As I get ready for Twestival Montreal tonight I can’t help but be in awe of the fact that this was possible at all. If someone have told me that there would be a series of linked global events in 200+ cities, all organized by volunteers with Zero budget and a fundraising goal of $1 million I would have thought it wasn’t doable. And I would have been right.
It’s not doable. At least not in the traditional sense. Had this been done by a single organization this never would have happened. Somethings are only doable if you harness the power of the crowd. This of course isn’t anything new. Hunting woolly mammoths isn’t something you want to take on alone, after all.
I’ve often struggled to find the value in social media, since it can be decidedly self-referential and too often is tech for the sake of tech. You don’t see alot of TV shows talking about the medium of TV after all. Recently however, there’s been a shift towards making these tools work for the greater good. Twestival is both the first (major) volunteer action on twitter and the first major collaboration. Regardless of your location, skill level, contacts or network, if you wanted to contribute, however large or small that contribution, you were able to. For an event like Twestival, this allows you to access people who are passionate about a topic and wield their collective force to create positive change. In this case providing clean water for thousands of people.
This idea of a virtual world action creating real world change is something that intrigues me and creates the real possibilities for social media. Someone once said Social media exists to make the offline world easier. This doesn’t just have to mean our offline world.
I’m frankly impressed that the Montreal event got off the ground – everything seemed to be going smoothly from where I was sitting and we attracted enough people to break out fundraising objective ($5,135.50 Goal was $4,000). And everyone seemed to be having a good time.
All this in something like 5 weeks, organized by a committee of people who hadn’t all met face to face, using Twitter, Google groups for event organization, promotion online and through traditional media and some solid networking to find sponsorships.
Pretty cool.