New links for January 20th
Written by Noah Flower on Tuesday, January 20th, 2009
Filed under News
Headlines: Kiva.org: Beyond www.kiva.org * 10 Ways Twitter Will Change Blog Design in 2009 * socialcreditcard.org * GroundReport * Using Metrics To Harvest Insights About Your Social Media Strategy * Government By the People 2.0 * Obama on No. 1 Change.gov Question: Let’s Punt * Vietnamese government implementing–and promoting–open source software (summary and commentary after the break)
Kiva.org: Beyond www.kiva.org – This may look like a piece of technical news, but it’s also a great example of working wikily: Kiva is about to release an API, which means that soon anyone will be able to write software that will further extend and modify the tools on the Kiva website. As they themselves note, this could lead to a Kiva iPhone app, text messages that tell you when new loan opportunities pop up, and any other creative uses that the world can think of. Taking the time to code a public API is an investment, but giving the world a public interface to your tools lets you tap into the creativity of others. You have to give up control, of course — but that’s part of the point. It’s one of the best ways to crowdsource innovation.
10 Ways Twitter Will Change Blog Design in 2009 – Social media never stops changing: Twitter hit it big in 2008, and this is a list of ideas/predictions for how the blogging form is likely to shift in 2009 to accomodate the new arrival.
socialcreditcard.org – This blog posts introduces the idea of a “social credit card,” a concept that beautifully epitomizes the usefulness of individual empowerment in today’s world: if a company wants to encourage volunteering and other socially constructive activity outside of the office, a social credit card is a simple tool it can give to the employees for tracking their work, making it easy to offer quantitative incentives for doing good.
GroundReport – A model of crowdsourcing: this website has given citizen journalists a publishing platform since 2006 and built up a network of 3,500 contributors whose work is vetted by professional editors. Writers are more than just volunteers — every story is paid, encouraging higher quality content.
Using Metrics To Harvest Insights About Your Social Media Strategy – A deep dive into the technical art of assessing a social media strategy, with details on which metrics provide the richest insight.
Government By the People 2.0 – A number of salient voices came together on a panel to discuss how technology is changing democracy. They offer some interesting insights into how social media impacted the election, the challenges of controlling your message from the top down versus bottom up, and many other related issues. (This is a liveblogged near-transcript of the conversation.)
Obama on No. 1 Change.gov Question: Let’s Punt – The top crowd-chosen question on Change.org was no softball: “Will you appoint a Special Prosecutor – ideally Patrick Fitzgerald – to independently investigate the gravest crimes of the Bush Administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping?” But Obama’s reaction was to simply say that he’s still evaluating the question. This would be an example of how to kill relationships with your online community: if you fail to take their questions seriously, it won’t be long before they decide that you’re behaving just like any other big institution, and that trying to engage with you just isn’t worth the effort.
Vietnamese government implementing–and promoting–open source software – Joining South Africa and several others, the government of Vietnam is now converting its operations to run solely on free and open-source software by 2010. Why? It costs nothing to buy, it’s cheap to administer, it’s often more stable and secure, and it has the public-image benefit of being made by a global community of volunteers rather than a profit-driven multinational — all reasons that should resonate with the social sector as well.
