Networks in action
Networks in the criminal world: an interview with Sam Logan
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 | Network theory, Networks in action, Synthesis | 1 Comment
For those of us who’ve been drinking the kool-aid that networks are a force for good, investigative journalist Samuel Logan’s new book This Is for the Mara Salvatrucha: Inside the MS-13, America’s Most Violent Gang is a good reminder that networks can also be a force for evil. He visited Monitor’s offices recently to speak about his book, as part of a regular event called GBN In Conversation, and share what he has learned about organized crime and gang networks. We had a chance to interview him afterward, and get his take on the topic. Sam is an investigative journalist with over 11 years of experience in Latin America. His work focuses on black markets, organized crime, street gangs and other matters of national and human security. He is also the founder and editor of Southern Pulse | Networked Intelligence, a not-for-profit human intelligence organization focused on security, politics, and energy in Latin America. › Continue reading
Nonprofits in the age of Web 2.0: what does membership mean?
Friday, September 18th, 2009 | Networks in action, Synthesis | 1 Comment
This post is by Cynthia Gibson and was originally published Monday on her blog.
Anybody who’s read this blog knows that it contains some recurrent themes—the need for more transparency and “real people” in public decision-making, as well as the cultural, political, and social shifts that technology is driving. I thought about this last week while attending a special session at the National Conference on Citizenship on “Nonprofits in the Age of Web 2.0,” which featured an impressive smattering of leading technologists, nonprofit directors, foundations, and Millennial leaders talking about how technology is pushing organizations to change—and change fast. › Continue reading
Slow Money: a networked vision for funding local food
Monday, August 10th, 2009 | Networks in action, Synthesis | No Comments
When I read the Roots of Change newsletter last week, I came across their announcement of the first national “Slow Money” conference happening in September. Curious about the idea of “slow money,” I read on, thumbing through their website and plan of action. What I found was a very interesting example of network-centric strategy for social change. › Continue reading
New working paper released – “Working Wikily 2.0: Social Change with a Network Mindset”
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 | Network theory, Network tradecraft, Networks in action, Synthesis | 3 Comments
We’ve posted on the Monitor Institute site our most recent paper: Working Wikily 2.0: Social Change with a Network Mindset. The paper examines how networks and working with a network mindset—embracing principles like openness, transparency, decentralized decision-making, and distributed action—can help funders and activists increase their impact. Working Wikily 2.0 draws on our research and experience managing network-related experiments with the Packard Foundation over the past two plus years. The report builds on the original Working Wikily report, a descriptive account of how networks are changing social change, published in the Spring of 2008.
Please let us know what you think! What are your stories of social change driven by a network mindset? What lessons are you learning about working wikily?
The social sector charges ahead in social media
Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 | Network technology, Networks in action, News | 1 Comment
The common perception is that social sector organizations lag behind the rest of the world when it comes to the use of technology. Many nonprofits have little money to spend on overhead, after all, and IT is easier to squeeze than personnel. But the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research recently released a longitudinal study that found nonprofits to be outpacing the business world and academia in the use of social media. This study was a follow-up to a study conducted by the Center in 2007 and compares organizational adoption of social media by the 200 largest charities in the United States. The headline from the results is clear: when it comes to fundraising, marketing, and organizing, social-sector organizations are using social media more frequently. › Continue reading
Kristof, charity : water, and 5 lessons for us all
Monday, July 13th, 2009 | Networks in action, News, Synthesis | No Comments
(This piece was originally posted from Jake Samuelson’s personal blog, My Geeky Side.)
With each op-ed, Nick Kristof chips away at the good-hearted but lazy NYT readers to make us aware and make us care about the world’s most pressing issues. He always has great data and research to back up his points. He often point us in the right direction of an amazing innovator and highlight something that needs fixing. He sometimes (but not often enough) will even tell us what we can do. › Continue reading
Does participating in social media make you a digital socialist?
Monday, June 22nd, 2009 | Network theory, Networks in action, Synthesis | No Comments
“When masses of people who own the means of production work toward a common goal and share their products in common, when they contribute labor without wages and enjoy the fruits free of charge, it’s not unreasonable to call that socialism… In the past, constructing an organization that exploited hierarchy yet maximized collectivism was nearly impossible. Now digital networking provides the necessary infrastructure.” – Kevin Kelly
Participating in social media is a means to more than just marketing success, contends tech visionary Kevin Kelly in a recent Wired Magazine essay. There’s no question that social media is an important path forward in the media revolution. But to participate in online community efforts is also to channel the age-old desire for collective identity and communal effort, the very same desire that fueled political movements in the past. › Continue reading
Esther Dyson on the big picture of social media
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 | Network technology, Networks in action, Synthesis | No Comments
Several of the tools that kickstarted the revolution we now call “social media” were angel-funded by veteran venture capitalist and technology critic Esther Dyson: flickr, del.icio.us, and MeetUp. In a recent interview with strategy+business she shared her vision of the big picture: a fundamental shift toward more transparent institutions and a more relationship-driven economy. In other words, a world of working wikily. Here is what she has to say on topics relevant to our conversation, and four questions that her points raise for nonprofits: › Continue reading
A “Twitter revolution” in Moldova?
Thursday, April 23rd, 2009 | Network technology, Networks in action, News | No Comments
Long before Oprah’s first tweet, WorkingWikily has been covering the Twitter phenomenon.
In previous posts we described how Congress is using Twitter and how TweetsGiving raised a substantial amount of money for charity. Recently, Twitter was featured prominently in international news after it was reportedly used to bring together a “smart mob” of protestors in Moldova. More than 10,000 protestors were brought together using Twitter in combination with other social network tools such as Facebook (see our earlier post on Facebook’s use in Egypt) and Live Journal.
What does it really mean to “organize” a netroots campaign?
Friday, March 13th, 2009 | Network tradecraft, Networks in action, News | 4 Comments
Everyone in politics these days loves to talk about the “netroots,” but hardly anyone really knows what it means to organize a netroots campaign. Enter Apollo Gonzales, the Natural Resource Defense Council’s new netroots campaign manager. The grassroots is easy to picture: they’re the everyday people who are on your mailing list, contribute money so you can lobby Congress, and occasionally call their leaders to voice their opinion. But the netroots is a more abstract concept that Gonzales and a few other pioneering netroots organizers are beginning to learn how to handle. › Continue reading
Egypt’s Facebook-based opposition: a preview of the power of social networks for organizing
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 | Networks in action, News | No Comments
The tragic conflict in Gaza has at least a small silver lining: it’s provided a vibrant example of social networks being used for organizing. Egyptian youth poured their hearts out on Facebook as the conflict unfolded, expressing every variety of rage, and the story of what happened was written up in the New York Times under the headline “Revolution, Facebook Style.” There is enough insightful material in the story that I’ve included a string of key quotes below.
New links from the holiday break
Thursday, January 8th, 2009 | Network technology, Network theory, Network tradecraft, Networks in action, News | No Comments
Thanks for your patience over the holidays. To make up for the break in content, here’s an extensive list of worthwhile links from the past few weeks, broken up by category: collaborative practices, serious tweeting, and technology/tools: › Continue reading
[SYNTHESIS] What online giving marketplaces might mean for philanthropy…
Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 | Network technology, Networks in action, Synthesis | 4 Comments
Emerging “online giving marketplaces” like GlobalGiving , Kiva, DonorsChoose, and GiveIndia represent one of the most interesting intersections between philanthropy and social media that we’ve come across in our last two years of studying this space. These Web 2.0 start-ups are using online tools to connect donors to local issues, organizations, entrepreneurs, and social programs around the world. › Continue reading
Networked funding for professional journalism at spot.us
Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 | Network tradecraft, Networks in action, News | No Comments
One of the basic tenets of working wikily is to bring a collaborative and participatory spirit to the relationship we’ve traditionally known between “audiences” and “authorities,” and the new website spot.us does that in a very creative way for the world of journalism. It applies wiki logic to the problem of funding quality stories: if a journalist has a story idea that the commercial papers won’t buy, with spot.us she can pitch it straight to the public. › Continue reading
TweetsGiving successfully breaks in the new model of tweet-raising
Monday, December 8th, 2008 | Network tradecraft, Networks in action, News | 1 Comment
I’m very happy to report that TweetsGiving was a smashing success, proving that “tweet-raising” can be used as a viable model for getting donations. The preliminary case study reports that the campaign raised $11,021 in 48 hours from 364 donors (beyond its $10k goal), prompted over 3,000 gratitude tweets, received 7,563 unique visitors from 101 countries, and got over 100 mentions by bloggers and the press. (UPDATE: There are now additional thoughts and reflections posted, which are worth reading.)
TweetsGiving: a Twitter flash-cause
Monday, December 1st, 2008 | Networks in action, News | 2 Comments
Twitter’s getting some serious use these days. Following hot on the heels of helping to get out the vote, they ran a Thanksgiving flash-cause to raise money over the holiday: TweetsGiving. Note their expert use of a few good tricks for getting the cause to go viral: › Continue reading
Radical transparency update: FORGEing ahead
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 | Networks in action, News | 1 Comment
Kjerstin Erickson has been very busy learning what it means to be radically transparent since we last noted Tactical Philanthropy’s description of her audacious open-kimono approach to fundraising. There’s a great deal of good news for her organization FORGE and also some insight for the broader discussion about what it means to work wikily:
Does your network look like this? Perhaps you need to do some weaving.
Friday, November 21st, 2008 | Network theory, Network tradecraft, Networks in action, News | No Comments
A third and final pearl of wisdom from the Pact/WBI essay is the brief case-study description of how Pact realized that the network it had created in Zambia was badly in need of network-weaving. › Continue reading
[SYNTHESIS] A President who “works wikily”?
Friday, November 14th, 2008 | Network tradecraft, Networks in action, Synthesis | 1 Comment
By now it has become a journalistic cliché to say that President-elect Barack Obama just ran the most impressive campaign in political history. Coupling his background in community organizing with the connective power of Silicon Valley’s latest Web 2.0 tools, he built and then supercharged an enormous grassroots network, › Continue reading
Online giving marketplaces: insights from the SSIR conference
Thursday, October 30th, 2008 | Network technology, Networks in action, News | No Comments
Lucy Bernholz kindly shared her notes from the SSIR conference on online giving marketplaces that happened on October 8th, which are insightful and well worth reading in spite of being raw. I was particularly struck by following three points: › Continue reading
