It needs to be said that ‘digital’, and all the new stuff that we call ‘social media’, isn’t really the point; relationships are the point. Same as it ever was.

And yet so much has changed. Charities now need to reach out to people in a way that isn’t just ‘marketing’ and catch people ‘in motion’ – when they are ‘goal-orientated’; meeting people where they are, in real-time (or near real-time), around what is interesting to them. It is no longer a question of simply delivering content to people; it’s about your convening power to help people discover each other to help make the change you both want.

The trouble is, by treating social media as just another ‘channel’, in-house departments are often completely unprepared when people ‘answer back’, and struggle to make the required change in tone and posture. With a few exceptions, our sector does not have a great track record when it comes to distributing trust to staff and many organisations have created a bottleneck as communication is funnelled via a handful of staff. Social media has become just another silo.

We really need a much broader (and deeper) organisational alignment around supporters. I want everyone who works for a charity to be seen more as assets and advocates than as cost streams to be subsidised. This seems to me to be even more sensible as we are challenged to do more with less; charity leaders have a passionate community right under their noses: their own staff.

I agree with Will McInnes who is convinced that eventually…

every member of staff [will] need to have some level of responding power and be empowered to use social media to communicate and build relationships with the people around them.

I think that this is inevitable and irresistible, but is your charity ready to create new roles, re-train, and reallocate resources and budgets?

Today is her Beth Kanter’s 53rd birthday and she is asking her trusted network to join her to raise funds for the Sharing Foundation, and help send some young people to school, where they belong. In Beth’s words…

Many children in Cambodia do not go to school because their families lack the $10 for a uniform, required for school attendance. And even though $10 may seem like nothing to us, it can make a world of difference for a Cambodian child. We have hundreds of kids who need uniforms – so let’s help as many as we can.

I’ve met Beth in person only once – in February 2007 – but we have collaborated a number of times. I’m just one of a whole bunch of bloggers writing posts today about Beth, her cause, and her influence. (Amy, Stacey… great idea).

I’ve donated. Not just because of Beth (and her family), but because Cambodia holds a special place in my heart, too. Twenty-one years ago I managed a small team at Oxfam UK which coordinated (with the BBC) The Great Blue Peter Bring and Buy Sale for Kampuchea (as it then was), which raised in excess of GBP 1 million.

If you can, please donate to Beth’s cause on Facebook.

And Beth… thank you for leading by example.

A long, long time ago (in internet time)… in fact, exactly six months to the day before the first ‘tweet’, a Category Four hurricane they inappropriately named Wilma slammed into the Caribbean coast of Mexico. In a matter of a few hours, most of Cancún’s resort beach had been sucked away and dumped on the sea bed. Serious stuff.

It was around midnight on Friday 21 October 2005.

Three weeks later, on 14 November in London, I spoke with Gabriela Rodríguez Gálvez, Tourism Minister for Quintana Roo, the state that is home to Cancún, Cozumel, and the Riviera Maya. As I wrote later…

We discussed the challenges ahead. I expressed my belief that traditional PR and marketing methods are losing their grip on customers as we take recommendations from each other.

Secretary Rodríguez seemed to agree, and she stated:

You cannot predict the future but you can be prepared.

“Definitely,” I nodded. So I encouraged them to start a blog. Tell people what’s happening, I said.

I wasn’t hopeful. I decided there and then to have a go myself (what was I thinking? I lived 5,000 miles away in the SW of England… or “Little Mexico”, as we like to call it). I even ‘mapped’ out some basic ideas on the train home after speaking with the Minister. I wrote down what the purpose of the blog would be, which would later become the about page when we went ‘live’ on 12 December 2005.

Four days later, Secretary Rodríguez was quoted in a CNN.com article as saying:

…it’s very important that the tourists know exactly the status of Cancún, because we don’t want them to expect something else and then have frustrated tourists.

No blog was forthcoming; just a megaphone. Wait for it: The Mexico Tourism Board pumped US$5m into a gimmicky glass-sided “Promobus” filled with sand, palm trees and bikini-clad beachgoers which roamed the wintry streets of 21 US cities, interrupting Christmas shoppers with the message “Cancún is open for business”.

Well, it was a plan. After all, they had always done it that way.

I got to work. I viewed every photo uploaded to Flickr tagged “cancun”, “playa del carmen”, etc., and invited people to add images to a Flickr group. I cross-checked the documentary evidence with the news I gleaned from hotel concierges or plucked from the wires. And yes, it became an obsession. Over the next five months, I estimate I dedicated over 500 hours to updating the blog.

And I guess that’s the first lesson: never ever underestimate the lengths that some people will go to collaborate with strangers to uncover the real story!

The blog became the only source of information on the beach reclamation project and you need only scan a few of these comments to see how keen people were for the clarity they were not getting from their hotel or tour operators!

So what else did we learn?

Now is too late

A big part of being prepared for future storms (or for that matter, any ‘crisis’ event) is to establish – in advance – the best way to inform people what is happening. This way, search engines will already have picked up the blog before any crisis kicks off. Speed is critical. Blogging in this context is a continuous record of facts and corrections of errors in near real time. Questions need answering quickly and accurately (truthfully) to slow speculation and knock down rumours convincingly. You can always add detail as it is verified. The State Tourism office went into damage limitation mode and instead relied on the webmaster to upload woefully inadequate information onto a web page.

In whom we trust

The ‘audience’ (I’m reaching for a better description) is integral to the story. How about inviting half a dozen smart people (who can write a bit) to blog through the hurricane season. Digital cameras were commonplace four years ago, but cheap point-and-shoot video cameras were certainly not. They are now increasingly ubiquitous. I can only imagine how this would have been amplified many times over had Twitter existed in October 2005,

Hello, is anyone out there?

I would have liked those working directly in the travel industry (hotels, tour operators, etc.) to have taken advantage of the blog – connected with it, and participated in the conversation. I was pretty well known to the Mexican tourism authorities, having been presented with a writing award by the Tourism Secretary in 2003. I contacted over twenty representatives in London and in Mexico. I met with a wall of silence. Not one reply. Not a single acknowledgement of what we were doing. Whatever you do, reach out to those who seek to be your advocates.

Head in the sand won’t stop the backchat

The job of PR was changing fast even back then. They can have a conversation with their customers – and potential customers – via comments and posts to bulletin boards. They can enjoy the value that comes from listening to what people have to say. Marketers need to understand that their job is more than simply ‘bums on seats’ and selling ‘product’. They are now marketing ‘conversations’, and they need to join in themselves. Participation is marketing.

Indulge me for a moment and allow me to use a travel metaphor: To fully understand the value and culture of social media, it is best to participate as a ‘traveller’, and not as an occasional tourist. It can be uncomfortable at times, but less so if you are well-prepared. Know before you go, and if the expertise does not exist in house, ask for help.

No news is good news… or is it?

Not necessarily. I recall one hotel which sent me a photo of some of its staff with their backs to the Caribbean Sea. I was able to locate a photo taken from almost exactly the same spot (on Flickr), but pointing in the direction of the hotel, which was badly damaged. Even those hotels which escaped with only minor damage, or none at all, should have said as much on their websites. Otherwise, we’ll just assume the worst.

In the words of Dan Gilmour:

Tell the truth. Tell it quickly. Tell as much as you can. People crave a genuine, human voice in times of crisis.

Thousands of people visited the blog. Very quickly it became clear that many were not going to be put off from travelling to Cancún for a holiday. I believe that this was the greatest failure of the travel PR people. They failed to grasp that by encouraging conversations about on-going developments (which was in fact largely a positive story following the disaster of Katrina), the blog meant that people travelled better informed and with sensible expectations. By their absence, the tourism authorities in this particular story turned a drama into a crisis.

So that’s the story. Nearly four years on, I remain enormously proud of what we achieved together. To be totally frank, looking back over the comments left on the blog brings a lump to my throat.

The web truly became social for me over those few months.

My only regret is that although I still visit Mexico (with family and my camera) every 18 months or so, I’ve not written a single article about Mexico since mothballing After Wilma. I’ve moved on, I guess.

Cue sunset.

Do you work for a charity? Do you use Twitter?

I’ll put the question I posed in the title another way:

Do you ‘tweet’ ‘under the radar’… or seek management buy-in before you start?

This is one of the questions we’ll be asking on Thursday (the 24th), when it will be the turn of my friends at Breast Cancer Care to host the fourth NFPtweetup.

When the very first nfptweetup was held in November 2008, you could pretty much squeeze everyone who ticked both the ‘charity’, and ‘Twitter’ boxes into the cosy upstairs room in the Coach and Horses in London’s Soho.

Less than one year later, and you are too many to mention. Many UK charities (or at least many individuals within charities) have adopted Twitter and like me have no doubt been surprised, confounded, and delighted in equal measure.

There are many great examples of Twitter success; I signposted a few good examples in a short and sweet piece I wrote for London Twestival earlier this month. Beth has done better elsewhere.

On Thursday I’ve agreed to facilitate a group break-out session around convincing colleagues of Twitter’s value?

Tweeting charity CEO, Gary Williams of Sound Seekers is in no doubt. He told me (in less than 140 characters)…

[It] has to be about organisational goals. Specifically, it has to be about building a richer conversation with stakeholders, potential supporters.

So, there you have it.

But what if you’re not lucky enough to have someone like Gary as your CEO and want to get internal buy-in? Should you go under the radar of management in order to first build a compelling and coherent business case (rather than a vaguely-defined idea) and make your ‘apology’ afterwards? Or do you prepare a 20-page strategy document – as Neil Williams did to convince civil service colleagues of the value of embracing Twitter. (Neil’s PDF template is well worth downloading by the way).

Now for me personally Twitter is the best thing since sliced bread (with the possible exception of Flickr and meeting my wife). It’s of enormous value to me. I’m with Danah, who I think described Twitter as “a social filter, flushing good stuff to me.” That’s it right there.

Plan or improvise?

But what problem does Twitter solve if you are a charity? And how do you capture the value from the relentless flow from people who would like to connect with you. It’s certainly more than a numbers game. As Joanne Jacobs points out:

Social media influence is best measured by network effects analysis, not popularity.

Takes a bit of time and effort then.

So do you plan or improvise? Can you plan *too much*? Arguably, you cannot nail down a strategy in an environment of such accelerating turbulence. You have to be ready to jump on opportunities (if you’ve left some slack in your budget). Maybe just trust your instinct and use some basic principles as a guide instead.

If you do run up against the buffers trying to convince ‘non-believers’ in your organisation to experiment with Twitter, we can all learn from Katya Andresen’s wise list of tactics to employ (written with social media in mind, not just Twitter)…

1. Change the subject:  If you’re having a debate over the value of social media [or Twitter], you’re having the wrong discussion. The discussion should be about your organisation’s goals – with web 2.0 being the means, not the end (see #2).
2. Make it about what your boss already wants: Don’t position your web 2.0 idea as a social media initiative; frame it as your initiative to support your boss’s goals, in your boss’s language.
3. Make it about the audience: A good way to depersonalise the web 2.0 debate is to make it about your target audience’s preferences rather than a philosophical tug of war between you and said boss.
4. Sign your boss up to listen: Set up Google Alerts and TweetBeep for your boss, so she or he can see that there are already many discussions about your organisation going on online.
5. Set some ground rules:  Set a social media policy for your organisation, so it’s clear how to respond to what you’re hearing – and what types of initiatives have internal support.
6. Start clear and small: If you’re going to start an initiative, make it a small one with clear goals so you know how to measure success.
7. Report, report, report: Share every little bit of progress and give your boss credit for it!

A pretty good list – even if I do balk a little at kowtowing to “your boss” quite so much! I’m hoping we can come up with our own list on Thursday.

I’ll give Neil Williams almost the last word on this. Neil says one of the benefits of having the [20-page] document in his armoury is

To get buy-in, explain Twitter’s importance to non-believers and the uninitiated, and face down accusations of bandwagon-jumping.

After all, microblogging is a low-barrier to entry, low-risk and low-resource channel relative to other corporate communications overheads like a blog or printed newsletter. And the pioneers in corporate use of Twitter by central government… all started as low-profile experiments and grew organically into what they are today.

Anyway, if you’ve registered for Thursday’s event – I’ll see you there. If you haven’t (and it’s already fully booked), you can follow the proceedings online.

Once again, the event is being sponsored by JustGiving (see Jonathan Waddingham’s summary of the nfptweetup story to date) and Beautiful World (who’s co-founder, Rachel Beer came up with the whole idea in the first place).

You had better believe it when I say of all the events I attend regularly… this is my favourite. I get a chance to spend some face-to-face time with some very good ‘online’ friends.

I captured this awesome cloud during a short family holiday in Northumberland last week. I like it a lot.

I guessed it was cumulus congestus but checked with Gavin Pretor-Pinney of The Cloud Appreciation Society:

“Yes, indeed. With a crisp summit like that, it had yet to mature into a Cumulonimbus, at which point the top freezes and looks more blurry. It’s a beauty.”

Feel free to use the larger version for presentations (or whatever).

I was invited to give a so-called “masterclass” [cough] at the Social Media Exchange in London this week. (This is me setting up and ‘delivering‘!)

You may already know that I’m a huge fan of Flickr. I’ve remained loyal since 2004, and despite some recent ups and downs (thanks, Yahoo!), the Flickr community continues to build great things, such as The Commons, which I talked a little about on Monday, and which has it’s own passionate supporters.

You can view this deck on Slideshare, but this time I thought it would be appropriate to upload the slides (as images) to Flickr! I think they’re easier to read, but you can see for yourself!

The plan had been to save enough to put down a deposit and first month’s rent on a flat in London, and start the next chapter of our lives together here, where we paint our houses the colour of bad weather. But the crippling peso devaluation in December 1994 kicked that idea – and our immediate aspirations – into touch. We had to start all over again.

So there we were, in Taunton (where my parents live) on a wet and miserable January morning. Gicela picked up what must have been Issue 5 (or thereabouts) of Internet magazine from the shelves in WH Smith. The rest, as they say, is history. Faster than you can say World Wide Web Consortium, we were both enrolled on the EU-funded electronic publishing course at Hoxton Bibliotech. I was whisked along by Gicela’s enthusiasm for technology, as I have been pretty much ever since.

In early 1996, Gicela started work at The Guardian New Media Lab, which was led then by Bill Thompson. She later joined the small team at Microsoft who launched Expedia in the UK, before moving to a web start-up called e-garden, which faded and died as the dot com bubble burst. I’ve fished out this interview in Computer Weekly, from that time.

Gicela was born in Toliman, high up in the heartland of Mexico. As a young girl she used to gather up an armful of avocados and chillies harvested from her parents’ garden, to sell in the town plaza every Sunday morning. Some years later, just before we met, she graduated as an electronics engineer – the only woman in her year. She stayed on to teach, and I recall that she later shared her lab (on the very jungly edge of a Pacific coastal town) with tarantulas, as well as many less handsome male colleagues. Take my word for it, teaching electronics to a class full of young men in Mexico is no beach holiday.

So here we are, a decade and a half later. Gicela, thank you for the journey and happy fifteenth wedding anniversary. I’m so proud that in their mother, our two daughters have such a wonderful role model.

Love and respect. Forever.

Follow Gicela Morales on Twitter (”Loves the social web, digital coach, techie from the heart, mother and entrepreneur”).

**

To find out more about Ada Lovelace Day, visit:

http://findingada.com

http://www.pledgebank.com/AdaLovelaceDay

For once, this is not one of my own images. My friend Billie Mercer captured this timeless shot on Sunday evening while strolling her neighbourhood in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. I asked Billie if I could post her photo on my blog, and of course she agreed. Come to think of it, it’s now six years since I last spent Christmas in Mexico, and images like this bring back happy memories for our family.

Well on a personal note, I’ve big plans for 2009, not least making an early start on a book about charities and innovation. I promise to share more about this in January!

Wherever you may be, I wish you a Happy Christmas and a very peaceful New Year.

Amy Sample Ward tagged me in her five-a-day-post, following the mindapples ’meme’ started (I think) by Andy Gibson of The School Of Everything, and brought to my attention initially by Tessy Britton. 

We’re asked what five things we do every day (or almost every day) to stay mentally healthy. So here goes…

• Listen to a TED talk. I do this often – or more accurately on those mornings when I answer my daily five o’clock alarm call, which if I’m honest, is about two or three times a week. TED talks typically last 20 minutes and rarely fail to inspire. My all-time favourite is Ken Robinson’s witty and moving rallying call for creating an education system that nurtures creativity. Genius.
   
• Explore Flickr. I first fell under the spell of the Flickr photo-sharing community in 2004, and in my opinion there is still very little on the web that can match it. Every day I look to see who may have viewed my own photostream and then click through to Flickr Explore. There’s no greater pleasure for me than attempting to capture the beauty of the world around us, and my family in it – even with my little compact camera. We live in a visual world that is becoming more and more visual, and if you’ve yet to experience Flickr, then perhaps this is the perfect place to start.
   
• Day dream. Whether I’m sitting in a favourite chair, looking out the window of a moving train, or on the seashore, or at the summit of the Tor, daydreaming is my #1 tool for creativity and I although I may not allocate time for it, I do it every day without fail. I cannot really plan for it, although I surround myself at home, around my desk, with physical things, often tiny things, each with a special memory attached to it. For example, take the tiny screw with the now infinitesimal fleck of turquoise paint. Looking at it instantly transports me back to 1991; it had slowly loosened itself over the course of a bumpy 12-hour journey on a ‘chicken bus’ from Guatemala City to Flores. Near our final destination, it had dropped into my lap. I decided to keep it. One day, if I ever write well enough, I might tell the whole story. (I was almost daydreaming there for a minute.)
  I should add that I also daydream on purpose, with a purpose; often to play out positive scenarios that I wish to happen that day, or in the future. In my daydreams I replay good times past, and imagine the good times still to come, when even the world’s injustices may be put right.  
   
• Listen to music – or more particularly, an anthem. Current favourite is Sigur Rós epic Hoppípolla, which packs a real emotional punch, especially now I associate it with a short film I watched at an Action for Children charity event in October.
   
• Be generous. I’m not certain of it, but I think I’m a pretty generous sort. I never expect anything in return, but it nearly always comes anyway; often when I least expect it, but when I have most reason to be grateful for it. Tools like Twitter make it easy to share and reward you in spades for doing so. And it only takes a minute to reciprcate. I’m reminded of something Guy Kawasaki once said: Eat like a bird; poop like an elephant. Finally… being generous can be as easy as making someone smile, or sharing a laugh. 

I went for a brief walk in Clifton on Saturday afternoon. You can view the slideshow on Flickr.

You can’t fake genuine emotion. Barack Obama connects and inspires. Did you see the tear-streaked faces of those gathered in Grants Park in downtown Chicago on Tuesday night? They were not mere spectators, but active participants as Obama called for a shared vision of the future – using We, not You or I as a subject.

Photo: David Katz/Obama for America. Licensed under Creative Commons on Flickr

Very seasonable, I thought! Also, my most ‘interesting’ photo on Flickr, according to Flickreenos, with just shy of 10,000 views.

I first met Don José in 1993, which is when I took the photo on the left. And this is his chair. Not just any chair; he made this one himself.

Don José is one hundred years old, or thereabouts. Nobody knows, not even Don José. His birth certificate, along with countless other documents, was destroyed by fire during the Cristero War in 1920s Mexico. 

All of his adult life he’s lived in the small town of Tolimán, in the state of Querétaro. It used to be so green here that every year they held a festival to celebrate the advocado. This has since been re-named the “semi-desert festival” as the land has become arid and the top-soil has turned to dust. On a small plot of land half way up the hill they call “Calvary”, Don José built a tiny house of adobe and surrounded it with a prickly-pear cacti fence.

From that spot Don José has seen it all. Like the day the first motor car pulled into town causing one poor old soul to drop dead with the shock of it all. He is fond of telling how around the time of the Mexican Revolution (which cost a million lives) people used to hack the silver coins clean in half for want of small change. 

When he was a young man he built spectacular ‘castillos’ - firework-towers. He lost half of one of the fingers on his left hand, a hazard of the job if you were a ‘cohetero’. He then worked for my wife’s grandfather, and long afterwards continued to look after the house, tend the garden, and harvest the nuts when my in-laws were away for long periods. 

Don José is honest to the bone and fiercely loyal. He has very few material possessions, but is hugely generous of spirit. In his own words he is a “a good servant”.

He attributes his longevity to the occasional sip of rough tequila and a smoke – one cigarette in the morning, another just before bed – “for the soul”.

During a call ‘home’ over the weekend, my wife learned that Don José had passed away on Wednesday. According to tradition, he was buried the following day. So we lit a candle for him, and remembered.

I hope this doesn’t sound trite or patronising. I wanted to write something about him, so you can understand why I feel so lucky to have known Don José. 

Que en paz descanse, Don Josécito.

This neat little video is part of Colalife’s submission to Google’s Project 10 to the 100th - a call for ideas to change the world.

Kudos to Simon Berry and the distributed Colalife team, for this one, and their intelligent and relentless campaign.

Just this morning, Mark Charmer of Akvo alerted me to a United Nations University study, which says providing sanitation and safe water is the top route to reducing world poverty.

Please join the Colalife group on Facebook; 6,391 members… and counting.

Imagine… a humungous aggregator of all the positive good that millions of people have done today. The tiny, but not so insignificant acts of kindness and philanthropy, which if joined together would add up to one heck of a powerful narrative for a more just world.

Bad news happens fast and travels fast, while a good story can take much longer to blossom and bear fruit.

Where are the stories of the courageous people who through their own efforts, or with a little leg up such as a Kiva loan, overcome their material poverty to create a brighter tomorrow for themselves and their communities, one person at a time.

There’s a lot of doom and gloom around at the moment. Even the last item on the late evening news – the one that is intended to make us forget the previous 25 minutes of bad news – well, even that has recently dropped off the end of the bulletin. It seems it’s all bad news.

Bloody hell, why can’t those news people get some perspective. Can’t they find just one, simple but remarkable thing that someone, or some group has done today with real and lasting social impact? Did they bother to look?

If you’re reading this and work for a charity – this is an invitation to demonstrate the positive impact of your work, more than you do today. Don’t tell me what £50 will buy for ’someone like’; show me what £50 has achieved. Better still, let me watch a video of a ‘real person’ that will bring me to within a heartbeat of your work. I’ll even donate towards buying a new computer, if you show me that the old one was used to empower a network of activists to make a positive difference.

I do not want to feel remote, guilty and helpless. I want to feel inspired and involved in making good stuff happen, right now.

We all want to be part of a good news story. Good news begets more good news.

And remember, today something good did happen. For a start, thousands and thousands of people participated in Blog Action Day.

Maybe it’s because I’m a glass-is-half-full kinda guy, but please tell me some good news, and I’ll gladly pass it on.

What are your ideas for making the good news more visible?

I was going to write about something else for Blog Action Day. I was going to write about Save the Children’s Kroo Bay and DfID’s bloggers. I’ll mention them, because they’re worth your attention.

I’m shortly going to be doing some work with Global Giving UK, to embed some more good news around the social web.

I know this is simplistic, and I’d never have dreamt making this sort of comparison when I studied Development Economics two decades ago.

But wait a minute, when other, less powerful nations needed bailouts in the past, weren’t these accompanied by stringent conditions? At the same time the rich nations exalted the “invisible hand” of market capitalism, they also attached “conditionalities” to the loans called “structural adjustment programmes“. The poorest suffered the most. The bankers and government ministers did OK.

Of course, I’m not surprised by these double standards. It just leaves a bitter taste in the mouth when at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, Gordon Brown advocates a “new global order, founded on transparency, not opacity”.

We do need a new global order. One based on fairness, equality, and justice for all. Not this.

Top row, left to right Porthcurno beach, Mousehole harbour, Rockpool play at Sennen Cove,
Middle row Sennen Cove surf, Logan Rock from Pednvounder, Looking towards the Minack Theatre,
Bottom row Pednvounder beach, Atlantic shower, Window onto the Atlantic

The Burma Campaign UK

Thanks to Joanna Juber – the charity’s Digital Engagement Manager – for inviting me to speak on a range of topics I will be blogging about over the coming months. Fundamentally, how technological innovation has always necessitated institutional innovation and how charities need to learn to be agile (the technology won’t slow to their pace).

Here’s the link to the presentation on slideshare for those of you picking this up in your feed reader, with the caveat that one or two slides make less sense without the narrative.

On my way back to Somerset on the train, I read that E. L. Doctorow once said writing a novel is like “driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

It struck me that this is much like the journey we’re all making with social media. Charities need to learn to be agile enough to get into driver’s seat, and brave enough to take the wheel and move out of second gear. It’s going to be an interesting ride. Baggsy be the co-driver.

I’m particularly looking forward to introducing Hoop MD, Sean O’Halloran who will talk about the Malaria Atlas Project (MAP). Sean has a close family link with the project.

MAP is funded by the Wellcome Trust, and is led by Professor Bob Snow at Oxford University. Malaria is one of the world’s biggest killers – but it is preventable if the right steps are taken. MAP charts the prevalence of malaria throughout the globe, and Bob’s team eventually want to make real time data available online.

Sean is as excited as I am about the creative potential of social technologies to mash up and interpret the data (through mapping, visualisations, etc.) and will be joining us at 2gether on Wednesday morning to frame the enormous challenge of eradicating malaria and perhaps bring some new energy to MAP with a big dose of collaborative thinking.

That’s just what 2gether is all about.