The Participatory Nonprofit?

gThe above video is one of the many social networking strategies that The Genocide Intervention Network used to transform itself from a small student group to national non-profit.    This case study, "Using Network to Stop Genocide," by Ian Boothe was published on Idealware a few days ago.  Go read it. 

Here's the key takeaways for me:

* The capacity to be successful is an investment in time

"While none of these approaches cost a lot of money, they certainly require staff time to support. Social networking requires commitment -- you can't set up a MySpace profile and then walk away. You have to approve new friend requests, respond to messages, post your latest action alerts, send out bulletins, keep your profile up-to-date, and more. You’re not creating a billboard, but rather starting a conversation -- you have to be willing to respond."

Taking it a little deeper, organizations should not go in the other direction - and be strategic in friending people.  The reality is that our brains only have the capacity to manage a limited number of relationships – each of various qualities. (More here)

* The mindshift to be successful

"There's a mentality shift required to fully engage with social networking and community content sites: sometimes, you have to let go."

This point really resonates with what Allison H. Fine writes about in her book Momentum.   The concept of openness.   Fine, a self-identified “recovering proprietary thinker,”  offers personal insights in opening up to new ideas and letting go of information, hierarchy and "proprietary" thinking.  The book includes a "Connected Quiz, a set of reflective questions that can help an activist think about how well they or their organization is connecting with others -- something to think about before jumping into the tools.

Another point of intersection here for me is Henry Jenkins recently published 72-page white paper "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century."   He describes what Ian observed what happened with his youth audience. 

Some notes from the white paper, I'm still digesting it (not being a digital native, I had to print it out)

According to recent study from Pew Internet and American Life project, more than one-half of teens have created media content and roughly one-third have shared ocntent.   These teens are actively involved what Jenkins calls "participatory culture" - a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one's creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices.  A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection to one another.

The paper gives examples of different forms of participatory culture:

-  Affiliations (memberships - formal and informal - in online communities)
-  Expressions (media creation, mashups, etc)
-  Collaborative Problem Solving - (working toether in teams - informal/formal to comlpete tasks and develop new knowledge.
-  Circulations - shaping the flow of media (e.g. blogging. vlogging, and podcasting)

The papers points out the benefits of these forms of participatory culture, including peer-to-peer learning, changed attitude toward intellectual property, skills valued in the modern workplace, etc.  Some argue that young people acquire these key skills by interacting with popular culture.  Jenkins points to some barriers to acquisition and makes a case for pedgogical interventions.

He also identifies the new literacies and skills -- and while he is talking about this in the context of children and education ... it makes me wonder about adult learners who are not digital natives and how they acquire these skills too.  Adults who work for nonprofits and feeling pressured to adopt and incorporate social networking tools and techniques.

The skill set:

Play — the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving
Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation
and discovery
Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world
processes
Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient
details.
Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand
mental capacities
Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with
others toward a common goal
Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information
sources
Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information
across multiple modalities
Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information
Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting
multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.

Comments

[iwilker]

Oy, there's a lot here to digest -- thanks for this tremendously useful post.

I've sort of bet the farm on this notion of "participatory nonprofits" -- all my work is focused on bringing these kinds of initiatives to life. It's really helpful have summaries of all the case studies and best-practices research being done; I need to soak up lessons very rapidly if I want my stuff to succeed.

[Roz Trieber]

What a wonderful summary of my whole philosophy. I currently teach people how to successfully use collaborative learning approaches; especially the facilitation of Improvisation structures as an additional tool for teaching at all levels and training people in organizations to be more productive, confident, and valued.

Your summary of the skill set is most appreciated.
Thank you.

[CCM Arts Admin]

Great comments! This is a lot of info...much of which we've covered in my arts admin program. These ideas on social networking are very interesting. Nice post!