WorldChanging Canada: Networks for Change

There is no shortage of articles about how social networking sites like MySpace and FaceBook can be used to support grassroots and progressive campaigns and professional networking sites like Linkedin and XING can help you get connected in your sector, but what about the networking sites specifically created to support social and environmental causes?

Worldchanging has been covering this trend on an ongoing basis (see for instance, Idealist, Be Green, David Weinberger on Social Software), but there are enough new sites connecting people, organizations, and projects, that it seemed time for a round-up.

In this article, we examine some leading networking sites with an aim (and capacity) to succeed in helping people achieve real change in the world.

With 7.7 million members, Care2 is a green consumers’ haven and social networking space. It has a wide range of features, including petitions, groups, blogs, e-cards, eco-shopping, click2donate, even online dating. The content focus is healthy, green, and ethical lifestyles, with an emphasis on animal rights. The discussion groups are popular, and the collaborative C2NN news portal is an impressive example of media democracy. Is it a vegetarian natural food store? Is it a revolutionary conference on the verge of coalescing an international movement for peace and sustainability? An interesting mix, and with this many members, a mix worth watching.

Idealist.org is a multilingual international directory that lists over 126,000 members profiles and 70,700 organizations, helping to connect people with the right skills to opportunities at progressive organizations. That said, Canadian job seekers are better served by listings on charityvillage.com. The social networking is limited to creating a profile, sending messages to other members and using the brand new groups function, but it could be enough to connect the right people together to help nonprofits achieve their funders’ goals.

TakingITGlobal is a Canadian-born international community site with over 162,000 “young people interested in making a difference”. Note there is no user age limit and there are many users over 30. The fully multi-lingual site site provides excellent opportunities to share opinions, ideas, projects and experiences, through art, articles, discussions and newly added podcasts. Beyond connecting wired young change-makers, and informing them with educational resources, TIG lists over 1,600 financial opportunities in the form of awards, contests, grants, and scholarships. A similar US-focused youth site is DoSomething.org, which encourages community projects.

New this summer is Razoo, a tagging-based community site where user can create, subscribe to, and interlink user defined causes, acts, goals, and discussion groups. With a membership of over 18,000 users making friends, taking actions together, and co-inspiring each other, this site could have the right ingredients to become an important tool for facilitating collaborative actions for achieving goals of change. Change.org is a similar user generated actions site but includes the linking of US politicians and Nonprofits who accept donations. A similar but less popular site USA only site (2people) has been discussed on Worldchanging before.

WiserEarth is another new site aiming to aid to build a community for positive change. Though it does not emphasize concrete actions the way Razoo.org does, or have the work opportunity listings of Idealist, it does provide an incredible listing of over 107,000 organizations around the world, and useful wikipages. With 5100 members after 5 months, if it gains a critical mass of active users, it has the right ingredients to become an important place to be.

There are a number of other sites that don’t quite fit our theme, but are nevertheless worth mentioning:

• The Orion Grassroots Network – a network not of people, but of organizations.

Finally, in a class by itself, we find Igloo.org. Created by the Ontario based Centre for International Governance Innovation, Igloo.org is a networking and resource site for professionals who work on global issues and government policy. English speaking academics, consultants and bureaucrats meet here to share insights and citations on governance. The high profile institutions that act as content and community partners have seeded the membership with many Canadians and set the professionalism bar very high. Igloo is an ideal place to host a governance discussion forum, post your policy wonk blog, find reputable research papers, and search for potential collaborators to inform your public affairs related project.

Hopefully by now you’re springing from your seat to tell us about the social networking sites for social change we’ve missed. We’d love to hear success stories in this space, what you’re using, what’s working. Please drop a comment below and share any new and promising spaces you know and love, how they work, and why.