Unfortunately, I was only able to stay for the first half of Ruge’s talk, but he is a captivating speaker (and a Keynote pro). I wanted to share a few of my notes and photos from this fascinating session.

The mission statement of Project Diaspora, written as an open letter to Africa, is a powerful, saddening, inspiring piece of prose. It pledges the following:

We here by pledge to mobilize, engage, and motivate the African Diaspora to take an active role in Africa’s economic, social, and cultural revitalization. We believe the economic assistance and relief models provided by the World Bank, IMF and other monetary or relief organizations to Africa has spectacularly failed on it’s promises over the last 30 years.

We propose a new model. There are over 167 million Africans in the Diaspora. As of 2007, financial remittances by these Africans topped $40 billion annually. That’s capital that’s directly involved in the sustainability of lives—through the stimulation of education, finance, health, and social sectors. We believe this model is far more effective in changing the Africa’s economic landscape. The continued direct involvement of Africa’s Diaspora community is our solemn mission.

My notes from Africa 3.0:

450,000,000 Africans (out of 1 billion total) are under the age of 15. They are ”the cheetah generation” — they are going to want the latest and greatest in technology. Accordingly, Ruge predicts that mobile web technology will leapfrog desktop computing in Africa the same way mobile voice communication leapfrogged landlines.

The following photo is a slide showing the massive under-sea telecommunications infrastructure surrounding Africa. (If you want to see a clearer version of this, check out slide 47 of this Slideshare deck, or click through to see the larger image on TwitPic) In a few years, there will also be a network of geosynchronous satellites over Africa providing broadband to the rest of the continent.

Ruge spoke about his mother in Africa. She has no electricity or running water, but her mobile phone is one of the most prized thing she owns. To have it charged, she sends it into town via taxi for an entire day. She’s able to use it to know what the prices of goods are selling for in nearby towns each day. Ruge actually tried to give her a call on Skype during the presentation, but apparently there was a network outage that day.

He was, however, able to pull up a live video chat with part of the team at Limbe Labs, a Camaroonian startup consultancy and incubator, and they described a few of the projects/ventures they’re working on. (Click through to see a larger version on TwitPic)

Unfortunately, that’s about when I had to step out of the session. This post feels entirely incomplete to me, as I was regrettably absent for the conclusion of the presentation, but I wanted to share what I could. If the session was recorded, I’ll put the video up as soon as SXSW releases it. In the meantime, I encourage you to visit www.projectdiaspora.org to learn more about Ruge’s work, and follow him on Twitter at @TMSruge.

We’ve all seen the ads: “For only pennies a day, you can make the difference in the life of a child.”  The thing is, this is absolutely true.  Whatever the cause, whether it’s children in Africa or the homeless in your neighborhood, it doesn’t take much to make a difference.  So why are so many of us reluctant to take that step, even if we believe it would be money well spent?

I had the pleasure of catching a live speech from Anderson Cooper in October.  He summed up the issue very plainly, saying “transparency is the key to giving money.”  This may not seem particularly profound, but it’s implications are.  The biggest impediments to greater charitable giving as I see them are the following:

1. We don’t trust the brand.  Who would give money to an organization they’d never heard of, no matter how passionate a one might feel about the cause they claim to support?  Larger organizations like the United Way and UNICEF attract donations despite the fact that they suffer from (relatively) massive overhead and there is no direct feedback about where one’s donation might actually be going.  This is because they have built trusted brands, and donors know that these organizations sacrifice a certain degree of efficiency for trust.
2. We don’t think it will make a difference if we’re the only ones contributing. A great majority of the decisions we make every day are dependent in a more or less direct fashion on our perception of others’ decisions given the same choices.  It’s rooted in our DNA — throughout our evolutionary development, our ancestors were the ones who survived by keeping with the pack, while those who set off on their own more frequently took themselves out of the gene pool. In practice, this is why right now Wikipedia has a graph at the top of every page indicating collective progress towards their fundraising goal of $6 million.  To this end, I see services like The Point having a significant impact as they become more mainstream.
3. There is no money-back guarantee.  This is invaluable in making purchase decisions.  I may completely trust and even vouch for a brand like Apple, but if they accidentally ship me a faulty iPod I had better be able to get a new one to replace it.  Conversely, I might be willing to make an online purchase from an unfamiliar supplier as long as I know I can get my money back if I don’t get what I paid for.  There is no equivalent accountability in charitable organizations, but maybe there should be.
4. We can’t see the direct results of our contribution.  Even if I trust the “brand” of an organization, this is the final sticking point when it comes to making an actual contribution.  If I knew that I could directly purchase lifesaving malaria vaccines for a dozen children in a developing tropical country, I’d do that in a second — after all, it would only cost me a few dollars.  But with most charitable giving, there is absolutely no way to know where my money has gone. As a result, I’m going to be much more reluctant to give than if I can see the direct results.

In my mind, the internet and the many different channels of social media have the potential to remedy most if not all of these inefficiencies and ultimately drive verifiable social change around the world.  As I’ve written before, social media creates unprecedented opportunities for the dispersal of messages that are truly actionable.  Transparency, in the form of feedback and accountability, is the key to closing that loop.

For the first time in the history of humanitarian aid, individual donors and worthy organizations can connect meaningfully on opposite sides of the world…. You now are beginning to have the tools at your disposal to have a direct, measurable impact on these causes — to help solve the immediate problems, on the ground, in communities with the most need.  You can help build a school in Southeast Asia, provide clean drinking water for an entire African village, or prevent domestic abuse in your own neighborhood, with the social media tools you use every day.  The real solution is in going straight to the source, and it doesn’t take much…

So I was stunned when this email landed in my inbox last week. It came from Scott Harrison at charity: water.

I attended the Twestival in Boston back in February, but to be honest hadn’t thought much of it since (just starting a new job might have something to do with that). But here was the result of synchronized events across 202 cities worldwide: a brand new well was being drilled to provide drinking water for a village in Ethiopia, and those of us who couldn’t be there in person got to see the actual result of our participation.

And it’s exciting to read about initiatives like SalaamGarage , featured just this afternoon in a post over on Mashable. Founder Amanda TK describes SalaamGarage as “humanitourism meets Web 2.0.”. Dana Oshiro at Mashable writes,

The group sends amateur photographers to developing countries to study and document the work of nonprofit organizations. One recipient organization,Vatsalya, provides food, education and health care to street orphans in Jaipur…. Through Facebook, photo blogs, Flickr, Twitter and YouTube, SalaamGarage has helped Vatsalya gain seven new onsite volunteers and media exposure in major outlets including the Seattle Post Intelligencer. Trip photos have been featured in Vatsalya founder Jaimala Gupta’s book “Eighteen Million Question Marks: Street Children of India” and a 2009 calendar – publications that have raised $15,000 towards the organization’s work.

This is the model for social change through social media — and it is now becoming a reality. Forget how many followers you have on Twitter, or how many eBooks you’ve published. This is meaningful stuff.

This is the power of social media.

A few days ago I touched on the idea of why the “social media” component of Social Media for Social Change is so significant.  ”The importance of SM4SC is unquestionable,” I commented over on the SM4SC blog the following day. But why? Why is this a bigger idea than Auto Mechanics for Social Change, or even CEOs for Social Change? The answer, I think, is that we in the social media space have the power, and thus the responsibility, to do more — to leverage the tools we use every day to reach millions of people, and to continue to build new tools to allow messages of social change to be acted upon.

I’m currently reading The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, an eye-opening a book by former World Bank economist William Easterly.  Easterly advocates small, direct, piecemeal solutions to real problems on the ground in developing countries, rather than the “Big Plan” mentality of Jeffrey Sachs and others.  As a result, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the potential of social media when it comes to aiding serious humanitarian causes.  The conclusions I’ve come to are: 1) yes, social media provides the most valuable platform to social causes that the world has ever known; and 2) it’s going to take some visionary people to connect the right tools with the right organizations to maximize the measurable benefits.

The first conclusion may seem bold, but to me it’s strikingly obvious.  For the first time in the history of humanitarian aid, individual donors and worthy organizations can connect meaningfully on opposite sides of the world.

Whether or not you take the time to think about it when you file your tax return each year, you are already sponsoring domestic non-profits and foreign aid organizations abroad.  But a portion of your contributions also goes to the pockets of your state and federal government officials, and another fraction goes to World Bank president Robert Zoellick’s salary and expense account.  I won’t try to calculate what percentage of your taxes allocated to social causes actually make it there, but I’m not sure I’d even want to know.

In contrast, you now are beginning to have the tools at your disposal to have a direct, measurable impact on these causes — to help solve the immediate problems, on the ground, in communities with the most need.  You can help build a school in Southeast Asia, provide clean drinking water for an entire African village, or prevent domestic abuse in your own neighborhood, with the social media tools you use every day.  The real solution is in going straight to the source, and it doesn’t take much:

Medicine that would prevent half of all malaria deaths costs only 12 cents a dose.  A bed net to prevent a child from getting malaria costs only four dollars. Preventing five million deaths over the next ten years would cost just three dollars for each new mother.

Easterly points out that the real tragedy is that the Western world has spent $2.3 trillion on foreign aid over the last five decades and still failed to accomplish these remarkably simple goals.

But you no longer have to stand by and let someone else decide how to divvy up your contributions to worthy causes.  If wanted to give $20 towards saving the world, or even saving a single life, my guess is you wouldn’t donate it to the United States government or the World Bank.  Fortunately we are entering an era where, with social media, you can choose to make a difference yourself.

Social media addresses two of the biggest hurdles of social change: reaching the people who can actually make a difference, and providing the means and channels for them to do so.  Only very recently has it been possible for individuals like Tim Ferriss to raise over $250,000 in one month for the construction of new schools in Vietnam and elsewhere – a campaign organized exclusively through blogs and Twitter.  Tim wasted no time raising another $15,000 for a school in Nepal, again promoted solely through social media and word of mouth.

This is earth-shatteringly great news for NGOs and non-profits, in the US and abroad, not to mention the deserving recipients of their services.  Not only are the tools available (for free, no less) to broadcast an organization’s message to the people who can help the most, but those messages are actionable, meaning help can be delivered directly, immediately.

Where I see the need for visionaries is in establishing platforms that close the loop between the cause, the message, the individual contributor, and the quantifiable result.  I don’t mean a central organization equivalent to the World Bank or IMF, who gets to decide who is worthy of aid and who is not — this is social media we’re talking about here, in the age of transparency, where the vox populi dictates the direction of change.  Some resources already exist as steps in the right direction. In terms of raising awareness, Change.org is a great central resource for information on humanitarian, social, and geopolitical issues.  Applications like Causes in Facebook provide the back end, allowing individuals to contribute directly to the organizations of their choice.  And the countless blogging and microblogging platforms provide the channels to promote and connect the two.

There are countless worthy causes out there in need of support from you and me.  Many of them can only be served through larger organizations like the United Way, UNICEF, or the federal government.  Don’t get me wrong, these organizations do an immense amount of good in the world, but they add a lot of overhead to the contributions they take in.  Social media is the key to bringing a new level efficiency to enacting social change.

How would you spend $20 right now if you knew 100% of it would be used directly by a worthy cause? And how far away do you think we are from this becoming a reality?

The concept of SM4SC is so simple – as I joked with Gradon, I was surprised they were able to get the domain – yet as demonstrated last night, a immensely valuable way to get social media thought leaders together offline to promote a meaningful cause. Of course, the event went off without a hitch – the venue was ironically fitting (new media types in an exclusive old-boy club), the cocktails flowed and the conversation was lively; but was truly a pleasure to hear Toni Troop of JDI speak so passionately about the cause behind the event and remind us of the reason we were all there. Even those of us whose hopes of winning a trip from JetBlue were left unfulfilled when the raffle was over didn’t leave empty handed, knowing that we’d contributed to an outstanding cause. I was most impressed that the event had attracted attendees on such a national scale – I spoke with visitors from as far away as LA, Las Vegas, and Texas.

But how do we bring this back to social media? After all, as a standalone event this could have been organized and attended by members of any industry (e.g. Auto Mechanics for Social Change). But the fact that we’re all deeply engaged in social media is significant, and hold us particularly accountable for the social change we seek promote.

It’s worth repeating something I wrote last week over at Chris Kieff‘s corporate blog: the barriers to quantifiable social action on the individual level are lower than they have ever been. We in the social media space are shaping the practices of broadcasting compelling messages through dynamic new channels and building the tools to make our messages actionable. For causes like Jane Doe, social media provides both the hammer and the nail – a platform for not just social awareness, but direct, positive, quantifiable action.

Hats off to Gradon and Dmitri, and to everyone who came out last night – it was fantastic to meet so many of you.

(Photo credit: @thespottedduck on Flickr)

Update: I was just notified that I won the #wwsmw challenge, ha! Not a bad consolation for losing the raffle.