Communications for Development

• Designing for Better Health: Simple Solutions Nudging Extraordinary Change | Changemakers
• RFP-Ronald McDonald youth

• YouTube – IWHC Partner Bafana Khumalo Discusses the Movement for Gender Equity in South Africa

• Three Things You Don't Know About AIDS in Africa – Esquire

• A Few Good Donor Management Tools

• Not-for-profit Resources | Personal Democracy Forum
• FOR HER ITs THE BIG ISSUE Evidence Report-en.pdf sanitation and women from WASH

I love this post from Cause Global, an excerpt:

As a professor of introductory anthropology at Kansas State University, Wesch says he has a “front row seat” from which to watch new cultural trends emerge from the youngest adult generation, and for the past two-and-a-half years, Wesch has been inviting his students to help him analyze the vast YouTube community.

After trawling through mega-gigs of content, watching hours of videos and posting videos of their own, Wesch says, he and his students “are finding that the same conditions of ease and anonymity that enable people to get snarky online” can also encourage them to participate in meaningful and collaborative new projects. In fact, says Wesch, YouTube and social media can mitigate the cultural tension between teens’ conflicting needs for independence and community by offering them “connection without constraints.” What looks like narcissism and individuality is actually a search for identity and recognition, Wesch told the digerati attending this week’s Personal Democracy Forum in Manhattan. “In a society that doesn’t automatically grant identity and recognition, you have to create your own.”

Wesch says he’s hopeful that social media will ease the “narcissistic disengagement” of many young people and encourage them to be more politically and civically engaged. Already, he says, some heroes have emerged—including the anonymous YouTube character who filmed himself giving hugs to strangers in the streets, and One World, the person who wore a Guy Fox mask and used his anonymity as a platform for collaboration, asking people to write messages on the palms of their hands and to hold them up to their Webcams for sharing. Millions of people shared this way, mostly about the need to love one another and to look beyond themselves.

“When I’m using a Webcam,” Wesch explains, “I’m not talking to you, I’m talking to it. When you’re Twittering, you’re not talking to me, you’re talking to it. Or when I’m on Facebook, I’m not talking to you, I’m talking to it.”

The point, says Wesch: When communicating face-to-face, people bring many different versions of themselves into a conversation based on the context of that conversation. “But when you’re sitting in front of a camera, or twittering to hundreds if not thousands of people in a community who you cannot see and who cannot see you, you don’t know who you are talking to or when or in what context, and so [communication via social media] it is forcing a kind of context collapse—a deeper level of self-awareness not present in simple, everyday conversation. People can get deeply self-reflective on YouTube and confessional…and reveal things they would otherwise refuse to reveal, even to their family and close friends.”

Edleman has created a Social Capital Widget.  I have been following widget evolution for some time now, and these cute pieces of HTML code have not totally  caught on, but I think there is a lot of potential.

How does it work?  Say you are filling out email forms to send letters to your legislator on issues like foreign aid spending or Darfur.  But you have to click through each form before sending the email.  With this widget you can easily see multiple action alerts at once, which makes sending your congressman an email quicker and cleaner.  Additionally the widget can live on your desktop, blog or homepage, so you know about new issue votes right when they arise.  Check it out:

But, as you see here, the widget has been designed for the Partnership For America’s Energy Security, a group that advocates for more oil drilling in the U.S.   They have a lovely website thanks to this top PR firm.

It’s ironic that Edelman has trademarked the words “SocialCapital”, a term which by definition should belong to all of society.  According to Robert Putnam, the term refers to  the collective value of all ’social networks’, and the beneifts that arise when these networks to do things for each other.  This synergy is a key component to building democracy and is currently in decline in America.

Here is my hope: that all the social action groups that have people and environmental concerns at heart, with their low-budget websites and clunky messaging, also use tools like this this widget so it easy  for people to take action on legislation that has global benefit.