Stop Madonna!

I have been asked to give a very brief presentation on PlanLive as part of an HIV/AIDS congress on 1 December (World AIDS Day) in Amsterdam. The idea is that we want to Stop Madonna and other celebrities from adopting children affected by HIV/AIDS and instead enable their (extended) families and communities to address the issues related to HIV/AIDS. If not adopting, what could we in the developed world do to help? And what could be the role of PlanLive in this respect?

Please leave your comments and suggestions here so I can include them in my presentation. After 1 December I will blog about the role that I see for PlanLive and the response and discussion of the workshop participants.

can't dummy community

I have been asked several times to show a demo or mock-up of PlanLive, the same way software is often demoed using dummy data. When I do, people are invariably disappointed. 


Friends' vacation photos used to be my father's worst nightmare. He dreaded sitting in dark living rooms watching uninteresting vacation slides without being in control of the remote control. "Let's visit them now before they develop their vacation slides!" He would have appreciated being able to see these photos on Facebook or Flickr. 


When we watch a demo website, we often expect to see National Geographic-like photos but get to see vacation slides instead. The content on community websites acquires its value largely from its authors who are valuable to you; much more so than from the 'objective' quality of the content itself. When we go to see our daughter in a theatre play at school, we don't expect to see a professional actress. We expect to see our daughter show us parents what she and her classmates have been preparing for the past few months. That is important to us. Conversely, when we do go to a theatre play in Amsterdam we expect them to outperform our daughter and her classmates. And if they don't, we demand our money back.


Only a small part of community content is 'portable' to other communities. The vast majority of community content—the content on community websites—is relevant only for the community that created it. Now, with Web2.0 technologies, many communities, however, can and do create lots of content at relatively low cost. Many communities times lots of content times a small part of still equals a lot of relevant and portable content—but that won't show in a dummy demo community. 

Child Protection & Participation 2.0

As soon as you hear internet and youth in one sentence, you think risk. Who is going to protect them and how?

Youth themselves seem to see mostly opportunity and excitement. A chance to say and show what they want, and to whom they want. A long longed for venue to express themselves and to engage or socialise with others. As evidenced by their posts, photos and amounts of friends, risk is not on their radar. At least not for now.

A quick look into one of the millions of Facebook pages easily shows more photos than would fit into a shoe box (yes I will put them into an album!). Rarely do the people on these photos look serious or formal. Casual is the rule and partying not the exception. The one thing that always strikes me looking at these photos is how different they are as compared to the photos that normally accompany a so-called Sponsored Child Introduction or Update. Smiles, pride and self confidence are the norm on Facebook, while shy, serious and uneasy faces feature on most photos Plan sends to sponsors.

As part of our preparations for PlanLive we research and engage with several of the major online social networks. Today I was quite shocked when I visited the Hi5.com social network site that is very popular in many African and Latin American countries. Hi5 has a so-called flirt feature where you can click through photos of members of the opposite sex and—apparently—of a much younger age. Want to flirt? You can click Yes or No. Click No and you see another girl (haven't tried simulating being a woman, so not sure how that works), click Yes and you can send the girl or young woman a message after you have paid a modest sum of Hi5 coins, a virtual currency.

How is PlanLive going to deal with this? We have created a Child Protection Task Force to further look into this important issue, and to continue doing so in the future. We are looking at it from the perspective of children and youth, of their caretakers (parents, teachers, community leaders, etc.), of Plan, and of the social networking technology. For each phase of the pilot we want to establish the necessary mitigation measures to be taken in terms of awareness raising, policies, procedures, training, alert and reporting mechanisms, monitoring and so on. If you feel you have something to contribute to this Task Force we would urge you to contact us.

PlanLive kicked off

Haven't blogged for months, haven't seriously tweeted for weeks. The longer you stop the harder it becomes to start again because somehow you feel guilty or ashamed for standing by, lurking, for being busy but not engaged. No more!

A quick recap of what has happened the last few weeks. Last month we had a PlanLive Pilot kick-off workshop in the US with participants from the 8 countries participating in the pilot (Cameroon, Canada, Colombia, India, Kenya, Netherlands, UK and US) and from Plan's headquarters. Before kicking off we had to make some adjustments to the original plans. The most important adjustment was to focus more on learning if and how Plan can use Web2.0 technologies instead of trying to generate a few short term results in terms of revenue and engagement. Web2.0 technologies such as social media, social networks and online collaboration tools can be used to support a range of Plan functions like fundraising, programmes, learning, building relationships, advocacy, research and so forth. The workshop further strengthened the notion that the primary added value of PlanLive is the content of, by and for the communities in the programme countries.

The outcomes of the kick-off workshop were then discussed with and amended by the PlanLive Pilot Board and then given the go-ahead. In other words: kicked off!

I will blog tomorrow about what that means in practical terms for the pilot and how you can get involved.