Twitter

Ashoka hosts a monthly, Twitter-based chat called SocEntChat, in which anyone can participate and discuss issues surrounding social enterprise. It's a great place to share ideas. This month's chat was all about technological innovations, hosted by Ashoka's Tom Dawkins. Along with the usual crowd, Tech4Society organizer (and Twitter newcomer) Rosa Wang was there to share reflections from the conference. You can read the full transcript here.

There's a live discussion on Twitter going on right now about Tech4Society.  Here's what people are saying, from Hyderabad and around the world.

You can join in too—just log on to Twitter and use #tech4soc in your tweets!

The Tech4Society event is warming up for it's opening tomorrow through Saturday, Feb. 11-13 in Hyderabad, India, and even if you can't be there in person, you can still be involved online.

The event – a celebration of Ashoka-Lemelson Fellows – brings together pioneers on the cutting edge of innovation in solar energy, clean water, mobile technology, science education, agriculture and healthcare. In 2006, Ashoka and The Lemelson Foundation launched a partnership that aimed to find, support, and celebrate social innovators whose inventions and technologies offer fresh, effective approaches to advancing social change. Combining Ashoka’s nearly 30 year track record for finding and supporting the world’s leading social entrepreneurs with The Lemelson Foundation’s renowned expertise in incubating and celebrating invention for social good, the partnership has sought to prove that entrepreneurship and invention can align in powerful ways to improve the world.

When: Friday, January 22, 2010

Where: Twitter, use hashtag #ICT4D

Local governments - from regional to village level - can be both a help and a hindrance to information and communication technology deployments in the developing world. Yet they cannot be avoided and should be brought into the project.

In the January Twitter Chat this Friday, we'll explore three vital questions any ICT practitioner faces when designing and deploying technology-based projects at the local level, using the #ICT4D hashtag in Twitter:

1. Do you work with local governments or bypass them? Why?
2. What are the keys to project success with local governments?
3. Where are examples of positive local government buy-in?

*Update* - We'll be looking at each question as it relates to Haiti, the immediate earthquake response, and the long-term rebuilding process.

Ashoka's Chloe Feinberg will co-host, along with @ICT_Works and @downeym.

We'll start at 12-noon Eastern Time ( http://bit.ly/Noon-worldwide ) with introductions, then move into the discussion.

Our hope is to learn from each other to find ways we can increase our impact and reduce failure, by engaging local governments.

-- Handy Twitter RT to let others know and join in the conversation  --

The Toronto Zoo recently launched an online Twitter campaign in its quest to save polar bears from the melting Arctic Sea ice. To date, 25% of the Arctic Sea ice has disappeared and soon, our polar bears will have no more home to live.

The campaign named "Polar Tweets" aims to encourage more people to tweet something environmentally friendly to spread awareness. Above is an image from the campaign website showing a polar bear struggling to stay on the ice berg. The ice berg grows in terms of tag quantity and quality as more people tweet about environmental topics. 

When the website was first launched, there was barely enough tweets for the polar bear to stand on and today, it looks like we have a giant iceberg in the making! So what are you waiting for? Start tweeting with a purpose today. If you're lost about what to tweet, visit Polar Tweets and use their convenient "Tweet" function which will recommend you environmental tweets. 

An easy and meaningful way to contribute to the environment :) 

By Su Yuen, CHIN (suyuen@gmail.com)

Messages to the #SocEntChat hash tag trickled in all day. The drizzle turned into a downpour five minutes before the event was to start, as users deluged their networks with tweets and re-tweets that the discussion was about to start. Like a flash flood, the group materialized, changed the world, and was gone.

Click the word cloud to see what was most talked about.

A total of 67 people joined us for the chat on the role of mobile technology in social change, and Twitter proved an excellent medium for harvesting the collective wisdom of our group of experts and practitioners.  Twitter’s imposition of a 140 character limit on each post forced an almost brutal degree of synthesis from our users, and the medium allowed anyone, regardless of invitation or location, to participate.

I've highlighted the questions and links to the resources discussed.  For a full transcript of the conversation, please see: http://www.squidoo.com/socentchatjuly09

QUESTIONS