Commoncraft (who call themselves "social design consultants") has a series of very well-produced short videos called the commoncraft show that demystify "in Plain English" concepts that befuddle clients such as RSS, wikis and social networking. They are short, funny and extremely informative.

I got to this site by meandering through a Jared Spool article on Building an Envisionment which talks about creating the right presentation to illustrate a concept that will guide or inspire your project. Also worth a visit and good read.

Nature (.com not .org) is by far one of the most reputed science journals out there and I have friends at the NIH whose career ambition would be to have their papers published in it. Scientists go through a tough process of editorial screening then exhaustive peer reviews before anything gets published in any serious science journal.

So what is interesting is that Nature created a site where it posts all the submissions it has received prior to any peer reviews. They call the site Nature Precedings, with a subhead: "Pre-publication research and preliminary findings". By doing this, it gives the science community a chance to glean over the body of papers that are good but may not make the cut, and the ability to even vote of them. If this takes off, then Nature will also benefit from getting some input into which ones they may focus their attention on (although I am sure they'd have to read them all anyway).

A case of a serious traditional print media taking new media crowdsourcing seriously.

According to Nature's Timo Hannay:

The traditional way for scientists to share their research results is through journals. These have the benefit of being peer-reviewed, citable and archival, but as a communication channel they are also relatively slow and expensive. As a complement to this, scientists also use more immediate and informal approaches, such as preprints (i.e., unpublished manuscripts), conference papers and presentations. The trouble is, these usually aren'teasy to share in a truly globally way (most repositories are institution- or funder-specific), and you can't formally cite them (which is important because citation underlies the scientific credit system).

Nature Precedings is trying to overcome those limitations by giving researchers a place to post documents such as preprints and presentations in a way that makes them globally visible and citable. Submissions are filtered by a team of curators to weed out obviously inappropriate material, but there's no peer-review so accepted contributions appear online very quickly — usually within a couple of hours. The content is all released under a Creative Commons Attribution License, and each item is made citable using a DOI or Handle (the same systems used for peer-reviewed scholarly papers).

[via: Joho the blog]

Many Eyes is a neat tool/site provided by IBM Research that allows you to visualize datasets through a set of visualization types and share the results allowing visitor comments.

All the maps are interactive.

Currently there are 3107 (as of 6/1/2007 1:34PM EST) visualization. They say they will be adding rating and other social networking features in the near future.

Here's an example visualization:

During the NTEN conference that I blogged about a few days ago I went to a session with Charles Best of Donors Choose, which is a site that allows individual donors to fund small projects proposed by public school teachers. Lately I have been coming across a quite few of these, where a site links private donations with those who need financial support. I had lacked a term to call these types of sites, but of course the smart people I met at NTEN already had a term for these. Some of the terms that were discussed were eBay philanthropies, philanthropic marketplace... but my favorite was one that David Weinberger blogged following his plenary at NTEN: P2P philanthropy where P2P can mean peer to peer or better yet person to person (whether or not he coined it I don't know).

Here's a round up of some Person to Person Philanthropies I have come across lately:

• DonorsChoose: As mentioned above.
• DonorsCamp: Attesting to the fact that good social entrepreneurial ideas are contagious and subject to replication, CJ Foundation (CJ is one of many Samsung affiliates) in Korea lifted (interestingly, with willing consultation from DonorsChoose) the DonorsChoose model and transplanted it in Korea. The twist is that DonorsCamp actually matches one-for-one every donation that comes through the site.
• Kiva.org: Kiva links facilitates micro-loans to entrepreneurs in developing countries, "empowering them to lift themselves out of poverty." The payback rate to date on the loans are apparently 100% according to their FAQs.
• GlobalGiving: According to their site: "GlobalGiving connects you with grassroots charity projects around the world. We ensure that 85-90% of your donation gets to local project leaders within 60 days. It's a direct connection."
• Modest Needs: I heard Charles from DonorsChoose mention this site at the NTEN conference. According to the site, "Modest Needs is a registered charity that works to stop the cycle of poverty before it starts for low-income workers struggling to afford emergency expenses like those we've all encountered before: the unexpected auto repair, the unanticipated trip to the doctor, the unusually large winter heating bill."
• Propser.com: Where there are philanthropic and non-profit needs, there will also be for-profit needs. Prosper.com is where you can submit a business proposal and have you loan funded in whole or in part by many private lenders, which end up being a lower interest rate and/or larger amount than you would typically get from a bank.
• Cytogether: Cyworld is a wildly successful social networking site in Korea. It has a philanthropic counterpart where you can donate Cyworld's currency, "acorns", to your favorite philanthropic organization. The site is a little more than a P2P philanthropy in that it also is a community and links volunteer needs and opportunties. From what I can tell, most of the prominent non-profits operating in Korea seem to have a profile page on the site.

Interestingly (or maybe obviously) DonorsChoose, Global Giving, Modest Needs and Prosper.com all have investments from eBay founder Pierre Omidya's foundation - Omidya Network. Their portfolio page is a very interesting list, more like a who's who in web/technology innovation, which include many organization I have a personal interest in - Ashoka, KaBOOM! and Linden Labs (aka makers of Second Life).

I attended the 2007 Nonprofit Technology Conference in Washington DC last week (April 5, 6). Here are some notes and highlights from the sessions I attended.

Session 1: What Technology Can Do for Your Mission

Interesting session with Charlie Brown (Ashoka), Isaac Castillo (Latin American Your Center), and Roberto Cavlcanti (Conservation International) presenting on the way each organization has been using technology to further their mission. Charlie talked about Changemakers (Forum One helped build their current site) and how putting their competition process online has allowed innovators at the periphery to participate. Issac talked about how creating an online database of their members has helped them focus their efforts and be more accountable to their funders. Roberto talked about the technology challenges of a scaling global organization with offices in many countries. (and how an investment in teleconferencing equipment paid itself off the first time in was used due to the saving in airfare)

My take aways: First figure our what problems need to be solved then find and use technology strategically to solve them.

Session 2: What Works with Online Community

Learned nothing new that I didn't know already about how to grow and maintain an online community. Well maybe that's a little too harsh. I did learn that there are 3 types of users that participate in online communities: goal-motivated user, socially motivated user, and curious learner.

My take aways: Not much, just that adding photos next to posts increases traffic.

Session 3: Fundamentals of Storytellig in Online Communications

This was an interesting session presented by Jonah Sachs and Susan Finkelpearl, our friends at Free Range Studios, the creators of The Meatrix and Grocery Store Wars. It covered the basics of good story telling - that you need a hero (Luke Skywalker), nemesis (Darth Vader), mentor (Obi-wan), oracle (Yoda) and an animal familiar (R2-D2), and how they used these elements to produce their flash-based campaigns. The nemesis doesn't have to be someone, or an organization. It can be something within people such as, in the case of global warming, indifference, ignorance, greed, laziness etc. The best stories sometimes ends up being stories that your users tell. However you have to provide clear directives for the users to tell their stories: "who influenced your most in school?" rather than "tell us a story about your school".

They also gave a step by step guide to storytelling:

1. Identify your audience
2. Identify emotional resonant themes
3. Set the stage
4. Choose your mystery / metaphor
5. Choose your medium

The first question from the audience was interesting: "When should you not use storytelling?" I thought that Jonah answered this question well - most of what they were talking about was targeted towards the general public, however for academics or researchers who look for hard data or research, storytelling the information may not be appropriate. In short, taylor your message to your audience.

My take aways: Let your users tell the stories for you. Let your organization be the "mentor" of the story (Obi-wan), and the user be the "hero" (Luke Skywalker).

Session 4: Branding Through Websites: Building your brand from the first click

Laura Quinn (Alder Consulting) defined brand as, "your gut feeling about an organization", which is creatd by rational (e.g. what you do) and non-rational (e.g. people who hate the color red) factors. It is the external perception of your organization that is out of your control, but you can influence it. And whether you like it or not "you already have a brand."

Some exercises that get to your branding are:

1. How are you currently perceived? (be brutally honest)
2. How would you like to be perceived? (fill in the blanks)
   • "XYZ organization is so __"
   • "They are great at __"
   • "They are different because __"
3. Define answer for: (in 1 sentence)
   • What do you do?
   • Why does it matter?
   • What makes you different?

Website are a powerful and often the only way to communicate to your constituents. You have control over the following factors that influence your brand on your site:

• Statements (tone, who are you trying to reach)
• Prioritization (of homepage content, navigation, teasers)
• Graphic design (establishes professionalism, credibility, audience-centricness, topic of the site)
• Information and functionality (provide clear evidence of service)

During the session, as an exercise, the audience was divided into smaller groups and given a site to figure out what they do and who they serve. Megan, our :>Refugees International client volunteered the site for a review by the session. The comments were interesting:

• "There is no clear sense that they are an advocacy organization, and not involved in actually humanitarian relief."
• "They need to tell their [success] stories"
• "'Where we work' and 'What we do' sections need to move up on the page [above the fold]"
• "There is opportunities to put video on the site"
• "The page looks busy, too much info, hard to know where to start"
• "There needs to be more statements about impact"
• "Audience track navigation maybe?"
• "Color palette is nice"
• "Good pictures"

My take aways: You have a brand whether you like it or not. How do you make sure it is an accurate reflection of who you are?

Session 5: New Approach to Social Change: Technology and the Social Entrepreneur

Great session with Steven Clift (E-Democracy.org), Charles Best (DonorsChoose.org) and Kris Herbst (Ashoka, Changemakers), about what it means to be a social entrepreneur, applying business practices and using technology opportunistically.

Steve provided better tips for maintaining a productive community than the session I went to yesterday. On e-democracy.org he has a couple of rules:

• Sign in with real name
• Posts limited to no more than 2 times a day (excellent policy for providing everyone a chance to participate, and avert flame wars)
• Stay within scope of local charter
• 2 warning equals a 2 week suspension
• Recruit 100 registered members even before you launch (seed communities before launch)
• Auto hide email quotes (so that posts are to the point and don't get long)

Charles had a fascinating presentation of how he started DonorsChoose.org out of frustration, when he was a high school teacher in the Bronx, with $2000 of his own money (while he was living at home with his mom). In the beginning, he also had his students handwrite letters to potential donors. Teacher have great ideas, but are unable to get funding, so DonorsChoose.org provides a platform for the teachers to submit proposals for school activities and for people who wish to fund a project to be "confident" about the project they are funding, by doing the background research for them, and providing follow up emails about the project. In Charles's words:

DonorsChoose enables every public school teacher to be a social entrepreneur and every person to be a philanthropist

Donors can search projects by location, subject, grade, keyword etc. Interestingly "autism" is one of the highest search terms and despite conventional wisdom, more donors fund outside their locale.

One poignant question from the audience was, "Won't this encourage funding for education to be cut further?" Charles answered, "if that happens, we will all quit." He went on to say that a local politician who was visiting the site was outraged to find that some schools in his district didn't even have dictionaries, and caused him to act. Also surveys showed that those who donated were likely to show more interest in education issues.

The biggest challenge that DonorsChoose faces is scalability. Scaling operations means more staff, and actually studying supply chain management. Also scaling in to other states means maintaining a ground presence in each locale. Charles emphasized that "the internet is not enough."

I didn't take notes on Kris's presentation since I know what Changemakers is about, but I did ask him and the panel the question: "If you are about 'open-sourcing ideas', how do you feel about open-sourcing your platform?" Kris answered that they plan to open-source the competition module they developed in Drupal. But this is the dilemma that most social entrepreneurs must face. How do you let go and let grow an idea that you have so close to your heart?

My take aways: Social entrepreneurs are myth-busters. Muhammad Yunus (An Ashoka Fellow) broke the myth that the poor are not credit-worthy. Rapid developments and access to technology lowers the barrier and enables social entrepreneurs to tackle society's pressing problems.

Session 6: Using Online Social Networks to Build Buzz, Community and Support for Your Cause

Scott Goodstein (Catalyst Campaigns), and Heather Holdridge (Care2.com) talked about creating online buzz about your cause around new social networking sites such as MySpace and FaceBook. Heather summarized by saying:

• Be everywhere you can be, but prioritize
• Be prepared for the big moment
• Meet people where they are

Scott emphasized that it takes a lot of work to establish and maintain a presence in MySpace. Just like energy drinks (Red Bull, Jolt, Tab etc) or niche radio stations market themselves based on understanding their niche audience, so should your online campaigns be. Your organization needs to develop its "online persona."

My take aways: It is wrong to think, "If you build your MySpace page, they will come." It takes effort to understand who you are trying to reach and speak to them in their terms to create a wave of buzz.

I went to Korea for a week in early March and I ended up meeting up with a lot of friends I hadn't seen in years. In explaining to them what I do at Forum One lead to some interesting conversations and insights about the internet culture in Korea. I am going to try to capture some of these in the following series of posts.

To begin, here are some random but interesting facts I know about Korea, and the internet culture in Korea:

• South Korea has a population of 48.5 million (2006), in a country a tad smaller than Virginia, with a GDP that ranks 11th in the world above Canada.
• According to PRB, the projected population in 2050 is 42.3 million. That's a population decline of 6 million. The current birthrate is about 1.1.
• 82% of the Korean population is urban, and close to half of the population currently resides in Seoul (capital) metropolitan area, making it the 3rd largest city in the world.
• Korea has one of the highest penetration of Broadband internet access (ADSL) in the world with 25.3 per 100 inhabitants (Dec 2005)
• Korea is dotted with the Korean flavor of cybercafes called "PC-bang" (translation: "bang" = room) providing cheap (about $1 for 1 hr), public access to internet and networked gaming services. Some estimate put the current number at over 22,000.
• Korean internet traffic is dominated by "Portals" of which Naver is the reigning and unchallenged king for the last couple of years. Daum, Nate, Yahoo Korea and auction.co.kr (eBay Korea) round off the top 5. Google Korea ranks 21 place in terms of traffic.
• Cyworld is on the top of pile in social networking sites. It is reported that 90% of late teens and early twenties and about a third of all Koreans have a Cyworld account. More about Cyworld in a later post. Cyworld recently launched a US site.
• The IM market, MSN Messenger has been edged by NateOn service recently. NateOn is part of the SK empire, which is the largest mobile service provider in Korea and offers NateOn services on its phones. Hard for MSN to compete there.
• A little more about portal Naver. Naver commands a whopping 77 percent of Korean internet page-views traffic. Its success has be attributed to focus on human interaction over mechanical search results. Its "KnowledgeIN" service allows its users to post questions which are answered by other users, adding to its growing database of knowledge. Of course it's not as simple as that - Naver has an army of staff who write, seed, and review the quality of the posts. When a user searches on Naver, they get the total opposite experience from Google: a fully "manipulated" search result page, with undifferentiated sponsor links, which Koreans find more useful and appealing than list of random search results. Call it laziness or market-savviness.

Someone finally had the good sense to bring the Flying Toasters back. For those of you who don't know, Flying Toaster used to appear in a late 80's screensaver for macs called "After Dark". Available free for download for Mac and PC. Brings back memories of my first Macintosh.

Following up on Corey's post about Second Life, Reuters recently set up a bureau on Second Life. NPR even recently interviewed its bureau chief/correspondent.

I knew that Second Life had its own economy and people make a living from building and selling stuff, but what I did not know was that Linden, the official currency of Second Life has an floating exchange rate!

PASICK: They do. Well, I mean, the laws of supply and demand hold true just as well in Second Life. And the interchange is a currency exchange called Lindex,where you can trade between U.S. dollars and Linden dollars. It's a floating exchange rate totally set by supply and demand.

RYSSDAL: What's the rate today?

PASICK: I can tell you. It is currently at 273 Linden dollars to the dollar. And that's one of the things that we're piping into Second Life. We're giving people kind of a live currency feed, so if you're making a business decision, that's the kind of information you'd want.

On 10/18/2006, Second Life also officially hit its 1 million registered user mark. Impressive.

Since I am perpetually concerned about information organization/delivery, what I would like to see is someone build a virtual library in Second Life, because I have yet to see effective 3D interfaces to information navigation.

Nikon is promoting its new camera D80 by giving it away to talented photographers they found on flickr. The resulting site is Stunning Nikon. It features a flash interface with a collage of images which you can click in to, which shows the photos, interviews with photographers, and link to the photographer's flickr page.

I am not a big fan of slipping and sliding flash interfaces, and found the site annoying to navigate, but still I thought Nikon was bring creative in reaching out and bridge "ordinary" photographers with more professional gear by capitalizing on flickr's wide market appeal and acceptance.

Update: I've found a less annoying alternative interface to the photos.