Tim Ferriss, author of the best-seller The Four-Hour Work Week, appeared today via uStream at the Inbound Marketing Summit during the session “How to Create a Worldwide Social Media Phenomenon.”

He took questions from the audience, and I asked how he decides which causes to support.

It wasn’t an idle question. Ferriss has become a remarkably adept advocate for philanthropic causes in a startlingly short time. He has successfully made use of social media tools to raise thousands of dollars to build schools in Vietnam, libraries in Nepal and India, and most recently, to help thousands of classrooms in the U.S. obtain basic classroom supplies. (Source: WalletPop)

Tim singled out three organizations and initiatives as exemplars of philanthropy in the age of Web 2.0:

• Donorschoose.org, the remarkable organization founded by Charles Best (I did a video interview with him Monday and hope to post it soon). Ferriss, who sits on the organization’s board, said the ability for users to select the specific educational causes they support and to receive tangible feedback are key drivers of its success.

• Roomtoread is a global organization that has established more than 7,000 libraries in the developing world since 2000.

• Charity: water, the nonprofit that was the beneficiary of the Twestival event in 205 cities, is representative of a new breed of charitable organizations, he said. Some of these groups have smartly begun to set up an administrative structure in which 100 percent of donated funds go directly to the cause, with a separate fund, generated through other means (such as a small add-on to support the group’s operations), paying for administration.

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Secrets and sex education from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Hannah Cordero, program coordinator for the Education Theatre Program of Kaiser Permanente in Northern California, tells about the Secrets program geared toward teens through theatrical performances. Educational Theatre Programs served over 360,000 people in Northern California in 2008. Hannah spoke at the recent sex::tech conference in San Francisco.

To see upcoming performances, go to: kp.org/etp/ncal/.

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Fair use and ‘free use’: As a documentary filmmaker, when must I turn off my camera?

Guest post by Peter Jaszi
Professor of Law, Washington College of Law, American University

The answers to some of filmmakers’ most common clearance questions don’t really lie in the realm of “fair use” at all, but fall under the heading of “free use.” Some examples:

• Buildings that can be seen from public areas can be filmed for any purpose. Although there has been copyright in architectural works in the United States since 1990, the U.S. Copyright Act includes an exemption for filming. It doesn’t matter whether the building is the subject of the film or an incidental background.
• Federal government works enjoy no copyright protection whatsoever, whether they are the words of federal government employees or footage taken by camerapeople in civilian or military service. The purpose for which you use the material – as well as the source from which you obtain it – are irrelevant from a copyright perspective.
• Public domain works (such as 19th century paintings or medieval manuscripts) in museums or private collections are free for use as well, if you have access to a reproduction. Many institutions claim copyright in their own photographs of old objects in their collections. But if you have a different source, you’re free to proceed, without a license from the collection.
• For most documentary projects, filmmakers don’t have to be concerned about the so-called “right of publicity” that exists under some state laws. The cases (and sometimes the statutes themselves) make it clear that the right bars only the commercial exploitation of celebrities’ “persona,” and First Amendment-protected expressive uses are specifically exempted.
• In answer to a common (but not intellectual property-related) question, documentarians don’t need photo releases from individuals who are filmed in parks, streets or other public places where they have no expectation of privacy. If you single out an individual for special attention, you may a need a release.

Related

• Filmmakers’ best practices in fair use

• The rules around capturing public performances

• Guide to shooting photos in public

• Your rights as a photographer

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I’m here at NTEN’s 09NTC and am going to live blog Beth Kanter’s session on mapping your social media strategy to metrics.  Below is the live blog or the archive of the live blog.  Can’t wait!

The internet connection here is such that I don’t think a live blog portal will sustain itself.  So, I’m going to trouble shoot and just take some live notes here and post them as soon as possible.

Here goes…

Takeaways:

• How to use listening
• The right metrics
• Analytics tools

Panelists:

• Wendy Harmon: social media manager, philosophy is to use social media to execute mission
• Danielle Brigida: using social media to increase, reach, engagement and revenue
• Qui Diaz:Livingston, recently did research for the Philanthropy 2.0 report
• Sarah Granger: advise nonprofits on using social media for advocating and communicating

Themes that people want to learn:

• new metrics structures can bubble up
• funders of a 20th century mindset – what metrics speak to them
• what things need to be measured
• obama reach vs local reach
• industry benchmarks
• how to integrate tools without reinventing the wheel
• success stories

List, Learn, Adapt – concept from David Armano: “Insight must come before investment when implementing a social media project.”

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Photo courtesy Blue Ocean Institute

Sensing is just one way in which mobiles are used in environmental protection. Another promising area is wildlife protection in sensitive areas where humans and animals collide, often to the detriment of protected animals.

In the Laikipia District in Kenya, the University of Cambridge conducted a project using mobile phones to protect and manage Kenya’s second largest elephant population, and the ecosystem they inhabit.  The goal was to alleviate human-elephant conflict between local farmers and the protected elephants.  The project used mobile phones for early warning of elephants approaching farmland by using ‘push-to-talk’ technologies, and GPS/GSM collars for the elephants, allowing wildlife personnel to intervene before elephant became a danger to farmers and vice versa.

Mobiles are especially useful for gathering and acting on just-in-time information. Imagine this scenario: A woman in Johannesburg, South Africa, stands at the fish counter in her local supermarket and texts the name of a fish to a phone number. Within seconds, she receives back information via a short text message informing her whether the fish is legally and environmentally harvested and advising her whether “to tuck in, think twice or avoid completely.”

The consumer is using FishMS, a text service of Sassi (The Southern African Sustainable Seafood Initiative) and the World Wildlife Fund to help consumers make informed choices about the seafood they purchase.

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Just in time for Earth Day: the site Breathing Earth, which is described as a “real-time simulation which displays CO2 emissions from every country in the world, as well as their birth and death rates.” The data used comes from reputable sources, although the site admits that a simulation on this scale can never be 100% accurate. Worryingly, they note that the CO2 emission levels shown are much more likely to be too low than too high. Yikes.

This is a fascinating site, and one which throws up numbers on a scale large enough to scare the best of us. Since I started writing this brief blog post, for example, the world population has risen by over 2,000 and total CO2 emissions have exceeded an incredible 760,000 tons. The United States alone was responsible for approximately 175,000 of that.

If you ever need reminding of the relentless march of global population growth, and the increasing impact that our growing numbers are having on the planet, there can’t be many sites better than this.

This entry originally appeared at Kiwanja.net.

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Maplight: shining a light on politics and money from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Sean Tanner, research director of MAPLight.org, talks about how the organization provides transparency to the political donations system through widgets that tap into pubic information databases. We spoke at the NetSquared conference in San Jose, Calif., in May 2008, where MAPLight won top honors in 2007.

Maplight offers a number of widgets that you can customize.

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Photo copyright by Peter Guttman

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, NGOs, journalists, individuals

What does capturing great photos on the road have to do with advancing the social good? Admittedly, not a lot, other than this: When organizations conduct a retreat, or members travel to distant locations to document work in the field, the photographic output of those expeditions — on the Web, in slide show presentations, in annual reports — can be improved dramatically by following a few simple steps.

Peter Guttman, a fabled New York-based travel photographer who has traveled to more than 190 countries, is the author of five influential books on travel. Guttman offered the following tips to amateurs in an interview with the New York Times.

Tip 1: Tell a story

Forgo the temptation to take photos of your compadres standing in front of monuments or landmarks. Instead, research a destination to find out what makes it unique, and look for unusual and offbeat angles or interesting characters to illustrate your story — you’re telling a visual story, after all.

Tip 2: Get close to the action

"The main mistake that people make is that they don’t get close enough to the action," Guttman said. "You have to decide whether you want to be a tourist or a traveler. A tourist basically stands to the side and takes timid candids of things that they see from a distance as a shy spectator. A traveler [makes an effort to enter an experience] and tries to feel all the essence and the joy and the drama of what a place has to offer."

Tip 3: Know when to photograph and use natural light to your advantage

"The most effective time to photograph is at the margins of the day," he said.

"Early morning, dusk and most particularly during blue light, which is after the sun sets but before the sky turns totally dark. It gives photographs a cobalt blue essence that’s almost out of a fairy tale and contrasts with the sparkling golds of man-made light."

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There is an inherent tension between strategy and tactical implementation of using social media to support a campaign’s objectives or nonprofit’s mission, whether the goal is fundraising, marketing, or taking action. Those who are just beginning to incorporate social media into their strategic thinking struggle with: “How do we get to know and understand how a particular tool can help us meet our goals, but not let the tool drive our decisions?”

And seasoned practitioners are debating whether a particular social media tool is in and of itself a strategy.   And, while it may be an argument about semantics, it further illustrates this tension.

The “is Twitter a strategy or tool debate” was fueled as Twitter got lots of attention (and  hype) as part of the coverage of last week’s protests in Moldova. Ivan Boothe points out in his post “The Fire and Food: Why There’s No Such Thing As A Twitter Revolution,” the real-time use of Twitter as an organizing tool is a not revolution.  Twitter has been used during the G20 protests, election monitoring and crowd-sourcing the location of a torch when it was passing through San Francisco.   And while quite, different from the “mainstream” use of Twitter by nonprofits, Ivan warns against tool-driven decisions for activism campaigns:

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