citizen

Be part of a kick-starting community of designers, coders, communicators and activists to help Switzerland move towards a more ‘direct data democracy’ for participation, transparency and accountability from the grassroots.

Switzerlands first Open Data Camps brings together thinkers and doers to get things done and make a difference: designers looking to make an impact, passionate developers, citizens and stakeholders from all parts of society. Your ideas and your competence are in high demand to shape to future of how we deal with data in this country, so if you too feel it's time to make a difference sign up as: Ideator, Designer, or Developer.

Click here to get more info

Be part of a kick-starting community of designers, coders, communicators and activists to help Switzerland move towards a more ‘direct data democracy’ for participation, transparency and accountability from the grassroots.

Switzerlands first Open Data Camps brings together thinkers and doers to get things done and make a difference: designers looking to make an impact, passionate developers, citizens and stakeholders from all parts of society. Your ideas and your competence are in high demand to shape to future of how we deal with data in this country, so if you too feel it's time to make a difference sign up as: Ideator, Designer, or Developer.

Click here to get more info

Tiffany St James is the former head of citizen participation for the UK government. She trained the UK Civil Service on how to better engage with the public online, part of which a digital strategist who gathered a strong experience on how you can motivate people to participate in online communities.

At Lift11, Tiffany will talk about how people are using online communities to galvanise like-minded participants into action and what we can learn from grass-roots community collaboration to support our own endeavours.

Tiffany St James

Consultant (UK)
Stimulation Community
» View Lift11 speakers

Laurent Haug: How are online communities enabling offline activism?

Tiffany St James: Trust in what we perceive as the authoritative sources of our information has shifted enormously in this last, post-digital decade. Whilst trust in communication from government in the UK is at around 14% and around the same for advertising messages, with the advent of social networks and trusted individuals becoming authorities online, peer-to-peer recommendation is souring at around 70%. Influencers in social networks and online communities have become a major source of influence and we need to ensure we know how best to with engage people in communities and through them to make sure the relevant information can circulate in a trusted way.

We are now living in a world where, through online communities, people have a real power to bring change - we have seen how the power of individuals with similar agendas can connect through communities to lobby, to create social good or to protest like never before and there are many learnings from how people are using communities to achieve their aims.

For example we saw recently with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that lobbyist can grab headlines to further their agenda. Greenpeace launched a competition asking people to redesign the BP logo, and a fake satirical twitter account was started @BPGlobalPR with a huge international following. Nestle’s was exposed for their use of Palm Oil in the KitKat product and lobbied by a fake advert on YouTube for killing orangutans by deforestation in the production of Palm Oil. Lobby appeal has got creative and through new tools enabling us and create, connect and share how these messages are circulated to galvanise public action like never before.

We have seen community contribution for social good. Crowd-sourcing, particularly in times of international disaster, can effect real and immediate change on the ground where it’s needed. Probably the best example of this is from Ushahidi. By allowing participants around the world to interact via their platform and contribute by SMS, MMS or internet, people can post pictures and reports of what is happening in near real-time. In the case of the Haïti earthquake, pictures where put online tagged with the names of people in them. Relatives could identify the survivors, and the community provided a way to reconnect those affected to their relatives. The post-earthquake map of Haiti is now much clearer owing to contribution from people at the scene.

Communities can use tools to bring protest and local opinion to a world stage. We saw this in Iran during the last election in summer 2009. Citizens were concerned that the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was not covered fairly by CNN, so they started to tag hundreds of tweets with the tag #cnnfail to highlight this. The movement got noticed, and CNN could simply not ignore it and had to react.

These examples show that online communities can have a huge bearing on media reporting and it’s impact on how customers feel about our products and services. It is critical to better understand how we can galvanise people to take part in communities and how to better serve our own communities of interest.

So how can we ensure people's engagement into online communities?

Communities form around interest, action, place, practice or circumstance. When considering in engaging with communities set a strategy on community engagement from the outset:
• Your organisations goals
• Find out what type of communities there are for your to engage with
• Work out what you can offer that community, what they would get out of engaging with your company

As a community manager yourself , the main issue is to have a good communication strategy in place. Setting clear objectives, know precisely which kind of audience you want to attract. Then it is about following the audience. Let your users take you where they want. Be flexible, adapt to the needs that arise, refine your tools and processes as you go.

That is one of the big difference online communities brought to the table, this ability to learn as you go and adapt quickly. Before you would launch a campaign, wait for the results, make changes for the year after. By allowing multi-way feedback mechanisms and by tracking visitors behaviours, you can know what is happening and make changes accordingly.

Juliana Rotich, an author, blogger and digital activist with Global Voices Online in Kenya, talks about citizen journalism in African countries. Starting from web examples, she then describes the value of mobile applications in this domain. Her presentation gives a broad overview of the issues at stake in mobile activism/journalism.

Juliana Rotich, an author, blogger and digital activist with Global Voices Online in Kenya, talks about citizen journalism in African countries. Starting from web examples, she then describes the value of mobile applications in this domain. Her presentation gives a broad overview of the issues at stake in mobile activism/journalism.