This video, produced by Streetfilms, is a great introduction to the potential of open data in transit systems.

Just a quick note to mentioned I’ve posted the slides from my presentation today at the Enviro 2010 conference over at Slideshare. I’ve uploaded with associated notes as a document to provide a bit more context for each slide.

In the presentation I mention Clay Shirky’s concept of the “cognitive surplus” – for those that are interested, he provides a great introduction to this concept in his recent TED talk (embedded below for quick reference):

Next Wednesday is the opening of the Enviro 2010 conference at the Melbourne Exhibition and Conference Centre.

I’m presenting there Thursday in the 4:00pm – 5:30pm session, on the topic of Social Design for Sustainability. In the presentation I’ll be looking at online social networks, the underlying trends that they represent, the importance of these networks in moving towards sustainability, and how “social design” (design thinking) provides a great toolset for organisations wanting to benefit through engagement within the context of these trends.

It’s been an interesting process pulling together the presentation, which ties together a number of the threads I’ve explored previously here in the blog, so I’m looking forward to seeing how it all goes on Thursday.

It’s also perhaps serendipitous that the conference coincides with the State of Design festival which has the theme of “Change by Design”. Hopefully my contribution to the Enviro 2010 conference will provide a nice tie-in between the two events.

Umair Haque’s post From Social Media to Social Strategy in the Harvard Business review (hat-tip: Michelle Williams) resonated with me, as I’ve been thinking along similar lines about building a more robust definition of “value” in a business context, beyond the financial bottom line:

… from Wall Street to Detroit to Big Pharma to Big Food to Big Energy. Our research suggests that 95% of organizations are unable to offer socially useful stuff that creates meaningful value for people, communities, and tomorrow’s generations.

Yet, most “social media” strategies have one or more of three goals: to “push product,” “build buzz,” or “engage consumers.” None of these lives up to the Internet’s promise of meaning. They’re just slightly cleverer ways to sell more of the same old junk. But the great challenge of the 21st century is making stuff radically better in the first place — stuff that creates what I’ve been calling thicker value.

I like the idea of “thicker” value – and I’ve also been wrestling with finding the right language to describe this concept. He goes on to say “Organizations don’t need ‘social media’ strategies. They need social strategies: strategies that turn antisocial behavior on its head to maximize meaning.”

This idea of “anti-social behaviour” is an interesting perspective on business attitudes and approaches. But that’s just a taste – the rest of Umair’s post is well worth the read also. Check it out…

Rachel Botsman posted this via Twitter today, and I suspect it would be of interest to readers here – an excellent examination of “viral” and an argument against using that term (which I wholeheartedly support).

There’s many quotable quotes in the preso, but one that caught my attention:

“When we say something is viral we focus entirely on the content itself and not on the needs of the people that we are asking to spread our ideas” @Faris

To me that cuts to the core of the argument. I often say (and I think I once read it somewhere, though I’ve long since lost the reference) that viral is something that happens, not some attribute we can design into a communication – i.e. you don’t “make a viral”, you create something that “goes viral”. @Faris’ comment sums this up beautifully.

The preso also hints at something Duncan Watts covers in his book 6 Degrees, which is that for something to spread through networks successfully, it needs to cross different community network boundaries.

This is the power of connectors in networks – often we focus our attention on the hubs (i.e. targeting a-list bloggers, or people with large follower counts) but the connectors, the people that enable memes to jump between disparate networks, are key to the spread of ideas.

Just a quick note to mention that Eventbrite, a popular event organising web application, has announced discount pricing for non-profits and charities – Eventbrite for causes.

The blog post makes mention of the U.S. requirements, but the pricing extends to non-profits in other countries as well.

As I mentioned in my last post, I presented at the Essential Media Communications Summer School last Thursday. My topic was social media for social change – looking at the principles of engagement with a specific emphasis on achieving social outcomes.

As happens with most presentations I do I was tweaking my slide deck right up until the last minute. The Summer School last week was no exception, so the version of my slides that was distributed to attendees at the conference is slightly out of sync with my actual presentation.

Thus here’s a PDF of the slides (6.24 MB) with my associated notes (which are also updated slightly from the distributed version).

From the conversations after my talk, there seemed to be a lot of interest in the diagram about different participation levels. While all this is included in my slide notes, I thought it worth noting that the diagram was conceived by Nicholas Street in response to a couple of reports, most notably the Participate Online research report (PDF 815 KB). It seems the diagram is no longer published on Nicholas’s blog – so I’m reposting it below for reference:

Around the time I came across Nicholas’s post I documented my thoughts, with an emphasis on my experience of Earth Hour 2007 – but have since expanded on them based on conversations with the Social Tech group.

While I still think the concepts are useful to consider, the Participate study is getting a bit long in the tooth now, which is why I didn’t spend a lot of time on that slide in my presentation. Seggr’s post on What social technographic are you? provides some more recent commentary to Forrester’s updated Social Technographics Ladder – both worthwhile references for those of you that are considering different types of participation.

The Pyschology of Influence and Sharing came across my Twitter stream while the Summer School was transpiring, which adds another perspective.

Thanks to everyone who attended the presentation, for the challenging questions at the end of the talk and for the kind words some of you shared with me afterwards. And thanks to EMC for inviting me to talk.

Just a quick note to mention a few up-coming events that I’ll be attending.

Essential Media Communications (EMC) Summer School

I’ll be presenting at EMC‘s “Summer School” program this coming Thursday 18 February. The two-day event is mostly a hands-on practical event, exploring campaigning tactics on a demonstrative campaign. (Disclosure: EMC is one of Zumio’s clients)

My keynote will kick off the event looking at how participatory activism (including social networks etc.) presents great opportunities, but requires a different perspective to traditional tactics to make the most of it.

This is an invite only event, but Gemma at EMC, who is co-ordinating the event, tells me that there are some spare spaces for participants from NGOs and non-profits – so get in touch with Gemma if you are interested: gemma AT essentialmedia DOT com DOT au.

Social Innovation Camp

The team at the Australian Social Innovation Exchange (ASIX) recently announced the successful ideas that will be developed at the up-coming Social Innovation Camp being held in Sydney 5-7 March.

I’ll be attending the event which I hope will be a great couple of days. Zumio is also providing consulting services as part of the prize for the winning idea at the camp – more to come on that front soon.

Enviro 2010

In July I’ll be attending and presenting a short talk at the Enviro 2010 conference in Melbourne.

I’ll post more about the topic a little closer to the date, but in essence my talk, which is scheduled for 22 July, will be looking at how applying the principles and tools of design practice and social networking to sustainability challenges presents opportunities for innovation, along with other benefits.

Via cheiftech:

Enterprise 2.0 for Breakfast – January 2010

Thursday January 21, 2010 at 8:00am

Single Origin

60-64 Reservoir Street
Surry Hills, New South Wales 2010 Get Directions

This is our second Enterprise 2.0 for Breakfast in Sydney.

James Dellow aka Chieftech (from Headshift) and Alex Manchester (from Step Two Designs) invite you to join them for breakfast to chat informally about Enterprise 2.0 and related topics like Knowledge Management, Intranet 2.0 and Collaboration.

Come along to ask questions and share your experiences of introducing social computing to the enterprise!

I’ll be attending – hope to see you there…

I’ve just finished reading Convergence: How Five Trends Will Reshape the Social Sector (PDF direct link – 856KB), a report released earlier this year by La Piana Consulting that looks at emerging trends in the nonprofit sector.

The report examines a number of key trends, including:

• Demographic shifts redefine participation
• Technological advances abound
• Networks enable work to be organized in new ways
• Interest in civic engagement and volunteerism is rising
• Sector boundaries are blurring

It suggests that current funding models need to be revisited, that a strong sense of core values and differentiation is important (I call this values-based branding), that organisational and partnering models may need to be considered, and that technology will play a key role in the nonprofits of the future.

These are the types of organisational challenges that social business design seeks to address. And the all, perhaps to different degrees, require a certain approach that relies heavily on an open and trusting culture. A difficult task for organisations that don’t already have these things in place.

I get a sense throughout the report that La Piana seem to be suggesting an approach not dissimilar to the “integrated flow” approach I advocate in the increasing surface area post from the other day.

It recognises and clearly places social media and network engagement in context and does a good job of expressing some of the challenges associated with it, as well as recognising the benefits including the low-cost nature of the tools themselves.

It also does a great job of presenting mini-case studies of nonprofits and social sector organisations that have successfully embraced some or all of these trends.

I would highly recommend the report to anyone working in nonprofits and NGOs, especially those in leadership/management positions, as I think it highlights many of the challenges nonprofits currently face, trends that are likely to increase in influence into the future.