Source: dothegreenthing on Flickr - http://flic.kr/p/8NUsNV

We’ve written before about our straight-up admiration for Green Thing’s focus on using creativity to switch people away from thinking of green living as something we ought to do, to something we want to do.

This time around, they’ve applied their talents to t-shirts.

As the blurb says: “Saved is a new sustainable product and anti-waste campaign that takes unwanted or unloved T-shirts, washes them, hand-stitches ‘Saved’ lettering onto them, adds a Saved story (saved from bad taste, saved from disrepair, saved from neglect) and in doing so makes each T-shirt a bit more fashionable and a lot more desirable.”

Aside from the obligatory celebrity endorsement (stand up Marina and the Diamonds, Imogen Heap, VV Brown, Professor Green and Zandra Rhodes, who’ve all donated t-shirts) the thing we particularly like is the innovation and design Green Thing used at every stage of the Saved cycle. Including a “pay it forward”-style approach to delivery – already recycled, the packaging containing your t-shirt can be reused with a freepost label to send back one of your own old t-shirts to be Saved for somebody else.

Find out more on @dothegreenthing‘s site here or watch the one minute video below.

But more importantly, buy one on their Facebook page here.

As many of you know, I’m involved with a mass collaboration effort (more on collaboration vs. crowd sourcing here) to rethink the portable / disposable coffee drinking experience. You see, the vast majority of to-go coffee cups aren’t recyclable, and it turns out we really like our coffee. Tens of billions of energy-inefficient cups end up in landfills every year. This post isn’t about the issue, but if you’re interested, please visit thebetacup.com (there’s still time to vote, rate, and improve upon on the ideas submitted, which is critical to identifying a solution).

This post is about 3 key lessons I’ve learned regarding the engagement of crowds over the course of this process.

1. Money is … well, money.

Money is a wonderful incentive. We heard from a number of people solely motivated by cash. It broadened the audience beyond the group that would have turned up only for the purpose of environmental altruism. However, when money’s at stake, the group is broader, but less collaborative. Some people would accuse others of stealing their ideas; others would respond within minutes to a new idea posted claiming it was too similar to something they’d submitted. I’ve been a part of a number of efforts like this now and money has always been a core incentive. But tying it to a cause illustrated how it can actually work against collaboration on occasion. Specifically, it undermined the bucket brigade reward system we hoped would occur through our community management.

I’m not saying money always has a negative impact, but understanding its limitations is critical in retrospect. It was great for the first part of the process (number of ideas, effort put into submissions, pass-along), but it was potentially detrimental to the second half (refining unpopular but high potential ideas, collaboration across related ideas, gaming of the system).

2. Employ a boring governing body.

Our friend @faris has regularly made the comment that crowds aren’t inherently wise regardless of book titles that have infiltrated innovations culture, which I couldn’t agree with more. In fact, as someone who has tried to wrangle a crowd on multiple occasions, I’ve always assumed there was a dangerous herd mentality I had to police against. In the case of Betacup, I was determined to not let the crowd’s opinion keep me from reading every single submission as a jury member. However, the crowd actually did an incredible job bubbling up the best / freshest / most effective ideas. Startlingly so, in fact. However, the few times I deviated in opinion from the crowd’s most influential members were on ideas that were, well, boring.

Crowds tend to collectively take a “wow me” approach (explains the current state of news media, no?). That works really well at encouraging new types of thought on an ongoing issue like this one, but it actually does some ideas a disservice. Some simple, boring ideas were actually very effective at solving parts of this complex issue (for example, a collection bin shaped like a tube to reduce the probability that other junk or recyclables would be placed in it). Yet these boring ideas were ignored, generating few views, comments, or ratings. My lesson here was of the importance of bringing in a governing group that has a bias of their own, in the other direction. People who value simplicity and boring effectiveness. That combination can yield powerful results to solve problems.

3. Don’t prescribe formats.

We made a bold choice when deciding what form Betacup submissions should take: any. It was why the highly flexible and open Jovoto platform worked beautifully for the type of problem-solving we needed. The coffee cup issue sounds like a design one on the surface: invent a design that’s recyclable but still fits in a cup holder, is cheap, can handle heat, and feels natural on the lips. But it’s actually quite layered. This problem is as much about human behavior and access to manufacturing and disposal resources as it is about engineering. By opening up the submission format, Betacup became accessible to people of all disciplines. When the problem is as ubiquitous yet unknown as disposable cups, it’s critical we have experts from diverse fields weigh in. Without it, we wouldn’t have had any intersectional innovation, and this problem demands it.

What’s impressive about crowds when they’re given opportunities like this is that individuals don’t introduce themselves as engineers, or designers, or marketers. They just solve a problem. And when you look at what they accomplished, you know different disciplines had to be involved, but the lines are too blurry to see where or how.

As I look back on the submission and collaboration process, I think we got a lot of things right, and certainly some things wrong. The lessons above were the most valuable for me as someone interested in such things. They may apply to a very specific collaboration environment: problem solving & innovation (not necessarily design or creative services), but they’ve changed the way I think about crowds. Now I just hope the 300+ ideas change the way we collectively think about our coffee habits.

thebetacup: 60 Seconds To Save The World from the betacup on Vimeo.

______

To see, rate and comment on the submissions, visit the contest page. To follow our journey toward a solution, follow @thebetacup.

Valerie Casey profile, SXSWorld magazine 2010

Ideas that marry great design with real purpose make us sit up and take notice. So it is with A Developing Story, which we’ve been following since its launch at the end of last year.

ADS publishes news stories from developing countries with a clean & intuitive design that avoids all the worthier-than-thou clichés associated with the category.  It also has a mindblowingly simple campaign at its core: to make the creative assets created for public awareness campaigns freely accessible across developing markets.

Makes perfect sense, right? A campaign that nonetheless needs all the support it can get if governments are to be persuaded to dump red tape and adopt what is in effect a Creative Commons approach across developing nations.

Of course that’s easier said than done. If you want to get involved or just show support, visit http://www.adevelopingstory.org/joinus or email adevelopingstory@googlemail.com.

To find out more we spoke to the people (John, Benjamin & Phil) behind A Developing Story.  Check out what they had to say below.

Tell us the story behind the story – when and how did the idea of ADS emerge?

JB: The idea was conceived online. I blogged about audioslide shows including something about Benjamin’s production company, Duckrabbit, Benjamin spotted this, visited site Amusing Ourselves, saw a thing called Londoniser which I’d hacked together using Flickr and Yahoo Pipes. He said something nice about it, and suggested that I might be able to apply the same sort of approach to the kind of content generated by NGOs, IGOs, etc. Benjamin is a good friend of Phil who is the Chief Executive of the Prison Radio Association – a Sony Award winning charity that provides support, guidance and expertise to existing prison radio stations and advises prisons interested in setting up radio stations and radio training facilities. Phil had worked in social work and international development before moving into journalism, and was keen to help us with the campaigning aspects of the site.  We all met, had a couple of beers and the decided that the idea was a good one.

How did you get from embryonic idea to launched site?

JB: I designed and built the site using WordPress – Benjamin helped shaped the editorial, creative and campaigning approach with Phil.

The impetus for the campaign, however, came from Ben’s time working in Ethiopia. As part of a campaign about sexual health he worked with a local team writing and producing radio programmes. When he’d finished, he couldn’t believe that the campaign assets weren’t available to others particularly as the campaign had been funded with UK tax-payers money.

So while we built the site with a specific campaign aim, we’re all interested in stories (I’m a novelist and Ben and Phil are both ex-BBC journalists) and in particular how new media can be used to afford a voice to those excluded by ‘mainstream’ media.

Help us understand your campaign approach – who are you trying to reach and persuade to get involved – governments, NGOs and/or the content providers?

While we believe that there’s clear value in bringing together this public-facing, awareness-raising communication material, we also want to do something similar for communications that are used in international development – e.g. radio scripts, posters, mobile text messaging campaigns, etc, used in health campaigns, etc.

Unfortunately, almost none of this material is available in the public domain. A public health campaign about the risks of HIV is run in South Africa, for example, but the artwork and radio scripts aren’t available to someone doing the same thing in Malawi six months later. And that’s what we want to change.

We believe that a few simple changes will have real and immediate impact on the way the international development community communicates. All it really requires is a change of attitude from Government, a simple addition to all relevant contracts which obliges the supplier to make any communications work they produce as part of a funded project, e.g. photos, text, video, available under an appropriate Creative Commons license on a central database.

Incidentally, we’re not saying that anyone should do less communication work, we just think that we should be getting more mileage out of the money spent. Running more campaigns without having to ‘reinvent the wheel’ each time. Using funding to create more content to help educate and promote their work.

We’ve started a dialogue with DFID who seem interested in the idea of using Creative Commons, however, we’re at an early stage as yet.

As with any huge task, the physical solution presumably needs to be incredibly simple. Do you envisage ADS itself becoming the database or hub? Does it need to be a portal (managed by moderators) or Flickr-style database (cloud-based, work tagged by the community) or could it be a more ‘distributed’ solution across a number of sites?

JB: The ADS site and the proposed database of communication assets would be complimentary, though we believe that it’s really important that the database have a strong educational component – capacity building is really important, so ideally local media producers can learn communication skills as well as just having access to assets. Whether it would be possible to run this with volunteer help is debatable.

What can anyone reading this do to get involved / do to help?

We’ve got a wide range of contributors from around the world, ranging from committed individuals to the web teams in large NGOs like MSF, Greenpeace and Amnesty.  If you want to help manage the site, or send us something you think we should feature, then you can learn more about how we work here: http://www.adevelopingstory.org/joinus

or please email us at: adevelopingstory@googlemail.com

How are you spreading the word?

We’ve been too busy building the community and doing our days jobs to get round to talking about what we do. Not great for people who have all worked in the communications industry, but we guess this piece is a good place to start, and we wanted to build something tangible to add credibility to our campaign – to prove that we can deliver this sort of project.

Rewinding to ADS in its broadest sense, you’ve only been live since October 2009, but can you tell us more about your plans for the future?

The plan has been to build community around the site, then start to add more semantic features – we already use elements some of the Open Calais plugins. We’re also opened a dialogue with DFID and we hope to progress the campaign for a shared development content.

***

We wish them luck – again, if you want to get involved you can contact John, Benjamin and Phil at http://www.adevelopingstory.org/joinus. Or email adevelopingstory@googlemail.com.

See also: http://www.designersaccord.org/ and the recent Labs post on T.I.E.

We need your help.

Aside from reading this (60 seconds) we also need just 10 seconds of your time.

If we can persuade enough people to give us 10 seconds and one click, we’ll help achieve something extremely worthwhile.

Read on . . .

In between some fairly insanely busy day jobs, a few BBHers from our New York office have been busy on a project called ‘Pencils of Promise’ (PoP), a startup non-profit organization dedicated to building sustainable education in the developing world. PoP is one of one hundred organizations participating in a $1MM competition (sponsored by Chase) called the Chase Community Giving Program. The competition is being run through Facebook as a voting contest, and the organization that receives the most votes will receive a $1MM grant. The five runners up will each receive $100,000. Voting ends Jan 22nd.

PoP is (as of today, Sunday morning ET) in 9th position, but only 1000 votes off the top 5 and 20,000 votes off top spot. Most of the organizations participating are leveraging massive databases and established relationships with celebrities to spread the word. Fair play. PoP doesn’t have that, so BBH Labs is attempting to activate our extended network of friends, bloggers and tweeters to spread the word today and activate some votes.

Pencils of Promise is also well-placed to make an immediate impact in light of last weeks horrific events in Haiti. With a commitment to sustainability and on-the-ground impact, the organization has committed, should they win the grand prize, at least $100,000 to youth focused projects in Haiti; they will personally oversee and develop these. That seems pretty awesome to us; once the immediate emergency aid is up and running it’s clear that the young people of Haiti are going to be central to the recovery. In it’s modest way, this should help.

Please help PoP and do two things . . . ideally right now:

1. Vote for PoP on Facebook: http://bit.ly/4DYKIV

2. We don’t usually ask for RTs at Labs but we think this is an exception, so please retweet the tweet that sent you here, or cut and paste this into Twitter:

We need your help with ‘Pencils of Promise’: ten seconds, one click is all it takes: http://j.mp/8naMZJ (please RT)

One click, ten seconds.

Thanks

Brad Haugen (BBH NY; @hoogs), Michelle Keith (ex-BBH NY; @michelleakeith), Ben Malbon (BBH Labs; @malbonnington)

@pencilsofpromis

For a 99 second intro on YouTube: youtube.com/pencilsofpromise

——

ABOUT THE ORGANIZATION

Pencils of Promise is a registered 501 (c)(3) nonprofit that builds sustainable schools, partnerships and solutions to enable basic education for under-served children in the developing world. Pencils of Promise is a passionate community of individual volunteers dedicated to empowering each person regardless of status or position to make a positive impact on the world.

Founded in October 2008, PoP uses for-profit business principles and non-profit ideals to work to empower Western youth to use their skills, abilities and networks to participate in the nonprofit process in a meaningful way. With more than 75 million children in the world without access to a preschool education, PoP helps bridge the gap of inadequate educational resources for the world’s most impoverished children.

In 2009, the organization’s first year of operation, Pencils of Promise raised over $150,000 in donations through fundraising events and donor support, built three schools in Laos, and established a presence in more than 20 cities and college campuses throughout the country. In 2010, Pencils of Promise has goals to attract 5,000 new supporters across the globe, to build seven more schools in committed villages in Laos, Haiti and Nicaragua, and to continue to identify additional areas of impact around the world.

More information about Pencils of Promise is available at pencilsofpromise.org.

Blog Action Day has it all: a social experiment on a mass scale, for the good of the planet. And, whilst it’s been pretty awe-inspiring to witness thousands of people write about the same topic in one day, it’s fair to say we’re most excited by that word in the middle: Action.

Creating a human SOS for 'Antarctica: A Global Warning' (Photo by Sebastian Copeland)

With that and #BAD09′s climate change focus in mind, we’re using our post here to share the work of Sebastian Copeland, the photographer, environmental advocate & polar explorer. (Full disclosure: I’m proud to say Sebastian is also my cousin).

Sebastian Copeland, board member & advocate, Global Green USA

Aside from the fact we’re not-so-secret fans of exploration in all senses of the word here at Labs, the thing we most admire (as we’ve discussed on a more than one occasion) is the killer combination of ground-breaking creativity put to great use.  In Sebastian’s case, it’s one thing to have enviable creative & technical skill as a photographer, director, writer & speaker, it’s altogether another thing when that’s combined with a fearless appetite for physical endurance and a single-minded commitment to putting climate change issues front & centre.

Sebastian is best known for his work on behalf of Global Green USA where, as part of a series of climate initiatives, he has led a series of hard-won, gruelling expeditions: to remote Antarctica, the Arctic and most recently all the way to the North Pole.  In 2006 he also created a book of extraordinary photography called Antarctica: A Global Warning (check out the site where you can find out more and download wallpapers or buy the book here).  Their purpose? To draw attention to the immediate impact of global warming and to urge the adoption of a sustainable economy.

Scale & light in Antarctica (Photo by Sebastian Copeland)

In his own words:

“The goal is to inspire people and to get them connected with that which sometimes can feel very distant… The polar ice is ground zero for global warming.”

“2007 and 2008 saw the largest depletion of summer ice, each year losing near 1/2 million square miles, or the size of Texas and California combined. Scientists now believe that the Arctic could be all but ice free in the summer months by as early as 2013.”

Source: NASA & Natural Resources Defense Council

For a very personal, entertaining & informative point of view as he trained for his last expedition, watch Sebastian’s film here.

Sebastian chairs a forum at the UN next month, its aim to encourage the creation of an international charter to protect the “fragile & rapidly deteriorating” Arctic environment “from the wanton exploitation of its natural resources.” You can add your support here and follow @sebcopeland and @globalgreenusa for more news.

In the spirit of actions speaking louder than words, we have 10 copies of “Antarctica: A Global Warning” to give away to the first 10 people who help us spread the word amongst their network: just let us know you’ve done so by leaving a comment below and we’ll be in touch.  In the meantime we leave you with more of Sebastian’s work and this, a rallying cry for action, made decades ago:

“There are risks and costs to a program of action, but they are far less than the long-range risk and costs of comfortable inaction.”
John F. Kennedy

All you need is glove: yours for just £5 (plus VAT & packaging)

We like nothing more than a brilliantly innovative creative idea that does its bit for the planet, as fans of iSaw and Papercut will know.  Throw in a fashion angle on top and we’re totally sold…. so when our friends at Green Thing told us about their Glove Love initiative, we were delighted on at least three levels.

Launched to coincide with London Fashion Week, Glove Love is part of Green Thing’s anti-waste initiative All Consuming and is their first sustainable product to help people do the Green Thing in the physical world.  Very simply, they will take lonely single gloves that have lost their original partners, wash them and then pair them up to create new and unique Glove Love pairs.  You can get involved by donating a lonesome glove yourself and/or buying a pair for just £5 plus postage & packaging.

Glove Love has received some great support from the likes of Emma Thompson, whose voiceover immediately gives their ‘Glove Story’ promotional film a decidedly Working Title rom com-esque feel:

We particularly like the fact once you place an order a mystery pair of gloves are despatched to you lovingly labelled with their life stories.  And of course you can add comments to the site and as a proud owner you’re invited to upload a photo to the site gallery.

Gloves Reunited

Glove Love is creative, ethical, slightly silly and has the ability to offer that little frisson of surprise life so often lacks.  What’s not to love?  Go donate a lonely glove or even better buy a pair at the dothegreenthing.com shop