Johanna Bates

Photo by Taryn James

The music industry. In my view, it’s been in an identity crisis for a while now. The advent of online music sharing, legal or not, are part of the change. Most people I know rarely buy albums anymore. I’m sure it’s hard to be in the recording industry these days, at all levels from artist on out. It’s even rough for fans. I don’t know about you, but I find it hard to buy music if I am not sure the artist is getting most of the funds, and stealing it online makes me feel worse (unless I just really need to hear WHAM! “Careless Whisper” once in a while; I think George Michael is doing okay).

But really, the problem likely goes back even further. As we see with social media, the old content production models—where a piece is perfected behind closed doors and is then released—is going by the wayside. More and more, the idea of sharing, collaboration, and two-way conversations are becoming the norm, in all kinds of media. And now is where we come to one of my fave projects that I know of on the Internets.

CASH music is an online platform and a new business model that uses Creative Commons licensing to help transform the music industry so that artists and the people who represent them can fairly and honestly sustain themselves. It’s not dissimilar to Radiohead’s pay-what-you-will release of In Rainbows, but it’s much, much more. The platform promotes music sharing, artistic collaboration, and financially beneficial relationships between artists and their fans. It’s brilliant.

In the words of one of their founders, Jesse von Doom,

…The idea is that artists are exploring new ways to bring their music to an audience, with the ultimate goal being to strengthen both sides of that exchange. …

There are videos, interviews, photos, ebooks, and lyric sheets. Donita Sparks even opened up percentages of licensing for a track off her last album. Listeners could buy shares in a song, letting them participate in the profits from any TV or film licensing.

The site is just getting off the ground. Is it working? So far, yes.

We’ve been especially happy to see people donating to artists. From the very beginning we were determined to provide direct access to music without placing artificial gateways in front of it. … we’ve seen numerous examples of people trying music and donating what they feel is a fair price. … An artist spends time writing the music and money is spent on studio time, all to put out the best possible music. I like to think that people are genuinely considering all that, recognizing the effort, and helping it to continue.

Read more about the CASH project on Creative Commons’ blog. And while you’re at it, visit Kristin Hersh’s CASH site and explore, grab some music, and see what you think.

photo by Vik Nanda

I am back from “vacation.” It involved some nice time in Maine, during which our 22-month-old learned many words, including the fave of the week, “LOON! LOOOOOOOOOON!!!” The main feature, however, was another sick-parent emergency, and our beloved greyhound has become gravely ill, too. What do you do when you need a vacation from your vacation? You come back to work!

So everyone’s talking about FriendFeed these days. It’s a site that consolidates the feeds from your friends’ activities across multiple platforms (blogs, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, etc.). Then, you can discuss all that incoming content with your friends right there on FriendFeed. I signed it up and joined the nptech room. There’s cool stuff going on, but I haven’t engaged there yet. There’s a lot going on. (Beth Kanter’s quick take on filtering FriendFeed that shouldn’t make your head hurt.)

Part of the problem for me with FriendFeed is that refreshing a page in my browser in order to keep up with the changing feeds just doesn’t work for me. I have come to adore Twitter, even though everyone’s always complaining because it goes down a lot (visit the fail whale here). Rather than refreshing Twitter in my browser, I use Twitter best via Twhirl, an application that runs on your desktop like an instant messenger window.

Well I found out today that you can follow FriendFeed on Twhirl (open up “Settings,” click on “Open Accounts,” choose FriendFeed from the menu, and you are off…). So I gave it a try. I’ve got two Twhirl windows open, one with Twitter and one with FriendFeed (it helps that I have two monitors). I am suddenly able to follow conversations on FriendFeed, and I have a feeling it will become more valuable to me in the days to come.

But one thing I just Tweeted about with Michaela Hackner is this: Yowch! FriendFeed shows you that we’re all dealing with a lot of incoming content! For my brain, too much. She and I both commented on the fact that the 140 charachter limit of a Twitter message acts as a kind of filter. You have to say what you’re going to say; you can’t babble. There’s no space for being long-winded (unlike this unlimited space in my blog here, for example). Some people do manage to Tweet about nothing over and over, and I just stop following those people. This is one reason I’ve come to love and prefer Twitter (even though it’s down right now. Sigh.).

Michaela also mentioned that Gen Y-ers are wired more this way, because there’s only so much you can do with texting. I’ve heard people lament the loss of person-to-person conversation, the art of writing, etc. But people said that about the telephone, email and instant messaging. I still see good writing and have wonderful “real life” conversations. So I am not convinced. Everyone can contribute to the new web. That means more content than ever. For me, the key to learning as much as I can in Web 2.0 is to not let it all in.

How do you filter the web? What works best for you? Do you feel like you’re missing a ton of good content? If so, does that bother you?

I am really excited to talk more about all sorts of things… internal Web collaboration strategies, new Web 2.0/Old Skool projects on the horizon, and the ever-changing work of the non-profit techie. It looks like my org might have another year of funding (fingers still crossed, but we might have made it!). I think, very possibly, there’s a year of really engaging work ahead of us, and I hope we will be learning a lot. I plan to share what we learn here.

At the moment, I am juggling my nonprofit techie work with a cute but obstinate toddler, and a terminally ill parent. One of the most incredible bloggers out there, whose blog (along with NTEN and Beth Katner) I consider essential daily reading, is Chris Brogan. His blogging tips, as well as his knowledge of and insight into social media, is unparalleled. I know he’d say one of the worst mistakes I can make as a new blogger is to not blog regularly enough; to take a break this early is surely unwise. It’s important, he says–and I agree–for your readers to be able to rely upon you for regularly-scheduled content. It’s one of the most important ways to cultivate a voice as a blogger and build a relationship with your readers.

But I have things to say and much I want to learn from readers in a blog-based conversation. I don’t want to let the fact that I am a working parent with sick family to stop me from blogging. There’s a difference between lack of commitment to blogging and life making it difficult for me to post as much as I’d like. Right now, the reality is that I do have to go offline more than some of my colleagues. I am not going to be able to post daily.  I hope that people will consider subscribing via RSS to this blog, or following me on Twitter. I hope that you will find the content and comments here valuable even if I am not as prolific as some.

For the next ten days, I am taking a much-needed break. I am going offline to go to Maine to be with my family. Late next week, I will be back with another post.

In the meantime, do other working parents feel this way? Like you want to participate in the social media conversations more, but your life demands that you spend more time offline? Do you feel like you’re missing out on Twittering your way through webinars and contributing to wikis as much as you’d like? How do you feel about these limitations, and how do they affect your work? Does a lack of free time online keep you from blogging?

Photo by Mikey G

I want to write about online collaboration software and Twitter and Jott and how we’re toying with all of those things in our tiny org. But when I think about social media and it’s principles, I think back to the most fundamental shift we made in our org in terms of the Internet. Probably most of you who are reading this are way past this stage, but I am not sure I can talk about other internal innovations without starting here.

It started several years ago when I arrived here. The website was static, updated by an “accidental techie” who was the only person who knew how to update the website. It was brochure-ware, broadcasting info about our programs. If someone needed to update a web page, she had to rely on the tech to get it done.

Our org is tiny and “flat.” That doesn’t mean we run the org by consensus. There are clear lines of supervision and authority. But we all have areas of expertise, and we defer somewhat to each other in these areas. What this has always meant is that we design projects and make decisions with a lot (sometimes too much) conversation.

Conversation and collaboration, online, are major principles of Web 2.0. What’s exciting about it to me is the decentralization of certain kinds of power. The power to put images and ideas on the web used to be tightly controlled. Messages came from the top down and were put online by highly skilled techies. Now anyone with Internet access and some basic skills can speak up on Facebook or her own blog. Anyone can post pictures to Flickr or video to YouTube. This is a significant power shift.

For me, that power shift began in the workplace. I started my career in non-profit tech as an “accidental techie.” I was intimidated at first by techie jargon. For some reason, I was fascinated enough with the web to learn in spite of my fear. But I’ve never forgotten that fear. It’s all too easy to slip into total jargon Tweeting about Friendfeed and other social media tools. (You can tell you’re talking in jargon whenever someone’s eyes glaze over and/or they look uncomfortable.  I try to look for this when I am yammering on about the Interwebs, but I am not always successful at catching myself.)

So, internally, my fundamental goal became clear: de-mystify the tools. With some limits for quality control purposes, I wanted anyone and everyone on our staff to be able to post information to our website. I wanted others to be able to send out emails to our lists. I wanted them to be comfortable with the Internet as much as possible, without having to be “experts” in it.

Luckily for us, others were thinking this way, too. We started using Democracy in Action to send out mass emails, which had a user interface that someone with basic web skills could easily use. I had been building websites for years, but open-source content management systems (CMS) like Joomla and Drupal were suddenly very accessible. I was able to re-build our website in a CMS so that, again, anyone on our staff with basic web surfing and word processing skills could post content to our site.

Yes, there were (and are) vetting processes to control the content that goes up on our site and out in our emails. But, from a tech perspective, when we made these changes, I was no longer the gatekeeper to emailing to our constituents and posting content on our website. Everyone knows at least a few HTML tags, including a couple of our staff members who are over the age of 60. Our staff could prepare web content in a hands-on way, which contributed greatly to their feeling of ownership of our site and to their learning about the web.

Today, I almost never post content to our site or send out an email. I can go on vacation and our news and blog roll on without me.  I keep the infrastructure healthy–I answer questions about Drupal quirks, fix problems and make improvements–but I have time now to think about tech strategy. To think and plan and dream about how to use new tech tools and social media to do our work better. Our staff understands the Internet and its tools better because they use them every day, and that helps them think about how to integrate them into our work, too.

Even though I was once the techie gatekeeper with the keys to the website, I love this loss of control and am inspired thinking about the new places it will take us.

I wonder a lot about how other orgs work. Who controls the posting power in your org? Who controls the content? How else is your org present on the web? Is it tightly controlled? If so, is that changing at all?

I want to thank everyone for the amazing comments I’ve gotten on my first post, including one from Kath from The Learning Community. She outlined some challenges she faces in her org using Web 2.0 tools.

I am just diving into this world as I’m taking on the communications work of a successful public school with one of the highest poverty rates in our state — after having worked on a college campus for a decade that was replete with resources. I’m investigating ways I can learn and tools that can be adapted to our needs without a big financial or intellectual cost. Have been told I should just camp out wherever Beth Kis, and her blog led me here.

Her org works with immigrants, who often have to be very careful with information, and with teachers and children.

On the other hand, our students are curious consumers of technology who we need to equip with tools to develop their voice and share their opinions. We want them to see themselves as thinkers with important stories to tell and want to help them learn to be heard. We have begun a few small experiments with digital recorders, blogs, etc. As with kids everywhere, they can’t get enough. That is great, but it is no substitute for them learning how to talk with one another, how to develop an opinion and express it, and how to disagree — my experience is that these things are best learned in person.

I could not agree more with what Kath says. I think some of the most powerful online community building is done when tied to real live communities that see each other in person. For her students, Web 2.0 tools are best used as another way to share and experience what goes on in their “offline” world, rather than a way to create a brand new “virtual community.”

She shared this fabulous project her org is doing, documenting the building of a new playground on Flickr for supporters of her org.

Then, there is everyone else — oddly, perhaps the best audience I have. I’ve just launched a little area on Flickr to document the transformation of our former parking lot into a super neato playground. Our external community of supporters has really enjoyed seeing this and several of our teachers are being introduced to Flickr through this experiment.

What a great experiment, and what a great use of photos and Flickr! I especially love the photos of the notes about the kids’ thoughts about the playground.

I wanted to use this project as an example to suggest some ways that one could push a “Web 2.0″ framework a little further, to involve the kids, without necessitating that they abandon real interaction for virtual interaction.  (Disclaimer: Kath, I am SO familiar with overworked staff with no funds, and in no way am I trying to dictate some “necessary” next step for your org. Rather, I am just using it as an example.)

So, with this project, you’ve started familiarizing teachers with Flickr. That’s a fabulous step. Assuming the kids are also watching the building of this playground, with a couple cheap digital cameras, the kids could take pictures or video–a couple times a month–of the playground’s progress. If the kids are too young to upload the pictures themselves, a teacher uploads them to Flickr and attributes the photos to the children who took them. Perhaps through class discussion, descriptions and/or comments are added to the photos. Kids get to see their photos on the web, with their names and thoughts beneath them. This is a key principle of online engagement–using technology to show the members of a community to themselves.

I find this to be particularly powerful. The magic of “social media” is that it shows us that we make the web, not some wizard behind a curtain. Technology does not have to be in the hands of some other power. It’s a tool that should belong to everyone. And the better we are able to use the tools to exchange ideas and information, the more valuable the web is.

I am wondering if anyone’s tried a similar project. How’d it go? In what other ways would you suggest that Kath’s org use Web 2.0 tools? (Her full comment is here.)

P.S. A post on internal tools coming next!

I am home sick today and I have been reading up on the cool new NTEN wiki project, Be The Media, “The Social Media Empowerment Guide for Nonprofits.” Already, insightful comments have led to the creation of How Can Your Organization Avoid Drinking the Web 2.0 Kool Aid?, a checklist helping orgs understand when they should not devote resources to Web 2.0.

I am someone who gets very excited about Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc. and how they might be able to help organizations meet their mission goals and raise awareness and funds. Most of the staff of Community Partners, including our E.D. (who Jotts Tweets from her iPhone), uses these tools. But how about our constituents?

We survey our constituents periodically. They are not early adopters. After many years, they are now solid email users and are fairly confident using Google. But RSS? Instant messaging? YouTube? As much as we want them to be there, they are just not there yet. Some are showing signs. They are just on the slower side of the adoption curve. So does that mean that our org should not be investing time and energy in social media tools?

What we’re doing is taking a Web 2.0 approach, but we’ve dialed down the tools a bit. We are slowly marching out more ways for our constituents to engage online. One of the primary principles of creating a good online community is to integrate online communication with IRL (In-Real-Life) actual meetings. We had the IRL meetings first; a key group of our constituents gather IRL every month. That’s where we started soliciting topics, authors and commentors for our blog. When we started to hear them ask for more ways to be in touch between those IRL meetings, we started a ye olden email discussion list. At this point in time, we know a FriendFeed room would not integrate well with their workflow. But a listserv? Yep, they are using it.

These efforts are going well. What’s next? Probably a photo project, so they can see each other online as well as IRL. Will that be a stepping-stone to video? I don’t know. We treat everything we do with Web 2.0 strategies as a learning experiment.

And on that note, perhaps another day I will post about how we use some Web 2.0 strategies internally. Certainly there’s always value in exploring that!

Since this is my inaugural post, I don’t expect comments, but if you happen to stumble across this blog… tell me… Do you ever need to walk the line between cutting edge social media and Old Skool in your org? If so, how do you do it?