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Calendar of 2013 nonprofit & social change conferences. Tweet The graphic recording created during Socialbrite’s “You Need a Strategy” session at the 2012 Nonprofit Technology Conference. SuperGuide to events for nonprofits & social good organizations Here’s our roundup of conferences in the nonprofit and social change sectors coming up in 2013. This has become an annual tradition here at Socialbrite, and we hope you’ll bookmark this page and return to it throughout the year — we’ll be updating it throughout 2013 as more conference details firm up. We’ll be reporting on many of these events and invite you to share your coverage or observations on Socialbrite, or let us know and we’ll tweet it or Facebook it. If you know of other must-attend events, please add them by posting in the comments below.

Update: Here’s Socialmedia.biz’s 2013 conferences: Social media, tech, mobile & marketing. Other conferences and events Here are some conferences that we couldn’t find any information for in the new year: • Government Web and New Media Conference. Gallup/BBG survey: ‘Massive’ increase in mobile phone, Internet use in Nigeria.

WASHINGTON – The use of mobile telephones and the Internet have soared in Nigeria in the past few years, with clear implications for BBG and VOA activity in West Africa. These were the major findings of a survey released here this morning by the Broadcasting Board of Governors and Gallup organization. 73% of Nigerians now reporting owning their own mobile phones, up from 52% three years ago. Cell phone use is more prevalent in cities – 85% of urban dwellers have their own phones. And cell phone use increases with education: among Nigerians with post-secondary schooling, 95% own a cell phone, according to the survey. 20% of Nigerians reported using the Internet – again stronger among the educated and urban dwellers.

“Access to Facebook and other social media sites is a primary driver,” said William Bell, Director of Research for the International Broadcast Bureau. “You don’t need a smart phone to go on the web,” said Bell. “Almost all mobiles sold in Africa have FM chips,” explained Bell. Social innovation: tackling poverty through social change. Innovation researcher Maria Clara Couto Soares calls for a new debate on expanding the reach of grassroots social innovations. The importance of innovation for development is widely recognised. Yet the benefits of innovation are not readily or equally distributed among or within countries. In fact, there has never been so much innovation with so little benefit for far-reaching social welfare. Innovation has created immense capabilities for improving life conditions, in areas such as food production and information technologies, but these coexist with growing poverty rates, widespread hunger and poor health conditions for much of the world's population.

One reason for this is the issue of global power relations, which influence how markets are organised and who benefits from technological progress. Innovation systems are not neutral — the effects of purely market-led science and technology efforts and associated innovations tend to aggravate existing inequalities. This needs to change. DoD Science and Technology Strategic Communication/Social Media Programs. European Cinema as Cultural Diplomacy. APDS Blogger: Emina Vukic Ever since the Lumiere brothers gave their first show of projected pictures to an audience in Paris in 1895, there was “a keen awareness of the fundamental and open-ended relationship between the formation and articulation of identity-whether personal, national or European- and the moving image.” European cinema has over the course of the last century gone from having a seminal role in the invention of the new art form and dominating the international markets, to falling into the shadow of the financially incomparably more viable Hollywood films that proved to be more satisfying to the masses.

Nonetheless, European cinema with all its strengths and weaknesses plays a major role in integrating and creating our individual understanding of ourselves and the world we live in. Nonetheless, the European film production cannot ignore the mainstream U.S. cinema domination of Europe. Very few home-produced films make it to the top 10 anywhere in Europe. Social media blast off @NASA. The universe doesn’t often give us occasion to think about Charlie Sheen and NASA at the same time, but consider this: After landing its Curiosity rover on Mars early Monday, the space agency is not just in the midst of an impressive Hollywood-style rehabilitation, it’s also tearing up Twitter. And if it’s not quite on pace to match Sheen’s early record-setting accumulation of followers, the @MarsCuriosity feed, written in a lively first-person, has zoomed from fewer than 140,000 to more than 800,000 over the past four days.

Born in 1958 at the height of the Cold War, NASA is in the midst of transforming itself into the very model of a 21st-century media company that creates and distributes its own content, in large part by allowing its employees to express themselves at will. When some viewers of the Mars landing noticed a hot guy with a red and blue mohawk in Mission Control named Bobak Ferdowsi, he blew up on Twitter and Tumblr.

YES Academy Iraq. “Min hem ya neem,” bellowed the baritone Kurdish Hamlet. To be or not to be—always a good question to be asked of any public diplomacy venture. Recently, American Voices held its annual Youth Excellence on Stage (YES) Academy in the city of Duhok, in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. American Voices, the nonprofit for which I am the Director of Communications, conducts cultural engagement and diplomacy in countries emerging from conflict or isolation.

At American Voices, we believe that cultural diplomacy requires sustained engagement and as such this year marked our sixth summer performing arts academy program in Iraq. With support from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government, the YES Academy Iraq program brought together over 300 Iraqi youth from across the country to study music, theater and dance for two weeks.

And since nature abhors a vacuum, somehow I ended up playing Assistant Director for this veritable Iraqi band camp. Photo by Dany Chrwsana. Good Governance in the Age of Internet Freedom: A Summary. There continues to be an ongoing debate about how to regulate the Internet. This conundrum arises from two questions. Is the Internet a platform for old ideas to be transformed in a new medium, or rather a medium for all-together new paradigms of thought?

Where it is simply another platform, citizens and their governments should already have the tools necessary to make decisions about what is right and fair based on previous methods of practice. However, when the Internet is a space that offers something new, it is necessary to likewise develop new means of governance for the space. The Internet is rapidly becoming ubiquitous both in global scope as well as in socio-economic availability. As an ongoing and evolving attempt to address these issues, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently gave her second address on Internet Freedom. This being said, the U. However more than just WikiLeaks has challenged the current U.S. policies. MacKinnon further notes: Putting Public Diplomacy to Work For Internet Freedom. APDS Blogger: Melanie Ciolek In her time as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton has made supporting internet freedom a core tenet of U.S. foreign policy.

Two major speeches, months of debate, and a wave of Middle East protests making use of online technologies later, it’s clear that discussion about internet freedom as a U.S. foreign policy priority is here to stay. What has been a less frequent topic of discussion is how the internet freedom debate connects to U.S. public diplomacy. In the most recent speech, Clinton made her most compelling case yet for why the U.S. should promote the “freedom to connect.”

Whether the U.S. should adopt such a strong position upholding internet freedom has been debated since Clinton’s January 2010 speech. On the other hand, there are reports that some activists developing these technologies would be reluctant to accept funding from the State Department, citing concerns about how well the bureaucracy could cultivate the development of these tools. India, Korea, Brazil Now at Heart of Battle for Internet Freedom. WASHINGTON --- If you think China and Iran are where the fight for Internet freedom are centered, you may want to reconsider. According to Bob Boorstin, Google’s Director of Corporate and Policy Communications, the crucial battles today are elsewhere. “India is number one,” he said, when I asked which country was at the top of his list. Another is Russia, where he said the problem is the corrupt private individuals who may soon hold the Internet for ransom.

"You may soon be paying large fees to mysterious figures,” he predicted, for Internet access there. Those countries, along with Indonesia, the Philippines and others described as worrisome, are issuing new laws and regulations that may limit free expression online and free access to information. Boorstin singled out two large, industrialized democracies for special attention. “It has gone past the critical point in Korea; it gives me nightmares,” he said. Boorstin described all of these as the countries “in the middle.” Adam Clayton Powell, III | USC Center on Public Diplomacy | Center Bios. Adam Clayton Powell III is based in Washington, D.C., coordinating USC research projects with government agencies on topics ranging from cultural diplomacy to trafficking in persons. Before his move to Washington in 2010, he served as USC's Vice Provost for globalization, where he worked with faculty and deans to advance USC’s globalization initiative by expanding the university’s international presence, increasing USC’s leadership role in the Association of Pacific Rim Universities and promoting the university throughout the world.

Powell previously served as director of the USC Integrated Media Systems Center, the National Science Foundation’s Research Center for multimedia research. He is a University Fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, housed in the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Prior to joining USC in 2003, Powell was general manager of Howard University’s WHUT-TV, the first African American-owned public television station in the United States. Adam Clayton Powell III. Adam Clayton Powell III Adam Clayton Powell III is a Senior Fellow at USC Annenberg's Center on Communication Leadership and Policy. He was previously USC's senior fellow for Washington policy initiatives.

He also served as USC's vice provost for globalization, he worked closely with faculty and deans to advance the university's globalization initiative, while expanding USC's international presence, increasing our leadership role in the Association of Pacific Rim Universities, and promoting the university throughout the world. Powell previously served as director of the USC Integrated Media Systems Center, the National Science Foundation's Research Center for multimedia research. He is also a senior fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, which is housed in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Powell brings considerable international experience to his role in the Office of the Provost.