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.