Oceans, Waves and Beaches

I was speaking with a exec friend the other day and he said “I feel like I’m routinely having two sets of conversations–one with people that understand the game-changing power of (social) networks and another set with people that think the world is the same as it was five years ago.” I feel that same [...]

I love the first few pages of this book. It tells the story of a Colombian in 2008 who was sitting on the beach with family and friends. They were talking about FARC, a drug-trafficking / regional terrorist organization. FARC had oppressed the entire country for years. What follows is a notable story of how [...]

I read this article “Google’s Do-It-Yourself App Creation Software” and immediately could see the connection to the environmental movement, and non-profits in general. The following line from the article intrigued me even more: “the free software… user testing has been done mainly in schools with groups that included sixth graders…”
Organizations need to realize [...]

DIY (do it yourself) isn’t anything new. I’ve written about it a few times on this blog because I love when an idea moves to a distributed ownership model. Further, one could argue that this idea isn’t new at all and that all activism has had a strong sense of do it yourself since day [...]

Global Social Media Checkuphttp://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=globalsocialmediacheckup-100221151236-phpapp02&stripped_title=global-social-media-checkup
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One thing is clear, Surfrider is a tribe.
In 2009 volunteers logged 125,000 hours under the Surfrider banner. We are a group of people dedicated to having fun at beaches equally dedicated to doing extraordinary efforts to preserve our coasts. We love waves. We love beaches. We love beach access. We come band together as [...]

Yet the idea of “democratization of intimacy” is quite intriguing. Parents traveling are putting their children to bed via video, families that have moved away are sharing breakfast with grandparents via video. Of course those aren’t as good as being there in person, nothing is. The point is that connections are being made, at a [...]

We don’t just have new tools to accomplish our mission. We have powertools with a leap of power, reach and influence. There was activism before the internet and there is something completely different with the internet.
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Solid piece in WIRED by Clive Thompson on how dialog breaks down with too many followers. This suggests a workaround of smaller, more nimble campaign-oriented messaging. I.e. People don’t want to “save the world” as that’s too abstract but they may want to follow the issues around offshore drilling.
All that said I’m not sure the [...]