PKB

I spent the better part of today at the inaugural NetSquared conference with Frank Hecker of the Mozilla Foundation. NetSquared’s mission is to “help non-profit organizations understand, use and expand the social web.”

Other folks who were there have already expanded in depth on what went down at today’s sessions.

Here’s what resonated for me.

Paul Saffo and Howard Rheingold spoke together on “Making the Most of Disruption.” It was an effective pairing, as they represented two prominent, disparate strains of reaction to the rise of the read-write Web. Howard relayed the Web-empowered, citizen-activist heuristic. He cited the recent immigration demonstrations in L.A., and the contribution made there by youth organizers who used their Myspace pages to rally and coordinate people, as an example of social network as platform becoming a conduit for meaningful, real world action.

Paul represented the value-neutral position. I sum this perspective up as: stuff is changing, and fast; hang on to your seat, and pray you end up in a good place. One of his first comments, to this effect (I’m paraphrasing): “We invent our technologies. Then we reinvent ourselves, and our cultures. We are living in a time where the water is moving particularly fast.”

As I’m writing this I admit that I was more engaged by Saffo’s presentation — he has the art of speaking in soundbites mastered, and I’m recognizing just now how fully my recall of presentations has been formed by the mass media I’ve consumed over the years. But the call to action Rheingold delivered — as opposed to the state of the world reportage offered by Saffo — works a lot better for me.

Both Paul and Howard talked about the era we are now experiencing as a cusp. A period within which a capital-S shift is happening in the way humans communicate, organize and act, enabled by the Web and its attendant tools for interaction. Where Howard focused on the potentiality of this environment, Paul warned about the speed with which large institutions are co-opting the language and protocols of the Web for their own purposes.

Paul’s takeaway quote: “This is a very good time to think about the world you want for your children 20 years from now.”

At the next session, “Citizen Journalism, Nonprofit Organizations and Social Change,” Ethan Zuckerman of the Global Voices project was the standout.

What Ethan gave me: an appreciation for the pace at which the growth of the Web is happening outside the west. He shared a rapid-fire sequence of data points to back this up: it took 36 years to go from 0 to 1 billion users of the Web. It will take less than six years to get to 2 billion, with the majority of these users and voices coming from China, India, Brazil, Africa and the Middle East.

In his work, he’s discovered that blogging is the best alternative for getting dissenting points of view out in repressive societies. Entwined with this: that the main barrier to the adoption of the self-publishing tools available on the Web is ensuring people can use these tools without getting arrested.

The last session I attended was on “The distributed grassroots marketing team,” hosted by Elisa Camahort, Tara Hunt and Chris Messina. The presenters were terrific in sharing their accumulated experiences growing communities on the Web. There were two tough, and salient (with respect to increasing the growth of Firefox), questions I recall from the Q&A.

The first: “How do you reach people with grassroots, Web-based outreach if the people you’re trying to reach don’t use the Web?”

The second: “How do non-profits develop content that spreads virally if it doesn’t have anything to do with technology, snarkiness, or humor?”

If I had the answers for you here, I could retire now, as the all-powerful grassroots blog-father. :-)

We struggle with both questions daily here at Mozilla. What I can say is the benefit of the era we live in now is that it’s both cost- and resource-effective to try things out to see if they drive the results you were after.

I think the signal truth of the interconnected world we occupy now, at least on the Web, is that the feedback you will get on the things you put out there is immediate and more importantly actionable.

I had a terrific experience at this year’s NetSquared. I’m looking forward to next year.