IGNITER

It’s go time.

ChangeMedium Toronto is slated for October 24th at MaRS. What is it? Read more to find out. Want a hand in it? Leave a comment below.

What?
ChangeMedium is an initiative to provoke public micro-messaging as a medium for change. Public micro-messaging (e.g. Twitter) is emerging as the most accessible, participatory public medium in history. Bringing the open and emergent properties of the web to the global reach of text messaging is already showing great potential for public benefit. But we’ve only begun to understand what’s happening let alone build an infrastructure to make the most of this medium. Enter ChangeMedium Toronto.

ChangeMedium Toronto is an event to explore the frontiers, gather community, and make the medium. It will be a simple format with 2 tracks – one for researchers and one for hackers. We want to explore the frontiers. What is this medium about? We want to push ourselves further. What are the implications for change? We want to contribute to making it better. Let’s make it happen.

Why?
The pace of change is stunning. Researchers, hackers and makers are already involved in understanding and applying this medium. Whether for fun, profit, or benefit we’re creating this as we go. ChangeMedium Toronto is our inaugural effort to convene this community and introduce and provoke the potential for change.

Who?
ChangeMedium emerged out of the work of a group of people passionate about the world play with Twitter as a platform for change. The Toronto event itself was provoked by Frances Westley and Renjie Bitauld of SiG@Waterloo, Lisa Torjman and Allyson Hewitt of SiG@MaRS, Ryan Coleman, Peter Flaschner, and James Walker.

Of course we’re just beginning and what ends up will be a product of the community. Have an idea? Want to play a role? Want to know more? Leave a comment and get the ball rolling.

Update (090811-20:51ET): The end felt incomplete – some more detail added.

I’ve been getting some questions about how public micro-messaging is different than other social media. Why is it not just another tool?

While the flip answer of “well it’s public and micro and that’s the difference” is correct what is more elusive is how that is changing things – an inflection in the web – and society.

So let’s start with ‘micro’. Micro is about sms – the reach of sms means every mobile phone on the planet – or about 4 billion potential contributors. Being on a mobile phone also allows for real-time publishing from almost anywhere. Micro also makes it easy to publish – with the least time commitment or audience expectation of any form of publishing there is.

With public though we get to the real shift. When publishing a micro-message you’re publishing it to… well no-one and yet everyone as anyone can read it. This has been a big part of the rise of blogging effectively bridges the power of the web with the reach of mobile.

Together, these features then encourage a unique form of publishing that is:

• spontaneous
• interest-driven
• succinct
• frequent
• anytime-anywhere.

As people publish through this medium they create an often uniquely authentic public expression of who they are, what they are doing and what they are interested in. To this we add the ability to reference another account, link, or topic in the public micro-message itself.

In the case of accounts, this allows for 1-1 conversation, in the case of topics it allows for many to many conversation, and in the case of links creates a dynamic layer of context around the link itself – a thread of free, interest driven public expression. In isolation these things are not so novel, but when we recognize them as a public collective we start seeing some new patterns emerging that point to a new use and form of the web.

These interconnected messages offer new interest-driven pathways for discovery that are constantly evolving. It’s a map of consciousness of sorts – based on spontaneous human interest. These pathways seamlessly weave between accounts, sites, and topics. While those new pathways are an easy invitation to get lost for some, they are definitely changing how public micro-messaging users experience the web. Some examples are:

• primary source for notification of current events
• primary source for new links of interest
• channel for relevant new connections to people and initiatives
• opportunities for new collaborations

Clearly this isn’t just a new tool.

It is instead:

• a new multi-facted, layer of personal public expression
• changing how we receive information
• opening new pathways for discovery
• lubricating trust and relationship

… which in turn is:

• opening us up as individuals and society to the new and the now in ways we’ve never had
• fostering new connections and collaboration
• making the web more relevant to us than ever before.

And in the end it’s just  the most simple, human, public expression we have. Who would have thought there could be so much in so little?

I’m looking forward to this year’s Social Capital Markets conference. Last year I came way with a sense of a movement – a long term movement that was working with the balance of social and financial objectives in service of a better world for all. I’m sure this year will do much of the same – bringing the best of the movement together to share their progress and inspire those who are looking to explore ‘the intersection of money and meaning’. If you are interested in this space, it’s the place to be.

This year though, I’m going with a more ambitious agenda. Jessica Margolin hit on something in her SoCap09 post – encapsulated in these 2 quotes:

“For me, the debate question was upside-down. It should be: How can we maximize financial returns given our drive to maximize social returns.”

“The question isn’t how to fit what we love into the structure of our money-making, the question is how to be productive given our need to engage with our lives.”

Since the last conference we’ve seen the depths of shifts underway in the financial system come along with continuing instability in our political and ecological systems. If we weren’t clear last year the core systems of our society are in transition. And since last year’s conference, we’ve seen the birth of the most accessible, participatory medium in history and the start of what Om Malik calls an interaction society. While it’s great to see people working on shifting our existing institutions and systems, we’re coming to this conference with a capacity for reinvention unlike any time in history.

The opportunity to me in this gathering is to create a space for a new conversation… a sub-track for folks interested in hacking new systems that support a civilization founded on the answer to more human questions than how do we maximize production.

This week’s #SoCap09 twitter chat should help kick that off. We’ll be looking into the question of how is social media changing change? I’m curious to see what threads emerge and what we can take into the conversation at the conference.

The game is changing more than we realize and in ways we don’t yet understand… so let’s ask some questions… let’s hack some solutions… let’s get to it.

Image via Wikipedia

We’ve become inundated with destinations, places to go, placess to post, places to read and place to make change… and the effort of aggregators seem largely only to have added another destination. And every destination seems to want us to have a conversation there. Well that’s not really working either because there are just too many places asking us for conversation.

Twitter however seems to be changing the game – for the first time enabling many to actually reduce the number of sources they monitor for information and the number of destinations they post at. And it’s also a universal place to have a conversation because the conversation doesn’t happen in a destination, it happens in public, wherever people happen to be.

Couple this with a movement to open data sets, like the Social Actions API, and I believe we are beginning to see a remediation of the great disintermediator that is the web.

Sticking with ‘social actions’ for a minute, here’s what I’d love to see.

1. A data set of things I can do to make a positive social impact or help those trying to do the same. This is an aggregation of the stuff I can actually do on all these destinations.
2. Associate every action with a micro-url that is branded to indicate it the url links to a social action. Urls are the universal element of the web. A branded url gives me an idea of what to expect is behind that link.
3. When I click on a that micro-url take me to the source, and offer up the context I need to evaluate the action through a header bar in the page itself (like hootsuite etc.). What I want to know are things like what is being said about the link generally, by my friends, and what it is related to. Give me the context quickly but do it in a way that doesn’t take me away from the source.
4. For the sources of actions, don’t make me have to come to your site to contribute to the discussion. Enable the discussion in the community (e.g. org, issue, and action related threads) and showcase that discussion on your site around the action or issue you are engaging on.

So for example, here’s what could have happened with #iranelections.

As the issue showed up, organizations for the whom the topic was mission relevant could have started tweeting, and spawned a widget on their site that displayed a filtered stream of #iranelection – posts from their prefered sources. If they wanted to spawn a related conversation they could then have created a new hashtag (or #iranelections.sub or !sub – or some other hash tag variant). If they had specific actions related to the cause they could have put them in the open data set and let them out in the #iranelection stream under a micro-url that is recognized as a social action link whether the organization was known or not. Someone following #iranelections could then have concentrated on actionable items coming through the stream, clicked on any that seemed interesting, and immediately been taken to where they can do something to make a difference with the context necessary to decide, quickly, if they wanted to take action.

Bottom-line, this would help surface actionable responses to any issue, make it easier for people to vet those actions on the fly, and increase speed and depth of actions taken on any issue. Interestingly, the pieces are mostly there, we just haven’t connected them. I love the idea of act.ly or do.gd as micro-urls for social action. SocialActions and more recently AllforGood have launched social action datasets and API’s. And finally some SocialActions developers have created some base code for a header bar. Even the engines to filter, embed, and even enable new hashtags exists and what doesn’t isn’t particularly hard to create.

If we got this right, I’d love to see how it could help things happen both in response to the crises that flare and the core issues that persist.

Think this would work? Have ideas to make it better? Doing something about it? Leave a note in comments. Maybe there’s a community out there that can stitch this together.

Twitter is giving rise to the most accessible, participatory public medium in history. The implications for social change, innovation, and entrepreneurship are huge but hardly explored. In the coming paragraphs I explain what I see and call out to you, to all, to help surface what’s happening and understand how it can help us create the world we want. I care because we need change like never before. If that matters to you too, please read, comment, and share. Let’s see where this goes.

What’s going on with Twitter (now at over 32m users – up from just 1.6m a year ago) is the emergence of a new medium based on the public micro-message – the most accessible, participatory public medium in history.

Think about it. That’s huge.

It’s the potential for 4B people to post, read, and respond to each other. Neither TV, radio, telephone, email, or the web have the same potential in terms of accessibility and participation.

Enabled by its ‘micro’ (140 character) and ‘public’ attributes, the medium fosters a communications DNA that makes it a hotbed for interest-driven sharing, discovery, connections and spontaneous collaboration. Being micro, it is also SMS compatible making it work with the most distributed communication technology we have – the mobile phone.

Social change is about people, engagement, and systems. Already, examples in citizen journalism and fundraising demonstrate some of the unique potential for real-time communication and spontaneous collaboration.  #mumbai and #hudson, broke news and photos of the Mumbai terrorist attacks and the crash landing of a United Airlines flight on the hudson river well before any other media were able to report it. #daniela raised $16,000 for a needy family in less than a week.  And in less than 18 days, over a dozen people peer produced #hohoTO, a sold-out party for over 600 people that raised $25,000 and 2t of food for the Daily Bread Foodbank. Taking it further, reasearch is underway into how it Twitter changes how we respond to disasters and even politicians are embracing the transparency. If this is what be happening with 5, 10, 20 million users,  what’s possible when we’re dealing with 100m or a billion users around the world?

Is it utopia and the solution to all our problems? Of course not. But we are talking about a medium with core attributes that make it the more compatible with social change and innovation than any other. This is not about ‘tool or strategy’ this is about the birth of a medium – and its potential as a medium for change.

Already there are some great starts at the infrastructure (SMOB, FETHER, tr.im, rsscloud, laconi.ca etc), standards (TwitterData, MicroSyntax,etc.) and usage questions (Kanter, Bravo, Wikipedia, etc.). But we’re just starting to scratch the service. Getting to the roots of this and how we can use it to make change needs a focus on social change and a coordinated strategy. Key tracks for that are:

• surfacing what’s already happening in terms of use, research, and potential for social change;
• studying the impacts and implication of the medium on making change; and
• encouraging systems and standards that optimize the medium for public benefit (more on that in my previous post).

So let’s get to it. This medium is here to stay and the potential for change making is profound. What have you seen? What do you think? “What are you doing?” Please do comment, share and let’s take this forward.