Facebook generation: 10 tech revolutionaries

PERSUASIVE MEDIA: Colleen Macklin
Colleen Macklin, 37, the chair of the communications design and technology lab at Parsons, is at ground zero in the assault on old thinking around social change. Her new PET Lab — an incubator for Prototyping, Evaluation, Teaching, and Learning around the use of multimedia for social change — will work with interested nonprofits and community groups to create rapid prototypes of video games and other media for use in encouraging philanthropy.

Macklin’s goal: to engage new generations, globally, around social problem-solving that matters. “There’s a need for philanthropy to engage a younger audience,” says Macklin, an interactive designer who has collaborated globally with such clients as Citibank, France Telecom, and Moët. Game design — which involves discovering which emotional triggers can evolve altruism — has traditionally been an undertaking too costly and complex for most nonprofits. Creating the average video game, for example, can be nearly as complicated as creating a blockbuster film.

“You need to understand programming, visual design, animation, and sound,” she says.

With her Manhattan-based, student- populated PET Lab, Macklin, in cooperation with the nonprofit, Games for Change, is establishing the first affordable space for nonprofits worldwide to experiment.

“Can we design video games and other forms of persuasive media to achieve real impact in the world? It’s already happening,” says Macklin, who has led collaborative projects for UNESCO, the UN, and George Soros’ Open Society Institute.

“All designers are optimists who hope their work will represent change for the better.” PET Lab, says Macklin, will prove it.

—   MARCIA STEPANEK

VIRAL COMMUNITIES: Michael Furdyk
Michael Furdyk’s computer talents came early: At age two, he was already fiddling with a Commodore 64 computer, brought home by his father, who worked at the local phone company. By age 16, he’d already sold his first Internet start-up for $1 million and was consulting for Microsoft.

Today, Furdyk, 25, leads Toronto-based TakingITGlobal, an international online community to ignite social change. The social networking site hosts more than 2,000 projects from over 50 countries, in 12 languages, ranging from youth voter mobilization efforts in Togo to a Canadian hip hop summer camp focused on boosting youth media literacy.

Though the group doesn’t hit up any of its 150,000 global affluentials for donations, it does provide a closely vetted list of more than 1,000 funding opportunities.

When Muhammed Abdul Wahed Tomal, a Bangladeshi college activist, joined TIG in 2003, he wanted to use his computer skills to alleviate poverty. Through TIG’s site, he organized a campaign with more than 100 members to push Bangladesh to take on technology access as a way to fight poverty and mobilize his efforts.

It’s a surprisingly substantive take on social networks—but that’s precisely the point, says author and digital media expert Don Tapscott, an early mentor to Furdyk. Says Tapscott: “TakingITGlobal is one of the world’s best examples of how Net-Geners are using digital technologies to transform the world around them.”

—   TRACIE MCMILLAN

ONLINE AUCTIONS: Charles Best
DonorsChoose.org matches donors directly to need — no nonprofit middlemen or experts required. Teachers post their wish lists for supplies, projects, and field trips; donors troll the listings, and when they find something inspiring, they donate a sum of their choosing with a few quick clicks of a mouse.

Best, 29, dreamt it up seven years ago, while teaching at a public school in the Bronx, where he shared his colleagues’ frustration over chronic underfunding for even basic learning tools. Since then, DonorsChoose has grown exponentially, raising $13.5 million to fund more than 29,000 projects in eight states [plus four additional cities]. In September 2007, every public school in the country became eligible for support through DonorsChoose.

While some compare DonorsChoose to a kind of philanthropic eBay — matching, say, a Manhattan millionaire with a public school teacher in South Central LA — Best says Wikipedia is an equally apt comparison. “In the same way that nobody thought an encyclopedia could be produced by laymen,” he says, “we’ve had a democratizing effect. Donors become their own program officers.”

This rise of the “citizen philanthropist” hasn’t made everyone happy. “Some foundation executives have reacted a bit territorially,” says Best, and at least one big-city principal threatened to fire a teacher who posted a request for money to buy dictionaries because he was embarrassed that kids in his school didn’t have them already.

Best, though, is forging ahead. He’s already planning to apply the same model to other causes — and other countries.

— MATTHEW MCCANN FENTON

VIRTUAL REALITY: Susan Tenby
Susan Tenby, 36, is the first nonprofit organizer in the virtual, 3-D world of Second Life. Her avatar, or digital “self,” is a svelte pink cat with pointy ears and whiskers named Glitteractica Cookie (far right) — reminiscent of the Japanese anime and manga comic books that Tenby read as a child growing up in Hawaii.

But “Glitter” isn’t Tenby’s first creative foray into the rapidly expanding virtual world. A few years after she helped to launch TechSoup.org in 2000 as a one-stop online technology resource for traditional nonprofits, Second Life’s parent company asked Tenby to join a focus group to help it build the virtual community.

Susan Tenby, top, center, and her avatar, Glitteractica, top right, and Ailin Graef, bottom right, and her avatar, Anshe Chung, bottom left.

“I immediately saw the potential of it,” Tenby recalls. “It was more of a platform than a game.”

A cancer survivor, Tenby wanted to focus her life on making a difference, so she dispatched her avatar to organize nonprofits in the virtual world — and then sought out a virtual philanthropist to donate virtual office space to keep the momentum going. Enter “in-world” real estate tycoon Anshe Chung, an avatar and Second Life’s wealthiest entrepreneur.

Earlier this year, Chung’s creator, Chinese-born Ailin Graef, donated 16 acres of pricey virtual space worth roughly $5,000 in the real world to the effort. Tenby’s Nonprofit Commons is now “home” to 32 charities, from CARE USA to America’s Second Harvest.

— JANET RAE-DUPREE

MORE FROM GIVING

Giving Section Front

Molly Sims joins fight against malaria Pepsi pays to 'refresh' communities ‘Sleepers’ raise money for homeless Madonna promises light for Malawian village Julianne Hough: Dancing with the kids Mayor revives distressed ghost town Bill Gates makes big push on education reform Giving Section Front   Add Giving headlines to your news reader: