Below is the recording of the livestream of the event, covering what’s happening in LA that is eco-conscious and sustainable, what can be done locally to affect the world at large, how to reduce your carbon footprint, how to get involved and make a difference, what to do in the home or office, and green consumerism in LA and via the Internet.
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Moira Nordholt's Tweetuplift December 2008

Since the inaugural voyage of The Schwaggin Wagon, I’ve been more aware of examples of people using the power of new media to quickly organize and mobilize individuals for brief acts of philanthropy–what I’ve called Flash Philanthropy. Now that the microblogging site, Twitter, has a larger user base, there is a greater potential for ad hoc acts of charitable mobilization that take less and less time to set in motion. Simply put: Twitter gets the word out fast when it’s time to create ad hoc groups based on a shared idea.

Back in the Spring of 2008, six of us organized the wagon project in less than 10 days, and it played out in 72 hours. A few days ago, vegan consultant and cookbook author Moira Nordholt organized her Tweetuplift in less than 48 hours and it played out in two! We used Twitter in the service of our project, whereas Moria used Twitter to organize her project in the first place. How did she gather ten people to give up their time on Christmas day (in order to hand out food and supplies to those in need)? How did she gather them in the pouring rain, with no mandate or preconceived structure, giving less than two days of lead time for anyone to alter their plans? Answer: Twitter–but not just Twitter. Specifically the fact that well-known and well-followed people chose to take up her cause and “re-tweet” her call on Twitter, meaning they re-broadcasted the call for volunteers for which Moira had originally asked. This allowed a wider audience of people to hear about the ad hoc event, and choose to take part.

Moira’s Twitter handle is @feelgoodguru. Among those who helped were @invisiblepeople, @vaguelyartistic, @AlexisNeely (who brought multiple family members and had been looking for such an opportunity when she saw the tweet), @JackiePeters, and @ronproulx. Re-tweets came from @rhetor (me), @lizstrauss, @perrybelcher, @scobleizer, @heathermilligan, @HarpArora, @Andrewjustin, @cfl_homeless, @nakisnakis, @linnetwoods, @Peppersantblai, @lovemorenow, @mrken777, @amoyal, @mandamin, @bcross, and @LAist. You can check out Moira’s recap of the event here. And the Laist post here. Bottom line: They handed out food and 100 scores of ponchos to some very cold and hungry individuals, and by doing so they made a difference in people’s lives.

Here’s the punchline regarding Twitter and this instance of flash philanthropy: Moira has only been a member of Twitter for less than a month, and she doesn’t have a vast network of friends in Los Angeles because she lives mostly in Toronto. She probably has less than 20 followers on Twitter who live in Los Angeles! She tells me:

“Twitter is a way of finding your tribe members and then taking it from there…when you tweet something you’re passionate about… it’s a great way of getting people to come out of the woodwork”

It sure is. Will we see future Tweetuplifts in all the major cities in the U.S.? I wouldn’t be surprised if we do. The “flash” in flash philanthropy can spark something far beyond the initial act, and I give a great deal of credit to the Moira Nordholts of the world. Keep flashing!

The Obama Campaign has made voter registration easy

When I created a yahoo group in 2003 to encourage discussion on how to make voting and voter registration easier in the U.S., I would have stopped in my tracks if VoteForChange.com [could have] existed. Chris Hughes and the gang in the New Media team of the Obama campaign have hit this one out of the park, and there’s precious time left to get the word out about this site. Now it’s 2008 and we have all kinds of social media and online networking tools to make sure people who would vote for Obama actually do vote.

Obama needs registrations from the key battleground states of Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, New Mexico, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and North Carolina. Most of these states have an October 6th registration deadline, so if you are to write a blog post or tweet about this site, or perhaps send the link to the people you know in those states, now is the time to do so. Ask them to share this site with the younger people in their lives. Share it on the OSNs like Facebook and MySpace, and share it with those who are on university campuses. Above all, if you’re reading this and you’re one of those Web 2.0 folks who has a vast online network of connections or blog subscribers, please take the time to explain to them that their act of sharing can make a big difference in this election.

I don’t have to take up any more space writing on why this is important. You already know why. Now just please spread the link, and be persuasive:  VoteForChange.com

Thank you.

Haiti Before Hurricane Gustav

UPDATE: See Gustav Wiki for clearinghouse of info on Gustav.

The folks who post on Twitter have sprung into action over Hurricane Gustav and New Orleans. They’ve publicized that an ad hoc social network using the popular NING white-label software has been created to help those affected by the storm to connect and help one another. Perhaps Twitter, with it’s up-to-the-minute capabilities, will supercharge information flow about the online tools that worked back in 2005: A Wikipedia page, repurposing Craig’s List (with Craig Newmark’s blessing of course), and good old cell phone technology. All these were examples of social and collaborative technologies being used or re-used to assist with the humanitarian efforts of relief agencies, or simply to help one person assist another directly.

Right now, people like Tim Street, Nicole Jordan, Peter Shankman, and Craig Newmark are sending message bursts to their followers on Twitter to publicize the NING Gustav site. I’m not sure who set it up, but kudos to that person! 

UPDATE: Andy Carvin set up the NING site (@acarvin on Twitter) at the suggestion of Wayne Sutton, who is also active in these efforts. Thanks to @jazzychad on Twitter for compiling a Hurricane Gustav Twitter Tracker to help us follow the updates, which will, in turn, help the helpers to get the word out in other ways (many of those affected do not use Twitter). Andy Carvin has also lead the way for a wiki page of Gustav Twitter resources; read his blog post about all this for even more resources, like the Gustav Wiki, fashioned after the Katrina wiki.

Here’s what I wrote back in 2005 about the Tsunami & Wikipedia/online collaboration, as a guest blogger on the North Star Leadership Group website, at the request of Adam Carstens and John Beck:

(it can also be accessed via archives here)

October 25, 2005

Information Helps in Disaster Relief

By [Michael] Liskin 

The current U.S. citizenry is often called apathetic and cynical. Yet I suggest that we are witnessing a surge of ad-hoc opportunities for those in our nation—and the world—who have always wanted to get involved in direct social or political action but lacked the knowledge, the time or the proximity to do much good.

Take, for example, the East Asian Tsunami. The coordination of recovery attempts for the tsunami produced a catalytic event in that it brought forth ad-hoc efforts to repair telecommunications, help displaced people, and rebuild a stronger disaster preparedness network through the use of the newer communication technologies: blogs, wikis, and more sophisticated web sites. This has not only redefined how we deliver aid to those in need, but it has fundamentally altered the speed-of-reaction time that is expected of information organization and retrieval in times of crisis. James Robertson writes:

…As the beginnings of a massive relief effort were co-ordinated and aid began flowing into affected regions, [Peter Griffin] realised that the response lacked a vital element – information.

With Paola di Maio, Dina Mehta and a small group of internet contributors, many from tsunami-affected areas, [Peter] Griffin established SEA-EAT, the South East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami weblog…

With more than two million visits since it was established this month, it has fast become the online clearinghouse for information and contact details.

This phenomenon was largely repeated during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina—but this time there were too many sites. Wikipedians came to the rescue with a clearinghouse page to serve as a meta-page that collected information from all the other web pages. But you cannot just use hyperlinks and call it a day. Somebody would have to enter the data in order to make it searchable. This called for massive collaboration.

People from the U.S. and around the world changed the notion of what it means to help in times of disaster. Those that would not have had the time or resources to help out in the traditional manner were able to pitch in from the comfort of their own home. They collaborated on a master disaster database for hurricane survivors, aggregating from other sources to provide a centralized website to help families locate their loved ones and provide important news and information. Just a few hours of data entry can go a long way to help a survivor locate their family. By leveraging the networking power of the Internet, the organization emerged to replace an unprepared and malignantly incompetent FEMA.

The master database collaboration was conducted through the open, free Internet encyclopedia—Wikipedia–a collaborative tour-de-force in it’s own right. After this aggregation page on Wikipedia provided an initial departure point for those in need, Yahoo.com and other portal sites stepped in to provide other meta-resource pages that include links to such information-rich sources as CraigsList New Orleans.

In many ways the distributed meta-data entry project was an ad-hoc collaborative effort in response to a government communication preparedness failure. Citizen stepped in to help fellow citizen, in a manner and with a tone not far from that of the open-source software movement itself. To borrow slang from Malcolm Gladwell, I proclaim that the use of new information and communication technologies in epic disasters has finally tipped.

Recently I started working at Blankspaces. This is a coworking office environment designed for freelancers and independent professionals who work solo, but who want to do so with others in an office environment. This can be a temporary, or somewhat more permanent solution to the isolation of working from one’s home. It’s a fantastic idea that embodies the best aspects of collaborative work and the potential for cross-pollination of ideas.  The proximity encourages conversations that might only arise seldomly at a cafe or cocktail party, thereby increasing chances of serendipity in one’s business and life.

Blankspaces is the paradigmatic example of the intersection between physical and online space–they have an online community that compliments and augments the offline community. Some of my graduate school work looked at examples of synchronous and asynchronous online/offline collaboration; I’ve been looking for more examples ever since.

Looks like I’ve found an important place, in that this office space provides the perfect research laboratory for the study of how offline and online interaction mutually affect one another, and how online tools in an intimate environment can facilitate friendships and business in physical space. It also uncovers what humans in this culture prefer to do online versus offline, when given the option to choose.

Kudos to Jerome Chang for creating a well-designed office space and in many respects a community center. Unlike Starbucks, Blankspaces has the potential to become a true “third place” that merits a mention to the sociologist Ray Oldenburg, who first discussed the necessity of such a place for the social vitality of a given community.

It is not often that I tell people they “must read” something. Bill McKibben eloquently tells us in this article why it is necessary for us to act now to make sure our governments collaborate on climate change agreements in the next 3 years.

I will say this at the outset– I believe him. I believe the scientist Rajendra Pachauri who McKibben quotes as giving humanity a hard deadline of 2012 — if we do not begin actions to lower emissions before that date, we will set off irrecoverable chain reactions in the environment.

The goal is to roll back our CO2 emissions from 385 to 350ppm (parts per million).

A few of us have just launched a new campaign, 350.org. Its only goal is to spread this number around the world in the next 18 months, via art and music and ruckuses of all kinds, in the hope that it will push those post-Kyoto negotiations in the direction of reality.

If ever there were a time for me to proclaim “this is the paradigmatic example of why social and collaborative media are crucial,” now would be it. If you’ve ever asked, “what’s the point of Web 2.0?”, here is the moment to jump on and get involved. Those of us who are using social and collaborative media on the web more than others owe it to humanity to pass this along in whatever form we think will make the most difference. If you blog, please consider writing about 350.org. If you use a social network, consider posting the URL; if you use Flickr then consider joining the Flickr group. McKibben is not an expert on Internet collaboration and new media, but he certainly gets its potential for results:

We do have one thing going for us: This new tool, the Web which, at least, allows you to imagine something like a grassroots global effort. If the Internet was built for anything, it was built for sharing this number, for making people understand that “350″ stands for a kind of safety, a kind of possibility, a kind of future.

And with that, I will reproduce the article in its entirety after the jump. It’s that important.

The World at 350
A Last Chance for Civilization
By Bill McKibben

Even for Americans, constitutionally convinced that there will always be a second act, and a third, and a do-over after that, and, if necessary, a little public repentance and forgiveness and a Brand New Start — even for us, the world looks a little Terminal right now.

It’s not just the economy. We’ve gone through swoons before. It’s that gas at $4 a gallon means we’re running out, at least of the cheap stuff that built our sprawling society. It’s that when we try to turn corn into gas, it sends the price of a loaf of bread shooting upwards and starts food riots on three continents. It’s that everything is so inextricably tied together. It’s that, all of a sudden, those grim Club of Rome types who, way back in the 1970s, went on and on about the “limits to growth” suddenly seem… how best to put it, right.

All of a sudden it isn’t morning in America, it’s dusk on planet Earth.

There’s a number — a new number — that makes this point most powerfully. It may now be the most important number on Earth: 350. As in parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

A few weeks ago, our foremost climatologist, NASA’s Jim Hansen, submitted a paper to Science magazine with several co-authors. The abstract attached to it argued — and I have never read stronger language in a scientific paper — “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.” Hansen cites six irreversible tipping points — massive sea level rise and huge changes in rainfall patterns, among them — that we’ll pass if we don’t get back down to 350 soon; and the first of them, judging by last summer’s insane melt of Arctic ice, may already be behind us.

So it’s a tough diagnosis. It’s like the doctor telling you that your cholesterol is way too high and, if you don’t bring it down right away, you’re going to have a stroke. So you take the pill, you swear off the cheese, and, if you’re lucky, you get back into the safety zone before the coronary. It’s like watching the tachometer edge into the red zone and knowing that you need to take your foot off the gas before you hear that clunk up front.

In this case, though, it’s worse than that because we’re not taking the pill and we are stomping on the gas — hard. Instead of slowing down, we’re pouring on the coal, quite literally. Two weeks ago came the news that atmospheric carbon dioxide had jumped 2.4 parts per million last year — two decades ago, it was going up barely half that fast.

And suddenly, the news arrives that the amount of methane, another potent greenhouse gas, accumulating in the atmosphere, has unexpectedly begun to soar as well. Apparently, we’ve managed to warm the far north enough to start melting huge patches of permafrost and massive quantities of methane trapped beneath it have begun to bubble forth.

And don’t forget: China is building more power plants; India is pioneering the $2,500 car, and Americans are converting to TVs the size of windshields which suck juice ever faster.

Here’s the thing. Hansen didn’t just say that, if we didn’t act, there was trouble coming; or, if we didn’t yet know what was best for us, we’d certainly be better off below 350 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. His phrase was: “…if we wish to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed.” A planet with billions of people living near those oh-so-floodable coastlines. A planet with ever more vulnerable forests. (A beetle, encouraged by warmer temperatures, has already managed to kill 10 times more trees than in any previous infestation across the northern reaches of Canada this year. This means far more carbon heading for the atmosphere and apparently dooms Canada’s efforts to comply with the Kyoto Protocol, already in doubt because of its decision to start producing oil for the U.S. from Alberta’s tar sands.)

We’re the ones who kicked the warming off; now, the planet is starting to take over the job. Melt all that Arctic ice, for instance, and suddenly the nice white shield that reflected 80% of incoming solar radiation back into space has turned to blue water that absorbs 80% of the sun’s heat. Such feedbacks are beyond history, though not in the sense that Francis Fukuyama had in mind.

And we have, at best, a few years to short-circuit them — to reverse course. Here’s the Indian scientist and economist Rajendra Pachauri, who accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year (and, by the way, got his job when the Bush administration, at the behest of Exxon Mobil, forced out his predecessor): “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.”

In the next two or three years, the nations of the world are supposed to be negotiating a successor treaty to the Kyoto Accord. When December 2009 rolls around, heads of state are supposed to converge on Copenhagen to sign a treaty — a treaty that would go into effect at the last plausible moment to heed the most basic and crucial of limits on atmospheric CO2.

If we did everything right, says Hansen, we could see carbon emissions start to fall fairly rapidly and the oceans begin to pull some of that CO2 out of the atmosphere. Before the century was out we might even be on track back to 350. We might stop just short of some of those tipping points, like the Road Runner screeching to a halt at the very edge of the cliff.

More likely, though, we’re the Coyote — because “doing everything right” means that political systems around the world would have to take enormous and painful steps right away. It means no more new coal-fired power plants anywhere, and plans to quickly close the ones already in operation. (Coal-fired power plants operating the way they’re supposed to are, in global warming terms, as dangerous as nuclear plants melting down.) It means making car factories turn out efficient hybrids next year, just the way we made them turn out tanks in six months at the start of World War II. It means making trains an absolute priority and planes a taboo.

It means making every decision wisely because we have so little time and so little money, at least relative to the task at hand. And hardest of all, it means the rich countries of the world sharing resources and technology freely with the poorest ones, so that they can develop dignified lives without burning their cheap coal.

That’s possible — we launched a Marshall Plan once, and we could do it again, this time in relation to carbon. But in a month when the President has, once more, urged us to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, that seems unlikely. In a month when the alluring phrase “gas tax holiday” has danced into our vocabulary, it’s hard to see (though it was encouraging to see that Clinton’s gambit didn’t sway many voters). And if it’s hard to imagine sacrifice here, imagine China, where people produce a quarter as much carbon apiece as we do.

Still, as long as it’s not impossible, we’ve got a duty to try. In fact, it’s about the most obvious duty humans have ever faced.

A few of us have just launched a new campaign, 350.org. Its only goal is to spread this number around the world in the next 18 months, via art and music and ruckuses of all kinds, in the hope that it will push those post-Kyoto negotiations in the direction of reality.

After all, those talks are our last chance; you just can’t do this one light bulb at a time. And if this 350.org campaign is a Hail Mary pass, well, sometimes those passes get caught.

We do have one thing going for us: This new tool, the Web which, at least, allows you to imagine something like a grassroots global effort. If the Internet was built for anything, it was built for sharing this number, for making people understand that “350″ stands for a kind of safety, a kind of possibility, a kind of future.

Hansen’s words were well-chosen: “a planet similar to that on which civilization developed.” People will doubtless survive on a non-350 planet, but those who do will be so preoccupied, coping with the endless unintended consequences of an overheated planet that civilization may not.

Civilization is what grows up in the margins of leisure and security provided by a workable relationship with the natural world. That margin won’t exist, at least not for long, this side of 350. That’s the limit we face.

Bill McKibben is a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College and co-founder of 350.org. His most recent book is The Bill McKibben Reader.

I recently returned from Sacramento, where I attended my cousin’s memorial (there was no funeral). I will never forget this event; 500 people came out to honor Harvey Rose, M.D. While this is not a personal blog, there is insight to be gained from the life of Harvey Rose, especially with respect to human interaction and the medical field in the U.S.

Perhaps we are forced to scour the Internet in the role of personal medical researcher more often than we would like; is medical research our part-time job? We spend more time harnessing the collective intellect of the English-speaking world on medical topics precisely because most doctors do not have the dedication or encyclopedic knowledge of Harvey Rose. I appreciate the use of community knowledge to help us understand our own medical conditions–in fact it is a crucial step since no doctor can keep up with the world’s research–but what happened to doctors embracing their oath to us, assisting their community of patients with even a fraction of what Dr. Rose gave to his?

Harvey Rose embodied the term community. He was a pain physician who fought for patients rights in the State of California at great personal cost. His stand for those patients ultimately culminated in the creation of the Patient’s Bill of Rights. Back in the ’80s the principle governing body of doctors wanted to pull his medical license in their blind quest to quash narcotics, just for his daring to prescribe pain medication to patients with unremitting chronic pain.

It was remarkable to watch patient after patient tell the audience that Harvey Rose was their hero, and that he saved their lives. Over time, the blog in which I am now posting will certainly evangelize the prospect of online communities making a difference in people’s lives, however it will not do so by covering up how important local community is, along with professionals who care enough to call their patients every night with their test results. Harvey Rose was such a man. He cared for his patients unlike any doctor I have ever known, and he helped make this country a better place to live. He will indeed be missed by the world at large and by Kari, Dianna, Nathan, and the rest of his family and friends. I will miss him. Click the above link to read the obituary from the Sacramento Bee.

Update: The Journal of Practical Pain Management has published a definitive obituary of Harvey. This is a must-read to get the full sense of his contribution to this world.

Freecycle.org is starting to gain more momentum. They are one of a number of online forums that facilitate the exchange of…well…..stuff — keeping all sorts of items out of landfills by providing an opportunity to give it away for free to someone else in your community. It’s a more efficient structure than leaving it on the sidewalk or having a garage sale. My question is… why are they still using Yahoo Groups as their primary means of interaction? This site is in dire need of some Web 2.0.

They are likely on a shoestring budget, therefore if you are willing to help them implement tags and their own online social apparatus, perhaps they would welcome the help.

Other than the obvious Craig’s List, what are your experiences with competitor sites that facilitate the exchange of goods and services? Which ones are most useful?