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

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So I'm sifting through my inbox: spam, spam, spam, iTunes receipt, spam, spam, newsletter, spam, spam, notice that one of our web sites has been named a Webby Awards Official Honoree, spam, spam...

Whoa. Back up.

No mistake: the Webby Awards nominees were announced this morning, and ChangeEverything.ca is an Official Honoree. Our client, Vancity, is listed alongside names like AOL and Weber Shandwick. Holy cow:

Of the more than 8,000 entries submitted to the 11th Annual Webby Awards, fewer than 15% were distinguished as an Official Honoree. This honor signifies an outstanding caliber of work.

We're walking on air here, of course, and we're pretty proud of what we've achieved. But more credit goes to Vancity, their online visionary William Azaroff, and most importantly the site's moderator Kate Dugas.

And more than to any of us, the real credit ought to go to everyone who's participating in ChangeEverything.ca, from the folks who just leave an occasional comment or vote in one of Kate's polls to the regulars whose contributions make the site such a vibrant, inspiring community.

So everyone, take a deep breath and repeat after me: "We'd like to thank the Academy..."

Just as you can never really tell if an online community will really take off, you also really don't know what form that success will take. And ChangeEverything.ca has proven that in spades.

First there was the out-of-the-blue thunderbolt of site moderator Kate Dugas' "Got Hats?" initiative.

Now comes the runaway success of community member EnviroWoman's blog about her resolution to live plastic-free in 2007.

Each post tells the story – often hilarious – of her attempts to find non-plastic alternatives to a product many of the rest of us take for granted. Her blog posts invariably foster lively comment threads that become little resource libraries, pointing to plastic-free options and information.

Beneath the self-deprecating humour, there's a serious determination to live up to the commitment she's made, and she now has hundreds of fellow community members pulling for her. (ChangeEverything.ca just signed up its thousandth member.)

But that's only the tip of the iceberg: EnviroWoman's saga has struck a chord across the blogging world. Treehugger, the 800-pound gorilla of sustainability blogs, picked up her story; across the Atlantic, her blog has become one of The Guardian's "sites we love".

It's another example of how passion, transparency (check out the deodorant thread) and practical relevance can combine with a distinctive, engaging voice to
yield real power. With a dawning awareness that we'll have to make profound changes in our lives – and that switching to compact fluorescents alone won't cut it – EnviroWoman is steering a deft middle course of change between the daunting and the incremental. And a growing number of people are hopping on for the ride.

Roland at Bryght has written a lovely profile of Vancity's ChangeEverything site. And there is much wisdom in it:

ChangeEverything.ca is illustrative of an online community truism: after you have a solid and reliable technology infrastructure like Drupal to build an online community upon, the social i.e. the people part of the community matters more than the technology part.

Online communities succeed only if users participate. The number of opportunities to participate online is exploding (share your photos! rate your teachers! comment on this video!), but time is the new land: nobody's making any more of it. Increasingly, a user who decides to participate on your site is making a conscious decision not to participate on another one.

So for your online community to take off, you have to design for participation, starting with your concept. In the case of ChangeEverything.ca, that meant the simple idea of allowing people to think about the changes they wanted to make, and then blog about them.

But don't count technology out. We needed a clean, easy way for users to link blog posts to changes... and that's where some techno magic comes into the picture.

Enter Khalid Baheyeldin, one of the greats in Drupal development. We contracted with him to create the custom module that lets users link pieces of content ("nodes" in Drupal-speak) in lists – and Drupal, Khalid, our client and Social Signal being who we all are, the resulting module (with a little extra work by Khalid) was released to the community.

Between Khalid's work, some solid advice from Bryght on data architecture and Courtney Miller's theming and interface tweaks, the result was a platform that was designed from the ground up for participation.

So yes, there was some technical mojo, but all of it in the service of, and strictly applied to, getting people to take part in the community. We were setting a stage – which is just a venue for the actors to shine.

And shine they have. Kate Dugas, the site animator, has been brilliant, in turns charming, warm and provocative. The community members have responded in kind, to the point where I now regularly turn to ChangeEverything.ca myself for ideas and inspiration. Community, enabled by technology: that's what this is all about.

Over at the Jackson Fish Market blog, Hillel Cooperman makes a strong case that "software is an untapped and exponentially powerful medium in which to convey messages and values for brand advertisers." He points to Burger King's videogaming endeavours, but says his argument extends to the web as well.

His examples: Lincoln's My Dream and Vancity's ChangeEverything.ca. And damned if he doesn't get exactly when Vancity (and we) had in mind when we built it:

The Vancity folks understand all that's necessary is an association with the goodwill generated by the site’s existence. In fact, the Vancity folks understand quite a bit - namely that the best way to get continued interest in their site (while accruing value to their brand) is to rely on the community to truly power the site with their content and stories.

We've been referring to that as reflected glory marketing, and it turns the conventional wisdom about sponsoring this kind of initiative on its head.

Supposedly, you maximize your return on your investment in something you're supporting (whether it's a web site, a run for the cure or the new wing of a university library) by slapping your logo everywhere you can, the bigger the better.

But online communities – really interesting ones – are a lot less likely to grow and thrive if you brand a site so heavily that users never feel any ownership over it. Sometimes your best bet is to acknowledge your role and then step out of the way, allowing the success of your community to speak for itself... and reflect well on your brand.

Cooperman (who headed up the user experience crew on Microsoft Windows Vista) compares that approach to the way Lincoln handles My Dream. It's well worth reading... although I have to admit he broke my heart when he revealed that My Dream's gorgeous front page area map is actually statically rendered. (Honestly, it was like finding out the truth about Santa Claus. Deep down, the five-year-old inside me still wants to believe that tag clouds could be this beautiful.)

His key insight is this:

I would bet good money that both Lincoln and VanCity feel that their endeavors were a success. I bet both feel like the exposure they got was relatively cheap compared to other methods they use. But I also claim that if Lincoln saw VanCity’s engagement numbers - average minutes per session, page views per unique visit, repeat visits per user, etc., they would be deeply jealous of what the VanCity folks had accomplished. And I believe this would still be the case despite the fact that MyDream has gotten way more traffic overall (due to Lincoln’s larger ability/effort to drive distribution).

Thanks, Hillel... and thanks, Vancity. We're tremendously proud of this project: both because of what it has achieved, and because of the faith our client has consistently shown in the power of online community.

Our good friends (and clients) at Vancity are running a contest on ChangeEverything.ca. The $500 first prize is great, but the cool thing about it as far as I'm concerned is, it's the ideal way for a beginner to dip their toes into the blogging waters.

Here's how the Viva la resolution! contest works in five easy steps:

1. You sign up on the site. (It's free, and no salesperson will call.)
   
2. You decide on a resolution – something you want to change in 2007 about yourself, your community or your world.
3. You blog on the site about your progress in making that change and include the tag (i.e. keyword) "resolution".
4. A panel of judges checks out your resolution and blog posts, and picks out the top three resolutions.
5. If yours is one of them, you walk away with a $50, $100 or $500 Visa gift card.

So why's it ideal for a beginning blogger? Here are five handy reasons:

• ChangeEverything.ca is a friendly community. Your chances of getting helpful, supportive comments are excellent.
• It takes just seconds to set up a blog, and you have an instant built-in readership: the hundreds of other members of ChangeEverything.ca, and the thousands of visitors to the site.
• Site moderator Kate Dugas is happy to help you if you run into a roadblock.
• If you made New Year's resolutions, you have built-in fodder for writing blog posts.
  
• A $500 Visa gift card would be a pretty good reward for a first outing.

So if you know someone who's been itching to start blogging, this could be the ticket. (And feel free to download the poster [PDF, 250kb] for the contest if you want to spread the word.)

Last night's Social Tech Brewing meetup (when are we going to start calling them brew-hahas?) profiled three very different projects with one powerful thing in common: a sense of place.

(Speaking of a sense of place: WorkSpace in Gastown was the perfect venue for the event. I loved it for BarCamp, and for this kind of meeting it's ideal. Consider them for your next event... or for your nomadic workplace of choice.) 

Up first: James Sherrett and ThinkSalmon.com, a place for people from the Pacific Northwest to "celebrate salmon’s contribution to our communities, and share their salmon experiences, stories, and thoughts." The site's backers (the Pacific Salmon Foundation and Fraser Basin Council) are hoping that, when you think about salmon, you'll think about more than just beauty shots of intrepid fish swimming upstream; you'll think about how we can work together to ensure the wild BC salmon survives and thrives.

"If you don't have salmon in a watershed, you don't have all the other things that rely on salmon," James pointed out, including bears, birds and even the trees themselves. He said that even some Okanagan wines are made from grapes containing phosphates that can be traced back to salmon.

The site is already seeded with video, photos and text, but it will come alive as more and more visitors begin participating. And that's where place comes into play: each story that users share can be geocoded; the site then draws on the Google Maps API to plot maps of stories.

Kylie Turner, the site's lead copywriter and editor, spoke about needing to lower barriers to entry. "When you think of stories, some people think they have to have perfect grammar and be this wonderful, beautiful textual thing," she said. "We need to show them they can just submit a picture or a child's poem."

Next up on the seat of heat: Vancity's Kate Dugas, presenting ChangeEverything.ca. (Why, yes, we did build that site. Thanks for asking.) She explained that the credit union wanted to launch an online community related, not to Vancity products and services, but to the changes important to people in the communities Vancity serves.

After going live in July, the site officially launched in September. Kate said there are now hundreds of users on the site, and the tone of conversation is great: no need yet to delete content or put out fires, and plenty of mutually supportive comments.

Several audience members suggested being even clearer on the front page that the site is not tied to product and service marketing, and that no information is being passed on to the folks in sales. And asked how to bring in new features without seriously disrupting the community, Kate answered, "by involving the community in shaping those features."

Finally, it was Rochelle Grayson and Jennifer Ouano from Elastic Entertainment, talking about their new project, MadeInVAN. They describe it as a "participative cultural urban guide", where Vancouver residents upload stories tied to specific places (called "stops" in MadeInVANese). Users can then compile the various stories from several "stops" into an itinerary for a tour.

Working with MobileMuse.ca, MadeInVAN aims to target mobile devices – mainly with text at first – so users can find out about locations on the fly and get an insider's take on how the city really lives. It's based on an existing site, MadeinMtl, but will extend that site's static platform with social networking and location-aware functions, built in Ruby on Rails.

There's a business model to the project, with sponsorship and contextual advertising but also possibly (and most interestingly) with various local venues kicking in to host their own communities.

Thinking about each of these projects, it's a little funny: back in the distant mists of time (that is, a decade or so), the Internet was going to erase the influence of geography. Instead, we're finding an increasingly powerful – and exciting – potential for mutually reinforcing interactions between physical and online community.

Thanks to everyone who presented, and everyone who came – it was an inspiring, enjoyable evening. And check back soon for details on the next one!

We're delighted that Change Everything has been noted on TechCrunch as "a nice alternative to the user generated advertising model".

Marshall Kirkpatrick writes:

I think this is a great example of a company making use of Web 2.0 tools to promote themselves in a way that places the ballance of the impact on providing value to users and incurs promotional benefits for themselves as a consequence of that. Though this model may seem less immediately lucrative, it’s also much less likely to face the kind of anti-corporate backlash bubbling up in MySpace and YouTube.

Marshall had a couple of tips for us, too:

Unlike at 43Things, there’s not the option at ChangeEverything to mark a goal as something you have done already or the question of whether a goal is worth persuing or not - perhaps leftists are too Quixotic for such features.

These are both options we hope to introduce on the site soon - so no, lefties aren't too Quixotic (in this respect, anyhow!)

Our friends at ChangeEverything.ca want to send some lucky Vancouver-area bloggers to see a free Bard on the Beach performance:

Blog about changing your community, and you could find yourself at Bard on the Beach, courtesy of our Blogging for Change contest!

Just add a blog post to ChangeEverything.ca related to our current change theme of Change Your Community, no later than 5:00 PM PT on Wednesday September 13th 2006 for your chance to win a pair of tickets to the Sept. 17th Bard on the Beach presentation of Measure for Measure.

And if you haven't checked out ChangeEverything.ca yet, we hope you do. Not just because we built it for Vancity, and not just because Vancity is such a kickass community leader in these here parts, and not even because we're thrilled with how it's turning out, but because we'd love to know what you think.

Think "financial institution", and you likely think of pinstripes, vaults and armed guards. Oh, and a powerful, deep-seated aversion to change.

So it'll probably startle a lot of people to see the latest project from Vancity, Canada's largest credit union. ChangeEverything.ca is an online community targeted (but not limited) to residents of Vancouver, Victoria and B.C.'s Lower Mainland. We spent the past few months building it, and launched a few days ago.

Here's how it works: Once you register, you can begin listing changes you'd like to make: as personal as changing your hairstyle or getting your bike out of storage, or as broad a global transformation as you can imagine.

Then you start blogging about your progress toward making that change. But the real substance of the site happens when someone comes across your change and gets inspired; they can join it. Now both of you are blogging, discussing, and potentially collaborating on making the change happen. 

This is one of those cases where building the site is only half the battle; you have to work ceaselessly to foster a thriving online community. Fortunately, Vancity has hired a terrific moderator for ChangeEverything.ca, Kate Dugas. And we'll be working closely with Kate and Vancity in the months to come to ensure the site's underlying functions and design give the community it needs to take root, grow and, yes, change.

The feedback we're receiving, even in these early days, is wonderful. The blog OpenSourceCU (home, by the way, of the best list of credit union blogs you'll find anywhere) calls ChangeEverything.ca "the best example of any financial institution successfully using the social web (blogging, user-generated content, building a true online community). Wells Fargo should be taking notes along with every credit union with a culture open enough to participate in social media with their members."

We're also getting some constructive suggestions from folks like Darren Barefoot, Vancouver's leading blogger and the one-half of the tech PR duo Capulet Communications.

In a blog post where he compliments the design (thanks!) and advises some changes to make the information architecture easier to understand, he says, "Also credit Vancity for a taking a big risk on this project, which really has nothing to do with them besides their brand in the banner." Agreed.

We'd love to see you at ChangeEverything.ca. As OpenSourceCU says, "You must visit the site and see for yourself.It’s exactly how the brand of a 'credit union' is supposed to be represented. Efforts like this can change the entire industry/movement/whatever-you-care-to-call-it."