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The Center for Social Media

The Center for Social Media showcases and analyzes strategies to use media as creative tools for public knowledge and action. It focuses on social documentaries for civil society and democracy, and on the public media environment that supports them. The Center is part of the School of Communication at American University.

New Organizing Institute’s New Media TrainingJuly 2

Last week I attended a two-day New Media Training conference with the New Organizing Institute (NOI). The Institute aims: * To train and support a new generation of technology-enabled campaigners. * To consolidate and disseminate knowledge gained in the field of political technology and online organizing. * To conduct new research and post-campaign investigations that employ results-focused, systems thinking to make progressive campaigns and organizations more efficient. The training was focused very much on political campaigns but the discussions still proved very helpful for any advocacy organization/think tank interested in upgrading their promotional and outreach capabilities, as well as media makers hoping to increase the impact of their productions. A few highlights: Marc Laitin from the AFL-CIO said, "Don't forget…

Blogging from the PDF 2009: Twitter as a promising tool to increase social actionJuly 1

At this year’s Personal Democracy Forum more than 1,000 opinion makers, political practitioners, technologists and journalists gathered together for the sixth time to discuss how technology is changing politics. Having witnessed how Barack Obama found innovative ways to leverage modern media tools to advance the campaign, the PDF is now focused on identifying how much the Internet and technology tools are changing the environment. Two panels I attended specifically looked at how the micro-blogging portal Twitter allows a wide public to actively engage in campaigns and advocacy work. Crowd-sourced projects, Twitter-based community organizing and fundraising are three promising methods to motivate a large public and actively bring people on board of a project. Twitter has many advantages over other social…

Fair Use Question of the Month: Free Legal Advice for Fair UseJune 30

QUESTION: Dear Center for Social Media, We are looking for an expert in fair use that can watch our documentary and let us know if we can use some of the news archival and other historical footage that we have included. As you well know, financial resources are always tight when making a film; therefore, I will truly appreciate if you know of anyone that can donate these services to us. All the best, Daniel ANSWER: Dear Daniel, We were co-facilitators of the various Codes of Best Practices in Fair Use that are on our website, and we strongly encourage you to use these as a guide to your decision making. It will be more reliable than the advice of…

Reporting live from the Personal Democracy ForumJune 29

I'm live-tweeting today and tomorrow at the Personal Democracy Forum conference, a gathering of nearly 1000 technologists, politicos and government transparency geeks dedicated to examining how technology is changing politics. Follow me on twitter @beyondbroadcast. Here at PDF (aka #pdf09) we're releasing a draft of our next field report, which I co-authored with CSM Research Fellow Nina Keim, examining the Twitter Vote Report and Inaguration '09 projects. We'll be checking in with a few more of the project organizers here to see how they're now working with tweets produced during the Iran election, and will post a finalized version of the field report within the next week. If you'd like a copy, drop me a note: jclark[AT]american.edu.

Lioness making an impact on legislationJune 26

Lioness shows how a documentary positioned at the centerpiece of a strategic outreach campaign can put an issue on the public agenda and have a direct impact on public policy. The National Defense Authorization Act for the Fiscal Year 2010 was approved by the House Armed Services Committee this week. Included in its recommendations is a section titled . “Recognizing Service Women Who Have Participated as ‘‘Lionesses’’ During Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan (see p. 315-316). This insert into the bill (H.R. 2647), which should be approved by the House this week, is the direct result of the March 31 screening and events surrounding the documentary film, Lioness, on Capitol Hill, which was supported by key members of Congress. According…