501c3cast interview

[Peter Deitz]

Hi all,

Corey Pudhorodsky published an 20 minute interview with me late last
night. It turned out real well.

http://www.501c3cast.com/shownotes.asp

All the best,
Peter

[Christine Egger]

Really fantastic, Peter.

I started transcribing as I was listening and thought that posting
these excerpts here would be helpful, not only for those who wouldn't
have time to listen, but also as source material for the website and
"principles and procedures" copy being built out.

And you're right -- George Santayana is famous! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santayana

Christine

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

[What is Social Actions?]

"Social Actions’ goal is to help individuals and orgs use social media
to plan, implement and support peer-to-peer social change campaigns.
They do this by aggregating opportunities to give or get involved with
organizations and also consult with how nonprofits and foundations can
better engage individuals with the missions and causes that they are
working for.

"What we’re trying to do is aggregate actionable opportunities across
a range of social action platforms like Kiva, DonorsChoose,
FirstGiving, Change.org, and others, and then create a single search
interface for people to find their way to the actions across the
sector. We’re looking at a very wide of action, not all of which are
connected to or benefit 501©3 registered charities, I just point out,
although many of them do. So actions defined as, perhaps, a
fundraising campaign that someone can contribute to, initiated by
another individual. It could be a petition that either a nonprofit has
created or an individual has created to gauge interest in a certain
outcome or policy change. It could be an offline meetup where a bunch
of people just go somewhere to protest or make something good happen.
Or it could be just committing on an individual basis to go out and do
something every day – turn your lights off when you’re not in the
house, that sort of thing. So we’re defining action in a very broad
sense. It could also be making a loan to somebody, like through the
Kiva platform – make loans to entrepreneurs in the developing world.
So that we’d consider a social action because there’s some kind of
community uplift that comes out of it."

[Background]

"… slowly but surely came to this idea of adding coherence and
encouraging collaboration among the systems that already existed. And
that’s not been an easy process. I started by saying to the social
action platforms, like Change.org or ChangingthePresent or SixDegrees
– I went to the platforms and said, “Wouldn’t it be great if more
people could find the actions listed on your site? To do that you
should do what bloggers do and create an RSS feed. Incidentally, I’ll
take this RSS feed and I’d like to add it add it to my system that
aggregates actionable opportunities. And so there you had an
opportunity to create the perception of collaboration among the series
of platforms, even though they didn’t necessarily know or intend to
collaborate with one another. So if you go to the Social Actions
website now it very much looks like a collaboration of these 19
platforms, to create a single data set of the actionable opportunities
on their site. All they had to do was actually simply publish a single
RSS feed. That process took about eight months, to get 19 platforms to
create that RSS feed."

[Long term vision for Social Actions]

"... Long term vision is putting individuals in a position to be full
partners at the table with institutions – whether they’re
governmental, non-governmental, or corporate – in affecting social
change. One other point that I don’t want to be shy about or neglect
to point out is I see this whole project personally as – this is
something that we talked about, Corey, when we first met at NTEN ’07 –
as somewhat of a critique, although a very proactive and positive one,
of the overly-consumer society that we’re living in. So the reluctance
to put advertising in the mix of Social Actions comes out of an
understanding of our project very much as a critique of consumerism in
alot of ways. So we want there to be a ubiquity not of advertising in
social media but of actions, an invitation to be growing and effective
agents of change. Not in any superficial way but in a very profound
and longlasting way."

[Criteria for Social Actions]

"One of our tasks for the summer will be to define our policies and
procedures, and that involves who we would recognize as a social
action platforms as well as to define what we would do if a social
action platform… doesn’t do what it says it does.. a rogue social
action platform. I want there to be a very large tent, so I believe
there will be companies… social action platforms that will be
nonprofit initiatives… there will be entirely open source kind of
institutionless software sites that produce actionable opportunities.
Right now there isn’t a clearly-defined criteria but we do want
whatever content to be on those systems as actionable opportunities
that an individual can become a part of, and we want there to be some
deliverable in the way of actual social change that comes out of it,
whether it’s on a very tiny scale – making someone feel better or
happier about themselves – or a very large scale – preventing massive
war of some kind. So anything with social change built into it that
counts as an action, as far as I’m concerned."

[Favorite quote, mantra, that gives you strength or inspiration in
your daily work?]

"I knew that question was coming and I have alot of phrases that
motivate me and keep me going. One I came across at the NetSquared
conference on the back of a business card that Bobby Fishkin of the
Reframeit.com start-up handed me. I really like it. I’m not exactly
sure how it will influence my daily work but I think there’s a lot of
substance in this quote I’m going to read by George Santayana. I’m
sure I got that name wrong. I’m sure he’s very famous. Anyway, here it
goes: "There are books in which the footnotes or comments scrawled by
some reader's hand in the margin are more interesting than the text.
The world is one of these books."

"For volunteers, for individuals, for anyone working what they feel
may be the margin of a larger initiative, the point is that their
efforts are tremendously important and of great interest."