Space is limited to 15 participants – there are currently a few spots left.  Please tell your colleagues in Brussels!

To register, send an email to training@internet4change.com with “Twitter” in the subject, or send a tweet to @ChristinasWorld with your name letting me know you want to attend.  The cost is 10 euros for Hub members and 15 euros for other participants.

If you’ve received already received a confirmation back from me by email or personal tweet, below is some additional information to know before you join us on Dec 17th.

1. Please come ready to work at Twitter.com. If you have not yet signed up for a Twitter account, please take 5 minutes to sign up before you come. Please know what your ID is, and keep your password handy.
2. Because Twitter only allows 140 characters, it is common to use a URL shortener. While there are many URL shorteners out there, I recommend http://bit.ly because it also helps you see which or your links people are clicking on.  You will need a bit.ly account at the course. Sign up for one now by giving them your twitter info (it takes 1 minute).
3. Head over to Klout.com and quickly add your twitter info into an account there, as well. Klout analyzes your activity at Twitter over time and provides insights into the kind of influence you are achieving. It’s another one of the tools for maximizing your use of time at Twitter  that I will be telling you about at the course.

I will post a wrap-up of the course here at the Internet4Change blog after it’s over, so you will have a place to connect with further questions after we’ve met.

Meanwhile, I look forward to seeing you on Thursday, and to much tweeting together in the future.

Christina

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.

I’d been looking seriously for a while at Thesis, but what sold me on Headway Themes was both the visual editor and the built in SEO tools, as well as a 30% off sale for Black Friday (thru a coupon offered by @johnhaydon earlier today).

Getting this blog in shape is long overdue. So now I have my work cut out for me for the next few days – forgive the messiness until then!

After much consultation with social enterprise folks where I live in Belgium, I’m starting a Belgian based non-profit association for the purpose of developing and launching initiatives that support social entrepreneurship – among them Internet4Change.  My aim in doing so is to be able to justify my own working life while I get things off the ground, while at the same time leaving room for autonomous project ownership structures to develop.

The association I’m starting – with the participation of another Ashoka fellow and a good friend who is an international investment consultant specializing in 3rd world projects (both Belgian) will likely be called Uplift Innovations. Thanks to the favorable sale of some property 2 years ago I still have enough money in the bank to live on for at least a year, so I will invest some of that in the association and become an employee.  That will make it easier to deal with start-up costs, health insurance (required by law in Belgium) and some of the other logistical issues involved in being based here. The statutes are being written to allow that Uplift Innovations may facilitate projects with cooperative and/or other kinds of autonomous ownership and management structures.

I’m also working on the application for Ashoka’s new Globalizer program http://www.ashokaglobalizer.org/, which is an initiative by Ashoka to assist Fellows in reaching global scale with their innovations. Whether or not I succeed at qualifying for what they are aiming at, it’s been a very good exercise to consider the questions the application asks, and I can’t see the harm in trying.

Meanwhile, I’ve been very pleased with the Defining “Collaboration” in the Social Change sector discussion at Ned.com. I’ve used Twitter to bring in 20 different voices so far, and the discussion has been rich.  It’s been a great venue for identifying allies and potential collaborators like Jean Russel @nurturegirl, Rosalind Chu @rosalindchu and Fabio Barone @faboolous who I’ve connected with beyond that discussion in recent weeks.  The discussion has also helped me confirm the 4 main directions that I hope to lead this work in the coming years:

1. I’d like to develop Internet4Change.com into a portal for a range of practical resources that are online to assist social entrepreneurs. The list of collaboration_resources we’ve started developing is just a start;
2. I’m hoping to identify the right technology for enabling personal pages at My.Internet4Change.com that can aggregate an individual’s online presence in the social change space – ie, consolidating not only static links but also dynamically creating an easily accessible current and historical record of conversations (where you are discussing/working on what).
3. Within the context of being able to see who is working on what, where, the economic model I have in mind would make it more financially feasible for change agents around the world to justify (and pay for) their time spent online, and provide financial incentive especially for works/initiatives created transparently in collaboration with others.
4. The final big piece of the Internet4Change vision (2-4 years down the line!) involves targeted training for Internet4Change agents in under-connected parts of the world, enabling not only more north/south collaboration but south/south collaboration as well. In other words, once a system that encompasses a collection of online resources, the ability to find the right people using those resources, and financial fuel to pay for using those resources is in place, then proactively teaching people to use the system will hopefully help to kick global social change into overdrive.

Carving out the earliest part of the path that will take this project toward those objectives is where I’m at now ~ making progress, but oh so much to do!

Experts recommend developing a “Social Media strategy”  whenever you launch a new campaign.  For me, however, my presence online is much more than a campaign, and my wwworld is much more than a strategy – it’s my whole life and my lifestyle, reflected through my relationships online.  I’ve lived and traveled all over the world, and there are people whom I love all over the world that these tools enable me to have ongoing relationships with today. It’s important to who I am as a person to use that beautiful gift with gratitude. I also know from years of experiences, that online relationships with people who actually know me (or feel like they do) are usually the most powerful force in my process of making Social Change happen.

My advice to any social entrepreneur seeking online collaboration today is to think more  about the deeper quality of your online relationships than about the numbers of people in your Social Media networks. I have come to realize that my number one personal and professional purpose for spending regular time on the Internet is to strengthen and deepen my human relationships, because I know how important they are to me as a person who works for passion.

While certainly the size of your networks can matter, I have always found that groups built around love and friendship are the easiest to mobilize into collaborative action for social impact. The power of my family and close friends alone was enough to motivate and enable me to start Life in Africa in 1999, and 10 years later it’s my mom and a cousin on my dad’s side of the family (previously out of touch with each other for more than 15 years) who have stepped up to start Life in Africa USA.

Once, when I lived in Uganda, we heard that there was going to be severe electricity rationing for the coming year.  At around midnight I posted 2 sentences about it in a small online community of social entrepreneurs – I’d met many face2face at a community meetup, and Life in Africa members were regularly online as a group with them from our community telecenter.  By 8am the next morning, less than a dozen of those online friends had pooled enough money together to buy us a generator!  That’s the power of a network that’s built on love, friendship and sharing oxygen in realspace – I didn’t even have to mount a campaign to get targeted, practical and timely help with the project I was championing.

As a social entrepreneur who cultivates personal relationships, it has sometimes been hard to find a balance between work and play in my interactions with others online.  An important consideration in designing my new wwworld is deliberately adding shape to my communities – deciding who I want to be interacting with, where, and what kind of role each community plays in my life. Each community and each content type that I put creative energy into is important to my personal process of making change happen, and requires my nurturing.

In my new wwworld, each of those online communities is a pillar of strength that supports me in my ability to achieve my online lifestyle objectives. There are 5 of them, by design.

The 5 Pillars

1. My Personal blog

2. Facebook

3. Ned.com

4. Twitter

5. My Work Blog

I’ve been deliberately working on redesigning my wwworld around these pillars since about August 2009. Some of the pillars are still currently much weaker than others. If I were to arrange them in a physical space, the first pillar would ideally be holding up the middle, with the other 4 arranged in 4 corners around it.  They all uphold a giant platform that is my global presence in cyberland. My lens on the world from each pillar is decidedly different.  How I spend my time at each pillar is also different. Each pillar has it’s own unique personality, it’s own unique kind of knowledge about the world to teach me, and it’s own purpose for being in in my online life.

Over the next several weeks I will continue to work on developing the Internet4Change blog into a space where many voices about collaboration in the social change sector can blog together. (Give a shout out if you’re in a position to help with developing the theme!) In the meantime, I will be contributing a 4 part series of posts about the 5 pillars of my wwworld. I want to document how I am deliberately designing them, which space is for engaging with whom, and how I am building bridges between them with content and web2.0 sharing tools.

Of course, you are free to reject, copy, or improve upon any of these ideas in designing your own wwworld as you see fit. My hope is to open your eyes to some new ways of thinking about purpose in your presence online. We can learn to use these tools to create more love in our lives. If you’re someone who works for passion, there is high impact social value you can generate for yourself by doing just that.

Coming next -

Part 2:  Personal blogging & Facebook

Part 3:  Collaborative workspace

Part 4:  Professional blogging & Twitter

Specifically, in late 2009, I am inviting readers to collaborate with me on developing a reinvented homepage concept for the social change sector, that would pull the broader online presence of a cyber-activist in the social change space dynamically into a functional, personalized page.

As a social entrepreneur who works a lot online, this is a page I want for me, to manage my own collaborative idea development processes. I have a strong hunch that such a  page would serve as a useful management tool for others in the Social Change space too.  I’d like your help to make it a page that YOU would find useful.

I foresee that if we develop a standardized format for a collaboration oriented page for Social Entrepreneurs that is both informative for visitors and practically interactive for the entrepreneur, then we could have a basis for further developing collaboration systems.

What does that really mean?

There are 4 main areas of my activity as a social entrepreneur that I want my page at internet4change.com to help me organize. I’m going to be using a number of social media tools and spaces to develop a model page that helps me manage those 4 areas – hopefully with some help!

Could what I’m proposing be an interesting way for you to work too?  Below are 4 invitations to engage in the model internet4change personal page and collaborative space design.

1. Tools, platforms, communities – I want to be able to have links  to all the tools and spaces I use and visit regularly right on my own page where I can find them easily, and I want to learn about better tools as they develop. With little fuss, I want to be able to click and connect from my start page both to other actors in a variety of online sectors, and to content I have  created that I want to share.  I want to easily play my Social Change related message across platforms and communities and audiences and monitor responses, and  I want to exchange useful reviews with others of tools that can help me do that more. My personalized page should offer that kind of start-page functionality for me.

• Blog me please! If you are working well with and/or developing an idea, tool or platform and you think other actors in the Social Change sector should know about it and possibly integrate it into their online activities, please submit a guest post about it that I can post at Internet4Change.com.  700 words max, related to a tool, platform or idea that can enhance online collaboration in the social change sector. Please submit your posts for consideration in a PM to Christina Jordan at Ned.com.

2. How-to – Equipped with links to my cutting edge tools, I want to be better able to use them to take action, and to help others take acti0n, on things that need doing in my wwworld.  I want to both teach and to learn.  I need help sometimes – not just with tools, but with developing my ideas for change, and I know I can also help you. I want my Social Entrepreneur’s collaboration page to make it possible for me to share what I know so that others can leap over my learning curves. I also want to be able to find the right information when I need it from among my peers at the click of a findable tweet.

• Twitter me sensible! Please send links to @ChristinasWorld with brilliant case studies and how-to articles that can help others in the Social Change sector understand how you’re using 0nline tools to create change.  I love to retweet!  Help me use #i4c to find and raise awareness of what all of us are seeing that has the potential to work well for encouraging collaboration in the Social Change sector.

3. Standards – For starters, I want a history.  Like many others I know, the online part of my career has been disrupted more than once by the disappearance of online communities where I had invested considerable amounts of my time and talents.  That is the nature of our wwworld; I am now embarking on a strategy for managing a more diversified presence. Understanding the reality of regular transition that has marked the development of my career as a social entrepreneur online, I want a personal presence that reflects my history as I enter into new discussions today.

I’ve been off exploring some other online sectors for a couple of years now. As I’ve stepped back into the exploding Social Change sector online, I would soooo love it if all of you who are working for change online had pages like the one I hope to build a model of.

• Claim your space! Use the blogosphere, twitter, facebook (an i4c fanpage will be coming soon) or the collaboration space at Ned.com to help me develop a pilot Internet4Change profile, please!  If you and other cyber-activists want one, we can also figure out the best way to get it hosted at Internet4Change.com or elsewhere.

4. A Collaboration System: Collaboration in our sector can be amazing. It can also be disappointing if it’s not designed and managed well.  We can develop systems to guide our interactions – we can work together to open up some global level playing fields.  I am a die-hard fan of the Omidyar developed collaboration platform that currently runs at Ned.com, especially because of the idea bubble-up and reputation building tools, and the archive-transparent wiki and discussion tools.

The functionality available at Ned.com inspires me to think of what it could look like if we were to link many interactive Internet4Change pages together – adding trust based  relationship building tools  and social-media ready shared workspaces to create a seedbed for cross-dimensional collaboration to grow in.

• Roll up your sleeves: I have started an Internet4Change group at Ned.com, where interested collaborators are invited to work together with me on a) hashing out the development of building a model high-utility profile concept for the Social Change Sector, and b) thinking through how to best connect those profiles together for maximum good.

Thanks for reading. I’m looking forward to collaborating with you!

Christina Jordan

8 years ago today, a global event occurred which rocked the world as we knew it.  I was in East Africa on that day, and had coincidentally just discovered – via my interviews with Ashoka the previous week – that there was a rapidly growing industry out there of people like me who were stepping up to the plate to say, “We CAN affect major change in the world, and I have a plan for a part of it.”

Understanding that a social change industry was out there was the single most transformative piece of information I had ever received in my life to that point. For a social entrepreneur like me, who had been working alone under a rock to develop a change-creating internet presence from Uganda, it changed everything.

When the World Trade Towers were hit just a few days later, almost instantly, I understood 4 things at a very profound, soul-shaking level:

1. Our Global Systems were crumbling and would continue to do so;
2. The Social Change Industry was already laying the groundwork for new grassroots-driven systems to create a  change-driven economy;
3. The Internet would become the dominant force for creating and ushering in new micro and macro operational systems for the planet.
4. I wanted to help architect new ways for ordinary people everywhere to work collaboratively for change – each armed with our own pieces of the puzzle.

8 years after that first very viceral dramatization of how very fragile and weak our old global systems are, I see tremendous evidence that the Social Change industry has begun to penetrate and influence the daily decision making of consumers and governments.  We are no longer an industry, but a vibrant cross-dimensional sector of social enterprise, social investors, non-profits, for-profits, consumers, volunteers, beneficiaries and  supporters of our sector’s wide array of social change oriented products and delivery mechanisms.

We represent hope, and the world needs us.

I also see that we are just starting to understand a common need to be able to collaborate in more effective and meaningful ways.  At the SocialEdge website this month, Charles (HipBone) Cameron is hosting a discussion entitled:  Who will build a more efficient marketplace? For the record, I have been announcing online for months that as of 1 September 2009 I would be moving back into work-mode… My short answer to the SocialEdge question as I begin piecing the starting blocks together at internet4change.com is, “I’m ready to try, and I’ve got a plan.”

The ridiculous ambition behind that statement has caused me many sleepless nights of wondering, “Am I really the right person for this job?” At the end of the day, I see that I can, so I must.  I am currently reading “Founders at Work” by Jessica Livingston, and wrote an abridged version of the following statement on the title page earlier today:

It is our obligation as careholders of the new kind of world we hope to create, to recognize the need to invest and participate in developing new forms of governance – and that starts with governing ourselves.  As we collaborate more and more, the structures and systems within which we are accustomed to working will, by necessity, become stretched.  To collaborate with maximum effectiveness, we must find ways to make our old legal structures, our old moral boundaries, and our old economic models irrelevant to the task of mobilizing solutions.

I do not mean to suggest that we learn to work in a state of lawlessness.  On the contrary, we must each find the courage to understand and accept the current-system risks and constraints to innovation that we face, and start developing new norms for operating in the cross-dimensional space we share.

I foresee that if we work together to establish economically and administratively viable norms and systems for pooling our grassroots-level human talents, knowledge and financial capital, will we be able to kick social change into overdrive in my lifetime. The plan, of course, requires that we develop the plan collaboratively.

Because we can, we must. Cyberspace is not going away, and there are many tools here in this new reality to help us build what we need.   The piece of the puzzle that the Internet4Change concept offers is a framework for how we can start using our online tools to start viably collaborating more.

With the utmost respect for your unique small or large piece of the Better World Building puzzle, whoever you are, I invite you to participate in what’s happening at Internet4Change.com, as it continues to evolve.

I leave this now to go and watch the movie United 93 with my children, and spend some time discussing with them the importance of what the people on that plane did, the many lessons that September 11 taught us, how it affected me, and how it affected us all.   I engage with them tonight knowing that 8 years later, #i4c exciting global times ahead.

Looking forward to your comments and reactions.

#piece

Christina Jordan
Founding Collaborator
www.Internet4Change.com

• weed out non f2f contacts
• decide on exceptions & inform why
• make list of tools/applications to explore
• create i4c fanpage

christinaswwworld blog -> my facebook, other bloggers

• finetune theme
• make list of posts to write
• write & schedule 5 entries
• re-start participation at entrecard community

internet4change blog-> social change sector

• develop theme
• reviewing 10 delicious bookmarks
• compile a list of experts to ask for guest posts
• list at technorati, mybloglog, blogcatalog, etc.

Ned.com -> social change sector collaborators

• build a ned.com twitter bridge
• post to user priorities thread
• create internet4change group
• seed 5 i4c discussions
• further develop profile

Let’s see what becomes of it now.