Leadership Learning Community [beta]

The social web is a brand new way of doing very old things with still emerging implications. The nature of change has always been connected and collective but our recent history and the infrastructure of the nonprofit sector and our social change organizations has been much less so. We as a people, and our communication tools, are on a path to bring the individual and the collective back into balance and planning for this is both impossible and necessary. A document in progress examining this shift is available here.

Join the Bay Area LLC on May 16th, 2008 (save the date!) to discuss this topic live and in person at the next Bay Area circle gathering.

Over on the NetSquared Think Tank Blog (net2thinktank), Britt Bravo is asking the question "Is Online Activism Good for Social Change?" (She will be posting answers from around the net after May 20th.)

My immediate gut reaction is yes, online activism is a useful tool for social change. But then, I quickly waver over to "no," as when I sign a petition on a website, and think I have done something meaningful toward making the world a better place, that's a bit of a problem. Have I actually had an effect, or do I look good on a grant report and like an engaged potential member/donor to a development team?  read more »

The Social Media and Leadership Learning Circle had an initial meeting on May 16, 2008 in the Bay Area.  read more »

The power of social media for change is being talked about and leveraged all over the place.

• John Fontana's recent post on Network World highlights the value of "citizen" engagement, social media and web-based networking in the rebuilding efforts in New Orleans.
• Clay Shirky's recent book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations talks about how social media has removed or lessened many of the barriers to self-organizing (and in my thinking lessened the relevance of the nonprofit model so that many things can be accomplished with "adhocracies"). The book itself has a blog too, where readers are active commenters.
• The Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network (NTEN) and Beth Kanter are facilitating a wiki project to develop a social media curriculum specifically for nonprofits and change initiatives called Be the Media: The Social Media Empowerment Guide for Nonprofits.
• And, over at NetSquared - Remixing the Web for Social Change, there's a veritable cornucopia of stories, examples and how-to's regarding social media and geared for nonprofits and change initiatives.

  Indeed, social media is changing how change happens. So what does this mean for leadership development - how programs are structured and supported, how are people recruited and selected, what's included in curriculum and how do we evaluate? My general instinct is that the term "leader" will be thought of as a fixed definition of a singular individual less and less. And we will talk more and more about leadership as a context-specific process exercised both by people and groups of people at different points in time. What is nonprofit leadership for 2020? What do you think?