How leadership in digital networks can accelerate civic engagement to achieve the millennium development goals

Transcription

1 How leadership in digital networks can accelerate civic engagement to achieve the millennium development goals Julia A. Ramalho-Pinto Director, Estação do Saber Belo Horizonte, Brazil Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I would like to thank the United Nations, specially the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs and the Division for Public Administration and Development Management for inviting me to participate in this meeting. I would like to talk about how leadership can accelerate civic engagement through digital networks, by talking about current challenges and opportunities as well as some examples. I d like to start my presentation with a question: Are you connected? I am sure that most, if not all of you, as citizens, use the Internet and a mobile phone in your everyday affairs. At each moment, we are more and more globally connected. We live a time, in which the Internet and the mobiles have become as essential for our survival as the industrial revolution and electricity have been for human beings in the past centuries. We are living a time in which changes occur faster and faster. Being connected has allowed us to be in contact with this transient reality in real time. Being connected may even allow us to interfere with this reality, also in real time, not in a later future. More and more, the delay between what is happening and the social interference will be almost nil. An example. In the days following the tragic Chilean earthquake people turned to Twitter to establish much-needed lines of communication. Signups spiked one thousand and two hundred per cent and nearly all of them were in Spanish. During the earthquake the was created to help people get information about possible victims. The users of Twitter sent a message to that account with the name of a person that was missing and a phone number for contact. After published the message again, including information about donations, thus making the use of resources more immediate and transparent. At this new moment, with the Internet Web 2.0, we should specifically look at Twitter as a potential tool to enhance social integration. Whether Twitter is a firm trend or a fad doesn t matter. The fact is that it has already been appropriated by citizens, organizations, and, more recently, by governments. It is already affecting your life, whether you like it or not. Even if you don t want to participate in this network, the fact is that either your friends, your foes, your government, or your employer may be talking about you on Twitter at this very moment or may be mobilizing subjects that matter to you.

2 What is Twitter? Twitter is a social networking and a microblogging service that you use to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based messages of up to 140 characters. That means you have to be concise and objective to communicate. But you can also add links to websites and other networks in your tweets. That means you don t need to be tied up only to the tweets. So, Twitter is a new way to communicate with people, organizations and governments. How does Twitter work? In a few words, let s see how Twitter works. When you sign up for Twitter you create an account and then you will have your own page. In this page, you can write your tweets or read the tweets from other accounts you have chosen to follow. Likewise, people may want to follow you, thus automatically receiving the tweets you post. Therefore, Twitter is both a source of information and a way to be connected. If you become connected to people who are already connected among themselves, you will be part of a cluster. So, a cluster is a group of individuals with dense friendship patterns internally and sparse friendships externally. A person can belong to multiple clusters. This is an important idea to further understand how to mobilize through Twitter. How to start mobilization through Twitter? The beginning of a mobilization process is always the same, no matter if on Twitter or not. Thus, in order to mobilize, you have to engage your network in your goal. The difference between using Twitter or other networks is that the mobilization process will then be faster. So, in order to consider how to mobilize other people through Twitter or other social networks, we have to consider some aspects of leadership. There are several competences required to be a leader. Today I d like to focus on three of them to explain leadership through Twitter: 1. Relational Influence: if you are a person that dislikes establishing new relationships, you won t probably be successful in digital social networks. Technology is there just to support the virtual activity of something a person does naturally in his or her real life. It is also important to realize that relationships in digital social networks are neither working nor personal relationships, but something in between. 2. Communication ability: how you can access people to help you and the kind of language you should use - almost informal, instead of very formal, polite and gentle, instead of direct and demanding - will be decisive for the response. And more: if you can t communicate well, or don t have the ability to listen to others, you will probably fail in getting commitments in Twitterland.

3 3. Mobilizing people to a goal: who our followers are is something that we cannot choose because we cannot order people to follow us. In a digital social network, there is no hierarchy. You must convince, or better saying, you must seduce. However, having followers cannot be immediately translated into the capacity to mobilize them. And beyond: mobilizing people is not necessarily having a lot of followers. You must have the right followers, in which case, being part of clusters is very important. Case Donate a book at Christmas In 2009, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, a campaign for the donation of books to public schools was started on Twitter. The organizer was fully engaged, the idea was good, the moment was precise, the contacts made were extremely successful. The people who started supporting the campaign included celebrities, and a link to an emerging cultural cluster named ETC - Encounter of Cultural Twitters was also incorporated. After only 2 months, the campaign collected about one hundred and eighty thousand books. Case Ficha Limpa (Clean Record) According to the Brazilian Constitution, bills can be proposed by the population if signed by at least 1% of the Brazilian voters from at least five Brazilian States and containing the signatures of at least 0.3% of the voters from each of those States. They are named popular initiative bills. In 1996, the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops of the Catholic Church (CBPJ) began the Movement to Prevent Electoral Corruption (MCCE). That same year, they started to collect signatures on a bill with strict measures to prevent politicians from buying votes from electors. It took 3 years to get the necessary number of signatures so as the bill could be proposed. It passed and became a law in 1999 (Law 9840/99). In 2009, another popular initiative bill, named Ficha Limpa (Clean Record), started to collect signatures. The proposal was that politicians found guilty by a court of justice, even if having the right of appeal, would be ineligible. On June 4,this year, it became a law, taking only 9 months to be proposed and passed by the Congress, as opposed to the 3 years of the first bill. As both campaigns involved well-known institutions of nationwide presence, relevance, reach, and influence, the difference was probably due to the fact that the second one used the Internet more intensively to engage people: Twitter, s, Facebook, Orkut, and other important websites for social mobilization such as Avaaz.org.

4 Case Estação do Saber Since 2005, Maria Luiza Gaetani and I have been in charge of an enterprise named Estação do Saber, which has as its main goal to stimulate the development of human beings. This is ideally achieved through leadership programs and social interventions with transdisciplinary themes that involve culture and education. One of our important projects is Estação Pátio Savassi. Every Saturday, in an open arena at Pátio Savassi mall in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, we invite a prestigious speaker to talk about the most recent developments in his or her area. The audience is heterogeneous and about a hundred people show up every Saturday. The basic idea is to appropriate a consumer space, where citizens come to shop, relax, and get entertainment, so as to induce and provoke the engagement of these individuals in issues concerning our society and city. In this project, Twitter has been used to spread, to further discuss and to engage other citizens in those specific social themes. Even during the very event, we tweet it and thus receive comments and questions through Twitter. During the week that follows, we receive further comments and links to other projects related to the same issues. We have also begun to transmit our event using Ustream, another site of social relationships. This innovation has allowed more people to watch the debates and interact either in real time or, afterwards through our website. We also advertise the events on other digital networks, such as Facebook, CulturaDigital.Br, and TeiaMG. As a result of the use of Twitter, the access to our website in 2009 rose about 500%, and, in 2010, in the last 4 months it rose about 300% as we posted 15 videos on Ustream. We have also received spontaneous reports, both personally and on the web, on how the project is changing people s minds and how important it is as an open space for the discussion of relevant social matters. What we have learnt about engaging citizens through Twitter and digital networks 1. Mobilizing and engaging people are competences of a leader: inside a virtual environment we do the same as outside. 2. Mobilization involves a lot of communication ability and relational influence: so we have to be aware of how people are receiving our acts and speech and that we cannot control what people will say or do. We also have to be faster than rumour and to be open for talk. 3. Being ubiquitous is useful: Besides Twitter also use other social and digital networks as integrated media to accelerate the process. 4. Mobilize through social world as well: there are a lot of fake mobilizations on Twitter. People may send messages but they really don t engage. You have to spent time in face-

5 to-face conversations with your strategic elements in the clusters. The point is not the virtual world against the real world. They are complementary and the digital world accelerates the real world. 5. Everything happens very fast in a connected world: so we have to be aware of the opportunities and of the risks of our projects 6. More and more spontaneous leaders are emerging. They will be able to mobilize, to spread and to implement ideas. Being connected will be the fastest way to reach your goals. Now, let s remember the MDGs: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, achieve universal primary education, promote gender equality and empower women, reduce child mortality rate, improve maternal health, combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, ensure environmental sustainability, develop a global partnership for development. At this point, I guess it s needless to say that leadership in digital networks can do a lot to accelerate civic engagement to achieve the MDGs. Regarding health issues, we can, for instance, mobilize immunization campaigns through Twitter. The Government of Minas Gerais, Brazil is actually doing that. There is also a Twitter account that mobilize on the combat of HIV/AIDS, twitting and reminding people to use condoms. Last year, the epidemic of H1N1 was largely mentioned on Twitter on how to avoid the virus. Regarding issues on environmental sustainability or global partnership for development we can share valuable ideas. On the last weekend, twitting about our presentation at Pátio Savassi about the sustainable museum of Contemporaneous Art INHOTIM, I received tweets of many people who were watching the transmission of the event. For goals such as the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger, the achievement of universal primary education and the promotion of gender equality and the empowering of women, we also can share projects or ideas. At this moment, we don t have universal formulas or precise ideas of how to use Twitter, but being in contact and aware you will find a lot of opportunities to engage. Thank you!