Gauravonomics Blog

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(Cross-posted on my fellowship blog – How International Values Shape Communications Technologies)

Sometime back, I made a list of the top ten resources on social 2.0 or how to use social media for social change.

Here’s a follow-up list of the top five resources on social media for social change in the Indian context.

- ThinkChange India — started by Vinay Ganti and old friend Santhosh Ramdoss — aims to be “your primary source of information on social innovation and social entrepreneurship in India.”

- InfoChange India — managed by Centre for Communication and Development Studies — is “an online resource base that provides news, views, perspectives and debates on crucial issues of sustainable development and social justice in India and South Asia.”

- India Banao — started by the uber high profile trio of Sanjeev Sanyal, Jayant Sinha and Sheetal Talwar — is “a platform for young people to participate in public affairs.”

- Lead India 2020 aims to “lead Indian youth to lead India to lead the world by 2020.”

- Change India aims to “encourage all citizens to participate in nation building by working with the government to improve quality of life of the citizens.”

It’s a testimonial to the flattening power of social media that ThinkChange India, the least “professional” of these mostly institution backed initiatives, is my favorite resource on social change 2.0 in India.

Finally, as a bonus, here is a cool social change 2.0 startup I recently came across —

- Grassroutes — run by Sriram Varadarajan, Abhilash Ravishankar, Keerthikiran K, Shravya Reddy and Goutam Ullas Mahapatra — funds one week trips for young people to work with changemakers in local communities and document their experiences. Think of it as a grassroots version of the IndiCorps Fellowship.

If you know any innovative India social change 2.0 startups in India, do ping me.

Rob Pongsajapan at The Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS) at Georgetown University totally delighted me yesterday by setting up the official “ISD Yahoo! Fellow Blog” within hours of our discussion.

How Global Values Shape Communications Technologies is a group blog co-authored by the 2008-09 Yahoo! Fellows — Ben Turner, Pavneet Singh and myself. We will be writing between 5 to 10 posts every week on how international values apply to the development and use of new communications technologies, especially in BRIC countries. I’ll mostly focus on how social media will be used differently by individuals and institutions in BRIC countries as compared to their first world counterparts, but also riff frequently on the broader theme. Ben and Pavneet will also write mostly about their own research areas (to be announced soon) but also contribute to the bigger conversation on the blog.

From mid-September, we will start a weekly podcast with thinkers and practitioners from the Georgetown University community and beyond on social media in BRIC countries and how to use social media for social change.

In December, we will invite contributions for a crowd-sourced paper (or even a crowd-sourced e-book!) on how global values shape communications technologies.

I urge you to subscribe to How Global Values Shape Communications Technologies in a feed reader or by e-mail and look forward to your active participation in this blog’s community.

‘Rebooting America: Ideas for Redesigning American Democracy for the Internet Age‘ is an anthology of forty four essays by some really smart people on how to use communications technology to engage (young) people in civic issues –

The Personal Democracy Forum presents an anthology of forty-four essays brimming with the hopes of reenergizing, reorganizing, and reorienting our government for the Internet Age. How would completely reorganizing our system of representation work? Is it possible to redesign our government with open doors and see-through walls? How can we leverage the exponential power of many-to-many deliberation for the common good?

In her foreword to the anthology, Esther Dyson sets the stage for the rest of the essays by saying that new communication technologies will continue to be at the core of civic engagement, for better or for worse, so we should better find ways to use them constructively –

This anthology of essays is intended to shine light, to spark conversations among citizens, and between voters and elected officials, about how we can engage more people in public problem solving and community building. Just as the Net created new business models, so can it foster new governance models…

Our society is relentlessly focused on short-term news and results… Rebooting America is a look at the long term—the past that could have been and the future that still could be. It’s ironic that it’s a book, but consider it a mere seed containing DNA seeking complementary strands of life in an online conversation with other Americans about how to “reboot” our country.

It’s interesting that my introduction to the book was from a rather contrarian essay by Danah Boyd — Can Social Network Sites Enable Political Action? (Danah says “No!”) –

A key aspect of SNSes is scale. The Internet not only collapses space and time, but beyond bandwidth, there is no additional structural cost between communicating with ten people and broadcasting to millions… Infinite scaling may be structurally possible online, but the attention economy—the tax on people’s time and attention—regulates what actually scales… This possibility of scaling is what tickles the fancy of most political dreamers, who see the Internet as the ultimate democratizing technology. However, people pay attention to what interests them. Not surprisingly, offline or online, gossiping is far more common and interesting to people than voting… Rather than fantasizing about how social network sites will be a cultural and democratic panacea, perhaps we need to focus on the causes of alienation and disillusionment that stop people from participating in communal and civic life. If we can figure out how to activate unmotivated groups, perhaps we can convince them to leverage their own networks and convince others to participate.

While I agree with Danah that online communities mirror the offline reality, I also believe that digital communications technologies have great power to change that offline reality. Danah, of all people, should know that.

You can read the book online, download the entire book in PDF form, or download individual chapters. Here’s Danah’s chapter.

I’ll spend a lot of time this year working on MobiChange — a social entrepreneurship venture that will leverage mobile social networking for mobilizing social change — and I might even teach a course on “how to use social media for social change” at the School of Foreign Services at Georgetown University during Spring. So, I’ll return to this theme frequently enough for it to deserve a new category, Social Change 2.0. Stay tuned.