants who agree to contribute to typed record, session prompted questions to tweet out to a wider online audience, etc.) Written instructions and verbal cues at each session could be used to direct participants more systematically to be co-creating structured wiki content.

I think either approach could work toward maintaining a moderate level of management control over co-created content production channels, that doesn’t need to impede the live flow of ideas or intrude too much on the flow of energy in the room. Perhaps a combination of both?

I’d be so very interested to read other’s thoughts and experiences with regard to Amanda’s #4change event media strategy. What else would you advise her to think about in the content harvest process and reseeding of content that needs to keep happening now. Please also explore with me your ideas that come to mind with regard to how to capture live event archives online in a space like the OxfordJam wiki, that can serve to build a useful event legacy.

With this post, I am also now inviting changemaker start-ups from around the world to participate in a similar online-only experimental collaborative support group for start-ups that I will create space for in early 2010 at Ned.com.

Both in Brussels offline and virtually online, the purpose of the group is to

• share our successes and challenges,
• hold each other accountable to our monthly business development goals,
• encourage each other toward further progress,
• identify opportunities for fruitful collaboration, and
• help each other get our projects up & running at full steam.

The Micro-Success group at ned.com will be a local + global members only group space, where participants can communicate to collaborate with each other  in a publicly viewable environment for an experimental period of 6 months.

1- 3 members of each participating project team can become Micro-Success group members at ned.com.  All members of the MicroSuccess group will be invited to contribute to the Micro-Success blog channel at Internet4Change.com, where I hope we can capture some promising new practices and practical lessons that result from this effort in modelling local and global #socent collaboration.

If you or a Social Enterprise you know are interested in participating in the Micro-Success group online, please contact me through a private message via my profile at ned.com.  Tell me a bit about your initiative – what you hope to achieve, and where you’re at in that process now.

If there are more than 12  start-up initiatives interested in participating online only, I will create a public poll to select participants for the 6 month pilot.

At tomorrow’s meeting @HubBrussels (14:00 – 17:00 37 Rue du Prince Royal, 1050 Brussels), we will be introducing ourselves, making some group decisions about how to operate, and setting an agenda for our expectations as a group.  A wrap up of that meeting will set the tone for developing the Micro-Success group infrastructure at Ned.com.

Stay tuned, and please share this invitation with the Social Enterprise start-ups you know online.