Guest post by Allyson Kapin
Partner, Rad Campaign

The tools for taking action and effecting social change are getting more robust all the time. Here are five of my current favorites:

Frogloop

1I think Care2’s Frogloop is one of the most trusted sources among nonprofit campaigners for having the latest resources and best practices to engage activists and donors using multiple channels including email, texting and social media. Full disclosure: I’m the Blogger-In-Chief but I don’t think that clouds my judgment. :~)

OpenStreetMap

2OpenStreetMap is a free editable map of the nation and the world created by regular people, Wikipedia-style. It’s a fantastic tool that nonprofits should be using more. It contains a lot more open data than Google Maps.

Threadsy

3If you’re the type of nonprofit campaigner who thrives off of multitasking, Threadsy could be a life saver. In a nutshell, it’s a dashboard that allows you to manage email, Twitter, Facebook, instant messaging – all in one place! It was in beta but now it has just been released to the public.

Idealware

4Idealware provides some of the best research and data to help nonprofits make smart software decisions – anything from choosing open source content management systems and the differences between them to low-cost data visualization tools.

The Petition Site

5Care2’s The Petition Site enables anyone — not just nonprofits — to start a petition around social action issues, from stopping the Sable Island seal slaughter to protecting against new drilling.

In this series

• Change-makers share 10 of their favorite tools

• An educator’s 5 top tools for social change

• 12 open source tools you should be using

• 6 productivity tools for social change

• A developer’s 5 favorite social tools

• Top 5 tools for the entrepreneurial journalist

• Top cause organizations

The post A change agent’s top 5 tools for social change appeared first on Socialbrite.

Launching our summer series on making media for social good

Target audience: Nonprofits, social change organizations, educators, NGOs, citizen journalists, media makers

We’re kicking off a summer series on making media for nonprofits and social change organizations. And, to highlight the wealth of tools on Socialbrite as we just marked our first birthday, we’ve rolled out a complete redesign of our Sharing Center.

Regular readers know that Socialbrite is all about showcasing social tools for social change. Every week we bring you a new batch of articles from our team to help you take advantage of the astonishing new ways to connect, collaborate and communicate and mobilize your cause online.

We’ve been saying for some time that every organization, every nonprofit, is turning into a media outlet, at least in part. It’s the same meme my Traveling Geeks colleague, journalist Tom Foremski, has been using with his new site, Every Company Is a Media Company.

So we decided to tap our friends’ expertise to highlight the tools and platforms that have been making the biggest difference in their own efforts — people like Allyson Kapin of Rad Campaign and Frogloop, Claire Sale of NetSquared, Andrew Rasiej of Personal Democracy Forum, Peter Deitz of SocialActions, Beth Kanter of Zoetica, Julie Crabill of Inner Circle Labs, Katrina Heppler of envisionGood.tv, Nathan Freitas, the mobile developer for the New York State Senate, and others.

Our original idea was to do one big roundup of indispensable tools — with the caveat, as always, that you should begin your efforts with a social media strategy, conversation strategy and social media strategy, and not just a set of tools. It turned out, though, that our colleagues provided so many suggestions that such an approach proved unwieldy. So instead we’ve decided to run a series of “top tools” lists by these experts in the field, kicking things off with this initial roundup of tools and resources for social good.

We suspect some tools and sites in the list below will be familiar while others may be new to you. Please add your own tips and suggestions in the comments below! And if you’d like to contribute your own short article, let us know.

Social action tools & platforms

Mobilize.org: Empowering & energizing the millennial generation

1Mobilize.org promotes greater civic participation and political engagement among young people. The site’s organizers believe the millennial generation offers hope for social justice regardless of race, class, religion or partisan identification. Mobilize.org has hosted eight Democracy 2.0 Summits on financial literacy, money and politics, millennial veterans, the environment and unemployment — with an eye toward developing sustainable solutions to these challenges. Follow mob_org on Twitter.

Amazee: Powering social collaboration

2Amazee is a global, Zurich-based platform that enables social collaboration for individuals, nonprofits, organizations and businesses. You can start a group to promote a cause or idea, to find like-minded people and to raise funds. Follow Amazee on Twitter.

Wiser Earth: Connecting you to communities of action

3WiserEarth is a free online community space connecting people, nonprofits and businesses working toward a just and sustainable world. Communities include the Culture of Peace Initiaitve, the Story of Stuff Project and the Radical Inclusion group. Now that Ning will be charging for hosted communities, Wiser Earth is a good choice for nonprofits and cause organizations looking to create an instant social network. Follow Wiser Earth on Twitter. Also see: Zanby: Roll your own community.

Charity How To: Step-by-step tutorials

4Next to Socialbrite, we think Charity How To does one of the best jobs of teaching nonprofits how to take advantage of digital tools. It offers step by step video tutorials, webinars and lots more. Follow CharityHowTo on Twitter.

WeAreMedia: A wiki of resources for social good

5WeAreMedia, spearheaded by Beth Kanter, is a wiki that came out of a hands-on workshop sponsored by the Nonprofit Technology Network. The site provides pointers to slideshows, resources and how-tos, like these tips and tutorials about Twitter.

Also, don’t forget Social Actions, which connects you to the issues and causes you care about.

Media creation tools

WordPress: Enabling citizen publishing

6WordPress.org, a self-hosted open source blogging platform, has become the software of choice for hundreds of thousands of blog publishers like Socialbrite or Syracuse’s University Lectures, while sites like Social Media Social Good use WordPress.com. You’ll want to take advantage of some of the thousands of free plug-ins that its global community of developers have created. Here’s our list of 10 WordPress plug-ins that rock, and here’s why we think WordPress is slicker than TypePad. Follow WordPress on Twitter.

OpenStreetMap: An open alternative to Google Maps

7OpenStreetMap is a free editable map of the nation and the world created by people like you. The service provides an open alternative to Google Maps by letting organizations embed maps and use geographical data in a collaborative way. Follow openstreetmap on Twitter.

BlogTalkRadio: Extend the reach of your nonprofit

8Want a keyturn solution for your nonprofit’s podcasting needs? BlogTalkRadio, the world’s largest social radio network, enables anyone to host an interactive audio broadcast and syndicate it with one click to Facebook, Twitter, iTunes and across the Web. See our full writeup. Follow BlogTalkRadio on Twitter.

Kodak Zi8: Capture life on the fly

9We do like Cisco System’s Flip hand recorders, but think the Kodak Zi8 is a bit better: Hi-def 1080i video recordings in a slick, easy-to-use gadget, now on sale for $130. So amazing it’s sick. Carry these around, interview interesting people you meet, capture authentic moments or newsworthy events, then upload the MPEG-4 or .MOV files to your favorite video hosting site. Follow Kodak on Twitter.

Spot.us & DocumentCloud: Collaborative journalism

10You want a powerful media creation tool? Head over to Spot.us, suggests Julie Crabill, founder of Inner Circle Labs. It’s an open source project designed to pioneer “community-powered reporting,” starting in the SF Bay Area and Los Angeles. Through Spot.us, nonprofits, NGOs and individuals can commission stories on important, often overlooked topics. Couple that with DocumentCloud, a site that will enhance investigative reporting by making source documents easy to find, share and read. DocumentCloud provides an online database of documents contributed by a consortium of news organizations, watchdog groups and bloggers, and shared with the public at large. Users will soon be able to search by topic, agency or location. Follow Spot.us or documentcloud on Twitter.

In this series

Here are the initial articles we’ll be adding to this series in the coming days and weeks:

• 12 awesome platforms for social good (Katrina Heppler)
• An educator’s 5 top tools for social change (Barbara K. Iverson)
• A quick guide to multimedia software (Idealware)
• Top 5 tools for the entrepreneurial journalist (Dan Pacheco)
• Facebook 101 for Nonprofits: Getting Started in Five Easy Steps (Azin Mehrnoosh)
• A change agent’s top 5 tools for social change (Allyson Kapin)
• 12 open source tools you should be using (Kim Bale)
• A developer’s 5 favorite social tools (Nathan Freitas)
• 6 productivity tools for social change (Katrina Heppler)
• Complete guide to creating a video project (Tim Davies)

Related

• Making media: Tools & resources for nonprofits and social change organizations (Socialbrite)

• The Socialbrite Sharing Center

The post Change-makers share 10 of their favorite tools appeared first on Socialbrite.

In “The White Man’s Burden – Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good,” William Easterly’s frustration at large-scale, top-down, bureaucracy-ridden development projects runs to an impressive 384 pages. While Easterly dedicates most of his book to markets, economics and the mechanics of international development itself, he talks little of information and communication technology (ICT). The index carries no reference to ‘computers,’ ‘ICT’ or even plain old ‘technology.’

But there is an entry for ‘cell phones.’

E. F. Schumacher, a fellow economist and the man widely recognized as the father of the appropriate technology movement, spent a little more time in his books studying technology issues. His seminal 1973 book – “Small is Beautiful – The Study of Economics as if People Mattered” – reacted to the imposition of alien development concepts on Third World countries, and he warned early of the dangers and difficulties of advocating the same technological practices in entirely different societies and environments. Although his earlier work focused more on agri-technology and large-scale infrastructure projects (dam building was a favorite ‘intervention’ at the time), his theories could easily have been applied to ICTs – as they were in later years.

Things have come a long way since 1973. For a start, many of us now have mobile phones, the most rapidly adopted technology in history. In what amounts to little more than the blink of an eye, mobiles have given us a glimpse of their potential to help us solve some of the most pressing problems of our time. As the evidence mounts, I have one question: If mobiles truly are as revolutionary and empowering as they appear to be – particularly in the lives of some of the poorest members of society – then do we have a moral duty, in the ICT for Development (ICT4D) community at least, to see that they fulfill that potential?

You see, I’m a little worried. If we draw parallels between the concerns of Easterly and Schumacher and apply them to the application of mobile phones as a tool for social and economic development, there’s a danger that the development community may end up repeating the same mistakes of the past. We have a golden opportunity here that we can’t afford to miss.

But miss it we may. Since 2003 I’ve been working exclusively in the mobile space, and I’ve come to my own conclusions about where we need to be focusing more of our attention if we’re to take advantage of the opportunity ahead of us. Don’t get me wrong – we do need to be looking at the bigger picture – but there’s not room at the top for all of us.

I, for one, am more than happy to be working at the bottom. Not only do I find grassroots NGOs particularly lean and efficient (often with the scarcest of funding and resources), but they also tend to get less bogged down with procedure, politics and egos, and are often able to react far more quickly to changing environments than their larger counterparts. Being local, they also tend to have much greater context for their environments, and in activism terms they’re more likely to be able to operate under the radar of dictatorial regimes, meaning they can often engage a local and national populace in ways where larger organizations might struggle.

So, waving my grassroots NGO flag, I see a central problem of focus in the mobile applications space. Let me explain. If we take the “Long Tail ” concept first talked about by Chris Anderson and apply it to the mobile space, we get something like this. I call it “Social Mobile’s Long Tail”.

What it demonstrates is that our tendency to aim for sexy, large-scale, top-down, capital- and time-intensive mobile solutions simply results in the creation of tools which only the larger, more resource-rich NGOs are able to adopt and afford. Having worked with grassroots NGOs for over 15 years, I strongly believe that we need to seriously refocus some of our attention there to avoid developing our own NGO “digital divide.”

To do this we need to think about low-end, simple, appropriate mobile technology solutions which are easy to obtain, affordable, require as little technical expertise as possible, and are easy to copy and replicate. This is something I regularly write about, and it’s a challenge I’m more than happy to throw down to the developer community.

Low-hanging fruit

Another key problem that we have emerges as a symptom of the first. Because larger international development agencies, by their very nature, tend to preoccupy themselves with the bigger issues, they often inadvertently neglect the simple, easier-to-fix problems (the “low hanging fruit” as some people like to call it). The Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s) are good examples of the kinds of targets which are far easier to miss than hit.

In mobile terms, using the technology to enhance basic communications is a classic “low hanging fruit”. After all, that’s what mobile phones do, and communication is fundamental to all NGO activities, particularly those working in the kinds of infrastructure-challenged environments often found in the developing world. Despite this, there are few tools available that take advantage of one of the most prolific mobile communication channels available to grassroots NGOs – the text message (or SMS).

Much of my own work with FrontlineSMS has sought to solve this fundamental problem, and in places such as Malawi – where Josh Nesbit, FrontlineSMS, a laptop and one hundred recycled mobile phones has helped revolutionise healthcare delivery to 250,000 rural Malawians – the benefits are loud and clear. In other countries, where activities of international aid organizations may be challenged or restricted by oppressive, dictatorial regimes, grassroots NGOs often manage to maintain operations and often provide the only voice for the people. In Zimbabwe, Kubatana.net have been using FrontlineSMS extensively to engage a population not only starved of jobs, a meaningful currency and a functioning democracy, but also news and information. In Afghanistan, an international NGO is using FrontlineSMS to provide security alerts to their staff and fieldworkers.
The software is seen as a crucial tool in helping keep people safe in one of the world’s most volatile environments. With a little will, what can be done in Zimbabwe and Afghanistan can be done anywhere where similar oppression exists.

In cases such as these – and there are many more – we need to stop simply talking about “what works” and start to get “what works” into the hands of the NGOs that need it the most. That’s a challenge that I’m happy to throw down to the ICT4D community. There’s only a certain amount of talking and critiquing we can, and should, do.

There are, of course, many issues and challenges – some technical, some cultural, others economic and geographical. The good news is that few are insurmountable, and we can remove many of them by simply empowering the very people we’re seeking to help. The emergence of home grown developer communities in an increasing number of African countries, for example, presents the greatest opportunity yet to unlock the social change potential of mobile technology. Small-scale, realistic, achievable, replicable, bottom-up development such as that championed by the likes of Easterly and Schumacher may hardly be revolutionary, but what would be is our acknowledgement of the mistakes of the past, and a co-ordinated effort to help us avoid making them all over again.

I spent the best part of my university years critiquing the efforts of those who went before me. Countless others have done the same. Looking to the future, how favourably will the students and academics of tomorrow reflect on our efforts? If the next 30 years aren’t to read like the last then we need to rethink our approach, and rethink it now.

This entry originally appeared at Kiwanja.net.

The post Social mobile: A moral duty to do more? appeared first on Socialbrite.