10 easy steps to help you on your collaboration journey

Guest post by Susannah Vila
Movements.org

To achieve scale and grow impact for your cause, it sometimes make sense to collaborate with other social good organizations.

Creating partnerships — and possibly building a coalition — is likely to increase the amount of resources available to you and the impact you’ll make in the world. Work with everybody – from the public to allied groups to governments to corporations – and let everybody work with you.

Here are 10 quick steps to help you on your collaboration journey:

Set expectations and define goals

1The campaign that you’re bringing other activists and organizations into should be clearly defined and visible. They should understand why they’re joining forces with you. What do you want the final result to be? What are the steps you’ll take to get there?

Determine a time frame

2What is your timeline? Depending on how short or long term your campaign will be, you might want to create a more temporary council or group of some sort instead of a coalition.

Make a list of potential allies

3When you think about it, you may be surprised at how many allies you have in your community. Groups, institutions, businesses and individuals who share some of the same interests as you are all people who you could be working with. Make a list of possibilities.

Research projects they’re working on

4Once you’ve identified organizations with similar goals, research them. Take notes. Educate yourself before you contact anyone. Know the projects that the organization is working on, the projects it previously worked on, and how the organization may fit within your campaign.

Consider organizations with different perspectives

5Don’t neglect “strange bedfellows,” or people whose politics may differ from yours but whose goals may be aligned with those of your campaign in at least the short term. You may be surprised at how frequently diverse groups can come together over a single issue. For example, read about the ‘”strange bedfellows” campaign to fight telecom immunity.

You’re more likely to succeed if the group of people brainstorming your strategy and tactics is itself from a diverse background, as one of them is more likely to see a situation in a novel way and come up with a novel solution.

Make contact — and have a plan

6Make contact. Reach out to them using whatever form of communication (a visit, a phone call, an e-mail) you think is most appropriate based on the group’s access to and fluency with technology. Mention what you’ve learned in your research and why you think your goals and their goals overlap. You’ve already defined the steps that your campaign will consist of, so show them how they can fit into your timeline by presenting it in a clear and concise manner.

Tip!: A formal and public coalition can prove to be more trouble than it’s worth. Consider working in coordination with other NGOs in a more informal, implicit way.

Set up a meeting or event, then keep in touch

7Set up a meeting or event for everyone who has signed on to meet each other. Allow each person to talk about his or her project and discuss how the coalition is going to operate.

Then follow up. Get in contact again with the groups you met with to summarize the conversation you had and to emphasize the next steps.

Create a steering committee

8Create a steering group or coordinating committee made up of a small core of individuals who are willing and able to devote more time and energy than others. If you’re one of these people, accept your own leadership position. If you’re not in this group, support them where you can, and offer them your best advice. Let them make decisions for the group, so that your work can move forward efficiently.

Trust each other

9Trust one another. You’re in it together now, so a little trust and good faith will go a long way. To facilitate that trust, make it as easy as possible for everyone to be as transparent as possible. Use tools that are helpful for collaboration, like Google Docs. We like it because if anyone accesses the document while signed into Gmail, you can see that.

Create a shared calendar

10Create a collective calendar with each organization’s different meetings and events so that anyone can attend anyone else’s gatherings. Make sure no events conflict with each other!

Tip!: Consensus is incredibly hard to achieve. Consider loosening how you define it – can you declare consensus reached even if not 100 percent of your group agrees? Should you make a two-thirds rule?

The post How to partner and form coalitions to grow impact appeared first on Socialbrite.

San Francisco has a new co-working space for “radical collaboration”: The Hub SoMa.

There is poetry here: The Hub SoMa is located on the revamped first floor of the Chronicle building at Fifth and Mission. While one institution falters, another is born as a collaborative incubation space for new social enterprises. The 8,600-square-foot space, dubbed a Social Innovation Complex, will feature art exhibits, offices and large event spaces for members.

I already paid a visit to the Hub SoMa last week for a presentation by Reporters Without Borders, the international press freedom organization. Hub SoMa is a gorgeous space, one where entrepreneurs of all stripes can come together, compare notes and move forward where interests coincide. Two of the new tenants there include Intersection for the Arts and TechShop.

Thursday night is Hub SoMa’s Launch party — get your tickets for $10. 350 people have signed up so far. I’ll try to make it.

The vision is for Hub SoMa to be a global coalition of designers, educators and business leaders driving impact — a place where change-makers find the people, ideas and tools they need to build solutions for change. It’s a stirring vision and they’re off to a good start.

San Francisco already has great co-working locations in Citizen Space and PariSoMa, and The Hub has other co-location spaces in the East Bay and around the world. But this is truly one to behold. More details on Eventbrite.

The post The Hub SoMa: Open for business appeared first on Socialbrite.

At lunch yesterday in San Francisco, eight folks in the social change sector gathered at Samovar Tea Lounge to compare notes, discuss partnerships and answer a question posed by convener Christine Egger of SocialActions.com:

What is the problem you see in your sector, and how would you solve it?

The conversation quickly turned to silos and the need not to break them down but, as Kristy Graves said, to build bridges between them.

The nonprofit sector. The social change and social innovation sectors. The social enterprise sector. The Gov 2.0 sector. The citizen journalism sector. The education sector. The micro-finance sector.

There are amazing parallel needs on display and immensely talented people working in all of these areas. Sometimes our efforts overlap. Sometimes we share resources. But too often we talk past each other, focus on our own events and pass up opportunities for collaboration.

The lunch came with no agenda and we left with no game plan but with a deeper understanding of some of the efforts taking place only a phone call, email or direct-message away.

One idea was to form a sort of cross-sector group or mailing list to help these sectors cross-pollinate. (I like that idea, but we’d need more participants for that to work.)

Some social change standouts you should know

We didn’t expressly say that the lunch was on the record, and I didn’t take detailed notes, but you should be following these folks and you can ask them directly how you can work with them: Jean Russell, aka @NurtureGirl, @adincmiller, @edwardharran, Scott Bechtler-Levin of @IdeaEncore, @CDEgger, @rachelannyes and @kg. Kevin Doyle Jones, Robert Rosenthal and Susan Tenby couldn’t make it. (If you’d like to attend the next — unscheduled — lunch, let us know!)

Quote of the day from Rachel Weidinger : “What if it’s not about portaling people into an event but catapulting them into toolkits and relationships?”

Most of what I jotted down involved resources I wanted to learn more about, like:

• IdeaEncore Network, a knowledge sharing marketplace where nonprofits, social benefit organizations and those who support them can share, sell and buy all types and forms of practical knowledge, planning materials and management tools. “Our challenge is to free information that’s in people’s hard drives,” said founder Scott Bechtler-Levin. We’ve just added them to our Cause Organizations page.

• I need to find out more about the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (GAFFTA), which Edward was telling us about. As the website says, it’s “a San Francisco-based nonprofit dedicated to building social consciousness through digital culture. Guided by the principles of openness, collaboration, and resource sharing, our programs promote creativity at the intersection of art, design, sound, and technology.”

• Edward also mentioned the Senseable City Lab (see image at top) run by my old friends at MIT and its hybrid e-bike copenhagen wheel project. Again, a project we should all know about, but don’t.

• IssueLab archives research about social issues, shares it with a broader audience, and advocates for the use of open licenses and open access standards in the nonprofit sector.

• Kristy mentioned the 10,000 Hours Project, a concert series where college-age students volunteer their time for community work and musicians like Ben Folds and Cake perform.

• I just received a copy of the new book “Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice” from O’Reilly Publishing, and so far I’m learning a lot and loving it. Will have a review of it here in May.

• The Hub SoMa‘s San Francisco co-working space’s coming-out party will be on May 27.

• I missed the just-ended Future of Money and Technology conference in San Francisco but am catching up on it through blog posts and #futureofmoney hashtag.

The post Collaboration: The next phase of social change? appeared first on Socialbrite.

The Extraordinaries lets your organization create a crowdsourced ‘mission’

By Kim Bale
Socialbrite staff

Recruiting friends and supporters to get real work done virtually on behalf of social-good projects is easy and fun with the help of The Extraordinaries. Based in San Francisco, the company has created a platform allowing anyone to create a micro-task and blast it to their community of friends and supporters to generate real, usable output when they spend a few minutes of their spare time on an iPhone or computer.

You can download the iPhone app at BeExtra.org and check out a wide array of simple tasks you can help with. Missions featured today on the Beextra home page include:

• Build a collection of cute dog photos for GoodDogz.org.
• Help build a searchable photo archive for the Smithsonian Institution (yes, that Smithsonian).
• Create a list of job resources for youths on behalf of Goodwill.
• Rate tweets from the SXSW conference.

The tools The Extraordinaries have created are available to nonprofits, for-profits, politicos, evangelists and passionate people alike. For example, Citizens Market, a company tracking corporate behavior, is using The Extraordinaries to research and rate company behavior. To map children’s recreational spaces, KaBOOM! is asking people to mark the GPS location of a playground, rate it up or down and snap a photo, such as the one at top.

Anyone can create a mission and harness the power of the crowd to achieve results while engaging and interacting with the broader community — the Extraordinaries has 29,000 registered users, more than 250 missions and 240,000 micro-tasks completed. The team vetts all apps submitted to the site.

Ways for nonprofits to use The Extraordinaries

How can you use The Extraordinaries?

1. Identify your needs. Many tasks, particularly administrative duties, are ripe for crowdsourcing. The Extraordinaries breaks these tasks into small bits of work with the potential for a big impact. Where could you use a few hundred extra hands? First identify your needs, then see how The Extraordinaries community can help meet them.

2. Create a mission. The Extraordinaries has created a few standard templates, making it easy to create a micro-task, or “mission,” and the list continues to grow.

• Build a map. Whether your organization is creating a map of playgrounds across the country or you just want to locate community gardens, this mission will allow your friends and supporters to help you build the map.

• Collect photos. Let the general population help you build a photo library with this mission. Users take and upload photos, which can then be rated, creating a ranked stock library for you to use.

• Tag and catalog photos. Organize your photo archive with the help of The Extraordinaries. Friends and supporters can add descriptive tags to your digital library, making it searchable and easy to navigate.

• Research a topic or issue. Need research on grants available to your organization, or information on businesses not engaging in sustainable practices? Let your community help do the research and generate usable data.

3. Complete your profile. Just like any social site, The Extraordinaries asks that you complete a profile for your organization. Upload a logo that is simple and recognizable, along with a brief description of who you are, what you do and why you’re asking for help. These are largely read on mobile phones, so brevity is key.

4. Engage your community. Let your friends and supporters know they can do real work for you via their iPhone or computer. Encourage them to download the iPhone app or complete your mission via the Web. The Extraordinaries can provide you with direct links to your mission page and embeddable tools for your website. When people complete your mission, they’ll have the opportunity to tweet about it and share it via Facebook or email, increasing your exposure and missions completed.

At South by Southwest Interactive on Friday, a TechSoup representative cited the Extraordinaries’ efforts to bring a new dimension to relief efforts after the earthquake in Haiti. The site collected 8,137 news photos and volunteers submitted 76,584 image tags, resulting in 746 possible matches and 24 matches good enough to contact family members.

Clearly, we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of the service’s possible uses in the years ahead.

The app is not yet available on other platforms.

How would you use The Extraordinaries? Share your ideas in the comments below.

Related

• The Extraordinaries: Building the ‘micro-volunteering’ movement (Socialbrite)

• New ways to take social actions (Socialbrite)

• Harnessing the crowd for social good (Socialbrite)

The post Tap into the collective power of your community appeared first on Socialbrite.

The platform just hit open beta, so create an account and start playing. You can create your own campaigns with unique URLs, add all kinds of media, and then start campaigning for change!

Here are some initial impressions.

What’s Louder?

LOUDER will be the new online home for campaigners. The free and accessible site draws together a range of social media tools for people who want to change the world.

Through Louder you will be able to create a microsite for your campaign with the most used ‘change-tools’ the web has to offer. You will be able to connect to and manage profiles on other social media sites helping you coordinate supporter action.

To help make your campaign louder you will be able to connect up with other campaigns and those running them. Providing a much needed online space for campaigners, from international NGOs to grass roots activists, to link up collaborate and share experiences.

Why I like Louder

I’ve been playing around with the new platform a bit and am quite excited about it.  I think it has a lot of potential to join with campaigning tools like Fairsay’s tool for Plone and collaborative tools like Zanby.

I like that Louder …

1. lets you create and distribute content all over the web
2. brings in content you create elsewhere
3. lets you work on a campaign without everything being “live”
4. uses a straightforward process to set up modules and then drag/drop to design your page
5. is being developed by folks IN the nonprofit and campaigning for change sector, so they “get it” already

Dive in!

LOUDER is in a “progressive beta” phase now and is working fast and furiously to built out more and more functionality for campaigners. You can visit their roadmap to see what’s in the pipeline of development and share your ideas about what you’d like the platform to do for you.

Some things currently in the works include:

• Newslist and newsletter management
• Email MPs/MEPs/Councillors and other influential people
• Contact management tools
• Collaborative tools for planning campaigns
• The ability to connect to Facebook accounts

What do you think?

What are you waiting for? Go check out LOUDER now!

And let me know what you think, too.

Republished from Amy Sample Ward’s Version of NPTech.

The post Louder: A collaborative campaigning platform appeared first on Socialbrite.

YouthNoise: Helping youths collaborate on causes from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

I‘ve long admired the folks behind YouthNoise, the global social network for social good developed for and by young people around the world. Based in San Francisco, YouthNoise offers a community dedicated to creating lasting positive change around the world, with the resources to build campaigns, amplify projects and kick off grassroots movements. The site offers a wide variety of tools, Web and mobile technologies and peer support that let members turn ideas into action in areas ranging from health to human rights, from education and the environment to poverty.

Think of it as a Change.org for young people, but with a somewhat deeper set of collaboration tools.

Above is an 8-minute interview with Ginger Thomson, who recently stepped down as CEO to take on an advisory role to cement a partnership between LinkTV and YouthNoise, among other things. Ginger has long been a leading figure in empowering Generation Y with the Web 2.0 and social media tools to advance social causes.

With traditional volunteer organizations constrained these days, Thomson says, the tendency of young people to take a do-it-yourself approach to volunteerism may prove especially fruitful, with youths diving in and raising money for the causes they believe in. “This is the DIY Generation,” she says, and young people today have become more entrepreneuria. While traditional volunteerism among Gen Y may have declined, many young people are creating projects around causes that they feel passionate about — with the help of YouthNoise and other sites.

“Alongside the DIY element they also want to bring their friends in, so that everybody’s doing things together,” Ginger says. The YouthNoise site contains social networking capabilities, fundraising tools and access to resources. See the site’s Toolkit Hall of Fame and its Raise It and Donate It Toolkit.

How are people using YouthNoise? Ginger pointed to a two teenagers who formed an offshoot of Malaria No More called Friday Night Live — a couple of teenagers who started a dance program that has gone nationwide in an effort to raise money for mosquito nets in Africa. She also cited Just like Me, a project in LA that helped break down racial barriers and brought middle school kids together in a troubled neighborhood. The LA school board asked the organizer to bring the program to other schools in the district, and with the help of YouthNoise in recruiting volunteers, it’s likely to go national, Ginger said.

Watch, embed or download video on Vimeo
Watch video in original H.264 on Ourmedia

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Spent Wednesday night at SocialVoter, a special event featuring California Secretary of State Debra Bowen and presented by CitizenSpace and the Social Media Club. You can follow the tweets on Twitter — for the next two weeks, anyway, when they disappear. So I thought a blog recap would be in order.

Here, too, is a Flickr photo set of the gathering.

For readers who don’t know Debra Bowen, she’s one of the most forward-looking public officials in the land, with a presence on Twitter (@DBowen) and Facebook and, more importantly, a commitment to bringing the public into public policy discussions.

The conversation between Bowen and the 35 participants in the room was free-flowing and wide-ranging, with suggestions about how to provide voters with critical information about candidates and ballot initiatives, how to crowdsource ballot explanations, how to increase transparency in the election process, et al.

Instant runoffs and crowdsourcing ballot arguments

Some highlights:

• Debra Bowen: “The most important resource we have in the Secretary of State’s Office is that I’m there and I want to make this happen. I want people to tell me about how they think this should work. … That’s your job, to figure out where this might go” and to help her and her staff work in a highly collaborative way. “What if people actually worked at the front of the policy chain instead of reacting to it?”

Echoes of President Obama’s call for bottom-up civic participation.

• One practical reason Bowen is looking to democratize some of the work that might traditionally fall to her office: The Secretary of State’s office has 470 employees. 80% of them are doing corporate and business filings and document processing. The elections staff has fewer than 30 employees. The voter education “staff” consists of one full-time and two part-time workers.

• I’ve long been among those who support a system of “instant runoff voting,” which San Francisco has done in the past and Alameda County and other districts are now seriously considering.

In an instant runoff, voters get to vote for not just their favorite candidate but their second and third choices, allowing citizens to vote for their preferred candidate rather than the lesser of two evils. If your candidate finishes out of the running, your vote goes to your second choice, allowing races with multiple candidates to be decided instantly without a runoff. Brilliant.

Said Bowen: “One of the conditions will be a voter education program so we don’t lose a big chunk of voters for an election or two while they figure out how it works.”

• For decades, California voters have been presented with two sides of every ballot proposition, pro and con. “East of the Mississippi, no one does this,” Bowen said. They’re either flummoxed or amazed. But some states are looking to California to emulate the practice.

Meantime, Bowen is taking the pro and con idea one step further. What if we crowdsourced the ballot arguments? she asked us. How would that look? Who polices it? How could people contribute, and should the arguments be limited to just two?

• Bowen asked for a resource with an easy-to-understand glossary for the public to learn about terms like social media, APIs and Creative Commons. I pointed out that Socialbrite.org has the best social media glossary around, and we’re happy to expand it. (It’s shareable under a Creative Commons BY license.)

• One especially good idea: Use the social graf when it comes to financial disclosure to identify which groups are backing what propositions.

• More Bowen: “I don’t think there’s anyone in California with a .gov address who’s done anything with a wiki.” It’s time to change that, and the group came close to agreement on setting up a public site to document all of these resources.

• Bowen: “95% of the voter education budget is spent on newsprint to print the voter information guide.” Almost zero for online info.

• I asked about restrictions against rewarding people for voting. In New Jersey, you can get free donuts or a cup of coffee for showing your voting slip. Not so in California, where giving a voter a donut for voting is a crime. There are no federal laws against the practice, Bowen told me. But there may be good reasons for the state’s prohibition, which prevents monied interests from shepherding poor voters to the polls to vote for a specific issue.

Grassroots politics resources

Some of the grassroots organizations and resources that were mentioned during the evening:

• The Sunlight Foundation for its pioneering work providing watchdog tools and advocating for political reform and transparency.

• Dan Ancona is building a “Democracy Dashboard,” which he showed me (looks really cool) and which will be ready for release soon.

• Uservoice, a way to turn customer feedback into action.

• Ideascale, a “crowdsourcing platform providing a way to suggest and discuss ideas for increasing openness and transparency.”

• Google Moderator, a tool that allows distributed communities to submit and vote on questions for talks, presentations and events.

• Civio, a voter activation network that debuts this fall.

• TransparentDemocracy, a site that helps you understand your election choices so you can vote more intelligently.

• SmartVoter and California Voter Foundation.

• The League of Women Voters, natch. and the League of Young Voters.

• Citability.org, making government “accessible, reliable and trasparent” through permalinks.

• Lala.com, a service that will give you a link to a song you want to cite so you can share it where you want.

• Adina Levin mentioned discussions around hacking open government at OSCON last week, though not sure where to look for info about that.

The post California’s Secretary of State: Come and collaborate! appeared first on Socialbrite.

Dania Gerhardt, co-founder and chief of finance and operations for Amazee.com,
discusses “the world’s first social collaboration platform.” Her company, based in Zurich, Switzerland, launched in September 2007 and the platform went public in May 2008.

Amazee is a platform for social activism and enabling groups and movements to use collaborative tools. I’m excited by what Amazee brings to the table, and I’ll definitely be following Amazee’s progress in the months ahead. The interview conducted during Supernova 2008 in San Francisco, is 7 minutes long:

Watch the video on Vimeo
Watch the video in original H.264 on Ourmedia
Download original video from Archive.org

Related

• Dania Gerhardt – Amazee: Boosting activism (archive.org)
• Amazee nominated for “The Europas” (amazee.com)
• Vote for the Amazeeng Widget! (amazee.com)
• The Five Most Promising Female Startups (tiburon-tv.com)
• Amazee at Venture Summit 2009 (amazee.com)

The post Amazee: a platform for social activism appeared first on Socialbrite.

Among the folks I met:

• David Levy, co-founder and VP of Strategic Account Management, SocialVibe

• Rahim Fazal, CEO and co-founder, Involver ("turn your video into an interactive application")

• Kristin Cunningham, eBay Giving Works and Cause-related Programs (Later: See my video interview with Kristen)

• Austin Choi, Legal Counsel, Kiva

• Krista Van Tassel, Marketing and Communications Director, NetImpact

• Hans Chung, co-founder, MokuGift ("plant a tree as a gift")

Plus, some folks from Room to Read, World of Good (an eBay community), Better World Books, CauseCast, Change.org and VCs from Greylock and DFJ.

Cross-posted to Socialmedia.biz

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