Leda Dederich is a technology strategist who has been managing online campaigns and Web sites for the nonprofit and political sector since 1995.
In 2005 she founded dotOrganize, a project that provides research, forums, and resources to assist organizers in utilizing online tools as vehicles for their vision.

During the interview, Leda discusses a new report released by dotOrganize in September 2006: Online Technology for Social Change: From Struggle to Strategy.  You can read the report online or download a PDF here.

A transcript of the interview is available on the NetSquared blog.

This Net Tuesday is Nica Lorber's presentation about RootsCamp at Net Tuesday in San Francisco.  Nica organized the November RootsCamp in San Francisco. RootsCamp was a self-organizing conversation and relationship-building event among progressives to discuss the lessons learned during the 2006 mid-term elections. Nica also talks about the RootsCamp that occurred in Second Life.The RootsCamp debriefing was a relationship-building event and self-organizing conversation among progressives in San Francisco about the lessons learned during the 2006 mid-term election. Nica also talked about the RootsCamp that occurred in Second Life.

David Collin interviews Nica Lorber at the San Francisco Net Tuesday.  Nica organized the November RootsCamp in San Francisco. RootsCamp was a self-organizing conversation and relationship-building event among progressives to discuss the lessons learned during the 2006 mid-term elections. Nica also talks about the RootsCamp that occurred in Second Life.

A recording of a presentation at the San Francisco Net Tuesday by Larry Halff, the founder of Ma.gnolia. Ma.gnolia is a social bookmarking service that makes the social aspect of bookmarking and tagging easier. Ma.gnolia  offers several options for groups that want to share bookmarks with everyone, with a select set of taggers, or with a private group of associates.

An interview from San Francisco's Net Tuesday by David Collin with Larry Halff, the founder of Ma.gnolia, a social bookmarking service that makes the social side of social bookmarking work even better. With contacts, groups, and different ways to share bookmarks both within and outside of Ma.gnolia, the service makes working together on a casual basis, or more formal projects fun and easy.

They used to say that freedom of the press belonged to those who could own presses, but today the words "we are the media" are a common cry from an emerging corps of citizen journalists.  What's a social change organization to do in this changing media landscape?

Citizen journalists have played an important role in the rise and fall of politicians and media icons around the world.  Traditional media faces declining distribution and runs stories about "the attack of the blogs".  From neighborhood controversies to events of international proportion, news coverage and analysis of the world today is coming from unconventional quarters in the form of writing, photography, video and voice, published online and consumed around the world.

What and who is a journalist anymore?  Are citizen journalists really just wannabes without the skills to get hired as real reporters?  How can credibility be measured if everyone's the media?  Is objectivity still a requirement in these new emerging roles?  Does the proliferation of citizen journalists correspond with an atomization of discourse and our entrapment in political echo chambers? Is the line between social change actor and casual citizen being dissolved just as, and in part because of, the dissolution of the line between media and audience?

What are the best nonprofit practices for going beyond traditional media relations? Should nonprofits still send out press releases, and if so, to whom? Should nonprofits and NGOs integrate citizen journalism into their own practices, and if so, how?

Photo: Dan Gillmor

Nicholas Negroponte was the talk of Davos when he unveiled his plan for a $100 Laptop. This project, now called One Child Per Laptop, has been highly controversial. Many people have argued with its choice of technologies (Open Source), business model (partnering with the United Nations and with national governments, rather than with private companies). Some people have questioned whether the computer itself is the critical resource bottleneck, citing Internet access as being an equally important and more difficult to solve problem.

What are the plans for the $100 Laptop? How far along is the project? If successful, how will it lead to development and social change? What are the key hurdles to overcome in order to achieve success? What does all this mean for the nonprofit and nongovernmental sector?

Photo: Michail Bletsas

Web 2.0 is more than a long list of new services, tools and companies. Traditional businesses and organizations are changing as well. Software as a service, user generated content, Application Programming Interfaces, and syndication all affect the way traditional software companies conduct business and interact with customers.

Yahoo execs have said they acquired Flickr largely because the service had figured out how to encourage millions of users to collaboratively build a huge photo-sharing community (with ten people on payroll!) AOL has embraced social media by acquiring the Weblogs Inc. blog network and launching its own social networking site, AIM Pages.  Google has placed itself at the center of the emerging mashup culture by offering access to its map database to outside programmers; APIs are now open to developers from companies as diverse as Ebay, Amazon, Salesforce.com and AT&T- and pundits project the shift from closed to more open-systems to be ubiquitous in the future. Proprietary software is being turned over to the open source community. Microsoft is making a serious shift towards subscription-based software on the web. The days of software bought in a box may be numbered.

Many of these changes represent new paradigms diametrically opposed to the business assumptions upon which these established companies were built on. Is this is a fundamental shift in the way software is developed and distributed, and if so - how can the millions of networked nonprofits and ngo's around the globe collaborate more closely with these companies in a way that yields mutual benefits?

Photo: Dan'l Lewin

David Collin interviews Amy Hill, Community Projects Director of the Center for Digital Storytelling. In addition to being the Community Projects Director for the Center, Amy is also a documentary filmmaker and public health consultant. Amy's lengthy involvement in coordinating community-based women's health and violence prevention projects led her in 2000 to co-found the Silence Speaks Digital Storytelling initiative, which teaches survivors and witnesses of violence how to create short digital videos of courage and healing. She continues to coordinate this and other community-driven projects at CDS.

Geek Entertainment TV is an emerging global media empire, reporting from deep inside the bubble as it re-inflates. GETV covers buzzword compliant topics such as web 2.0, tagging, AJAX, social software and the bubble juice known as VCs.

Speakers:
- Andrew Aitken
- David Geilhufe
- Zack Rosen
- Katrin Verclas (immoderator)

Open Source has proven to be a successful development paradigm for many core enterprise systems, e.g., Linux, MySQL, Apache, as well as for personal productivity tools, e.g., Firefox, Open Office, etc. At the same time, there is growing interest in the non-profit community in the development of Open Source tools specifically designed to meet the needs of non-profits, e.g., CivicSpace, CiviCRM.

Open source software tends to be widely supported, highly customizable, quick to react to bugs and other problems, and in theory highly affordable.  But how do open source tools developed for the nonprofit sector stack up against more corporate developments?  What are the key barriers to the development of increasingly powerful nonprofit oriented open source tools?  What is the status of open source development beyond the big CMS/CRM systems, of tools for functions like tagging and media sharing?  What actions should be taken to enable the development and deployment of open source tools for non-profits? How do we create a sustainable and growing Open Source ecosystem? How are the questions around standards being answered? How do we access the existing developer communities?

Photo of David Geilhufe.

Daniel Ben-Horin, the President of CompuMentor, opens the 2006 NetSquared Conference.

Open APIs are one of the hallmark features of Web 2.0 services. They allow developers to tap into external data and repurpose it, creating a new tool "mashed-up" from two previously separate ones.

The easiest to understand examples illustrating the potential of mash-ups are map mash-ups.  Much noise has been made of GoogleMaps Open APIs, because this has led to a huge stampede of map mash-ups that harness the massive amounts of data available from Google.  A great example is chicagocrime.org, a nonprofit that has used crime data together with Google maps to make Chicago crime information freely available in a wide variety of views and layers.  Another example is "Following the Dollars," a mash-up that maps the campaign contributions of individuals within a zip code.

Photo of Tantek ���elik .

Panelists:

• Mike Linksvayer
  
• Jason Schultz
• Tara Hunt (Immoderator)

Many new ICT tools allow more people to speak and create more freely. On the other hand, repressive governments, corporations, and even individuals are trying to repress free speech and innovation through technical and legal means or old-fashioned intimidation. Now that free speech and creativity are more possible than ever before on a technical level, are we ready?

What are the key legal and political battlegrounds for free speech issues? What are the greatest risks to the free speech needed by nonprofits, NGOs, and individuals? Are the new, social media becoming available changing the very questions that society has to answer about free speech? What new technologies are being created to both facilitate the suppression of free speech and to preserve freedom of speech? If these new technologies have great democratic potential, how can we actualize that potential?

Photo of Tara Hunt.

A few quick updates about what's happening at NetSquared including info. about upcoming NetSquared Meetups, Microsoft's Develop Without Borders Challenge, the League of Technical Voters, and NetSquared Conference recordings.

Speakers:

• Joan Blades
• Amy Goodman
• Micah Sifry (immoderator)
  

Panelists:

• Lee Davis
• Jim Fruchterman
• Clara Miller
  
• Vince Stehle (immoderator)

The Internet and ICT have increasingly become platforms for commerce, and after the dot com bust, viable Internet and ICT-based business models have arisen. For example, Google has achieved an enormous market capitalization due to its advertising-based business model. oogle ads have also benefited many web site publishers, especially in the developing world where ad commissions stretch further.   At the other end of the scale, sales of ring tones have been a surprising success.

In the nonprofit world, Amnesty International has used online video to solicit various forms of support.  Wikipedia is supported by donations, but also by a commercial arm that sells services for private use.  The Dean presidential campaign was supported by a historic groundswell of small donors found online.  Many smaller organizations use blogs to communicate consistently with their funders and supporters.

Fundraising is a perennial issue for community-based npos, and especially for community-based NGOs in developing countries. As npos and ngos increasingly interact with their constituencies via the Internet and ICT, can they tap into new business models to develop revenue streams?  Is there real change possible in the business model side of the ICT revolution - or will the basic dynamic of agents of change being beholden to the wealthy elite remain?  In an information economy, will your constituents expect something different from you in exchange for their financial support?  If your favorite nonprofit ran contextual advertisements on their web pages - would you click on them?Fundraising is a perennial issue for community-based npos, and especially for community-based NGOs in developing countries. As npos and ngos increasingly interact with their constituencies via the Internet and ICT, can they tap into new business models to develop revenue streams?  Is there real change possible in the business model side of the ICT revolution - or will the basic dynamic of agents of change being beholden to the wealthy elite remain?  In an information economy, will your constituents expect something different from you in exchange for their financial support?  If your favorite nonprofit ran contextual advertisements on their web pages - would you click on them?

Photo: Jim Fruchterman

Panelists:

• Patrick Ball
• Dan McQuillan
• Bryan Nunez
• Anna Feldman (immoderator)

Opportunities for information and web-based human rights and social justice work are available like never before - but how can activists take advantage of this changing world of new communications technologies?

Our challenge is to build an architecture of participation, to grow activism and involvement and to allow people to speak for themselves. The prize is an empowered engagement that could change our relationship with our members & supporters. The risk is that, despite the tools, people won't take part, or that by taking part they will put themselves at risk. We need to recognise where we are being naive about the users themselves or naive about the determination of corporations & governments to control them.

What are we going to do about it? How can human rights and social justice organizations use new technologies to respond to the state of the world? What's already being done that needs to be more widely known about? What are some of the early lessons-learned from the nonprofit adoption that has occurred? Or are these new tools just an overhyped fad - irrelevant to the bread and butter concerns of most nonprofit organizations?

Photo: Anna Feldman

Panelists:

• Elisa Camahort
• Tara Hunt
• Chris Messina
• Marnie Webb (Immoderator)
  

People have been trying to harnass the power of the successful viral marketing campaign by encouraging people to spread the message themselves.  This technique was served to great effect for environmental causes with the (anti) Chevy Tahoe campaign, which generated a lot of buzz to the effect that environmentalists had turned Chevy's marketing on itself. However, it's an open question as to who took advantage of whom.

Two recent campaigns were SpreadFirefox and the outreach for the first BlogHer conference. These efforts reached large audiences, without expending large advertising budgets.  According to the Pinko Marketing Manifesto, you have to believe in your product or message, and then let those with the passion go spread the word for you.  Give the power of communication away, don't try to control it.

Can this work in the social change world?  Are the words "marketing" and "advocacy" compatible?  What are the best techniques for spreading the word via online tools?  How do you encourage those who believe in your work to spread the word for you, and how can you make it easier for them to do that?  Finally, what can you do when people adapt your virus to their own purposes?

Photo: Chris Messina

A few quick updates about what's happening at NetSquared including information about upcoming NetSquared Meetup Groups and an excerpt from the NetSquared Conference session, Gender and the Social Web.

A few quick updates about what's happening at NetSquared including information about Katrina relief efforts, Angela Glover Blackwell's talk at the NetSquared Conference, BarCampEarth and DrupalMentor Bay Area.

<a href="http://odeo.com/claim/feed/db63c9163e7c3bf6">My Odeo Channel</a> (odeo/db63c9163e7c3bf6)

Description:

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) offer the promise of global connectivity, economic growth and democratization.  Questions remain, however, about both the political and economic implications and the best technical way forward.

Some people point to the informal network of community telecenters as a key way to bring the world online, while others are working to create super low cost laptops.   There are international travelers who help local organizations set up blogs and there are people who ride satellite-connected motorcycles around the countryside to provide brief periods of internet access.

ICT for development is a part of a larger conversation unfolding that calls for the creation of knowledge and innovation centric economies. How does this movement impact the NGO sector in the developing world and would-be allies in the developed world?  Since there is no guarantee of success for the innovation and ICT centric model of economic growth, how can nonprofits make sure that they benefit even if the private sector efforts suffer or fail?

There are also political questions to be asked.  What role should governments play?  Is digital connectivity a neo-colonial railroad - ultimately transporting resources out of the developing world?  Or is it a key factor in leapfrog development, enabling some of the nastier stages of industrialization to be skipped?  Does ICT for development end up imposing paradigms on users they may not be in their best interest?  In the context of nonprofit technology, what are some of the most important steps to take *now* to ensure positive outcomes down the road?

What technologies - and supporting infrastructure - will be successful in the developing world? 

What technologies are already successful, and why?  Is the $100 computer really going to be the panacea of tech challenges in the global south?  Is the panoply of Web2.0 tools that rely on broadband going to lie fallow for over 4/5ths of the world's Internet users because they'll be going straight from dial-up to handheld-based wifi access?

Photo of Kate Raynes-Goldie

Description:

While online activism can make an impact on the world, it's vitally important that we consider how all these exciting new technologies can be leveraged to mobilize and activate people effectively off-line.

Online organizing was widely credited as a key factor in bringing large numbers of people to Seattle in 1999 to protest the World Trade Organization.  MySpace and cell phone text messaging were essential in getting huge numbers of young people out to the recent rallies against the immigrant targeting US HR 4437.  From the Philippines to Bolivia, cell phones have been used for off-line organizing around the world. The website Meetup has helped countless people interact face to face for a variety of purposes.  Protest.net is a huge centralized directory of global protests and Upcoming.org lets users tag and search by tags for events of interest.

What are the most powerful lessons we've learned so far in the early years of integrating online and offline social change work?  What have we learned from earlier organizing that can be transferred to online organizing and what is different?  How can our organizations engage with the often highly decentralized communication that goes on online?  Are old-school, centralized organizations going to get left in the dust by emergent decentralized communities of interest?  What's the best way to use communication technology in support of offline activities beyond just rallying warm bodies who've seen too many informational web pages to be useful?  How can we make sure that this kind of organizing reaches beyond the young, urban middle-class?

photo of Ruby Sinreich

This is an interview by David Collin with Teck Chia and Flora Sun, the founders of Gabbly. Gabbly is a chat service that allows you to chat around any webpage. Gabbly is building a platform that enables people to connect instantly and collaborate around any content, topic or interest.

Open Source software has had significant market success in server-based platforms and applications. But some people believe that there is great potential for low cost, easy to use, open source based personal computer systems, especially for developing countries. This belief has been put to action by some, including the low cost, handheld Linux OS Simputer. The famed $100 laptop project is another open source computer effort underway.  A variety of other projects aim to create open source thin client systems, where one hard drive networks with a number of very simple computers that use its processing power and memory.

When will fully-functional, easy to use (open source) systems become available? How successful are localization efforts? When will these systems be low cost, and fully supported? What are the implications for use by non-profits and deployment to low income users both in developed and developing countries?  How much agreement is there on standards and interoperability?Is open source computing even the best strategy to pursue in order to make low cost computing widely available?  Would seeking donations of proprietary systems for populations in severe need be a better approach?  Will issues of access be taken care of by a future where hardware is given away for free so that users can look at advertising-supported software as a service?

Assuming that widespread distribution of open source computers is the best path the world can forge - what is it going to take for that to happen?

Photo of Jonathan Peizer

Open Source software has had significant market success in server-based platforms and applications. But some people believe that there is great potential for low cost, easy to use, open source based personal computer systems, especially for developing countries. This belief has been put to action by some, including the low cost, handheld Linux OS Simputer. The famed $100 laptop project is another open source computer effort underway.  A variety of other projects aim to create open source thin client systems, where one hard drive networks with a number of very simple computers that use its processing power and memory.

When will fully-functional, easy to use (open source) systems become available? How successful are localization efforts? When will these systems be low cost, and fully supported? What are the implications for use by non-profits and deployment to low income users both in developed and developing countries?  How much agreement is there on standards and interoperability?Is open source computing even the best strategy to pursue in order to make low cost computing widely available?  Would seeking donations of proprietary systems for populations in severe need be a better approach?  Will issues of access be taken care of by a future where hardware is given away for free so that users can look at advertising-supported software as a service?

Assuming that widespread distribution of open source computers is the best path the world can forge - what is it going to take for that to happen?

Photo of Allen Gunn

Speakers:

• Dimitri Glazkov
• Bob Robertson-Boyd
• Ginger Thomson
• Ami Dar (immoderator)

MySpace has become the second most visited web site on the Internet. There are new general, themed and niche Social Networking Services being launched on a regular basis. Why do so many people find these so compelling? Perhaps because they help quickly facilitate connections between people with common interests. Perhaps it's the self expression that they enable, with ever fewer technical skills required with each new set of tools.
Many other online tools have begun to incorporate social networking features as well, and social networking is becoming an increasingly multimedia phenomenon as outside services tailor their features for use in social networking environments.
NetSquared has found that some organizations and nonprofit workers like to use the large commercial social networking services. We've also found a large number of topic specific and fundamentally nonprofit social networking systems. Just a few examples from our case studies include:

1. The Lightstalkers networking system for media workers
2. Malecare Prostate Cancer Support for Gay Men
3. The youth oriented TakingITGlobal
4. The sophisticated Never Again network bringing young Rwanandans and young people in the USA together.

These examples seem to belie the idea that Social Networking is just for lonely or intoxicated teenagers and those who would gawk at them. The business world uses systems like Linked-In, but do these kinds of activities really work in a nonprofit context? What are the benefits of engaging in a large, public network vs. a small targeted one - and vice versa? What are the best ways to maximize ongoing use of these systems - are they worth the effort to set up - or do busy people lose their interest after a short period of time? Does time spent interacting in a Social Networking Service count as working? How can you prevent individuals associated with your organization from making you look bad via their activities in such a system? How can you and your organization get the most out of this type of tool? What valuable Social Networking techniques can you import into your own website?

Photo: Dimitri Glazkov

A few quick updates about what's happening at NetSquared:

* Net Tuesday with Teck Chia and Flora Sun of Gabbly.
* Net Tuesday Meetups in Los Angeles and DC August 15th.
* Global Exchange, Rainforest Action Network and the Ruckus Society's Flickr photo contest.

This is an interview by David Collin of Susan Tenby and Salvador Luna of Compumentor about how they created the TechSoup presence in Second Life and organized the "mixed-reality" Net Tuesday that took place both in Second Life and in San Francisco at the same time on July 18, 2006.

Speakers:

• Catherine Geanuracos
• Christine Herron
• Fran Maier
• Lisa Stone
• Susan Mernit (Immoderator)

Description: Many lists of the most high-profile individual blogs online, sometimes called the A-list, appear to be dominated by men. Science writer Annalee Newitz says getting Slashdotted leads to as many comments about her looks as her article. A large proportion of video blogs are hosted by young women who are Beauty Standards �¢ï¿½�¢ compliant. Second Life skin pics of naked avatars get more comments than almost any other items in news blog coverage of the space. On the other side, the Blogher network is going strong in its second year of "creating opportunities for women bloggers to pursue exposure, education, and community." Mary Hodder has created a diverse wiki directory of available public speakers on tech. Shelley Powers has helped kick off a movement to write and defend biographical entries to Wikipedia about women. It's widely argued that gender cannot be engaged with in isolation from other factors of identity. It's also argued that the new web tools offer profound democratizing effects. Technology in general has a history of male dominance. Will there be anything different in the proliferation of tools and expressions that constitute the social web? Are there ways that the social space around new web tools can be articulated by new actors with a new vision of equitable interaction?

Photo: Susan Mernit

David Collin interviews Jeska Linden, Community Manager for Linden Lab, about the mixed-reality that happened during the July 18th Net Tuesday in San Francisco. Net Tuesday occurred simultaneously in the "real" world at CompuMentor and in the virtual world of Second Life.

A quick update about what is happening at NetSquared.