We just wanted to say a big "thank you" to all of our friends out there who headed over to the Webby Awards People's Voice site and voted for Vancity's Change Everything.

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ChangeEverything.ca, the online community we conceived and built for Vancity, has been nominated for a Webby Award.

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My new TV addiction is "The Sarah Connor Chronicles", which brings the Terminator franchise to the small screen. There's nothing like watching robots kick ass to make me think about the big issues in life, and this week's man-versus-machine showdown got me thinking about our widely-noted anxiety about the possibility of robot or cyborg takeover.

From Blade Runner to the Matrix, from Star Trek's Borg to Battlestar Galactica's Cylons, we've spent a lot of time imagining the day when our super-strong, super-smart robots get tired of vacuuming and decide they want to rule the world. You can even buy a witty and informative manual on How To Survive a Robot Uprising.

As a sci-fi fan and insomniac I've spent more than my share of hours staring at the ceiling and wondering whether our house is about to be stormed by robots who've made their escape from the Honda assembly line. That's given me an opportunity to consider a more immediate threat: Facebook. Not just Facebook, actually, but all the social networks and online communities to which we give our eyeballs, braincells, hearts and dollars. Could these online communities constitute the machine threat that sci-fi has taught us to anticipate?

Here's what we know about the prospect of machine takeover:

The machines share a common intelligence. Thanks to networking, the machines are all connected together. Networked, machine intelligence is way more powerful than solo, human intelligence, which is why the machines crush us like bugs (at least at first). Similarly, an online community links users (and their computers) in a giant network that agglomerates the knowledge, passions, and creative assets of its members. A single social network is a collective entity that is far smarter, better informed, and more interesting to talk to at a dinner party than any one of its members.

The machines evolve. In any scary robot movie, the shit hits the fan once your nice, domesticated robot develops the ability to build a nuclear missile or graft human tissue onto its exoskeleton. You want to keep a very careful eye on any machine that develops intelligence or skills that weren't specifically and deliberately engineered by its human creator. So please worry about social networks like Flickr (originally a set of tools for a multiplayer online game, turned into a photo-sharing community) or communities like Second Life (started as a demo, turned into a world). We may initiate our networks, but we're kidding ourselves if we think they remain under our control.

The machines figure out how to build new machines. Machines cease to be dependent on -- or beholden to -- human beings once they learn how to build more of themselves. That's why you've got to worry about networks like Ning, which are deliberately set up to spawn new networks. Talk about letting the genie out of the bottle. Before you engineer your network for a path of relentless, viral growth, get to know its social dynamics and trajectory, so you have some sense of the trajectory you're initiating.

The machines need a body. Aha! you're thinking. The robots need some sort of physical presence before they take over -- ideally something that goes beyond a computer-controlled jet or tank. Opposable thumbs are as helpful to robots as to humans. Well, Facebook has 128 million opposable thumbs: every Facebook user is a real-world avatar for the network. Don't believe me? Almost 100,000 Facebook users signed up for a worldwide water fight last July 14th -- that's right, the network already has us armed and turning on one another.

The robots always kill their creator first. That's bad news for Mark Zuckerberg, and for all the rest of us who spend our days and nights in the laboratory, coaxing our communities to life. Sure, a community may stagger around the room, thrusting out its arms and legs in a vaguely dynamic way, but you know it's ALIVE when it turns around and plunges a dagger through your heart. Anyone who's launched an online community, only to have the members completely reinvent the community's mission, user agreement and/or code, knows what I'm talking about.

Robots reflect and amplify the worst traits and behaviors of their human creators. Robots can do all the stuff we do: perpetrate mass slaughter (Matrix, Terminator, the Day the Earth Stood Still), take away our ability to make independent decisions (2001), exploit human energy/labor (Matrix), destroy the natural environment (Matrix, Terminator), and appropriate other species' cultural, biological and physical assets (the Borg). Likewise, the virtual being constituted by a social network can amplify the worst traits within the network: social networks have perpetrated mass frauds (hello, lonelygirl15!), turned peaceful coexisters into rotten neighbors, reduced people to whether they are hot or not, and -- in an especially horrific case -- even bullied at least one teen to her death.

Your Facebook profile page may not look a lot like Arnold Schwarzenegger, but it bears more than a metaphorical resemblance to the intelligent machines of our nightmares. Each half-machine (servers and software), half-human (coders and users) network you belong to is a collective intelligence. It may not be embodied (or rather, its embodiment may be distributed -- across all its users -- rather than unitary) but it is a new kind of being, a new kind of intelligence, that could have a crucial impact on the future of humanity.

You can understand that impact simply in terms of each network's social, psychological, and perhaps also economic and/or political footprint. A network can fan the flames of material aspiration by encouraging people to think about what's next on their shopping list. It can reduce human connection to the next hookup. It can reduce professional collegiality to notches on a virtual bedpost. Or a network can focus members and observers on how to change everything.

But network participation doesn't just affect us: it constitutes us. When we become part of the network's collective intelligence, the network becomes us -- and we become the network. The network consciousness is (to a greater or lesser extent, in proportion to our participation) our own consciousness.

If our network aims at professional schmoozing, we're schmoozers: as genuine as our last message was forthright, as opportunistic as our last inquiry was grasping. If our network interactions play at zombies and vampires, we're zombies and vampires: undead, sapping energy from our more vital and dynamic selves. If our network focuses on change, it is change; and the consciousness of each member becomes change (and a force for change) too.

That's why it's time for you -- for all of us -- to join the resistance. Our social networks can be the malevolent, murderous creatures of dystopic science fiction. They can form collective consciousnesses that reflect, amplify and encourage materialism, exploitation and cruelty. We can give birth to these half-human, half-machine beings, and be remembered as the generation of foolish scientists who let the experiment escape from the lab.

Or we can constitute another creature entirely. Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek and the Terminator franchise all feature cybernetic creations who turn against their wicked siblings and instead join with humans for their salvation. Our social networks may have millions of users, but even in machine time, they are still in their infancy. Their first steps may be shaky, but there's still plenty of time for us to steer them on a path towards constructive engagement; towards claiming the best of their human legacy, and amplifying it with the power of machine intelligence.

The collective consciousness of your social network constitutes some part of your own consciousness...but you help constitute its consciousness, too. Your contribution -- your words, your photos, your choice of connections, even your choice of which networks to engage in -- determine the character of each of your network babies. Resistance is far from futile: resistance to materialism, exploitation and cruelty are the very qualities that we can model, embody and endow. A networked Terminator that reflects these qualities of resistance: now that's a cyborg I'd like to help build.

(surveillance camera talking to computer user) Don't you think joining that "Facebook, stop invading my privacy!" group is a little... I don't know... paranoid?

Last month, we launched a new Facebook application for BC Hydro, called Green Gifts. It's a virtual gift-giving app with a twist of sustainability: a conservation tip that accompanies each virtual gift and friend-to-friend message.

So far, it's been a lot of fun. The launch was accompanied by a daily prize, awarded randomly to a Green Gifts user; our client gave away everything from hand-cranked lanterns to iPod Nanos with solar chargers.

Today, though, things took an interesting turn. With the end of the daily contest, we've announced a new prize... and a new Green Gift to accompany it.

It's the XO laptop:

In 2002, MIT Professor Nicholas Negroponte experienced first-hand how connected laptops transformed the lives of children and their families in a remote Cambodian village. A seed was planted: If every child in the world had access to a computer, what potential could be unlocked? What problems could be solved? These questions eventually led to the foundation of One Laptop per Child, and the creation of the XO laptop.

You may remember it as the hundred-dollar-laptop initiative. That figure turned out to be too low to deliver the level of connectivity and computing power the foundation wanted to put into kids' hands... but they were able to pull it off for twice the amount.

It has a Linux-based operating system with a specially-designed interface geared to kids. The keyboard is built for a child's hands. There's no hard drive and no optical drive; it uses WiFi to ferry data to and from the outside world. Spill-proof, drop-proof and as child-proof as a laptop can reasonably be made, the XO won't win any awards as a performance whiz... but it has the potential to make a big difference for a lot of kids.

Here's where folks in the developed world come in: until November 26th, we can buy an XO laptop for the kids in our lives. You pay $399, which pays for both the laptop you'll receive and a laptop for a child in the developing world. (You'll also receive a $200 tax receipt.)

So the idea at Green Gifts is that, between now and the 26th, you can send a virtual XO laptop to your Facebook friends... along with a tip that tells them about the XO (which is a sustainability marvel; you can charge its battery with a pull cord or a solar charger, and its power draw is meager) along with a link to buy one (or, more accurately, two).

Which is why BC Hydro is buying an XO, too, to be awarded to a lucky Green Gifts user after Nov. 26th. And while the folks at One Laptop Per Child will probably be happy to get BC Hydro's cheque, that's not the point of the exercise.

The real point is awareness, and giving people an opportunity to contribute to a worldwide effort to make a real difference for kids.

As we build online communities and program in the latest bells and whistles, it's easy to forget that, for many people, the killer feature is the opportunity to change the world for the better – even if it's just in some small way.

Facebook: so marvelously designed, so magnificently conceived, so amazingly successful... and yet...

...so peppered with irritants. And one of them is, well, is.

As in, "Rob Cottingham is fed up with having to start every status line with 'Rob Cottingham is...'."

That little two-wordletter verb has drawn fire on Facebook for some time. The Facebook group "Campaign to lose the mandatory 'is' from status updates" now boasts more than 64,000 members.

Well, the tyranny of Ism will soon be naught but a dimly-remembered nightmare. At least, that's what I predict given today's update to Facebook developers:

When you're a company looking to make your first foray into the thickets of social media, building your own online community from scratch – and taking on everything from usability issues to platform selection to how you get that critical mass of people to sign up in the first place – can seem pretty daunting, and with good reason.

British Columbia's public power utility, BC Hydro, is taking a different tack: a toe in the water that could well signal a bigger splash to come. Instead of building their own stand-alone entry in the Web 2.0 sweepstakes and trying to lure users from other sites, they've headed to where people are already participating in droves: Facebook.

We've worked with BC Hydro to create Green Gifts, a brand new Facebook Platform application. Green Gifts lets you send a free virtual gift to your friends, including an icon-sized environmentally-themed image, a personal message from you, and a practical Power Smart tip for conserving energy and reducing your environmental footprint.

And it's that tip that's the key to the whole thing. Virtual gift-giving is huge on Facebook (as your notification inbox attests soon after you join it). We want to capture just a little of that activity... and give people a chance to devote it to energy conservation.

Which is emblematic of the approach we're recommending to many of our clients who are new to the social web (and more than a few who are old hands). You don't have to create the next Facebook, YouTube or Flickr to successfully engage your public; especially if you're starting out, join them wherever they're already participating:

• Chances are good your potential users are already voting with their feet - or, more to the point, their browsers. For instance, judging by the figures for the Vancouver and Kelowna networks alone, there are well over half a million British Columbians registered on Facebook, and the number keeps growing. The province's goal of becoming energy self-sufficient by 2016 makes it urgent that BC Hydro's message reach as many ears and eyes as possible... and Facebook's an ideal vehicle.
  

• Look for opportunities that offer plenty of participatory infrastructure. The Facebook Platform is loaded with features, beautifully usable and highly flexible. (Want to program in PHP? Go ahead. Java? Sure. Flash? Knock yourself out.) The documentation is extensive and, at least as far as functionality goes, thorough. (Facebook's admirable determination to prevent spam and abuse, on the other hand, translates into unannounced notification restrictions and usage algorithms that had us climbing the walls once or twice. Eh, we lived.)

• Look for the culture of participation among the users, and work with it. Facebook is a place where people come to keep touch with each other, and often it's a light touch at that. Green Gifts gives users a way to connect, while spreading the word about conservation.

So if we've seemed a little more excitable than usual these past few weeks, now you know why: we've been working on one of the most fun projects we've taken on so far, on a topic that's core to our social mission, on a platform we've been itching to dig into for the better part of a year, with a client that has the (ahem) power to make a real difference in sustainability.

We've had the privilege of working with some first-rate people, too. Agencies that operate in strict regulatory environments often have to find their way carefully in new media, but we were impressed at our client's determination to get their feet wet in the world of social networking.

And on the project team, we had the pleasure of working with folks like Jeff Reifman of NewsCloud fame and Communicopia's Jason Mogus. But the guy who truly blew us away was illustrator extraordinaire Jeremy Crowle, who produced some absolutely gorgeous icons for the first round of gifts:

I hope you'll check Green Gifts out. You can find it right here.

Would you be a more effective agent for social, economic or political change if you could see the progress we're all making as a movement?

That's a theme that has popped up for me repeatedly in recent months, including at Web of Change. Whether you're wondering if it's worthwhile to leave your car at home when so many others are driving theirs, or struggling to keep up morale in your issue-driven nonprofit, sometimes the whole job of social change feels like one big collective action problem. How much energy should I invest in change if others aren't also investing their time and energy in change? How much is our effort worth, anyhow? Are we really making a difference?

The truth is, none of us are alone -- not even a little. For proof, you need look no further than a site like Wiser Earth, which offers a window on tens of thousands of social movements around the world.

But it can be hard to stay connected to that larger movement, to notice that your work is supported and amplified by millions of other people working towards the same transformation, and to appreciate the changes we're effecting every day. It can take a big event or milestone to remind us that we're making progress -- for me, the recent wedding of two of our dearest friends, a gay couple, was a reminder that yes! change is possible.

What can we do in between those milestones to track our progress, boost our morale, build community, and celebrate our successes? In this as in all things, Facebook may have an answer. The fabulous Jon Stahl shared a practice in place at ONE/Northwest, where team members often end their day by e-mailing each other a list of the tasks or accomplishments they completed that day. Quite apart from its team building value, this practice struck me as a great way of noting and appreciating the small steps we're making towards change.

But you don't need a team practice -- or a battleship appearance -- to declare "mission accomplished". Many of us are posting daily, hourly or minute-by-minute snapshots of our activities via Facebook status updates or Twitter. These status updates could be a great way for us to share the small steps we're all taking to strengthen our communities, reduce our personal environmental footprints, increase issue awareness, support people in need, empower and mobilize marginalized communities, support social justice -- all the many many things people in non-profits, activist groups, government agencies, social enterprises and multinational corporations are doing to move us towards a world that is socially, environmentally and personally sustainable.

I would love to know what my Facebook and Twitter friends and buddies are doing every day or every hour to move things forward. Maybe you've just covered your neighbourhood with posters for an upcoming rally, maybe you just designed the logo for a new non-profit, maybe you had a meeting with one great insight into how the climate change movement can mobilize more support among retirees. Whatever it is, big or small, put it in your update! And don't be shy about blowing your own horn -- that's the point. Your success may be just the encouragement that someone else needs to keep going.

I posted my first "change status" just a few minutes ago. Here's what it said:

Alexandra is happy with the excruciatingly detailed tech requirements she's drafted for a wonderful new social networking community for vulnerable people.

OK, so tech requirements aren't as sexy as rioting in the streets, but that's what I did with my weekend and hey, I really do think it's a small building block towards the right big picture.

What did you do today that moved your work, your organization, your issue or your personal practice forward? Post it to your Facebook or Twitter status. And don't forget to friend me on Facebook or buddy me on Twitter so that I can hear about it.

(worker carrying away another worker's computer) Sorry, but it's gotta go. Management says it could be used to access Facebook.

Think blocking employees' Internet access is a bad idea? Check out Shel Holtz's Stop Blocking campaign.

(woman to another woman, looking at a man) He's the kind of guy you want as a Facebook friend, but not as a friend friend.