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Kedar is an activist of sustainable living and collaborative creation. He is involved with BarCamp events, TwtrTales, a twitter based story writing project and Picky Polly. His learnings come from experiences that span an education in electronics and telecommunications, multi-cultural professional engagements in software development and communications, a business administration student life in pretty Paris and experiments in implementing technological solutions for social challenges.

Since turning vegetarian over a year ago due to self consciousness about the unsustainable nature of meat production, he has been trying to think of solutions that could better engage people to change their current habits for collective good.

Where did the idea for Picky Polly come from?

Since moving to Dubai over 3 years ago, I’ve observed that this city is the epitome of excessive consumption. UAE residents also have one of the largest ecological footprints on our planet. Using this behavior among residents as inspiration I felt compelled to do something about it.

Taking the lead from other measurement tools like the Google Power Meter that helps people take control of their energy usage and alter behavior, I felt mobile devices could act as an even more powerful tool in providing information and changing they way we shopped and used things in addition to household energy consumption.

Thus came along the idea of a personal ecological footprint measurement tool that helps people make better choices and transform lifestyles, Picky Polly.

What’s your goal for the new tool?

As a society we have largely stopped being picky about things we consume. But as co-inhabitants of this single planet we need to take more control and responsibility for the types of lives we lead. This consciousness and reason to change for our collective sustainability can only come from the awareness of our individual impact due to over consumption. Picky Polly aims to deliver that information for every item used by us and also help transform us by learning from our peers’ behaviors.

What’s different about Picky Polly from other “consumption + competition” tools people may have used before on facebook or elsewhere?

Numerous websites and mobile applications currently exist to help us get a rough idea of our ecological footprints by asking us questions to approximate our lifestyle patterns e.g. number of people in a household, distance driven in a month, miles flown in a year, vegetarian/ non-vegetarian, etc. These are good measuring tools in raising awareness about the ecological disaster that lies ahead, but they do not sufficiently motivate me to alter my behavior with using plastic bags at the corner store or buying a cup of coffee on my way into work or eating a burger from a popular fast-food chain. These are the kinds of purchases or behaviors, if changed will result in significantly larger social change.

I have not yet come across a robust and handy mobile solution that takes all the disparate pieces of information available to help people track their current impact and alter it based on self improvement, peer reviews and expert recommendations.

Picky Polly is simply an open and collaborative technological tool, firstly providing people a better way to measure themselves and secondly to provide relevant and contextual feedback (with incentives/ rewards) to alter their lifestyle patterns/ choices.

What are the implications of such a tool on our production-heavy consumption-driven society?

There are numerous way this tool can improve the way the consumption cycle of our society change. It is meant to work it’s way from the conscious measurement of people’s behavior.

1. Social Change: Better inform people to make the right choices
2. Information Transparency: Better labeling of products and inquiry into resource usage, labor use, toxics, health, etc
3. Government policy: Rewarding citizens for their behavioral changes and better regulating toxic products.
4. New product development: Helping businesses learn from changes in social behavior and better adapt products/ packaging to people’s sustainable needs.
5. Community production: Encouraging entrepreneurs to find community solutions to meet the localized needs.

These are just some ways, that come my mind, Picky Polly can assist the different parties mentioned from its measurements of local lifestyle patterns.

What help could you use at this stage?

I am no expert in the field of sustainable living, rather a passionate fellow citizen of this world who could use help and collaboration from

• the Netsquared community in the form of feedback on the idea,
• experts in understanding the footprint life cycle consumables,
• game designers to help design compelling social incentives,
• 3. mobile application developers to build a robust prototype.

Additionally, I’m aware that such a project requires reasonable commitment of time from the above people and hence any financially support from a believer in the idea for the creation of a working prototype is also most welcome.

PS: Financers will of course be rewarded a stake in the eventually funded entity.

What else are you working on?

I’m also involved in TwtrTales, a project that would like to leverage the creative potential of twitter users in writing collaborative stories. This project has many similarities with Picky Polly, like co-creator credits, collaboration between participants and peer reviews which I’m learning more about as I go along.

How can readers get involved or follow your work?

I have recently started a Tumblog at www.pickypolly.com to document efforts by others providing practical information on sustainable living and to include podcasts with individuals and organizations that help make better everyday choices.

Additionally, I’m can be reached on Twitter, would also love to converse with you over email at kedar dot iyer at gmail.com or connect on LinkedIn.

Today is Blog Action Day and this year’s theme is Climate Change.  Earlier this week, I posted a summary from this month’s #4Change chat that focused on social media in the Climate Change movement.  If you haven’t seen it, check it out here!

What’s Blog Action Day?

Blog Action Day is an annual event held every October 15 that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day with the aim of sparking discussion around an issue of global importance. Blog Action Day 2009 will be one of the largest-ever social change events on the web.

At the time of this posting, there are already 9,340 blogs contributing to Climate Change conversations today in 150 countries.  That’s huge!

Create Actions for Everyone

Something I’d like to focus on today comes about from two things: Tuesday, the eCampaigning Report was released that showed data and best practices for campaigning and advocacy online; and yesterday I met with a local climate change focused nonprofit organization about some of the work they are doing.

The organization comes at climate change from a nontraditional angle: their target audience are those that do not normally care about the climate or social action, spend their time off line and online focused on trends, fashion, networking and livin’ it up.  The organization works with scientists and other organizations to stay on top of the latest news and actions going on around carbon, energy, and other climate-influencing topics, then works to translate those things into relevant actions or news for their audience (for example, instead of breaking news about figures or facts, they may encourage people to share photos of themselves in winter woolies and encourage them to dress cozy and turn the thermostat down a couple degrees).

I asked the organization what they were doing next Saturday for the Day of Climate Action.  They quickly said, “oh, nothing – our target audience wouldn’t be interested in that.”  I was shocked!  I said, “really? They wouldn’t even want to get a discount for shopping at a vintage shop (used clothes, not new) only on that day, and have lots of folks going together (bridge online and offline communities)?”  The people I was meeting with looked at each other and said, “now there’s an idea!”

I use this story to say that no matter who your audience is, so long as you know them, you can provide relevant and exciting opportunities to take action to make a positive impact on our environment.

The first pieces of any social media strategy or campaigns are to identify the audience and get to know them – how do they want you to talk to them, where online do they want you to talk to them, what do they want to be able to do (give you ideas, share your content, campaign or fundraise for you, etc.)?  Knowing your audience is key in all the work you do.

And, when you know them, you can use days like today and next week’s Day of Action to link your network with networks around the world to make a bigger difference.

Join Blog Action Day

• Blog about Climate Change and start a conversation (register your blog to show up on the Blog Action Day website)
• Take action on Climate Change
• Learn more
• Share your ideas in the comments below

Read the post below or visit the Stanford Social Innovation Review blog to comment.

How can we and how are we using social media tools for social change? That’s the question that the monthly #4Change chats (that take place on Twitter) address, this month focusing on the Climate Change movement.  This was a very lively conversation, filled with examples and experiences from people involved in climate change organizations and campaigns leveraging social media in their work.  “Social media is all about moving people up the ladder of engagement” (@JeffM2001) and is designed “to inspire (and to have lasting effect)—build fields and bridges, not brands” (@tropology). These points and the full #4Change conversation are applicable to the Climate Change movement, but also to many social impact sectors and the campaigns reaching around the world.

So, what are the biggest lessons for using social media in a global movement?

There were three main lessons or focus areas that emerged in the discussion.  These three lessons focus on what is successful, unique or important about using social media for the Climate Change movement (or any social impact area).  Note: the @names provide links to the Twitter users who made specific comments, just in case you want to connect and continue the conversation!*

Lesson #1: Voice

“Social media is a storytelling tool, it’s let voices effected by climate change be heard around the world” (@amysampleward).  Many social media tools are specifically designed for users to tell stories and voice opinions, others are built as aggregators and distributors of users’ stories.  Think about a tool like YouTube, where people can share videos (uploaded and created in various ways from mobile phones to laptop computers to high quality cameras) and then find others who care about similar issues.  It is impossible to tell a story about someone else being affected by Climate Change as well as the authentic voice of the person who is living with Climate Change.

“I’m really interested in how people are starting & joining movements – and how they’re growing via people-powered social media!” (@engagejoe)

The power of social media and the authentic storytelling that takes place is in the opportunity for people to inspire other people to take action, which leads to lesson #2.

Lesson #2: Action

@HildyGottlieb asked a great question, “How many ppl think that by “following” a climate change guru, they’re creating change?” Her question spurred some interesting comments that targeting the idea of taking action.  Social media is still the tool or the medium, not the change or the action.  The challenge, then, is how to use the tools to effect change, “not just talk about change we want to see one day” (@replyforall).  The power of social media in this context, “is in networks growing and collaborating, not silo-ing” (@amysampleward) or “connecting/leveraging/magnifying the work of people who’re already aware” (@HildyGottlieb).

Another side of empowering action via social media is to focus on what hooks people in: “Social Media can only inspire ACTION when people EASILY see how their action a) is part of something bigger, b) makes a difference” (@SethHorwitz).  “People need choices of action, if they are listening to you they are more than likely interested in your cause / initiative” (@BeverleyPomeroy) so provide opportunities to take action; your supporters are ready!  As, @@JeffM2001 explains, “awareness of climate change is already very high, we need to raise awareness about what we can do about it.”

Lesson #3: Local vs Global

The final focus area is on the local vs global impact of social media.  With tools that let us connect in real-time to anywhere else in the world, it can be hard for us to streamline, focus, or even tell our stories in ways that makes sense to the audience.  It especially poses problems for campaigners looking to collaborate around the world and create meaningful opportunities to take action (someone in Taiwan may have a compelling story about Climate Change, but they may not respond or be empowered by a US legislative petition, for example).

“Real world movement needs to allow 3rd world (biggest victims) to take leadership” (@SethHorwitz.)  “The accumulation of climate conscious communities will slowly add to a big pay off. People don’t see ‘big picture’ but relate locally” (@kristianakocis).

The local issue also takes the shape of real people, connecting in person.  “Social Media can’t be a replacement for getting one-on-one commitments from people—we need faces in the movement, not Facebook newsfeeds” (@replyforall).  Linking in global messages or large-scale campaigns to “to offline events and opportunities across organizations/campaigns” (@amysampleward) can bring local communities into the mix and create more ownership for outcomes.

Examples of Social Media

There were many, many examples cited in the discussion.  Please follow the links to learn more as I’ve tried to pull out as many as I could:

• There are many organizations using Twitter to promote actions, including: @350 @1sky @tcktcktck @replyforall @avaaz @PowerShift09 @wiserearth @focusthenation @consequence09
• Collaborative mapping of climate change policy http://bit.ly/1Jol4U
• http://climatelab.org is a climate change wiki
• http://consequence09.org/TimeToLead
• CoP15 Global Observatory worth a look http://globalobservatory.net
• http://climatecamp.tv
• Kinda technical, but for any nerds the drupal.org profile of TckTckTck is worth a look http://drupal.org/node/585950
• #Dreamact -ers have expanded the role of SM, not just to stay connected, but informing supporters on how to use SM themselves
• 1 way social media inspires action is by making it really easy, e.g. http://consequence09.org/call
• Pinc is using http://bit.ly/18nurm 2 inspire & inform, evoke w/ built in actions other platforms do similar w/ their applications
• Climate Ntwks, @1sky @powershift09 @focusthenation & @consequence09 each have own branded window into same 435 groups

Learn more about #4Change or review the full transcript.

*For transparency: I am @amysampleward in the above chat.

What do you think? Visit the Stanford Social Innovation Review opinion blog or comment below!

Happy Earth Day, everyone!  What are you doing today to celebrate the Earth?

I wanted to use today to focus in on a question recently posed by my good friend Joe Solomon on Twitter:

What are the nonprofit/orgs that are working 2 wire the green movement, like what @netsquared does 4 nonprofits, @sunfoundation for politics; which orgs are working to expose data, leverage soc media, connect the orgs together?

How is social media being deployed to connect the Green Movement?

The way I see it, there are many directions that technology is aiding social change work:

• enabling data sharing, exchange and mapping
• connecting organizations for shared knowledge, partnerships and coalitions
• changing individual motions into a unified movement

It’s this last item I want to talk about right now.  The climate change/ clean energy/ environmental (or whatever other title you prefer) sector is not unique to the broader social change arena in that there is still along way to go to really harness the power of the web.  This GreenLiving article asks, “Have Facebook, Twitter and Web 2.0 Made Earth Day Every Day?” – I certainly hope not! Otherwise we have settled for low impact and disengaged motions; I’m after a real movement!

Facebook

Facebook has lots of applications, it’s true: whether they are specifically targeted at “green” efforts (like the lil green patch app) or not (like Causes).  But are Facebook apps really turning citizens into advocates, individuals into changemakers?  If the goal of your organization is to educate young people about the effects and causes of climate change and motivate/empower them to start making changes, Facebook could certainly be a part of your organizations strategy.  But what are you doing on Facebook? Simply “being there” isn’t going to cut it.

Facebook’s newest “renovations” have, as many people have already noticed, nearly relegated Groups as a thing of the past and pushed Pages onto the main stage.  As the numbers of users grow, so do your number of friends, and then in turn so does the frequnecy of news items, status updates, and general calls to action for your network.  So how do you cut through the noise, how do you sift through the hundreds of apps, how do you connect and engage? Good question.

The best answer I can give (without spending the entire brainstorming, strategizing, and working in person) is that Facebook is a place to connect, and round up supporters. The engagement takes place outside of Facebook.  You can make friends and call them into action, but those actions and real engagement will link to and live outside of the platform.

Twitter

There are TONS of climate activisits and organizations on Twitter – spreading news, policy alerts, new developments, and ideas.  We have seen awareness campaigns like World Wildlife Federation’s “wildlife watch” (next time you see wildlife, Tweet it with the hashtag #wwf!), and news streams like #earthtweet.  There is a lot of potential with Twitter to spread messages and calls to action from sources onto the Twitter stream, and then back again.  For example, using Social Actions (which aggregates actionable opportunities from across the web), you could pull all of the actions related to your organization’s specific environmental focus and push them out via Twitter or your website, and so on.  You can also use Social Actions’ Twitter mashups to pull and push actionable opportunities to your network.  So how do you cut through the noise, how do you sift through the random updates, how do you connect and engage?

It’s the same answer: connect on Twitter, grow your network, and make those calls; but the real engagement, the action, takes place outside of Twitter.  Don’t create a strategy or even expect to use Twitter for the actions. It’s not going to work.  Use the tool for what it is: a communications platform.  Target your communications, leverage mashups and applications that help you deliver information, updates and calls to action that are important to your work and your network, and then move those supporters into the movement taking place above Twitter.

Blogs

ItsGettingHotInHere is just one example of getting it right in the blogosphere – aggregation is key to really get content (read: messages) out and around the web, creating opportunities for more people to read and also more people to share.  The climate change movement has shown a lot of focus on helping people effected by climate change (everyone) share their story, voice their concerns.  This is excellent – something that many other sectors could learn from.  But it isn’t enough to only tell our story.  We need to couple real voices, with real opportunities to take action and get involved.

The power of blogs is the real-time documentation.  Something that can really help the climate change movement is documentation, shared between campaigns, organizations, and coalitions, about 1. what is happening and 2. lessons learned from the work.  Openly sharing strategies and what worked and didn’t work can help save time, money, and a lot of wasted efforts at reinventing the wheel.  Blogs are a great way to do this because of their immediacy, accessibility, and linkability.  So how do you cut through the noise, how do you sift through the random updates, how do you connect and engage?

Your Twitter or Facebook calls to action might bring people to your blog, or your website. But the action is still taking place beyond the blog.  It’s a cop-out, I know, to say all of this, but it’s true.  And I feel like I have to say it to remind us that living and working and concentrating soley on social media is not going to change the world.  It’s what we do with social media to find and collect supporters, education them, empower them, and provide real opportunities to go out and make the changes that really matter.  Some of that work may still be online, and in fact much of it may be, but no Facebook application is going to install solar panels on my roof – though I could fundraise for those panels in the same space.

What do you think?

This post is really to start a conversation.  And I really, really, REALLY want to hear what you think.  Here are some things to help get the conversation started if the above didn’t already give you something to say.  These are just questions to get you thinking, and talking. I’d love for you to share your ideas, answers, questions, and thoughts below – but if you have the conversation offline, in your organization, and with your friends, well, that works for me, too!

FiredUpMedia wants to create a platform for youth effected by climate change to share their story and create news articles that can be cynidated throughout college radio/news networks and beyond.  This is a great example of providing a real, authentic voice to a global issue.  But how do you wish the platform would work? How could the platform also integrate policy items as well as education and action items to get people involved?

TakingItGlobal is an online community for youth interested in global issues that provides tools and resources for members to enagage and collaborate on issues they care about.  How can a youth-targeted platform like this bridge the sector to connect the stories, voices, action items and projects underway with those in other groups (whether those are geographic, cultural, racial, or religious groups) working on climate change, too?

Change.org’s Climate Change cause area has over 23,000 members.  How do you want to see these supporters engaged?  Is there a way you would want your organization’s community or membership to interact with the content or actions distributed through the Change.org platform?

Earth Day Network has a great website to help get people involved in celebrating and protecting the planet.  Should EDN be an aggregator for the sector, pulling in news and reports, information and so on?  How could EDN, or similar projects like Focus The Nation, move from a specific date-based event to a 365-day movement?

TechSoup Global’s GreenTech project has launched a campaign to education people about steps to “green” their work.  What are the most immediate actions a global organization like TSG could advocate for?  How could TSG integrate the GreenTech work with their international work of providing discounted technology projects to nonprofit organizations?

Happy Earth Day everyone!  I’m really excited about this conversation, about pushing the climate change movement forward, and about what we can all do, regardless of our position, skills, or location, to make a difference.  Can’t wait to hear what you think!