I am so excited to have been included in Social Edge’s “Twitter for Social Entrepreneurship: The Top 100 Tweeps to Follow”, especially within their list of 20 eclectic social entrepreneurs. A huge honor. And an exciting opportunity. I feel I’m just getting my Twitter voice. But the possibilities are endless – especially for social change.
Twitter for me is not only a way of keeping my finger on the pulse of what is happening in the parts of the world that I care about most, but also a way of tapping into some of the most innovative activity taking place in circles you might never come across through mainstream news. Which in turn gets my own gears turning. Just imagine the gears turning when you have millions following millions in this space.
One morning last week I sat down to peak at my Twitter feed in between various tasks, trying not to get sucked in. I saw an alarming tweet about riots happening live in Kampala, Uganda. Two clicks and I was looking at a live map of the city, posting SMS text reports of where the riots were breaking out at that moment. Memories of the Kenya election riots that involved widespread rape, and the horrific violence against women in Guinea last week inspired a new idea for use of such technology as an early warning system for women. What if that live map could turn into active texts to women’s cell phones of when the riots were nearing their location, so that they would have time to bundle up their kids and get to some other form of safety? Who could make that happen? A Grameen phone + crisis hotline + FrontlineSMS…
I think in the next few weeks I’ll start throwing out onto Twitter some of the random ideas that are filling up notebooks and going unused. I’ll see how I can invite others to do the same. Ideablob is one place where ideas flow freely. Would love to start a little experiment and see if there is some way to track what gets adopted and how quickly. But how do we reach the world’s most vulnerable who could benefit from such innovation, but who have the least access to technology? Where are new technologies being leveraged for social change beyond economic progress? What traditional networks exist on which we can overlay or integrate into social media networks? For example, can women in parts of rural Africa be accessed at a local well for participation? How do we include the illiterate? I think one of the most critical questions facing change agents interested in advancing a liveable society globally is still how best to bridge the digital divide. But that question is no longer about hardware – shipping computers to the developing world. It’s about innovating for network expansion and inclusion.
Tags: social entrepreneurship, Twitter
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