How Social Media is Redefining Activism? Live Blogging from JM Conference

JM's very ownMarcia Stepanek is hosting the panel on how social media is redefining activism, at JM's Stakeholder Conference in doing so, she's bringing us down to one of the main challenges of this 'new' field: an abundance of information (in a time when there is a scarcity of formally abundant natural resources) - which managers and others don't know how to handle. And both the collaboration and the confrontation is just beginning. She talked about the challenges - especially as advocacy groups increasingly take on the role of the media. And that power sharing is essential in a hyper-connected world. This is Part 3 of my Series on this fascinating conference.

One of her panelist, Dr Dan McQuillan, co-founder of Social Innovation Camp, talked about neither collaboration and confrontation but construction. He suggested that it's not really about engagement -its about social deficit. People 'engage' on issues on which there is a 'deficit' - one's overall impact on the world. He challenged organisations to realise its not about the organisations in the first place - its about why the organisation are there - the issues that people care about - which most of our modern organisations, from NGOs to corporations, don't have the capacity or the ideas/vision to do. It's enabling social innovation - people to be engaged. People will try to do the right thing - companies and organisations need to not get in the way, and facilitate the people who are already doing the right thing.

He suggested that 'If you want to be part of social innovation, make yourself hackable.' A great question was raised - sure, but how do you earn a living from it? Answers: people make money doing different things. Some don't need to make any money from it - a lot of it is volunteer-based and based on altruistic needs. And for some there is serious competition with business models based on funding, advertising, and other models. He suggested that philanthropy itself is changing - and that there is a 'clash of economies'.Measuring impact becomes increasingly important - and that's true throughout the field of sustainable development and CSR. The new 'swarms' and groups are part of making that happen.

One of the underlying themes of the question-time was how much is short term and how much is real long term change. 'Swarming' tends to be short term - and public attention is often short. McQuillan pointed out that while it is not yet always scalable, that which is geared towards construction and not merely destruction is exciting and, sometimes, has real change. He emphasised the importance of emergent solutions - step by step processes. Learning how to do this isn't supported by the school system - or very many other main institutions. And figuring out what this means for long term challenges is still, well, emerging.