Social Media & Society: An example taken from “Civil Society 2.0”

Alexandros Papageorgiou, AU 7On line media consultant @ Google

August 20th 2009

Time Magazine, December 2006

The Green RevolutionJune 12 2009 - …

IRANIAN PRESS… & ON THE WEB…

citizens 2.0 = the new journalists, new opinion makers ?

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Over the past few years, we've seen politicians and campaigns from around the globe use YouTube to broadcast their platforms, debate their opponents, and engage with their supporters. Following this trend,

YouTube has recently become home to the German elections, as German citizens prepare to vote for a new government in September.

In a partnership with ZDF, the second-largest public TV broadcaster in Germany (13.1% market share), we created a special channel and concept for the occasion: Open Reichstag. As the name implies, the goal of this channel is to open the doors of the Reichstag, the parliament building in Berlin, to dialog and discussion, encouraging direct interaction between the YouTube community and members of the different political parties in Germany. For a start, we've decided to turn things around and have well-known politicians of the six key parties pose a "Sunday question" to the YouTube community. Here are a couple of interesting and creative responses:

The first citizen-powered interview series

YouTube and Google partnered with the Politico and WJLA to give Virginian voters the opportunity to submit text or video questions for the state's three Democratic gubernatorial candidates: Terry McAuliffe, Creigh Deeds, and Brian Moran. Submissions took place on a new tool called Google Moderator, which allows you not only to submit questions or ideas, but also to vote on the submissions of others, moving them up or down in importance. Thousands of Virginians took part in the interactive interview, and last night WJLA and the Politico aired the results, in which all three candidates answered the top questions on television.

As our CNN/YouTube Debates demonstrated during the 2007 presidential primary season, the web allows citizen engagement to play a prominent role in the country's most important public forums. Now with Moderator, the people's voice can be an even more powerful force in surfacing the issues that matter most to the public at large. We've used Moderator in our "Senator of the Week" series on YouTube, and President Obama employed Moderator in his "Open for Questions" initiative back in April. We look forward to taking this model to other local, national, and international elections.

Spotlight on a cool YouTube channel doing innovative things with video in the developing world: Video Volunteers. This non-profit group is creating a self-described "CNN or BBC for the one billion people living on less than two dollars a day."

Their idea is pretty simple, albeit not easy to pull off. Basically, they're trying to empower people living in slums and villages around the world by giving them the tools to produce video content. By enabling local communities to create videos telling their story with affordable video and editing equipment, Video Volunteers hopes to set up a "global community media network."

They're doing amazing work already in India. Take a look at this video, in which young kids take action on the lack of a playground in their neighborhood:

http://www.youtube.com/charitywater

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4hqWfp3374

http://www.youtube.com/youthmovements

Howcast created the videos in conjunction with the first-ever Alliance of Youth Movements Summit where social media experts and delegates from 17 international youth organizations met in New York City to discuss how young people can leverage social media and technology to end violence, oppression and human rights abuses around the world.

Facebook’s causes aplication Twitter based charity events: Twitter users use a message

that puts a dollar sign before the name of their charity or cause of choice. Then they receive a direct message linking them to where they can make donations

Non profit organizations lead the way in social media adoption (society new communications research)

Facebook Causes application: To collect donations raise awareness and gather petition

signaturesProject for awsome:

Opportunities & benefits of social networking• Outreach to those who would never come into an agency• Education on relevant topics• Demographic survey• Potential increased donor base• Potential increase in funding opportunities and donors• Ability for partnership opportunities with other service

providers