Last night was the first in what will now be a monthly chat for community builders or those interested in learning more about building community, on and offline.  The goal of this chat was to set some of the ground work for us to build on going forward. Below you’ll find highlights from the first chat and details for the next one!

August 2010 – Community Builder Chat Wrap Up

Last night’s chat had a good turn out for being the very first one – thanks to everyone who lurked, joined in, and shared! The two main questions explored were:

• Why build online communities?
• How to increase engagement when dealing with limited functionality rights granted to members and members who are new to online media?

Get the full transcript from the chat here: Launch August Chat Transcript

September 2010 – Community Builder Chat Details

We already have two questions selected for the September chat generated in the August chat. (Thanks!) This time we’ll explore 1. migrating communities from one platform to another, and 2. tools and tactics that build a loop between offline and online activities.

• Date: September 16th
• Time: 4 pm Eastern, 9 pm UK (duration: 1 hour)
• Visit: Launch the Chat (not active until the 16th)

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If you couldn’t join the chat last night, you can still contribute! Share your ideas or responses in the comments here to keep the conversation going until the next chat. If you have any questions, feel free to post those as well. Looking forward to the 16th already!

Hi everyone! Welcome to the new monthly chats focused on community building. These are a branch of the #4Change chats – so whether you have participated in the past on a different topic or not, welcome

In the future, these chats will have a topic and questions (generated from you!) posted ahead of time. As this is the very first one, I wanted to keep it open to focus on exploring what was most appropriate for this community in a few respects:

• Do we want to use a hashtag other than #4change?
• Does this time work or should the time shift (perhaps two times, so every other month it is time 1 or 2)?
• Who’s here and what are your passions?

Hopefully exploring those questions and responses leaves us with plenty of time to also ask questions that we are currently thinking about. So, join in!

We’ll be talking at 4 pm EST, 9 pm UK on August 19th, 2010. Use the link below to launch the chat!

#4Change Community Builder Chat – August 2010

Ivan Boothe posted a link to this story recently on the Progressive Exchange list. It’s been a busy week so I just clicked through today and thought it was an excellent opportunity to start integrating more conversation starters into this blog (as suggested in the Blog Redesign thread).

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The article from Spiegel Online International begins:

They may have been dubbed the “Internet generation,” but young people are more interested in their real-world friends than Facebook. New research shows that the majority of children and teenagers are not the Web-savvy digital natives of legend. In fact, many of them don’t even know how to google properly. (Read the full story here.)

It goes on to examine a few ideas and theories about the next generation and their relationship with the Internet. But, before I jump into just what I think, I’d like to open the floor (or the comments as it were) to you!

And, if reading the article isn’t enough to get you talking, here are some conversation starters:

• Has your organization made strategic decisions or marketing with the expectation that youth are online and plugged in?
• What is the biggest lesson you’ve learned about approaching any age demographic, be it young people or not, with online content?
• Where are you on the Internet-dependent scale?

I come across so many great conversations, ideas, and resources all over the web every day. Here are some of the most interesting things I’ve found recently (as of August 16th). You can join the conversations in the comments, or click through to the original posts to find what others are saying.

To follow more of the things I find online, you can follow @amysampleward on Twitter (which is just a blog and resource feed), or find me on Delicious (for all kinds of bookmarks).

• Openness or How Do You Design for the Loss of Control? | Blog | design mind – "Openness is the mega-trend for innovation in the 21st century, and it remains the topic du jour for businesses of all kinds. Granted, it has been on the agenda of every executive ever since Henry Chesbrough’s seminal Open Innovation came out in 2003. However, as several new books elaborate upon the concept from different perspectives, and a growing number of organizations have recently launched ambitious initiatives to expand the paradigm to other areas of business, I thought it might be a good time to reframe “Open” from a design point of view."
• The internet: is it changing the way we think? | Technology | The Observer – "American writer Nicholas Carr's claim that the internet is not only shaping our lives but physically altering our brains has sparked a lively and ongoing debate, says John Naughton. Below, a selection of writers and experts offer their opinion."
• Emergency Social Data Survey Results – americanredcross's posterous – Check out the slides and data from the American Red Cross's survey on Emergency Social Data!
• In Case of Emergency, Update Your Facebook Status | Beth’s Blog – "In January, after the Haiti Earthquake struck, if you were participating on social networks, you couldn’t help but notice the many, many Tweets and Facebook status messages about the Haiti Earthquake. The messages included pleas for support or retweeting the news, but beyond that the stream included pleas from people on the ground in Haiti asking for emergency assistance or letting loved ones and friends know they’re okay. A new American Red Cross survey shows many web users would turn to social media to seek help for themselves or others during emergencies—and they expect first responders to be listening."
• Monitoring and Evaluation NEWS » Most Significant Change (MSC) – "The most significant change (MSC) technique is a form of participatory monitoring and evaluation. It is participatory because many project stakeholders are involved both in deciding the sorts of change to be recorded and in analysing the data. It is a form of monitoring because it occurs throughout the program cycle and provides information to help people manage the program. It contributes to evaluation because it provides data on impact and outcomes that can be used to help assess the performance of the program as a whole."
• Transparency: Where the Stuff on the Internet Comes From – Transparency – GOOD – "Every day, thousands of stories are passed around the internet on blogs and via Twitter. A new study by Journalism.org has examined the source of those stories. It turns out, most of them come from old-school media. We may like to share information via Twitter, but the information we share comes from the morning's newspaper. This is a look at where blogs and Twitter users are getting their stories, and what kind of stories their users are most likely to link to."
• Marshall Ganz: Why Stories Matter « Friends of Justice – "Learning skills and practices is not like learning a formula; it’s more like learning how to ride a bicycle. You can read 10 books about it or listen to someone lecture about it all day, but how do you really start learning to ride a bicycle? You get on. And you fall. That’s how you learn practices. That’s how you learn organizing." Thanks to Joe Solomon (@engagejoe) for the link!

My latest post for the Stanford Social Innovation Review is now up – you can check it out and join the conversation there; or read the repost below!

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Last year I used the metaphor of “gardening vs landscaping” to outline some of the key attributes I believe make for successful community building, on or offline. The basic idea:

The Gardener creates an ecosystem open to change, available to new groups, and full of fresh opportunities to emerge naturally.  The approach is focused on organic collaboration and growth for the entire community.  The gardener is simply there to help, cultivate, and clear the weeds if/when they poke up.

The Landscaper creates an ecosystem that matches a preconceived design or pattern.  The approach is focused on executing a preconceived environment, regardless of how natural or organic it may be for the larger area.  The landscaper is there to ensure that everything stays just as planned.

Lately, I have had the opportunity to chat with various colleagues like Bonnie Koenig, Debra Askanase and others about the topic of cross-platform community building. The way I look at it, the issues and best practices are just as clearly linked to the idea of gardening as other community building approaches are in my previous post. Here’s what I mean:

Cross-Platform Community Building :: Tending to Multiple Flowerbeds

The internet is huge, there are literally countless platforms where people are forming community. Your organization, whether it has an organizational presence there or not, has people interested in your services, programs, mission or cause talking about it and everything else all over the social web – from mainstream networks like Facebook and Twitter to niche communities on Ning or even forums (some branded, some not).  As much as the temptation may be to want to call out to everyone interested to join you in your place, the best thing you can do is recognize that not everyone flourishes and thrives in the same place, with the same treatment, and even the same amount of visibility. We should approach our community building work with the intention to create thrivable community on and offline, and in order to do that successfully we need to take time to recognize which elements contribute to various groups and segments of our community thriving.

Let’s look at the way a gardener can tend to multiple flowerbeds in one big backyard and the way that translates to our work of building community across the web:

Analysis and evaluation: the garden is visiting all of the flowerbeds or cultivated areas of the yard (and all the ground in between!) so has the best view to continually evaluate and analyze what’s working and what it isn’t, where things are dry or over-watered, where the weeds are cropping up and where the birds and bugs are hanging out. The garden can make decisions based on all this data to keep the whole yard in a thrivable place, but also recognizes the need to give part of that evaluation opportunity to the plants themselves by giving them a chance without assuming one can only grow in certain conditions or prefers being near only certain others.

Cross-pollinating: just like a bee, as the gardener goes from each bed to the other, she is helping cross-pollinate the plants; in our case, this means sharing conversations, ideas, and insights across the greater network. Highlighting opportunities, events, or conversations of interest across various platforms to prevent groups operating in silos when they may be interested in discussing the same/similar issues – the difference is the preference for where online to talk, not necessarily what to talk about.

Transplanting: as part of the analysis and cross-pollination, the gardener is also taking steps to ensure that if a plant is really not thriving in it’s current location, that it can have the chance to try out another place in the garden – maybe one with more or less sunshine, fewer or maybe even more plants nearby, anything to give it a new opportunity to grow. In our use of community building, this can be seen simply in sharing the links between platforms when sharing content or stories from one to another, or by highlighting the needs of users or groups to the larger network.

What do you think? What would you add about cross-platform community building? What issues is your organization facing or examples can you share?

Want to keep talking about community building across platforms? Join me for a monthly online chat!

I come across so many great conversations, ideas, and resources all over the web every day. Here are some of the most interesting things I’ve found recently (as of August 11th). You can join the conversations in the comments, or click through to the original posts to find what others are saying.

To follow more of the things I find online, you can follow @amysampleward on Twitter (which is just a blog and resource feed), or find me on Delicious (for all kinds of bookmarks).

• Social Versus Entrepreneur – "Grammatically, the word social modifies entrepreneur, indicating a social entrepreneur is one whose entrepreneurial activity is social in nature. I think about the word social as referring to social welfare, be it poverty alleviation, environmental protection, or any type of intervention that benefits humanity in what has traditionally been thought of as a charitable way. With so many new ventures founded every day, it is becoming increasingly more difficult for me to decipher what the social purposes of some initiatives are. This is a significant problem for the social enterprise movement."
• Submit your Case Study to the Global Digital Activism Data Set! – "The goal of the Global Digital Activism Data Set (GDADS) project is to turn qualitative case studies of digital activism around the world into a non-proprietary quantitative machine-readable data set in spreadsheet form that will facilitate the work of scholars in this new field." Learn more and submit your case study today!
• http://manage-volunteers.org/ – "As far as we know, it is the first such comprehensive listing of options for causes, nonprofits, and NGOs who need tools to manage volunteers. Organizations that rely on volunteering can compare and contrast the wide variety of volunteer management software available, and more quickly identify the software that is right for them. Software developers may also gain better recognition and hopefully more customers by having their software listed on the database. <br />
  <br />
  Our goal with this site is to help nonprofits and other volunteer organizations grow and thrive by giving them easy access to the<br />
  resources they need to better manage their time and volunteers. <br />
  <br />
  Our goal with this site is to help nonprofits and other volunteer organizations grow and thrive by giving them easy access to the<br />
  resources they need to better manage their time and volunteers."<br />
  <br />
  Check it out and provide your feedback!
• The 2010 Social Networking Map / Flowtown (@flowtown) – I love maps and I work in social media; so I always love the maps of social media! Here is an updated version of XKCD's Map of Online Communities; with updated numbers and networks.
• Four social media lessons from the New York Times | Creativity_Unbound – "If you look at the Times from another perspective – that of partnerships, social media behavior, and content – the company’s actually a shining example of how to hold onto core values and evolve at the same time. Here are four things it’s done that serve as examples for any traditional company, including advertising agencies."

Two weeks ago I shared a couple reflections that I had on a recent #4change chat about community building – the major output from that chat and the follow up blog post was the call I heard for a regular opportunity to talk about community building. So, I said that I’d take the step to host a monthly chat if people were interested in joining; and you said YES!

Monthly Community Builder Chats

Why: In addition to the level of interest from people on this blog and from the #4change chats in the past, I’m looking forward to having a regular opportunity to connect with others working to build community on and offline, share ideas and tips, and really start creating a community of the community builders in a way that gets us all out of the various email lists or forums and into a more public forum.

The #4Change team that has managed/supported/hosted the monthly chats for over a year now has recently come to a very interesting transition phase – there are quite a few options on the table and many directions that we could take, including a partnership with Internet4Change. I’m really interested in what happens next, and not just because I am part of the team but also because I think we can be a case study in ourselves of the changing landscape and processes of online collaboration. I want to keep these chats associated with the #4change network so that more people can find and participate, we can more directly share across other topics, and these chats can stay bundled together with anything/everything else that comes next in the growth and evolution of #4change, whether as part of the larger Internet4Change or not. Exciting times!

When: Thursday, August 19, at 9-10 pm UK (1 pm Pacific, 4 pm Eastern)

I know that at this point it is just a matter of picking a time and making it happen. I’m willing to do just that, but want to note that I’m open to having rotating times or multiple chats to better accommodate the fact that we have a global community (and that we all need to sleep at some point!). I also think we can start with an hour-long slot and use it to stay on topic and drive conversation without people spending a long time with a chat.

Where: Click here for the live-chat (launched on the 19th)

I plan to continue exploring the best options for these chats, and welcome your feedback. For this first chat I want to use CoverItLive because 1. it’s a tool that I know works, 2. has twitter integration, 3. does not require installation for anyone to participate. The link above will work to join the chat on the 19th and will work to access the transcript when the chat closes.

What: Community Building Across Platforms

For this first chat, I wanted to go ahead and pick a topic so that we had something to drive with. In the future, I’d love to have others suggest topics that they working on or want to explore with the group.  Even though I’ve selected the topic for this first chat, I haven’t picked the questions that will guide our conversation! Please share the questions you’d like to explore by adding a comment here ahead of time and I’ll use those to feed our discussion.

Really looking forward to starting a monthly conversation on community building with you – feel free to use the #4change hashtag and if you’d like to suggest something else, go for it! Perhaps #4change.commbuild or something? Let me know

See you on the 19th!

As readers of this blog know, I often mention the idea of “movement building.” There is enormous opportunity and potential for creating real, lasting impact in our world by operating in a movement-oriented way with our programs, events, campaigns, and calls to action. Collaboration and partnerships can easily come together and be successful under and umbrella that puts the work of all those involved toward the movement, instead of the one-time effort or project.  Scale is incredibly important to creating movements, and we are all still learning how we scale our work to a global level.

Introducing the Global Scale wiki!

Bonnie Koenig and I have had some great conversations about how we have seen and how we have tackled scale in our work.  In those conversations, we realized that we probably had some good examples to share and case studies to provide; but we also realized that there were many, many more people we wanted to be having the conversation with! That’s what led us to start the Global Scale wiki, and we hope that you’ll join us…

With this wiki, we are aiming to create a resource for NGO practitioners where guidelines, lessons learned, tips, links and other help for ‘scaling up’ effective programs can be found.

Today, we’re hoping that by sharing this invitation via the blogosphere (and the corresponding tweets and emails) that you’ll share your ideas and enthusiasm with us – and join us on the wiki. Check out Bonnie’s announcement, too!

Join & Contribute

This wiki is a community learning space, where we recognize that we are all still learning, testing, and experimenting; and where we are all in a position to share and learn.  We hope you’ll take this as an open invitation to jump right in with your own case studies, lessons or best practices and also comment if there are questions you hope others can address.

Visit the Global Scale wiki to dive in today: http://globalscale.wikispaces.com

Looking forward to sharing with you there!

As I recently announced, I’m collaborating with Matt Chevy on a redesign of this website to freshen up the design, make presentations, resources and case studies all easier to find, and surface the rich conversations taking place in the comments. Last week was focused on feedback from readers and wow: I got a lot of really thoughtful, valuable comments! Thanks to everyone who shared opinions and those who I know will continue to weigh in.  Today, I want to share some of the core elements that I heard from you all and things that are driving the work Matt and I are doing to improve this space.

Redesign wrap-up: What you said, Where we’re going

Last week’s posts had three topics: Content, Comments and Extras.  The comments and feedback really helped clarify thinking, confirm ideas I had, and make clear the opportunities for improvement. Here are some of the high-level key points. If I’ve missed something, I hope you’ll let me know!

• Categories and Tags: Using content categories like (presentation, case study, opinion and so on) can help people find the type of content they are after, as well as categories and tags that indicate topics, conferences and tools. We’ll be using these to a much higher degree to help surface and sort content much more effectively.
• Diverse Content: Most people noted that they come to the site for case studies and presentations as well as more opinion-style pieces. But I also took note that there’s a great opportunity to diversify content further by sharing short updates, news or reviews to jump start conversation. Look for that!
• Where’s the Action: There’s lots of opportunity to improve the real-time-ness of the site. Many folks recommended/requested ways to see what posts were most popular/read/commented on. I have a worry there about the cycle of because a post is listed as popular, it then gets more visits, which then makes it to the list of popular posts – but I trust we can work on that.  And focusing on where the action is also means highlighting posts that are getting a lot of comments so folks can find conversations that are taking place. Definitely something we’ll be sure to tackle!
• The RSS Connection: A comment from Emily got me thinking about the different experience readers have when they follow the blog via RSS opposed to visiting the site itself. There are a lot of RSS subscribers and I want to make sure that the redesign tackles not just the design of the site, but the way content can be more valuable to all readers. This means brainstorming ways to integrate changes to the content so readers anywhere find it even more valuable.
• More than Posts: Many comments touched on the fact that this site is about more than the blog posts so there’s great opportunity to bring other spaces and resources into the spotlight, whether it is the public NPTech RSS dashboard, books, or other resources – or content and conversations on Facebook and Twitter.
• Ability to Navigate: Right now, the site really operates with stock WordPress options, but from the feedback last week I know there are a lot of readers interested in being able to navigate the site/through content in a much more elegant way. For example, being able to connect to similar content types or topics from post to post, using suggestion widgets to generate the “you may also like” recommendations, and so on. I’m excited to try some of these options out!

This list gives an overview of some of the issues and ideas Matt and I will use as a point of departure for redesigning this site. I’ll keep you posted as things develop and let you know in advance before the new site appears. But, you can always leave feedback either in the comments or in email – any time.

Thanks again to everyone who provided feedback last week! I’m really excited for making this a more valuable space

Changents is hosting a contest with P&G Give Health calling for bloggers to share why they are clean water Change Agents. What’s in it for bloggers? A few great things:

• winner joins a P&G Children’s Safe Drinking Water Program expedition
• possibility to win $15,000 for your favorite charity that’s working in the front lines of the global water crisis
• every vote for your entry means P&G will donate a day’s worth of clean drinking water (2L) to a person in need in a developing country

The contest runs most of this month, so register your blog today and start rallying supporters to help get donated water to those in need, and join the Children’s Safe Drinking Water expedition!

Learn more about Clean Water Blogivation!

Have you signed up? If so, leave your blog URL below so we can be sure to check out your post and support you!