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.

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