I've talked a lot about the role of music in young people's lives (see 7-16-07 entry), but it has been largely academic in tone. This summer, I was asked to write a piece for a magazine called Guilt & Pleasure on a musical infatuation and whether I was still in love. I ended up writing about U2, and how their music furthered my early activism...at least until they wrote a love song. You can read it here.

And if you're interested, here is the performance of theirs that still inspires me:

Collaboration as an engagement strategy has so many other tangible benefits that it is time we started a list. Feel free to add your thoughts in the comments...

* Builds more intimate, less transactional relationship with people,
*Open doors to better reception of more immediate forms of communications with members,
* Allows for word-of-mouth and viral marketing possibilities otherwise difficult + expensive to achieve,
* Through the aggregate of members' social circles/networks being activated through word-of-mouth/viral, scale can be efficiently achieved,
* Allow your members to innovate and discover solutions to support your mission by bringing in new perspectives and skills,
* Is cost effective because it uses staff in new, efficient ways,
* Makes cultural relevancy easier to achieve because it is intrinsic to the process,
* Naturally leads to community-building, which has a whole range of other benefits

I've got my eye on a number of people's blogs (I should get around to a blog roll one of these days), and one of them is called "Community Group Therapy." It seems to be a guy, Sean, who works as the General Manager of Community Support at Microsoft. He's work has "a particular focus on engaging the active enthusiasts and leaders that fuel the value of communities."

Today's blog entry intrigued me because it talked of the 5Ps of Social Media. It is along the lines of the stuff we talk about with regards to engaging communities in change through culture: particularly our fascination and work with people (they make change, not institutions), place (hence our new flexible use office space), process (we call it collaboration and conversation), patterns (we are big on measuring, and have developed some ways that the nonprofit sector CAN measure community-building). Platform is not one we've thought of much...I'll have to put that in the noggin for a few days.

Here is how he describes the 5 P's:

* People: The talkers, authors, contributors - empowerment of the individual.
* Places: All the diverse venues the conversations can take place in.
* Process: What collaboration (and moderation) you enable, how you entitle contributor types and how you integrate with existing systems.
* Platform: Where and how you tie together the places, processes, people (identity/privacy) and privileges.
* Patterns: Presenting, tracking, filtering, measuring, monitoring and decision support

A sixth P, he suggests could be purpose. This is definitely in line with our thinking.