ChangeEverything.ca has earned the Webby award
Five reasons the Change Everything community has earned the Webby:
- It’s a community committed to social change. As someone who scours the Internet Movie Database obsessively, I’m the last person to complain that so much of the web is devoted to the trivial and inconsequential. But when a site weighs in with a substantive mission and becomes a real success, it encourages others to follow suit, pursuing real-world results – and for those of us convinced of the social web’s potential as a tool for social change, that’s powerful stuff.
By the way, among those real-world results for Change Everything: a warm clothing drive that self-organized on the site in its early days, after a particularly nasty cold snap threatened the poorest and most vulnerable residents of the Downtown East Side. Within a few days, the drive had netted more than 70 garbage bags filled with hats, gloves, scarves and coats – and triggered several spin-off initiatives.
- It embraces the open-source spirit. Change Everything is built on the Drupal content management system in a sector (financial institutitons) where closed-source software is the near-universal rule. And yet, in contrast to its closed-source Webby competition (with the notable exception of open-source browser Flock), Change Everything isn’t just built on Drupal – it regularly contributes back to the development community (most recently releasing the Nudge module).
What’s to stop another credit union or (gasp) bank from using Nudge as part of a site designed to steal Change Everything’s thunder? Not a thing… and the fact that Vancity isn’t letting that fear stop them is a clear sign they’ve embraced the community ethos that underlies the open-source movement.
- It’s a Vancity project… but not the Vancity project. Social networking may not be your business, the way it’s Facebook’s business, but it’s not Vancity’s business either – and that’s why Change Everything is such a success. What Vancity does know is how to serve the needs of its members: not just their banking needs, but their needs for a vibrant, sustainable community. If you’re part of an organization with a distinct social mandate, approach and values, your social smarts are needed in the social networking world.
- It’s small and focused. How can Change Everything’s 3000 users hope to beat Facebook’s 70 million? In sheer numbers, they can’t. But there’s a quality to be had in a small, focused community: intimacy, shared interest, and perhaps a little more willingness to trust a fellow community member. (Not to mention the fact that you’re much less likely to be tracked down by people you’ve been trying to avoid since grade four.)
There’s room online for both the online giants and the nimble niche or hyper-local communities; each serves a different purpose. But it’s about time we started paying a little more attention to those niche communities – while the Facebooks and MySpaces of the web may provide utility, it’s the niche communities that are more likely to capture users’ passion.
- The content, in all modesty, kicks ass. Feeling a little tired of pokes, vampire bites and which of your friends is the hottest-looking? Change Everything can give you the often-hilarious story of EnviroWoman, who went a year trying to live plastic-free (and mostly succeeding) – told with wit and humility. It can give you posts like Alex’s on plastics and BPA, posted nearly a full year before the media started really taking notice and the Canadian government announced a ban. And it can give you stories like this one, about the difference a simple bicycle ambulance design is making in Malawi and Namibia.
But the best way to understand why Change Everything is to explore the community itself. http://ChangeEverything.ca
