TEDActive Projects Social Networks
The TEDActive Social Networks Project will explore the hidden influence of social networks on our lives -- through the lens of inspiration. We'll take a close look at online relationships and the influence they wield by sharing inspired messages and their ripple effects. Join the conversation »
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Social Networks Project news from the TEDActive Blog:
11 March 2011
A week of social
Last week, I participated in the TEDActive Project – Social Networks. The purpose was to explore how we might use our social networks to turn inspiration into action.
Monday. We meet, 20 people with experience across different social networks and with roles from journalists to artists to change agents and connectors.
The expertise of the people within the group is astonishing, each of us bringing a “superpower” to the group. As discussion unfolds, we surface questions to explore with the wider TEDActive audience:
- How might you find what matters to you through your social networks?
- How do you discover what you can do about the thing(s) that matter to you?
- How might you tip inspiration into action?
- How might we tackle big things with human-sized action?
- How might we nurture your social aura (effectivess, reputation)?
- How might social networks make you more courageous?
- How might you move from tweet to street?
Tuesday. I find myself in a random group to share lunch. I say I’m enjoying being a part of the projects and we’re exploring questions like “Do social networks make you more courageous?”. The conversation kicks into gear. While the projects are useful for having a focus and meeting a group during an overwhelming week, they also encourage deeper conversations.
Wednesday: We set about putting an experiment into place. The most difficult part of the project has been finding how to capture our different passions. We’d been charged to develop a set of “micro-actions”, but how do you find a way to draw those differences together in a meaningful way?
Thursday: One minute. Our story.
When I woke this morning and checked my messages, I had a link to a video. The video was made by two Year 12 students, Nile and Hannah from Huntington School in York in the UK. And they made the video to explain why they’re excited to hear about the TEDED program.
They found TEDED through their teacher, who was sent the link by his head of school. The Head of School found out through Sir Ken Robinson who sent out a tweet asking people to support this initiative. Sir Ken sent the tweet because he was messaged by Marcus, a member of our group for whom Sir Ken is a mentor, a personal connection. In a single day, with 9 targeted messages, our group got the TEDED link into 6,017 schools across the US, the UK and Australia.
Rather than proposing a specific micro-action, we are proposing a new micro- philosophy. Know the power of the people in your network, know the way to reach them, and know to ask them to act in a way that matters. Whether it’s showing support for the middle east, participating in JR’s global art project, or spreading TEDED we’re asking you to be deliberate in your social networks. When you share your ideas from this week, we’re asking you to be the signal, not the noise.
Friday and beyond. Amanda Rose summed it up best:
- Be yourself. People respond to those with an authentic social media voice.
- Listen and give back to your community.
- Chose the right social media channel for your message. Consider the audience.
- Clearly define what it is you are asking.
- Be passionate. Show people how they can be part of something bigger.
- Report back. People want to feel valued and hear the impact.
The outcome of TEDActiveSOC project is to ask all TEDsters to take on this micro-philosophy. Make these the Six TED Commandments of Social Networks to turn inspiration into action.
09 March 2011
Ideas are free. It’s spreading them that is expensive.
I’m a big fan of the concept of “ideas worth spreading,” but I also realize how hard it can be to give a little idea with potential the nudge it needs to flourish in the wider world. One way to be more effective is to see where obstacles and pathways exist.
Before TED, we started gathering tweets with the #tedactive hash tag to see which ideas were rising to the the top (and which were languishing). We can also see who’s driving the conversation (you’ll see our team member @acarvin as the fountainhead for a ton of retweets), and some trends in how great ideas go from theTED stage in Long Beach to making a difference in far flung cities around the globe.
Check it out yourself on this dynamically updating map (
thanks to Claude and the team at Nexalogy) and we’d welcome your feedback on how to use this to lower the “cost” of spreading worthwhile ideas!
http://nexalogy.com/demo/tedactive/
03 March 2011
Social networks — your interpretation?
I love connecting with people! Love meeting them, understanding where they come and what makes them who they are. Through my travels I have met amazing individuals. I was born in Senegal, where for generations, the palaver tree was a symbol of communication, sharing and collaboration throughout Africa — people would gather under its protective shade to listen to stories, share ideas and news and resolve community problems and conflicts. This made me realize while working on the social networks project that we are all connected.
TEDActive is a social network, and for me it’s like the old beautiful tree we see in villages of Africa. I deeply believe that makes a difference to humanity and what makes us safe, strong and able to grow as individuals.
Our social network group has pulled ideas from all around the world, drawing on people’s expertise in documenting Middle Eastern and African issues, understanding markets and mapping humanity. We looked at complexity in online and offline networks, how online reputation or “social aura” is nurtured, and how we can turn inspiration into action. Each of us in the group has chosen one of seven questions which we will ask our fellow attendees and people in our social networks as a way of gathering more insight. And we’ll use your responses to inform human-sized actions we can take at the end of the week to spread inspiration.
Here are some of the questions we asked:
Social networks
And here are some videos:
Are social networks good or evil? You can decide … but we hope it is good, and that maybe each of us, in our own way can make a difference, be courageous, find a purpose and share it.
Together, we have the power to change our world.
03 March 2011
What road to what matters – inspires you to action?
Amongst socially aware causes and talks as well as socially engaging parties, what did the social networking group do?
We spent a few moments that we could to drag ourselves away from the social talk to the social walk. From Monday to Wednesday our team of 20+ people came together to discuss how we go from inspiration to action and how social networks are involved.
These are some of the questions we discussed and invited TEDActive attendees to engage in:
1. How do you find something to do that matters to you?
2. What might trigger you to act via social networks?
3. Can you share a unique experience you had via social networks that made you act?
4. How do you get found?
5. How do you connect?
6. What does “open”, “random”, and “selective” mean to you?
On Monday – once we’d agreed on these themes, we signed-up to talk to people on one of these questions.
I picked the one on finding what matters to you.
Thank you:
Patricia and Richard Hollingum from Auckland, New Zealand
Liz Wallace Ellers, from Haverford
…for spending a significant amount of time discussing your perspectives on how you found your calling.
The theme that connects us all based on those I spoke with is that people find their calling through a very personal event, series of events or a person that has a profound impact. We felt that this personal experience is what gives us the focus that making a difference requires.
01 March 2011
Day 1 Dispatch from the Social Networks TEDWalk
In a word: wow
In two words: rockstar team
In three words: holy f!*k&@g s*!t
As the purported facilitator for the TEDActive Social Networks project, I can only describe our day-one, two-hour, meaty opening session as both tough slogging and engaging beyond all reason. It is a remarkable group who has signed on for this project – dynamic & thoughtful, excellent listeners, generous, funny & kind.
We (pretty quickly) reshaped our opening question into seven more specific ones that we would love love love folks to respond to with ideas that answer them (as we will be doing as well in the next couple of days). You can respond here or in threads on TED Conversations, as well as on our actionplatform on IfWeRanTheWorld.
To my social network project brethren - I’ve written these questions slightly differently than we captured them on the board today. I know you will chime in if you feel I’ve strayed too far.
- How might you better discover what matters to you through your social networks?
- If you want to do something for an issue or cause you care about, how might you find an action you can take?
- How might you tip inspiration into action?
- How might we tackle big things with human-sized action?
- How might we capture & communicate our footprint/achievement/reputation for real-world action?
- How might we capture & communicate a group’s footprint/achievement/reputation for real-world action?
- How might social networks make you more courageous?
- How might you move from tweet to street?
We look forward to what everyone has to say.
14 February 2011
TEDActive Welcomes PSFK’s PurpleList Experts to the Projects!
Via PSFK.com
TEDActive is so excited to have PSFK on board as a collaborator for the TEDActive Projects! They have invited their friends to explore, collaborate and act on vital issues raised at TED, and is actively engaging their expert network, the PurpleList, to give their valuable input for the different teams involved with the projects.
Their experts have already joined in on the conversation! Check out their feedback for the following projects!
Education
Mobility
Sustainability
Social Networks
Travel
07 February 2011
ideas worth doing
The pound-for-pound talent tonnage of TEDsters boggles the mind. It is absolutely the thing that makes the TED community so incandescent, as well as so humbling and deeply neat-o to be a part of. So it is no small thing to aim this talent at very real problems with the goal of emerging from the gathering with ideas worth doing, as is happening this year for the first time with TEDActive Projects.
No doubt that some wonderfully innovative approaches will surface. The question that has us nibbling our nails is how they will translate into action.
Introducing IfWeRanTheWorld
One way is through the use of a very new, very beta platform called IfWeRanTheWorld, the brain/love child of Cindy Gallop (of MakeLoveNotPorn fame). IfWeRanTheWorld is an online platform that is designed to power real-world action. It makes it very easy for good & talented people to work together to achieve a common goal – be it host a dodgeball tournament or expand an urban community farm program or only eat cupcakes with lots of icing. Microactions are the coin of this realm – they are small, eminently doable tasks that, when added together, make things happen.
On IfWeRanTheWorld, you are what you do – it is where you ‘walk’ your social media ‘talk’. If Facebook is the social graph and Twitter the interest graph, then IfWeRanTheWorld is the action graph.
Here’s how it works:
- Bring your project, talent, inspiration and good intentions to ifwerantheworld.com
- Answer the question, “If I ran the world, I would….”.
- Join forces with other people working on similar things by picking up & doing their microactions.
- Accelerate action by suggesting microactions, and inviting your network to act with you by sharing through Facebook, Twitter, you name it.
- Start an actionplatform (or project) to make something happen on your own.
(if you prefer pictures over words, here is the how-it-works video)
How it might work for TEDActive Projects
The thought for TEDActive Projects is this: Some project teams might publish their solutions as microactions, inviting the wider TED community (and beyond) to do them, report back, & collaborate. Other project teams might use microactions to invite outside insight and expertise on their topic area. Still other project teams might blow our doors off by using microactions in a totally new way.
It feels appropriate to the theme of wonder and the spirit of experimentation that we don’t know exactly how people will make use of IfWeRanTheWorld. For me, though, it just makes it that much more exciting.
That said, I’ll be on hand at TEDActive to help the project teams do their voodoo. If you are interested in IfWeRanTheWorld (or scotch, or experience design as seduction, or comic books), then look for a girl with long blonde & blue hair wearing epic but foolishly high-heels. That’ll be me.
The magnificent shot of Cindy (above) is by Jon Bauer, who says he is ‘mostly doing this stuff for fun’ but who is extraordinary & should be mostly doing this stuff period.
01 February 2011
Be A Part of TEDActive Projects!
We invite you to join us in making ideas worth spreading come alive with the TEDActive Projects! We have invited some of the top experts, leaders, and idea amplifiers from each project theme to come to Palm Springs and collaborate with YOU, our project leaders, in creating a call-to-action on vital issues raised at TEDActive.
As a project leader, you and your group will be part of discussions, workshops, and activities during the conference to help you on your path to finding real solutions to big problems. We also hope this experience at TEDActive will help foster meaningful relationships to continue well beyond the conference.
You will also be invited by the TEDActive team to be a contributing writer to our official TEDActive Community Blog and encourage you to start “tweeting” your project experiences before, during, and after the conference for the public to engage in.
While we invite everyone to partake in this new initiative, spaces are limited to join a project team at TEDActive. We encourage all TEDActive attendees to sign up here on our Project Leader Application Form. Once you receive confirmation from our Projects team, you can immediately begin acting by connecting with your team, and documenting your experiences on our blog!
Be the first to participate as leaders in this exciting new initiative. Act now!
18 January 2011
Welcome to the TEDActive Blog!
This spring, a unique group of people will convene in Palm Springs, California, to exchange ideas, inspire one another and experience a live simulcast of TED2011: The Rediscovery of Wonder. TEDActive brings together global innovators – the doers of the world making a difference in their communities and their professions – to interact and learn from one another while absorbing TED2011…
TEDActive Social Networks Project on Twitter: #TEDActiveSOC
This project is supported by:
