Web of Change

We're really excited to let you know about the Open Everything Retreat, coming this fall to Hollyhock. Former WOC convener Mark Surman is at the helm, supported by Jason Mogus, David Eaves, and Mike Lewkowitz.

From the Open Everything website:

Open Everything is a global conversation about the art, science and spirit of 'open'. It gathers people using openness to create and improve software, education, media, philanthropy, architecture, neighbourhoods, workplaces and the society we live in: everything. It's about thinking, doing and being open.

Can you help us get the word out even wider about the Social Tech Training?

We've put together some slick badges for you to use on your own blog. You can grab them from below, and use the code you'll find below the badge of your choice.

If you've got a website of your own, it would be great if you could both stick a small one in the sidebar on your site, and also write a blog post using the large one.

Thank you!

<a href="http://www.marsdd.com/socialtechtraining" title="SocialTech Training"><img src="http://webofchange.com/sites/webofchange.com/files/images/stt_badge1.gif" alt="SocialTech Training"></A>

We're very excited to announce that we've confirmed Ricken Patel as our keynote speaker for the Social Tech Training. Ricken is the co-founder of Avaaz – the world's largest global online advocacy organization.

Avaaz is member-driven, and 3.2 million people strong. If you've been alive, and on the internet, you've almost certainly received (and perhaps signed) one of their petitions in the past year. Just last week, they ran the fastest growing petition of all time, gathering 1.5 million signatures for Tibet. You'll also recognize them from the now-famous campaign that turned the tides in Bali at the climate change talks last December, mobilizing over 300,000 people in 72 hours and forcing governments to listen to the voices of concerned citizens.

We’ve been hard at work the past few weeks, putting together a strong and comprehensive agenda for the Social Tech Training.

Working with a team of experienced social tech leaders, our biggest challenge has been to choose what to focus on! Many of the topics we’ve selected could be entire workshops in and of themselves.

We’ve done our best to select the topics that we feel are the most useful to social change organizations, and to arrange the “flow” for maximum effect.

I spotted this over at WorldChanging a couple days ago – an interesting article by Ethan Zuckerman, based on a presentation he recently gave at ETech.

It's long, but this first part summed up the phenomenon of user-generated content, and why it matters, nicely. This is an evo/revolution of the web that no one is denying anymore.

Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers.

Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats.

The Social Tech Training website (and registration!) is now live.

We're really excited about this workshop – it's our biggest event of this year, we've got a handful of talented Web of Changers on faculty, and we're working with a terrific team at MaRS. Plus, the agenda is shaping up to be amazing – to our knowledge, there is no other training like this.

As you know, many organizations (companies as well as NGOs) these days are seeking that mythical person who understands the web, understands social networks, understands the opportunities and the challenges that the web offers for deepening engagement, and can take leadership in that space. So we've created the training we would want to go to, and send our staff to – to help people create leaders and build capacity to harness the web as a tool for social change.