In our final week of IMC 619 – Emerging Media we contemplated ethics and intellectual property in a Web 2.0 world . As we discussed the topic, I felt my social responsibility senses perk up as I thought of all the resources that companies have to research and develop innovative technology that can be used for the greater good, but are often reserved for the highest bidder. In fact, the lesson made a particular Toyota commercial come to mind.
The commercial is part of Toyota’s “Ideas for Good” initiative. The challenge is to use one of the five available innovative technologies and apply them to a creative idea that will benefit your community or environment. It is this type of sharing and collaboration that I hope more companies would make available to the public. It would seem to me that ideas could go so much further, provide for so many more, and accomplish greater goals if they were not cached only for the use of commercial gain. In the nonprofit world this mentality is even more counterproductive as we strive to find effective and efficient ways to help others, often with limited resources.
Emerging media has brought community building to a digital space for organizations hoping to reach further and wider. From recruiting volunteers to donating a portion of your shopping proceeds to charities, the same need for networks has only been updated to communal online spaces. New ways to get people involved include micro-donating, micro-volunteering, and the rise of crowd-sourcing. Crowd-sourcing is an open call that draws the most qualified talents to perform tasks, solve complex problems and contribute with the most relevant and fresh ideas. A great example is Social Entrepreneur, an open API search engine for finding social entrepreneurs, designed in order to provide an exchange and transfer of information.
Creating a data-feed for the community using technology, or community-based design, to harness smaller efforts by many people is how we move forward. Often efforts for the same causes are duplicated because models are not share and resources are not pooled. These projects exemplify a new wave in technology that is all about impactful cooperation and represent the growing trend of global sustainability and corporate citizenship.
Posted on December 27, 2010
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