Katrin Verclas, NTEN

In the NTEN community there has been much critique lately of the Web 2.0-hype that has taken on shrill proportions in the mainstream press. In the end what is this all about? Whatever you think about Web 2.0 tools, what we are seeing is creative expression made a whole lot easier than ever before. This admittedly creates a lot of junk but also some innovative gems. It's about conversations between and within communities and constituents and that is scary and exhilarating. It is about the ceding of power and control, and nonprofit organizations that like to control the message don't do this lightly. And in the end, it is about collective action.

Ali Levine, NTEN fellow and graduate student, makes the point that its "the conversation, stupid" for young people - online expression, talking back, taking charge, and creating content are simply who they are and what they do online. Nonprofits - the old, professionalized, top-down organizations that say what campaign is good for everyone - should take note.

This issue of NTEN Connect is about the power of technology to build community and enable participatory expression in a nonprofit context and for nonprofit causes. It's a heady topic for a year-end edition and was planned long before Time Magazine made us all the people of the year. In the following articles Beth Kanter writes about the many ways nonprofits are capitalizing on their communities, and Alexandra Samuel gives an overview of the most common tech methods for participation. Kari Peterson connects our theme to community media organizations that are reinventing themselves.

To quote Howard Rheingold, "the technical power of many-to-many communication networks is important because it multiplies pre-existing human social networking capabilities that enable collective actions." Read that sentence again and breathe. We are more connected than ever before, more able to express, organize, and act.

A recent Zoomerang study, found that marketers are still clueless about Web 2.0 tools and technologies. But as David Weinberger notes in the Cluetrain Manifesto (pun intended), "a powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result markets are getting smarter - and getting smarter faster than most companies."

The Zoomerang study notes, "consumers have long had fiery and provocative conversations about brands, but it took blogs and other consumer-generated media to make this visible to ivory tower marketers. Now that the conversation is visible, and of concern... smart marketers understand how important it is to engage their customers in a dialog... The advice for marketers looking to embark on a Web 2.0 strategy is to "shut up and listen... Your customers have a lot to say. Stop broadcasting messages they TiVo out anyway and hear what they have to say. Once you've done that, you can think about a thoughtful engagement strategy." Nonprofits, listen and listen HARD.

Yochai Benkler, writes that we are "connected social beings and will take advantage of these new capabilities to form connections that were practically infeasible in the past." He notes that "this is not media determinism, this is not millenarian utopianism, it is a simple observation. People do what they can, not what they cannot. In the daily humdrum of their lives, individuals do more of what is easier to do than what requires great exertion; when a new medium makes it easy for people to do new things, they may well, in fact, do them, and when these new things are systematically more user-centric, dialogic, flexible... .people will communicate with each other in ways and amounts that they could not before."

Jay Rosen simply calls us 'the people formerly known as the audience."

There are cautionary notes too, of course. Power and access are not evenly distributed, and technology has not leveled the playing field. Furthermore, "the new forms of production that social media affords amount to nothing more than new forms of consumerism for the majority of users. Production is the new consumption," as Ulises Ali Mejias writes.

And yet if the Pew Internet and American Life Project's numbers are right, nonprofits need to take note, experiment, let go of control over the message, and truly engage, similarly to the way fraternal organizations did at turn of the century.

For me right now NTEN is an expression of what I am talking about, in small ways. It is a network of passionate users and a community of people who support each other, innovate, and explore how technology fits into their work of making the world better, more just, more equitable, and more beautiful. We are a microcosm of what I am talking about - not always elegant and often messy, but certainly always interesting.

It continues to be a privilege to be part of this adventure! Happy New Year to us all.

From Katrin, Holly, Annaliese, Karl, Bonnie, and Ali here at NTEN