I’m some­one who works with social tools for a liv­ing. My job is defined by the level of exper­tise I bring to using them and the way I can use them to con­nect with peo­ple in com­mu­ni­ties of exper­tise, mostly in a busi­ness con­text. In a grand fail­ure (or, is it?) of work-​​life bal­ance, my social and per­sonal life involves a good deal of social net­work use too.

And, as part of my par­tic­i­pa­tion in TEDAc­tive next week, I’m involved in a project called TEDAc­tiveSOC. It’s all about find­ing deeper mean­ing in the way we use and cre­ate social net­works and our ever-​​increasing hyper­con­nect­ed­ness. My ongo­ing research and think­ing has me con­vinced that the heart of the project needs to be about enabling the pro­duc­tion of social, or pub­lic goods.

We all know we can use our social net­works for every­thing from the mun­dane and triv­ial to the world-​​changing.

I want to weight my use and actions in 2011 to real and tan­gi­ble out­comes; some­thing like a set of Umair Haque’s laws for organ­i­sa­tions into a sim­i­lar set for social inno­va­tion.

It can’t be that hard.

There’s real social cap­i­tal to be derived for users at the per­sonal level with these out­comes in mind and even greater good at the level of organ­i­sa­tions and soci­ety as a whole.

I’m keen for a per­spec­tive on social, organ­i­sa­tional, gov­ern­men­tal and per­sonal change as an out­come that use of these tools can amplify. There are no Twit­ter and Face­book rev­o­lu­tions. Rather there are rev­o­lu­tions of peo­ple, some­what ampli­fied through social networks.

At this point, I’m actu­ally think­ing a touch wider. What I want to see is the cre­ation of new social net­works (what­ever and when­ever they are) with a “do no harm” per­spec­tive built in from the ground up in the DNA of the com­pa­nies (and peo­ple) who make them.

So too, I want to see the users think­ing the same way. Here are the sorts of ques­tions I’m ask­ing myself:

  • How do we use our social tools to ensure that no harm comes to oth­ers now and into the future as a con­se­quence of our actions?
  • How do we cre­ate thick social value through the inven­tion and use of social tools and networks?
  • How do we ensure our social tools are always about peo­ple over things?
  • How do we cre­ate and use social tools based on prin­ci­ple ver­sus strat­egy — aim­ing pur­pose over profit?

I think we need to look to Africa and parts of Asia.

In these places, soci­eties are becom­ing more con­nected, but in sim­pler ways that ben­e­fit the peo­ple directly through out­comes such as ensur­ing best prices for goods at mar­ket (Kenya, I think), know­ing which port will buy your catch (Sri Lanka), ensur­ing police are paid their full wage rather than cor­rupt offi­cials skim­ming a cut (Afghanistan), etc. All these projects are enabled by Internet-​​connected tools, but not accessed by any­thing more com­plex than an old-​​school grey screen Nokia and text messages.

This is the stuff that’s bug­ging me.