Vancouver International Digital Festival

Vidfest Liveblogging: Positively Charged - Do-gooding in a digital age

03:25pm - Mogus: How can people get started doing something like this?

Karjaluoto: Just start, try it out. See where it goes. You will be so satisfied.

Higgins: Look at yourself and find out what makes you happy. Rotate it a bit and change your path. The next thing you know, you’re going down that path.

Williams: I asked that same question and got to a point where I just said “follow your tears”. And that’s brought me to where I am.

03:21pm - Q: How do you take crowdsourcing to the next level, for people to enable their own social networks to become involved with these kinds of projects in a more engaged way?

Higgins: People are interested in Kiva at a high level, but we need to tap into why people are choosing certain projects and regions.

Williams: There is a group of people in Vancouver that loves Kiva and Mexico. They organized a bike trip to Mexico and organized a social network to fund both their trip and donations to Kiva. This is one way that our two platforms (GiveMeaning and Kiva) can work together.

03:15pm - Q: Could you talk about the future of community-generated media in relationship to what you’ve been speaking about? Specifically, I’m thinking about Up the Yangtze.

Williams: Up the Yangtze created a fundraising project at GiveMeaning and it’s been one of the most successful projects in our site’s history. The challenge, as media makers, is you tell a story that you’re no doubt passionate about — but what’s the response? It’s about connecting the film, or your project, to something that your audience can do about it.

Higgins: Right now if you looked at Kiva, it’s quite static. But, with time, we’re hoping to have our partners and projects create a more media-rich environment, which promotes a higher level of engagement with lenders and audience.

Mogus: Are there ways for storytellers to engage on your sites?

Higgins: Kiva offers programs for individuals to go to project locations to document them for the site.

03:14pm - Williams: In looking at philanthropic flow, a lot of funding and aid goes to specific groups and issues. For example, funding to African children, not even teenagers, and certainly not adults. What we need is a change in compassion.

03:12pm - Q&A with panels

03:07pm - Mogus: There’s a huge boom in available work in the non-profit sector at the moment. These new models are really helping to build new communities around social change.

03:00pm - Mogus: How can this be sustainable - can this be a viable business?

Karjaluoto: We’ve put in most of our effort in spreading the word about our project, but have not been focused on having it make money. We did the project at a time when we could afford to do it, but it’s a balance trying to keep doing it while maintaining our other revenue-earning business.

Higgins: Right now, with Kiva, every donor to a project allocates part of the loan money to maintain Kiva as a lending organization. Kiva is focused on the developing world but, for Higgins personally, he is interested in helping the working poor here in North America.

Williams: Sustainability…we also do what Kiva does in having a percentage of donors’ money goes to maintain GiveMeaning, but donors understand that they don’t charge any fees to the donor. Secondly, GiveMeaning asks everyone to give $5 a week which, thinking about a crowdsourcing mentality, could be huge. We are reliant on what we call “the power of plenty”. And then, thirdly, we’ve really hoped to find corporate sponsors that we’d be willing to display on project pages. Taking an event sponsorship model and extending it. The challenge has been that we’ve had offers from tons of companies that, ethically, we’re not interested in taking any money from.

02:57pm - Mogus: How did you choose to start these projects or get involved in existing ones? What kind of research did you do?

Williams: Came up with solution before understanding of problem. Went to non-profit sector and proposed microfinancing solutions before knowing what problems the sector and industry were actually facing. Needed to understand what was really required and most valuable, for his project, to design solutions to real problems.

02:50pm - Dylan Higgins of Kiva.org. Kiva is world’s first person-to-person microfinance website. Higgins was working as an attorney in Seattle and took a step back and examined what he’d been doing, wondering whether or not he was achieving the social change he’d been hoping for. Looked up microfinancing and found Kiva and could immediately see the project and its efforts immediately democratized. Most microfinancing projects go to financial institutions or large-scale philanthropists. What Kiva has done is it takes multiple small investments and aggregates them all and then the loan is pushed through to an entrepreneur in a developing country. Higgins was in Ghana recently helping individuals there to use the internet to set up loan projects on the Kiva site.

02:46pm - Tom Williams of Givemeaning.org has started a micro-philanthropy project. Inspired by the thought that everyone has something they believe in and is willing to put their money behind. Realized he needed means to assist smaller organizations and non-profit groups to facilitate their philanthropic work. GiveMeaning.org enables groups to realize their goals, by leveraging the power and support of social networks of individuals, willing to support causes. Williams says it is the best thing he’s ever done with his life.

02:40pm - First up, Eric Karjaluoto: started DesignCanChange.org project just over 2 years ago. While watching An Inconvenient Truth made him think that he needed to make his design studio more sustainable. Desire to do more. Designers are in a unique position in helping companies to determine how to build their brands; recognized real possibility to encourage clients to do this more sustainably. Have had more than 2,000 designers sign up, take the pledge, and get involved in the project.

02:39pm - Introduction to panel by Jason Mogus of Communicopia. Lines between corporate and social change models are increasingly becoming blurred. Great speakers here from local organizations here today:

Tom Williams, CEO, Givemeaning.org
Eric Karjaluoto, Creator, DesignCanChange.org; President, smashLAB
Dylan Higgins, Fellow, Kiva.org