Pollenizer’s focus is on building web businesses, you can see that through the focus of our site, our blog posts and our experiences. However, something you might not know, is that many of us are also quite interested in the impact that technology has on civil society (NGO’s, not-for-profit).
Today, I had the privilege of sharing a panel with Alberto Arévalos (Communications Director for Google in LatinAmerica) and Alec Oxenford (Founder of DeRemate.com, DineroMail and OLX amongst others) during the launch of a series of Technology Workshops for NGOs (in Spanish). I was invited by Juan Cruz Mones Cazón who is heading Idealistas.org in Argentina. Google Argentina generously hosted the event and provided snacks and coffee. The talk was all in Spanish of course, which was a challenge in itself as it’s been almost 10 years since I last spoke in front of an audience in my mother tongue language 🙂
I was asked three questions:
1) How can new technologies help increase the impact of social organisations?
2) How to use the web to involve citizens in social change?
3) Which do you think will be the revolutions to come with new technologies?
I was given only 30 minutes for my talk and the Q&A session. I have to say that I am the only one that followed the format, both Alberto and Alec had more “free flow” interventions (I saw that Google was recording the event so if it appears on GoogleVideo or YouTube, I will link to it). They had very interesting points and made clear to the 60 or so representatives from NGOs that using the web is simpler now than ever with blogs, GoogleApps, AdSense, etc.
I agree, blogs are very simple to set up and allow NGOs to give their own voice to their message and to also give voice to the voiceless, their consituencies, and more.
Technorati had, in their latest “State of the Blogosphere 2008” numbers that are mind boggling: 133 million blogs, 900,000 new posts every 24h … With numbers like that, it’s easy for your message to get “lost” in the sea of information, so you need to find additional ways so that it doesn’t happen. NGOs need to participate in groups, forums, social networks that are relevant to the issues they want to address. The ability to reach large numbers of users or focussed groups that are passionate about specific topics is now possible without much effort. A topic often ignored in these discussions though it the issue of language. If you are trying to reach a wide audience to discuss an issue of global impact, let’s say like climate change, you need to reach not just the English speaking audiences but the other main languages on the net, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, etc. (for the potential audiences, just look at Phil’s post about his talk and check the numbers he talks about for Chinese or Russian sites).
New technologies are certainly reducing the cost of adoption, especially with GoogleApps, Salesforce or Confluence and other wikis (all have free access or licenses for NGOs and non-profits) so even very small non-profits have now access to tools and applications that were previously only available to the largest ones or companies.
New technologies are not only used to convey your message, they are also used to strengthen the democratic process. I made a specific reference to OpenAustralia, a project started by my good friend Matthew Landauer. OpenAustralia is a non-partisan website which aims to make it easy for people to keep tabs on their representatives in Parliament. Bringing transparency to the work of Parliament is fundamental in a democratic process and this is an example on how technology enables citizens and organizations to be able to understand what their representatives are doing on their behalf. And get historical information about their positions on any topic that got discussed in Parliament. BTW all the source code for OpenAustralia is free and open source.
Finally, on the topic of the next revolutions, I can’t dissociate the revolutions from the challenges that we will face with new technologies and I couldn’t focus exclusively on web/software as there are some very challenging new times ahead in the area of synthetic biology. I am certainly not an expert in this field however I can clearly see the ethical challenges that we face in this rapidely evolving field and I was pleased to see how some scientists are getting inspiration from the software movement, in particular the open source one.
The issue of privacy (already recognise through habeas data in certain countries) in a more and more interconnected and digital world is certainly something that the civil society has an enormous amount to contribute to.
I think it’s evident that mobile platforms like Android or the iPhone are already revolutionising how people communicate, how people interact and how people shop however I thought it was important to mention it.
It was a very interesting session (IMHO) and the mentions of OpenAustralia and Open Source drew the most attention. I believe that civil society and NGOs need to get more involved and make better use of the amazing new opportunities that are out there and it’s our job, as technologists, to help them understand what they can do with all these possibilities.