Open Source Giving

Socially-conscious social media is working up north: Alaskans have taken to the Pick. Click. Give. campaign, which is leveraging platforms from Facebook and Twitter to YouTube and Causecast to draw attention to and explain the Permanent Fund Charitable Contributions Program. The program began officially in 2009 to allow Alaskans to donate a portion of their PFD to qualifying Alaska nonprofits of their choice while they filed online for their PFD. An underlying goal is to encourage individual philanthropy in Alaska. Here's a Q&A on the program with my friend Aliza Sherman, a veteran digital guru and co-founder of the social media firm Conversify! in Alaska, and Jordan Marshall, initiatives & special projects manager for the Rasmuson Foundation and project manager for Pick. Click. Give.

1. Last year, Pick. Click. Give. raised more than half a million dollars for Alaskan nonprofits - how did it work and how was it unique to Alaska?

ALIZA: The entire Pick. Click. Give. awareness campaign is based on something inherently unique to Alaska: our Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) or the annual payment each Alaskan receives as part of a pay out to share in the state's oil and gas profits. No other state provides a similar fund or payment to citizens of their state.

The overarching goal of the Pick. Click. Give. campaign is to draw attention to and explain the Permanent Fund Charitable Contributions Program. The program began officially in 2009 to allow Alaskans to donate a portion of their PFD to qualifying Alaska nonprofits of their choice while they filed online for their PFD. An underlying goal is to encourage individual philanthropy in Alaska.

Additionally, through social media, the Pick. Click. Give. campaign is working to give exposure to the program and motivate Alaskans to participate and to encourage their friends, family and followers to participate as well.

The previous year (2008) was spent assessing Alaska nonprofits based on a number of criteria to ensure that they qualify for the program as well as to set up the technical aspects of adding a list and way for Alaskans to check the organizations on that list they wished to support with an amount of their choice.

2. You're using social media to spread the word - which platform works the best for you? What have you learned about how causes and social media work?

ALIZA: We're on our third year of learning about not only social media for cause-related missions and messaging but also of using social media for not only hyper-local outreach but hyper-rural outreach as well. In partnership with first Rasmuson Foundation and then the Pick. Click. Give. program, we've explored Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, and Causecast as well as blogs as social media tools for education, outreach and activism.

While it is hard to say exactly which social media platform is working the best for actually driving Alaskans to pick the organizations to support when filing for their PFD, we can say the following:

The Blog - Each post averages over 100 views. The post about Facebook for nonprofits exceeded 200 views. Currently, there is little comment participation but we can assume people are reading the information and interested in reading the blog.

Facebook - We're at 352 fans. In the scheme of Alaska nonprofits, this is a solid number. Compared to other Alaska-related for-profits, this is small although even Alaska companies struggle to break 1000 fans.

Twitter - We're at 213 followers. Twitter is still relatively nascent in Alaska but we are also finding we are struggling to get Alaskans on Twitter to follow and retweet. This may be a learning curve on the part of Alaskans who tend to be very conservative about following others on Twitter. They tend to use Twitter more like Facebook - conversations with actual friends.

YouTube and Causecast - Because of the video PSAs created for the campaign last year and this year, we wanted to leverage those on the most popular video sharing site (YouTube) as well as the one dedicated to causes (Causecast). This year, we added some simple clips of representatives from several of the nonprofit organizations that received donations from the program last year to explain specifically how they'd be using the money. We wanted to emphasize that the money from Pick. Click. Give. was making very specific impacts and define what those were.

MySpace is a mixed bag right now, often feeling - and behaving - like a red-headed stepchild, but I'm a firm believer of leveraging that network for it's multimedia capabilities and to reach another strata of Alaskans who may not be on Facebook or Twitter.

3. Were smaller organizations able to keep up with the larger ones? How did they do it?

Some of the charities that did the best succeeded for several reasons unrelated to the size of their organization. In the case of a certain animal rescue group, for example, this was the first time they had put themselves out there for support from individual Alaskans and people jumped at the chance. Still others had tremendous success by sending out reminders in newsletters, via email, and dipping their toe into social media for the first time.

4. The Permanent Fund Dividend is unique to Alaska, but what can nonprofits take from the campaign?

ALIZA: There are several takeaways for nonprofits from a social media standpoint:

- Be Targeted. Social media can be effective as not only a global or national communications tool but can also be calibrated to be hyper-local and even hyper-rural. For smaller nonprofits whose scope doesn't reach beyond a state or a region or a town, social media can still prove useful and can be that finely targeted.

- Pick the Right Tools. While I firmly believe we have the right mix of tools for a strategic social media-powered campaign, we did set out with additional tools that we've pared down because they were too time consuming with little return. Holding onto MySpace is only possible because it takes less resources to maintain than Facebook or Twitter. Holding onto Twitter while the numbers are smaller is a strategic move to be ready for the 3rd year of the program when I believe more Alaskans will be used to Twitter communications.

- Coordinate Efforts. Social media tools can be linked together and coordinated in such a fashion that they can be utilized with a very small staff. Last year, I ran the bulk of social media efforts alone as just one campaign of many that I ran simultaneously for other clients I consulted. This year, we are lucky to have one additional person devoted to social media a few hours a week and have better internal coordination with our project partners such as Rasmuson Foundation and the Nerland Agency (the ad agency that developed the programs brand and the PSAs).

JORDAN: No matter which state you live in, the success of the fundraising depends on making a personal connection with your existing and prospective donors. It’s one thing to create a broadcast message about a new tool for giving, but it’s entirely another when the homeless shelter makes a personal pitch to you asking for help. The beauty of Pick Click Give may be that it reminds people that they can make a big difference in peoples’ lives, so when they get “the ask” from the nonprofits they’re more inclined to act.

5. What could a grant-making foundation learn about the campaign - for instance, could some of the best practices be replicated?

JORDAN : Grant-making foundations are in the unique position of being able to facilitate long-term change. A foundation can help pull together the key players and invest in the big ideas. This allows the individual nonprofits to focus on delivery of their services and programs, rather than shouldering the responsibility of managing a campaign.

6. What was the most surprising result of the campaign?

ALIZA: From a social media standpoint, I was surprised at how many Alaskans we could reach on Facebook, especially in VERY rural areas. I was also surprised by how few we are reaching - and galvanizing - through Twitter. Again, I don't believe Twitter is a lost cause here in Alaska because Alaskans are on an upward curve of learning and adoption. But I was hoping this would be the year that we'd do gangbusters on Twitter and it has yet to happen. Still, we have an excellent foundation to continue using Twitter for communications about this program over the next year so I see this as an important step to the overall social media picture.

Putting the imperative issue of civil rights and justice around the world for women and children front and center at this year's Clinton Global Initiative required intense coordination between CGI and the Obama Administration - starting of course with the world's foremost power couple.

But it also relied on some special sauce that was both unpredictable and incredibly effective: the distribution, discussion and amplification of social media.

This year's CGI, which brought together more than 1,200 movers and shakers in New York  in the cause of social change and international development, became a virtual boombox empowering women...and it's a two part-story that reaches from the motorcades and presidential suites to digital alleyways of Twitter and blogland.

First, the top-down power messaging.

Fighting abuse and human trafficking of women and children is the signature issue for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who declared in her closing address: "we will put women at the heart of our efforts."

Her husband, former President Clinton put the theme out front on the meeting's first day: "Women perform 66 percent of the world's work, and produce 50 percent of the food, yet earn only 10 percent of the income and own 1 percent of the property. Whether the issue is improving education in the developing world, or fighting global climate change, or addressing nearly any other challenge we face, empowering women is a critical part of the equation."

And President Obama tied the work of his late mother in microfinance to the "spirit of the Clinton Global Initiative" and work empowering women and assisting children. His Administration was omnipresent at CGI, which coincides each year with the opening of the U.N. General Assembly. Besides Secretary Clinton, speakers included Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke, Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, economic adviser Larry Summers, and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett.

One of the highlights was a peppery panel the first day, hosted by Diane Sawyer of ABC News, featuring Melanne Verveer, the State Department's Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues, Zainab Salbi, founder and CEO of Women for Women International, and Edna Adan, director and founder of the Edna Adan Maternity and Teaching Hospital in East Africa, along with the head of the World Bank and CEOs of ExxonMobil and Goldman Sachs. And the panel brought about one electrifing moment: when Salbi challenged ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson's statement that funding isn't the problem - a fairly typical assertion these days. Retorted Salbi, whose organization provides women survivors of war, civil strife and other conflicts with the tools and resources to move from crisis and poverty to stability and self-sufficiency:

But women still get very small, women and girls, get so very small, minuscule amount of funding…One cent of every development dollar, less than one cent goes to girls. So when you look at the larger scope of development money and how much is being invested in so many other things, women and girls get the least amount of funding. Money is not the problem in terms of if it’s available, but the political decision to say we need to invest much more in girls and women is not fully there yet.

You sensed some "shareholder value" vs. "humanity's needs" tension on the panel, and indeed throughout this year's CGI - where perhaps the corporate titans are taken for the infallible gurus of finance they were before the recession. Blogger Emily Davila at beyondprofit captured the panel's vibe, the classic CGI combination of corporate powerhouses with practitioners:

On one hand, the unprecedented high-level private sector participation means that the women’s agenda has gone mainstream; real change will not happen if only women are talking to each other. On the other hand, the panel would not have succeeded if it hadn’t had two women from the trenches who could keep the discussion grounded in the life and death realities many women face.

Those life and death realities were emphasized in a news conference with Secretary Solis, who vowed that the Labor Department would pursue companies with slave labor in their supply chains, and Ambassador Verveer, who said that "modern-day slavery is a global scourge - no country is immune."

Verveer and Ambassador Luis CdeBaca, who monitors human trafficking or the Obama Administration, clearly positioned the State Department as a new activist player on the issue. Indeed, Verveer wondered aloud if civil rights for women around the world hadn't reached a "tipping point."

If it has, the combination of star power on display at CGI and the bottom-up effect of social networking are playing complementary roles to U.S. government policy - a rare moment when an administration's policy is in near-total sync with NGO and grassroots activists.

Star power also played a role. Film star Julia Ormond, who founded the Alliance to Stop Slavery and End Trafficking at CGI two years ago, said that "meeting with victims and hearing their story just seals the deal." And singer Ricky Martin made it personal - and advanced the storyline - during a shutter-clcking appearance in a special session, well-captured by Ari Melber in his Nation blog:

When Ricky Martin took the stage at the Clinton Global Initiative on Thursday, he did not sing, or dance, or even flash his trademark grin. Following the same stage directions as dozens of other celebrities who dropped by Clinton's 5th annual global summit, from Brad Pitt to Bono to Jessica Alba, Martin struck a somber note while discussing the fight against human trafficking.

"I feel that my heart is going to come out of my mouth," he said, recounting his sadness for the "millions of children that didn't make it." Martin was followed by testimony from a woman who, along with her two children, was kidnapped and held for four years of forced labor.

Martin made his remarks in what an interesting venue for Twitter reach. His own tweets - "on the CGI it'll b my honor 2 present heroes tht r doing gr8 thinx agnst human trffckng.will xchange ideas n learn what else needs 2 b done!" - reached more than 338,000 followers.

But the Twitter king - actor Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) - was also making the CGI scene with his wife, Demi Moore (@mrskutcher); he has a Twitter-leading 3.6 million followers, whilst she pitches short messages to 2.1 million more. The couple tweeted their commitment:

Hubby & I have started The Demi and Ashton Foundation or The DNA Foundation as we like 2 call it. We're ready 2 help bring an end 2 slavery

And Kutcher sent his followers to the live CGI video stream for the plenary on human trafficking. He also found time to tweak a more senior delegate to the meeting:

Listening to John Glenn mock the social web because he doesn't understand it. I wonder if people mocked his space program.

Meanwhile, Moore introduced her followers to the nation's leading journalistic voice on the issue:

Sitting in listening 2 a panel speak on investing in Women & Girls at CGI. In Nick Kristoff's words Women are the solution not the problem!

Celebrity tweets clearly go to a rather broad audience, but I think they help to reinforce a potential cultural shift in how we view sex trafficking and women's civil rights. Repetition from the likes of an A-list TMZ-type couple can puncture the social permafrost around a difficult issue like this, and deliver it to the mainstream.

Besides, there's a core audience for information from CGI that is not celebrity-obsessed: writers, analysts and bloggers who work in and around the "social sector" year-round. To a large degree, they carry a lot of the heavy baggage for CGI in terms of disseminating and discussing ideas and innovation with a wider audience.

It's this group that sent a couple of dozen correspondents (including me and my CauseWired partner Susan Carey Dempsey) into the chaotic and tightly-controlled CGI press pool - a large-scale operation that is understandably focused primarily on the video and still cameras, there to capture the bigshots and stars. And it's this group that now uses blogs, Facebook, and Twitter to spread some of the bigger thoughts and developments to an activist group beyond the (occasionally oppressive) Sheraton press room. And you could see a the big theme of women and girls sprouting everywhere you looked.

For instance, tweets with both the #cgi09 hashtag and "girls" appeared more than 200 times over the last week, #cgi09 and "women" was tweeted more than 450 times, and #cg09i and trafficking more than150 times. This doesn't include the celebrities, who tend to use Twitter more as a broadcast medium and don't tend to use the hashtags to organize the conversation.

Relatively small numbers - #cgi09 never "trended" into the top ten of Twitter tags - yet the audience for international development and human rights was paying attention around the virtual network. And that's important for an issue that's just arriving at its moment, getting its wider organizing chops together under a new Administration with an activist State Department.

That's important to an undertaking like CGI, I think. Despite its success and the billions committed to helping people around the world, building a network to carry its causes onward - even at smaller scale - is crucial to getting beyond the limitations of one organization, however large and high-powered. Upwards of 30,000 people watched the proceedings via the live stream, which CGI made available this year as a widget anyone could use on their own sites to carry the proceedings.

It isn't about making the power brokers haul out their iPhones and tweet from the inner circle. As Bill Clinton said in his summation: "Twitter. That's a funny word." But he still got the importance of distributing the discussion; he said CGI generated 80 tweets per hour, and that the social network - inside and outside the hall - is heling to power the bottom of the innovation pyramid.

Midtown Manhattan is in virtual lock-down, as motorcades shut streets and security agents create instant frozen zones to protect the heads of state here in New York for the United Nations General Assembly. Cabs are worthless hulks of immobile yellow metal. Buses are very nearly short-stay hotel rooms. And the commuter trains and subways run under extra vigilance, under reputed threat from terrorist explosions.

Here at the Sheraton, security is as tight as the bedsheets in the presidential suite upstairs - President Barack Obama is due this afternoon to help kick off the 5th annual Clinton Global Initiative, the massive who's who gathering of heads of state, movie stars, philanthropists and corporate titans (if any can be said to exist in 2009).

Yet the word here in the blogger and media bunker a couple of floors below the CEOs and Nobel types is that Bill Clinton's dizzying annual confab of development and do-gooderism is more "open" than before.

Oh, not in the most obvious ways: you generally still have to be somebody of serious accomplishment or pony up for a large-scale commitment to the developing world or domestic poverty to get a delegate's badge. At CGI, Brad Pitt's the leading voice on New Orleans. And that's no accident - star power drives this show, which is all about bringing attention to the world's problems. That is succeeds wildly nearly nine years after President Clinton left office is testament to both his contacts and continued energy - and to the people who make this thing run. Super Bowls have fewer moving parts.

So yes, it's very much a top-down affair from a messaging standpoint. What President Obama says, what Bill Clinton highlights, what Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and Ashton Kutcher promote, what Al Gore,  Queen Rania and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton comment upon - those items will drive the headlines and the video spots on cable TV.

Yet that summation would ignore a trend that's as plain as the code on the CGI webcast of the sessions: a Twitter app that allows anyone to ask questions of the participants. It's a small foot in the door, I think, for a conference that ranks with Davos in high octane policy-making and is unsurpassed in attendance by heads of state from around the world.

This year, you also sense that the Tweetstream - and its ubiquitous #cgi09 tag - isn't limited to a handful of symbolic tweets from the movie stars and the constant updates from bloggers; many of the delegates are posting as well from their iPhones and Blackberries. Then too, bloggers are now allowed access to some of the smaller speciality sessions - like 'The Infrastructure of Human Dignity: Protecting the Most Vulnerable' on Thursday - that we used to have to watch closed-circuit television to listen in on. And last night, President Clinton hosted another late-night roundtable with bloggers; I couldn't make it this year, but was at last year's and it's generally a free-wheeling session on an incredible variety of serious policy topics. This year's CGI is also streaming video outside the Sheraton more completely than in year's past - an overt attempt to carry the conversation beyond the hotel walls.

This will never be Bar Camp or Netroots Nation. It's not exactly the barbarian's storming the gates, either. Yet despite the wall of hard-nosed security on the way in, CGI is opening up. And given the importance of this gathering to social entrepreneurship and international development, that opening may encourage more bottom-up involvement.

To anyone who's worked in direct fundraising, "churn" isn't exactly a new concept. Indeed, losing members of any list comes with the territory of appealing for money to support causes. Yet when users leave social networks it seems somehow different than opting out of an email list. That's because the investment of personal time and informational capital is much higher than signing up for an e-blast. You've made "friends" or garnered "followers." You've created an identity. You're part of an interconnected network sharing not only your favorite causes, but your likes and dislikes, the books you're reading, the music you like, the movies you love.

When someone signs off from Facebook - someone who's been pretty active and involved - it feels like the person's disappeared. When an active Twitterer leaves, there's a void; a channel of information with a real person behind it has gone dark.

And then there's the hype factor. Facebook and Twitter have been deservedly promoted as the largest (Facebook) and the coolest (Twitter) social networks ever launched, the new Microsoft and Apple, harbingers of vast societal change. Yet the inevitable "is that all there is?" factor was always heading down the highway. You knew there'd be a backlash, particularly against two private corporations that assumed such important societal positions. Virginia Heffernan's column in last Sunday's New York Times was the roadside flare for that head-on collision, taking on the anecdotal surge in Facebook farewells among the writer's friends:

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. Facebook, the online social grid, could not command loyalty forever. If you ask around, as I did, you’ll find quitters. One person shut down her account because she disliked how nosy it made her. Another thought the scene had turned desperate. A third feared stalkers. A fourth believed his privacy was compromised. A fifth disappeared without a word.

Ask around, and you'd find quitters on Twitter too. And among some of the next rung sites like Digg, Ning and Mahalo. And among bloggers, Flickr photo-sharers, YouTube videographers, and various people-powered networks of all shapes and sizes. Churn happens. Time is limited. Life intervenes. As Heffernan (I writer I admire) says later in the piece: "Many seem to have just lost their appetite for it: they just stopped wanting to look at other people’s photos and résumés and updates, or have their own subject to scrutiny."

Exactly. Yet as my friend, venture capitalist Fred Wilson, responded on his blog: "...churn is part of online media, particularly social media. People come and go. Some stick around, some don't. These stories about quitters are true of course, but they miss the big picture. More and more people are using these services every day." And then Fred posts the latest Comscore numbers for Facebook and Twitter. About 52 million people visited to super-hyped Twitter in July, makiing it the 47th most popular site on the Web - an incredible growth story that continues. And an whopping 370 million visited Facebook. As Fred says: "Facebook is a global juggernaut. It is the fourth most popular website in the world after Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!"

So if Aunt Sally and that boy you dated back in college drop from site on Facebook - and that social entrepreneur tires of Twitter - it's interesting from a personal standpoint. But the sheer size and continued growth of the largest social media properties makes them ever more important on the social commons, in my view - particularly as they continue to be places of experimentation and innovation in fundraising and philanthropy.

As far as I can tell, not a single human being in the many thousands surrounding Tegucigalpa airport in Honduras during last weekend's dramatic and deadly stand-off between protesters and outlaw military units supporting the rump post-coup government was using Twitter. Yet the conversation around the confrontation - which ended with a young protester shot dead and the plane of ousted President Manuel Zelaya blocked from landing - swirled furiously on Twitter and by late afternoon, the #Honduras hashtag was trending.

Unlike the larger and murkier drama in Iran, where one faction of the 30-year theocracy seeks to oust another while pro-democracy organizers seek a foothold in an essentially closed and repressive society, the situation in Honduras was far more transparent - and, in my view, more authentic and dramatic online. While fake Twitter accounts, disinformation and frantic rumors seemed to abound in the long, drawn-out and widespread upheaval in Iran as a large, western echo chamber grew with every "retweet," the Honduran Twitter "story" was far more straightforward, for several reasons:

1. Honduras is small - just 7.5 million people - so an accurate picture of a society in political turmoil is easier to capture.

2. Old media was allowed to cover the story. Live footage from Venezuelan outlet teleSUR and al-Jazeera covered the stand-off from the airport live. Their coverage (streamed via the net) became the basis for the ongoing Twitter dialogue.

3. That dialogue was intense and featured several different points of view - this is important, and in sharp contrast to the Twitter "conversation" over the Iranian protests, which at times devolved into a Diana-like display of mass hysteria. Yesterday, American right-wingers sided with the coup plotters (in contrast to their calls for "freedom" in Iran) while most liberals either took a cautious wait-and-see stance or called for Zelaya's return; the Spanish-language debate (as much as I could folow) was equally intense among Hondurans.

4. There was a real chance to influence the outcome - oh, not at the airport, perhaps, but in terms of U.S. policy toward Honduras and Latin America. Many of those on Twitter appealed directly to President Obama and Secretary Cinton via Twitter. And indeed, the Administration clearly understand it has a more hands-on role to play in this important hemispheric stand-off; Clinton met with Zelaya this week.

For my own part, I tweeted like a mad man. The story is a compelling one, it's a true test for President Obama, and offers the chance for better U.S. policy in Latin America. It's time to call the right's commie-baiting on Venezuelan's Chavez, for example - just as it's time for the left to stop allowing him to be the hemispheric pebble in their shoe. Public engagement - promised by Obama during the campaign - should be our guide.

That said, there were a couple of times when I stopped to consider the journalistic phenomenon of Twitter. I think it's a brilliant interactive distribution channel for news stories, one that invites participation and conversation. But it's no pure substitute for reporting. Without question, the video feeds from the airport yesterday carried the day. They were supplemented by great opinionated blogging, Flickr pics, and Twitter commentary and linkage.

As I blasted away last weekend on the Twitter story from Honduras, I took two quick time-outs and tweeted them:

Caution on #Honduras info coming via me - RT'ing does not constitute journalism, but merely a conversation (also good) - grain o' salt.

Caveat emptor: nothing I tweet on #Honduras should be taken as journalism or reporting - it's a conversation in public only.

As I watched people pick up on my tweets and pass them on, I thought it was important to issue mild disclaimers. Nonetheless, it was a moment of journalism - one that American television and web outlets pretty much let slip by, unwilling as they were to interrupt the latest updates on the Jacko funeral plans or Sarah Palin's imaginary future.

This week's Personal Democracy Forum in New York was the sixth annual confab of social media geeks, government 2.0 types, non-profit changemakers and digital dreamers of all shapes and sizes - but it was really Year One AO: After Obama.

Last year's social media avalanche, loosed from the peaks of a historic national election, made everything seem possible; armies of do-gooders wielding iPhones and tweeting for change were poised to radically remake both the polity and our vast social commons. (Well ok, that was #IranElection two weeks ago as well - but you get the idea).

This year, it seemed to me, doubt walked the halls at PDF, and optimism tempered by experience kept both the Twitterstream and the panels and speeches well out of the red on my hand-held hype meter. Indeed, the very word "Obama" seemed to be sharply discounted in its usage around the Time Warner Center - used more respectfully (and sparingly) as a reference to a new(ish) Administration facing a myriad of challenges foreign and domestic than as a harbinger of of sweeping, digitally-interconnected change.

That's no knock on the President, especially at a conference where progressive-leaning attendees clearly outnumber their conservative counterparts. ("Republicans don't really don't care about community and all that," snorted GOP digital operative David All, as if to cement his side's outsider status at a gathering largely devoted to more open government). Rather, I think it was a "settling in for the long road ahead" moment, a groupthink realization that big change isn't easy, and that turning an entity the size of the Federal Government quickly is a bit like spinning the Queen Mary into a watery parking space.

Yet the fact that 900 attendees would gather to talk about the possibility for wired change - both 'CauseWired' to borrow the theme of my book, and politics-oriented - in the current economic dust storm (and in a non-election year) was very impressive. And some of the themes and news bytes well worth recording:

The talk about the super-hyped role of Twitter and other social media in the protests surrounding the disputed Iranian elections was mainly about authenticity, crowd-sourced reporting, and whether governments could effectively shut down digital communications. Yet it was stunning to hear Randi Zuckerberg admit that Facebook doesn't know if the "official" page on the social network for Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Moussavi is genuine or not, considering the missives published there are often taken for the official voice of the protest. And it was hardly a triumphalist sentiment that NPR's new media wizard Andy Carvin shared when he emphasized that Twitter users "have to be skeptical of where the information is coming from."

Yet there was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's social media maven Alec Ross extolling the use of digital platforms and networks to change how Americans face the rest of the world. Ross argued that everybody who lives in our network society now has the power "to be a Paul Revere" and sound the alarm for everyone else, noting that it was a couple of young people on Facebook who organized massive rallies against the Colombian guerilla group FARC. "It doesn't always have to be over the mahogany table with porcelain cups of tea," said Ross of crowd-sourced statecraft; it was Ross who leaned on Twitter not to shit down for maintainance during the height of the Iranian protests.

And there were a couple of big "government 2.0" announcements at PDF: the Obama Administration's launch via CIO Vivek Kundra of the new U.S. Federal IT Dashboard, which provides at-a-glance access to the budget process, and Mayor Bloomberg's announcement (via Skype) of a "big apps" contest for developers who mash up the city's data feeds in ways that benefit the public. Such thinking about sharing information, said PDF co-founder Andrew Rasiej, shows that "we do have Big Brother now - Big Brother now is us."

That might be the ideal, but as a couple of speakers argued, nirvana on the digital public common's ain't exactly nigh. “Can poor people see streaming video that calls out corruption in government and in business?” Josh Silver, the executive director and co-founder of Free Press, in reaction to a discussion about President Obama's broadband. And Microsoft's Danah Boyd called out class distinctions on the digital commons - to the mainly white, non-deprived, plugged-in geekage: "We still don't have a language to talk about classism in America today," she argued in an eye-opening presentation. "There is no universal public online."

The very word "pandemic" can sow panic, activating dystopian nightmares of mob rule and societal breakdown keyed to cultural memories of movies like Outbreak and 28 Days. As the swine flu epidemic kills scores of people in Mexico and leaps borders and oceans in this modern transcontinental age with alarming ease, it's tempting to bite down hard on the urge for news and an emotional response short of mass hysteria.

And while Twitter and social networks can satisfy the hunger for information with amazing speed, it'll be interesting to see what role they play in either feeding or tamping down societal panic. In other words, will Twitter and Facebook and all the other forms of sharing links (and fear) assist our global society in dealing with a kind of virality none of us wants to see expanded.

In the early stages of what threatens to be a major worldwide health challenge, the flow of information from my "follows" at Twitter beats any other amalgamation tool. The death toll postings, news of new outbreaks, and government warnings and policies hit my own Twitter stream faster than they do my email inbox, and from a much wider variety of sources. The #swineflu hashtag is a seriously central spigot for information - it took my, for instance, to a Google map created by "niman," described as a biomedical researcher from Pittsburgh, which seems to be the most complete, up-to-date graphical tracker of the outbreak I can find.

But the #swineflu hashtag is also a virtual spinal tap into the core of societal fear over the kind of pandemic we've always been warned about - the one without a cure that jumps species and borders and threatens civil society. Spend some time the hashtag on the pandemic (of course it's number one) and you'll peer into that fearful "group soul" - or rather, the fearful group soul of early adopters and techno geeks. Some try to undersell the danger, with playful (hopeful?) references to "hangnails" and government over-reaction and having a good excuse to skip work. But I also sense in some of the joking a rather wishful urge for gallows humor, as if a few good tweets can make it all go away. "More people are currently sick from eating bad alfalfa sprouts than from the #swineflu," is one such tweet. And yet the WHO and the White House and the EU aren't freaked out about alfalfa sprouts.

Yet others are far more serious, and the near-instant access to statistics and information about the epidemic clearly forces what is already a well-informed crowd to pay attention to seriously dark news. Here's one such tweet: "up to 149 deaths in mexico city from #swineflu. That's .09% fatality. But geez. Its going up so fast! Last nite was .05% fatality."

One aspect of this pandemic-related information flow is crystal clear - in times of crisis, people turn to their governments for guidance and assistance. The US government's PandemicFlu site is cited in hundreds of Twitter posts, blog posts, and Facebook feeds and clearly, some wired civil servants are working overtime to keep the official view as up to date as possible.

Clearly, we don't yet know how bad this pandemic will be - and pandemic it is, with news of cases in Scotland and Spain to go along with Mexico, the U.S and Canada - but I for one find some comfort in a personalized flow of information that didn't exist a few years ago. After the disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the San Diego wildfires (among others) it became clear that online networks would carry more of the societal weight during times of crisis, that they hold the potential for drawing citizens together to help. This is a new kind of crisis an along with the health warnings and news, we'll be following the performance of social media in providing information ... and in calming fear.

UPDATE: Via Andy Carvin, here's Wikia's flu wiki, by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

Last week in Oxford, I posed a simple question to the audience assembled for my panel at the Skoll World Forum: who was on Twitter?

About half the attendees raised their hands. And indeed, the the conference - better known as #SWF09 on Twitter - really become two separate experiences. As Peter Deitz of Social Actions (who did a a great job organizing the mass online participation for Skoll’s Social Edge community) commented: “Frankly, there are two conferences going on: one for the tweeters and one for everyone else.”

And it was about a lot more than cool technology, laptops and iPhones - as Peter said, “The twittering delegates are having a distributed conversation with people here and around the world. The others aren’t.” Even during my panel, I kept one eye on the Twitterstream - and found that there were tons of people not present in Oxford who were “sitting in” on the conversation that I was faciliating from afar, and even prompting actual attendees to ask tough questions.

At Social Edge, Catherine Michel captured the upside:

While sitting in one panel, I follow the live updates from others. I capture the most stunning quotes from my session and absorb the most influential in others. Most impressively, people in Panel I are using twitter to ask someone in the audience of Panel II to pose a question to the experts. The answer, of course, appears again on twitter, satisfying even more people’s need for information. With twitter, we get a taste of every session, we can maximize our exposure to knowledge, we can be greedy.

Now to be sure, there was a temptation to zone out to the actual panels - and the speakers in the room - and drift downstream with Twitter chatter. During the inevitable dry spots in a 90-minute panel discussion on finance models for social entrepreneurship, there was always the pull of organizing the evening’s “Tweetup” pub crawl. But walking that wire between tuning out and broadening the conversation proved well worth the effort, in my view. I was able to audit several sessions that conflicted either with meetings or with other sessions. Further, it was great to meet people whose opinions and reactions mattered to me - and to read some of their follow-up blog posts.

Frankly, this is not a new phenomenon for technology conferences, where live-Tweeting has been a staple for a good year now. But the Twittered Skoll World Forum was something new for the non-technical social sector, and it added a rich new level to the conversation. As Nick Temple wrote on the School for Social Entrepreneurs blog: “This was the event where I really began to understand the full potential of Twitter.” Next year, I think, everyone in the room will raise their hands.

Lifting a pint in an Oxford pub that celebrated its 500th birthday two years ago with several Skoll World Forum attendees may have provided the exclamation point on a notion that developed during my panel on peer-to-peer philanthropy and microfinance platforms earlier in the afternoon yesterday: these are early days for online organizing, volunteering, crowdsourcing and wired causes.

The world economic crisis tends to sharpen the focus at this year's Skoll confab, nicknamed the 'Davos of Social Entrepreneurship' but itself a mere baby against Oxford's ancient spires (and the King's Arms as well), yet the panelists in my session took the long view, despite the weekly press of funding challenges.

Together, they represented a fairly broad spectrum of online social enterprises - from the pure philanthropy of Global Giving, to the popular online success of Kiva's  nonprofit peer-to-peer microlending community, to the for-profit start-up MyC4 which syndicates mid-range microcredit directly from investors who can expect a financial return on their social investment.

"Our goal is to become the first public company owned by the world," said Mads Kjaer, the serial entrepreneur who founded MyC4 two years ago. MyC4, based in Copenhagen, allows users in Europe to bid on microloans to middle-range business owners in Africa, allowing investors to realize a return on their peer-to-peer online lending. Mads has facilitated 14,000 small loans to 4,100 businesses valued at 10 million euro with an average interest rate of 12.9 percent. It's not charity in any way, yet MyC4's founder says the site has an inherent social goal that stems from his belief that government aid and philanthropy will never really change the African economic climate.

Premal Shah, the president of Kiva, has a challenge most social ventures would love to have: how to take a small but iconic brand with a model that works to a larger scale. After only three and a half years, Kiva's numbers are startling: $65 million in microloans from the general public, $25 at a time, with a current average of $1 million loaned per week and climbing and a payback rate of 98%. Yet as Premal noted - with partner Matt Flannery, Kiva's founder, looking on - that $65 million is still small in the grand scheme of things. When the idea of merging the three platforms at the speaker's table was used as a stalking horse for more collaboration in the online sector, Premal had a very clear response: these are still the early days - let's all continue to build and experiment and create brands. His message: collaboration by all means. Consolidation? Not yet.

The collaboration question was taken up by Mari Kuraishi, Global Giving's president and founder. She said there's really no reason why the many platforms in the online social sector don't collaborate more - except for a lack of personal bandwidth in each organization. Like any small organization, said Mari, Global Giving has goals and taking their collective eye off of the goal "would be irresponsibilty." And Global Giving has done some wonderful work, spotlighting projects big and small around the world - the nonprofit, which has been in operation since 2000 and has founded more than 1,200 projects for more than $20 million. Mari talked openly about the challenges of fundraising and the promise of crowdsourcing for the projects the Washington DC-based organization supports. She said that technology should never get in the way of good story-telling and developing trust with donors. And yet simple technology decisions can change the model. Twitter, she told the Skoll audience, has become the channel of choice for workers to file reports from the field.

And Twitter was also the channel of choice at my panel: upwards of 20 people were Twittering during the 90-minute session - and even more are Twittering from Skoll using the #SWF09 hashtag. It's a huge flow of information that contains everything from the ideas of Ashoka founder Bill Drayton (originator of the term 'social entrepreneur') and Jeff Skoll, the eBay co-founder who created the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship here - to the information on locations for our "Tweetup" pub crawl last night. Yet as I stood on a darkened Oxford corner last night with Peter Deitz, founder of online aggregator Social Actions, we joked about Twitter overkill - since it had taken the equivalent of unreliable long-distance shortwave radio to finally connect over pints.

When I wrote CauseWired last year, I argued that online social activism and peer-to-peer philanthropy and microfinance was developing into a real, discrete sector of its own - lodged between social networking platforms and social entrepreneurship, and taking the best of both worlds to increase citizen involvement in changing the world. I'd still make that case, even as the number of online platforms has increased wildly in the 10 months since I handed in the manuscript. This is a sector with real leadership and leading brands (like Kiva and DonorsChoose), a real depth of experience (like Mari and the folks at Global Giving), and a huge grassroots movement of small-scale entrepreneurs creating great projects in their garages. Yes, it should collaborate more - but it also needs support: a group of venture funders willing to lock into online social ventures as an investment area. Any takers?

The 'CauseWired' online distribution platform can change how a news story is presented, and power the creation an international cause. In late September, 2008 Cyclone Ivan hit slashed across the African island of Madagascar with winds of more than 125 miles per hour, bringing heavy rains and massive across the island. Government officials reported that the cyclone left about 190,000 people homeless and caused heavy damage to crops, roads and public buildings. More than 80 people died. The storm hit Madagascar during an unusually heavy rainy season, to the ground was already saturated and flood damage has been sustained from previous storms. The Republic of Madagascar, formerly the Malagasy Republic, comprises the world's fourth largest island, a poor nation in the Indian Ocean that nonetheless enjoys vital importance as a center of somewhat fragile biodiversity.

Media coverage in the west of the cyclone, a storm roughly the size and strength of Hurricane Katrina, was minimal - a few wire service stories, and postings on sites like AllAfrica.com. In the United States, there was little coverage and no video on the cable news stations. Indeed, I learned about Cyclone Ivan by reading Beth Kanter's blog. Beth is a self-described "web technology evangelist" and one of the world's leading experts on the effects of social media on nonprofit organizations. She's a prolific blogger with a vast network of online correspondents, and I'm always surprised by what turns up in her feed; her curious mind and extraordinary linking powers always bring in some fascinating stories. And it was Beth who told me about the work of blogger Joan Razafimharo and by extension, the social venture known as Foko Madagascar.

Foko Madagascar was formed quickly after the gathering of the exclusive TED conference's regional expansion into Africa in 2007. The conference's theme was “Africa the next Chapter” and  several social entrepreneurs and bloggers pooled their activism to start the Foko project, to help support Madagascar’s development. That work took several forms: a biodiversity initiative (Madagascar has some of the highest biodiversity in the world and is home to as many 12,000 plant species but struggles with the use of fire as an agricultural tool by poor farmers on the island), a women's craft skills program aimed at helping poor women to make additional income from embroidery, sewing, and weaving, and a blogging project. In partnership with the Rising Voices initiative, the Foko Blog Club is teaching young people in Madagascar blogging skills. Rising Voices is a project of Global Voices, the "non-profit global citizens’ media project" founded at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, a research think-tank focused on the Internet’s impact on society and it aims to "spread the tools and techniques of citizen media to communities that are under-represented on the conversational web."

Lova Rakotomalala, Foko's project manager for health, described the goals of the blogging project on Foko's blog:

We all know too well how actively participating in the global conversation through digital media can have a major impact in our way of thinking and approach towards development and global awareness. Joining the global conversation is critical on many levels. Firstly, it fosters the exchange of ideas with projects with similar goals such as the former and current rising voices grantees. Many creative ideas have been tested in different settings all over the world; learning from the rest of the world’s experiences can only help our project be more efficient in achieving our goals. Secondly, it allows Malagasy people to illustrate and directly share with the rest of the world their perspectives on issues that they’d know best. Thirdly, joining the global conversation will expand the network of people with similar interests nationally and internationally, connecting them and promoting positive collaborations.

When Britney shaves her head, everybody hears about it. When Ana Nicole Smith dies, everybody hears about it.But when Madagascar gets struck by a record six tropical cyclones in one season, killing hundreds and displacing perhaps as many as a hundred thousand, not to mention jeopardizing food supplies for many more, does it garner major and sustained U.S. press coverage?

Last month around the inauguration of President Obama - and the day of the service centered on the celebration of Dr. King's life  -  there was a ton of focus on creating a lasting online movement for citizen-powered change. As the economic crisis deepens and the new Administration deals with that challenge on a day-to-day basis, some of that January enthusiasm has been tempered by the reality of February - but during a recent conversation with the CEO of online social venture Zazengo.com brought back a bit of last month's spark.

"This concept of challenging others, of making people do something, of a very focused call to action - that's a big part of this call for national community service," said Vicki Saunders, a serial entrepreneur and chief of the two-year-old online social change platform.

I think Vicki is exactly right, and that there's an opportunity - even in the downturn - to create that "focused call to action" on the Web. And Zazengo is a very interesting platform: its motto is "What happens after the call to action?" and the emphasis is very much on impact. In Zazengo's case, impact of members - in volunteering, raising money, taking actions and the like - is measured through a handsome user interface that favors graphs over pure numbers. This recognizes, I think, the idea that activism isn't always about pure metrics (dollars raised, for example) but about impact over the longer term. Zazengo's cool graphics offer a kind of friendly and light feedback loop that emphasizes encouragement over spreadsheets.

But Zazengo is also highly cognizant that the world may not need another destination website, with actions focused on a single URL. "People looking at destination sites, but that's old thinking," says Saunders. "It's really all about getting your unique value proposition out to other sites, to where people live. We really want to be about tracking the impact."

Last month Zazengo partnered with the Obama transition team and the Corporation for National and Community Service for Martin Luther King Day to encourage and measure actions around the MLK Day of Service. About 2,000 people participated, many using a Facebook application or a widget, and the results were modest - with reports like "1,198 clean miles traveled" and "270 lightbulbs changed."

But as Saunders points out, "it was a great test group" and the results are all archived in Zazengo profiles, which become important as the "stakeholder engagement engine" begins to track impact and port it over to the rest of the web. Down the road - "when we're really advanced and have the databases speak to each other" - it may be all about what Saunders calls the "social resume," an inherent part of an online identity that's baked into Facebook, and Twitter, and open identities.

It remains to be seen how widespread the call to public service becomes, but as author Valerie Tarico wrote last week on the Huffington Post blog: "Our current crisis and the highly sophisticated Obama campaign structure together create a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build lasting community infrastructure for the common good -- not government based, not faith-based, not politically based. Community based."

And that's where Zazengo's emphasis on the social resume may help create the kind of positive peer pressure that gets people off the sidelines.

Sure, February 12th was Abraham Lincoln’s 200th birthday - and there were 200 candles on Charles Darwin’s cake as well - but in the CauseWired world, there was a bigger pin on the calendar.

The premise of last week's Twestival was incredibly simple: more than 200 cities around the world hosted Twestivals that brought together Twitter communities for an evening of fun and to raise money and awareness for charity: water. Every event was different - but they all raised money for clean drinking water in the developing world.

In Montclair, NJ, for instance, organizers planned a night out at a coffee house with a singer-songwriter and French Macarons. In Amsterdam, there was a social media workshop and live music. Liverpool hosted a massive charity auction with some great art-related items. Jerusalem had wine tasting and a giant bubble-making artist. Bogota organized a giant disco.

Admission to in-person events was generally less than $10US  - and charity: water is also raising money through online donations and T-shirt sales. Of course, all the organizing (well, most of it) has been done in 140 characters or less. The charity: water pitch was a simple one:

Right now 1.1 billion people on the planet don’t have access to safe, clean drinking water. That’s one in six of us.

Unsafe water and lack of basic sanitation cause 80% of all sickness and disease, and kill more people every year than all forms of violence, including war.

Many communities in developing nations often have a plentiful supply of clean drinking water just below the ground, but no way to get to it.

This is where charity: water and their partner organizations come in. Drilling a well can cost from $4,000 - $12,000 USD and many living on less than $1 a day cannot afford one in their community, even if the money is combined.

Social entrepreneur Scott Harrison, a former nightclub promoter from New York, founded charity: water in 2006 after a trip to Africa, and brought his talent for the world of promotion, organizing, media and celebrities to the clean water movement. He estimated that Twestival would raise more than $1 million in one day - results aren't in yet. Meanwhile on Twitter,  the #twestival hashtag is still singing its story of a vast, geographically diverse festival for change.

Heifer International is already on online pioneer, using its innovative virtual catalog of livestock and plants to encourage gifts relieving global hunger and poverty. But two years ago, its grant-making Heifer Foundation affiliate combined social networking with the idea of virtual charitable portfolios in the Kiva mold to create Hope Equity, an online community that allows donors to invest in a variety of funds by region or by cause. With the look and feel of a traditional stock portfolio, Hope Equity creates an online “portfolio of giving” investing in endowments that support ending huger and poverty while caring for the earth. This online model offers a type of investment that Heifer calls "micro-endowments." In the program, Hope Equity invests the donations and makes a percentage available to the donor’s selected causes each year. This allows for the original contribution to remain untouched, continuing to grow in perpetuity. Donors who commit to a certain level of giving can create their own funds - for causes like HIV/AIDS, environmental issues, hunger in Africa and funds for countries including Kenya, Mozambique, and Afghanistan.

Greg Spradlin, vice president for Hope Equity, says that the investment approach favors an open approach to information - just as everyday investors revolutionized financial reporting, modern charitable donors and investors may well change philanthropy - and the online portfolio, so common in the consumer brokerage world, is beginning to gain favor among donors who crave information.  "One of the things people respond to is the non-competitive approach, the fact that it's not tied to any religion or any political party, the open source nature of it," says Spradlin.  "We have investors with broad spectrum of beliefs, but it doesn't matter because we're not tied to one way of thinking - and they love the idea that it is open source."

Those investors range from young software entrepreneurs in Seattle to an 85-year-old woman who "just wants to know the money's being used the way she wants it being used." Spradlin believes that the formal nature of philanthropy is rapidly changing, and that personal involvement and a desire for information, metrics, and results is at the core of that change - as well as a societal movement towards causes as defining factor in how people view themselves.

"I really believe we are on the tipping point of change in philanthropy, based on what we are seeing and hearing from donors - and we deal very personally with people - giving and causes are part of their family, part of their. We created this to meet a need because we believe people are going to change the way they give, and they favor integrative approach, not just 'it's that time of year again, I'll write a check' Giving is a daily choice and causes are part of people's lives, whether it's the Red campaign or what coffee we drink. I don't think it's going to be a fad thing, I don't think it's going to fade. People are making it part of their lifestyle choices on a daily basis. You have to be socially conscious. In today's work, we don't have the choice to be isolated any more."

And in some ways HopeEquity.com is a capital market for philanthropy, in much the same way Kiva.org and DonorsChoose are - it's part of what Carla Dearing on Philanthromedia  calls "the Schwabification of philanthropy," with greater direct access to the mission of nonprofits, and the greater expectation of transparent reporting as well. As Daniel Rabuzzi, CEO of Peter Drucker's Leader to Leader Institute, wrote in onPhilanthropy.com in 2004: "capital markets for the social sector is an idea whose time has come." Yes as pioneering venture philanthropist Mario Morino has said repeatedly, historically there have been no markets for philanthropic capital. That is just beginning to change, and the open nature of online communications and data-sharing is fueling what may be a fast evolution. "If new wealth creates new philanthropy, then what does new philanthropy create?" asked Morino and Bill Shore of Community Wealth Ventures in a paper entitled High-Engagement Philanthropy: A Bridge to a More Effective Social Sector. "It creates dialogue, in public and private, reflecting vigorous, animated soul-searching on how such precious new resources can be best put to use to improve schools, health care, and the other delivery systems for basic human needs. And, hopefully, it leads to transformational change."

There are two trend lines heading for a collision - on one hand, people are ever more conscious of philanthropy and its role in commerce and society; on the other, these people are talking to each other more so than ever before. Allan Benamer, the IT Director at Coalition for the Homeless in New York and the blogger behind the aptly-named Confession of a Nonprofit IT Director, argues that the notion of consumer philanthropy has a small, point-of-sale, small consumer quotient as well: "Let's take that whole notion of 'consumer philanthropy' and put that back in the Economy 2.0 space. Wouldn't it be possible to move the hardest social services cases in the nonprofit sector over to the Web? And wouldn't it take just a little more thinking to get people to donate to those cases, in effect, becoming a consumer philanthropist? We're basically applying the network effect to donations and ending up with another shading on the notion of consumer philanthropy. It's not so much big-money philanthropy but online retail philanthropy."

He's got a point, of course. As the web experience grows ever more personal and less and less about big portals and media brands, so too does the giving experience - especially for the net native demographic. Even as consumers are inspired by the big names and big cause marketing campaigns, their day-to-day world online may well expand to include philanthropy. But is this a tipping point? Inflection point? You pick the economic cliche.

My partner in onPhilanthropy.com, editor in chief Susan Carey Dempsey, has reported from the front lines of philanthropic change these last eight years. "Everyone," she says, "is intrigued by the phenomenon of online social networking, which is making an impact on the micro-level in nonprofit fundraising as well as grass-roots political activism. Yet the implications of these millions of tiny interactions have the nonprofit community intrigued, encouraged and, with good reason, shaking in their boots. Clearly, the rules that have governed the donor-grantee relationship over the last few centuries of American philanthropy increasingly will not apply; those rules of engagement are still being re-written."

As that relationship changes, fewer decisions will be made entirely by the nonprofit professionals, and some degree of influence will devolve to the vast pool of donors - much as investors ultimately control the destiny of a public company. "The basic premises of seeking diverse input, trying some design methodologies such as rapid prototyping, and drawing from multiple disciplines are strategic approaches to solving social problems that are starting to gain some traction," wrote the philanthropy analyst Lucy Bernholz in her 2008 essay "Is Philanthropy Going Open Source?" The concepts, she said, are exciting, but "they also raise some questions for philanthropy. Where are the lines between public and private when it comes to ideas for the public good? Can or should someone be able to own a policy innovation? Protect a service delivery process? Are all socially positive ideas public?"

Susan Davis, the founding chairman of the Grameen Foundation and CEO of BRAC-USA, the American fundraising arm of the Bangladeshi microfinance agency, spoke about the shift in the winds of philanthropy at the Hilton Humanitarian Symposium in New York in 2007.  “I believe a change is coming between palliative philanthropy and what I call jujitsu philanthropy,” she said. Palliative philanthropy is “about saving lives and it’s based on compassion and a sense of social justice.” But “jujitsu philanthropy is all about finding the point of highest leverage to effect systems change.”

The CauseWired phenomenon may well have its greatest impact in the sector that is traditionally the slowest to change. In the last 50 years, only two new nonprofits have entered the ranks of the nation’s largest organizations – otherwise the top charities remain the same, year after year. And even in the most charitable country on earth, giving remains stagnant as a factor of our national wealth. But “Facebook Philanthropy” - along with Carla Dearing's "Schwabification" and the growth of philanthropic markets for change - is redefining what it means to give, how people view charity and social involvement, and what causes will ultimately succeed in the new philanthropic landscape.

Indeed, American philanthropy now surpasses $300 billion per year, or roughly the size of the entire economy of Norway. Yet, its relationship to the U.S. economy is stable, logging in year after year at just under 2% of the nation's gross domestic product. For all the headlines around massive philanthropic commitments tied to billionaire names like Buffett and Gates, for all of the attention philanthropy and social investments receive in the halls of the World Economic Forum and the Clinton Global Initiative, and for all the marketing and media that have made social causes a central force in our consumer economy, philanthropy has not grown. Every great idea for change needs funding, and every social entrepreneur must compete for capital.

The competition would seem to favor online markets for capital. Just as eBay expanded and democratized the market for used consumer goods from Pez dispensers to vintage Corvettes, so, too, might a wired marketplace connecting millions of people and hundreds of thousands of causes expand and democratize philanthropy. While that marketplace has yet to develop (my book, CauseWired, covers several attempts at that market), it is clear that something in what we have thought of as philanthropy is changing. The maturation of the social entrepreneurship movement, coupled with the emergence of new online models and a willingness to blur the lines between traditional charity and social causes, has created a fertile field for change. When Google, the leading online company in the world and a powerful force at the center of human communications, announced that its "philanthropic" commitment would not be a traditional foundation but rather a for-profit hybrid known as Google.org, my colleague, Dr. Susan Raymond, one of the world's leading philanthropy analysts, knew it was time to ask some bigger questions. In her onPhilanthropy column, she wrote:

In centuries past, these were fairly straightforward definitions. Philanthropy was charity, the donation of private dollars to private organizations and individuals caring for social problems for which no private organization had a sufficient commercial interest that motivated action and for which no government agency wished to raise taxes. Orphanages. Soup kitchens. Homeless shelters. In the past several decades, the blurring began and definitions began to erode.

Clearly, continued Dr. Raymond, "The End of Definitions is upon us. This is a good thing. Change reflects the adjustment of institutions and intellects to the realities of life. As Abraham Lincoln observed, 'The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.'" That stormy present is made all the more changeable in the world of philanthropy by the unparalleled growth of private wealth in the United States in the past quarter century—wealth that has prompted the kind of personal philanthropic investment and involvement that personified the age of Andrew Carnegie.

The United States is an increasingly wealthy country, but even those with massive, fast fortunes won in the IPO wars or the hedge funds respond to leadership when it comes to causes; not only do billionaires put on their pants in the same fashion as you and I, they are also moved to give by the same motivations.

An 18-year-old college freshman urging her friends to "Save Darfur" by joining her Facebook group is employing the same tactic as Bill Gates when he urges other captains of industry to fight malaria or improve American high schools. It is good old peer pressure, used for a noble cause. When Forbes released its annual list of the 400 richest Americans two years ago, a mere nine-figure net worth no longer cut the mustard: The list was made up entirely of billionaires. It is true, the economists confirm, that the rich really are getting richer—and they are getting richer faster. As the ranks of the wealthy swell (there are more than eight million millionaires now in America), the ways in which they take advantage of their wealth are changing.

The surge in luxury goods, the myriad travel opportunities, the lifestyles and real estate are all part of it. But so is philanthropy.
 

Matthew Arnold called Oxford the city of dreaming spires, a reference to the timeless beauty of the harmonious architecture of the colleges spread across the landscape—but also to the centrality of thought that Oxford expresses for all of Britain. Every year, at the annual Skoll World Forum, those dreaming spires take on another meaning as leaders in social entrepreneurship from around the world gather at the University of Oxford's Said Business School.

The forum is the brainchild of Jeffrey Skoll, a young entrepreneur who became a billionaire in the moment of eBay's initial public offering in 1998. The Canadian-born Skoll was the online auction giant's second employee and its first president. In the years since his eBay billions made him one of the Internet industry's richest men, Skoll has turned most of his attention to social causes. He has funded feature films such as Al Gore's Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth, and, through the work of the Skoll Foundation, has been an ambitious funder in the growing field of social entrepreneurship and the convener of the annual forum amid the gates and walls of Oxford. Along with Pierre Omidyar, eBay's original founder, Skoll has attempted to turn the very marketplace-democracy that powers the best online businesses into a force for social change.

Indeed, through his foundation and the Skoll Centre at Oxford, Skoll has emerged as the leading light of the social entrepreneurship movement, which began as early as the 1980s, when technically savvy entrepreneurial types such as Ashoka founder Bill Drayton and Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus first sought to bring their brand of disruptive change to the world's problems.

At the World Forum I attended in the warm British spring of 2007, Skoll spoke under the dome of Christopher Wren's seventeenth-century Sheldonian hall at Oxford's town center and remarked candidly on "a changing time for philanthropy." He suggested that while much of the focus of the past several years is on bringing business practices to philanthropy, buzzwords like philanthropreneurs may miss the point: It is not just about a change in the nature of philanthropy, "but a movement from institutions to individuals." Individuals, he suggested, can move faster and take more chances: "Wherever you find humanity at its worst in the world, you'll find a social entrepreneur working for change."

Indeed, there is considerable glamour attached to social causes. While social entrepreneurship often involves starting small and leveraging scant resources to create change, whether in environmental science, feeding the poor, or facing down disease, any movement like this needs star power, and at Skoll that incandescence is provided by people like rock star Peter Gabriel, Google.org chief Larry Brilliant, and Queen Rania Al-Abdullah of Jordan. Each year, the social entrepreneurs bring with them stories of human struggle from the field, ideas about innovation in programming and finance, and seemingly boundless optimism about fomenting social change. They also bring some very real-world concerns to the "dreaming spires" of social entrepreneurship. At the various panels and convocations, they worry aloud about funding and sustainability, attracting talent, and working with governments. Many dare to puzzle about the concept of social entrepreneurship itself—whether it can grow and thrive beyond its current buzzword status, whether it can truly change the seemingly hidebound worlds of foundations and established philanthropy.

Time and again in the Skoll sessions, committed social entrepreneurs talk about how hard it is to raise funds (donations, capital, "investments") for innovative ideas that do not fit into what foundations and philanthropists believe about funding projects. Outside of the self-funding ventures in microenterprise, the money it takes to fire up major movements such as tackling global warming, eradicating poverty in Africa and south Asia, preserving delicate environments, and empowering poor women generally comes from fundraising.

Jacqueline Novogratz, CEO of the Acumen Fund, admits that fundraising remains central—that social enterprises "always came back, somewhat reluctantly, to philanthropy—to finding a few big supporters." Nothing I have heard here changes that formula, particularly for startups; entrepreneurs have always had to battle, to scratch, to promise their firstborn to get the capital they need to launch something. For social entrepreneurs, that means major donors. Said Novogratz: "Look, we need philanthropic money still."