Networks, social change, and tech tools

On her Philanthropy 2173 blog, Lucy Bernholz recently posted a request for "examples of networks that have made some kind of positive social change happen. Ideally these are networks that:

* Consist of unaffiliated individuals, not coalitions or alliances of existing nonprofits
* Made something concrete, and socially positive, happen
* Continue to exist after making a change - so they are more than 'just' a protest group (this is the hardest one to find)"

I have to think that My Social Actions members are especially familiar with these kinds of networks. Manny Hernandez' Tu Diabetes and Juan Carlos Zaldivar's Art Tribes Network come quickly to mind. Tori Tuncan has already added Lend4Health to Lucy's list, and I proposed Social Actions, which grew out of a loosely-affiliated network that came together in a Google group.

What other networks should be added to Lucy's list? Hop over to the blog post and leave a comment with your suggestions.

The Social Actions suggestion prompted Lucy to ask a follow-up question that's also of interest to My Social Actions members and got me thinking:

"Seems that many of the examples we can find are about human networks + tech tools so that organizing happens more easily, faster, and on a grander scale. It is also much more distributed organizing. So if that is what we can learn from what has already happened, can we "apply" them prospectively to hypothesize about how change might happen on tangible, nearby challenges (homelessness, prenatal care, job training....)."

How do you see your local initiatives affected by the availability of tech tools, if at all (yet)? Are you seeing groups make use of mobile phone technology, social media, and tools like the Social Actions API to gather and mobilize resources for on-the-ground efforts? If that's a ways off -- and I suspect that for most communities it is -- what do expect that "change-making" will look like?

One of the things I'm struck by, when I talk with local nonprofit-development-charitable organizations, is how dismissive they are about social media and online tools as a resource for what they're doing locally. If they've always been able to get by with phone calls, check-writing, and an occasional emailed newsletter and article in the local paper, why should they deal with the challenge of figuring out Facebook or Firstgiving pages? If their cause and work are geographically centralized, why should they leverage technologies that are clearly about connecting with people far away?

So I'm contacted daily by nonprofits from far away, using these tools to connect with me where I am. And I hear very little from the organizations in my town because if I'm not already on their email list, and miss the blurb in the local paper about their next event, I'm out of the loop.

(Technologically) distributed organizing and communication doesn't have to mean (geographically) distributed impact. The more quickly that's understood, the more quickly we'll see a groundswell of networks + tools + transformation.