Bruno in his last trip to Brazil call me from the airport: “I am excited, just looking the cover of October’s edition of Harvard Business Review.  It reads: Harness the masses, the contribution Revolution: Letting Volunteers Build your Business! . That it is V2V, we are in the loop!” .

So…I went to the nearest bookstore -the mythical Elliot Bay in Pioneer Square, Seattle- and bought the magazine for 16.95US$ plus local taxes. The article is worthy to read, because it shows how difficult is for most traditional business people to really understand, and accept the potential of what is called the 2.0 approach, that is the power of collaboration: “the user contribution paradigm poses a challenge to long-unquestioned beliefs about the role of management”(p. 68). Scott Cook the author, explains how it took him more than 6 years to embrace it. He was in an exceptional position to surf the wave: board member in Amazon and eBay in the late 1990s, and co-founder in 1983 of Intuit a  firm of financial software based in Silicon Valley, the hottest-spot for technology and innovation.  In this article, he propose different ways to implement this approach in all companies’  functional divisions: customer service, marketing, employee support, capital resources, design and development and production.

The most interesting part of the article is where he explain how to implement this collaborative approach, in traditional companies which are usually scared of giving more power to either employees or customers. Here are the 8 tips: “use personal experience to move mind-set, nurture small experiments, let enthusiasts and young employees provide ideas and leadership, set boundaries but guarantee freedom with them, protect experiments from your company’s natural control instincts, seek organizational buy-in only after you ‘ve some success” (pp. 68-69). In V2V we have this 2.0 approach to volunteering and we are facing those challenges so….lets be patient&sapiens when we face them!

This week, 10,000 Starbucks employees are participating in volunteer actions in New Orleans, as part of the 2008 Leadership Conference.

Starbucks decided do host their annual Conference outside of Seattle for the first time this year, so that the company could have the opportunity to give back to the community in a big way.

Starbucks employees will be helping in the restoration of homes, parks and schools. These efforts are being organized with the assistance of local organizations and local community-based groups. More than 54,000 volunteer hours will be contributed in activities like painting, landscaping, cleaning up, planting trees, building playgrounds and creating artistic murals, as well as an investment of more than $1 million in local projects.

I think this effort is a big deal, considering the current economic downturn.

To know more about the mobilization on these projects check this V2V action about the Starbucks Leadership Conference: www.v2v.net/actions/nolc

V2V is also being announced to more Starbucks Partners this week. According to the company: “Starbucks V2V is an online extension of the in-store Starbucks community. For years, Starbucks stores have served as community gathering places, welcoming customers and encouraging creativity and connection with others. V2V offers an online forum where our partners and customers can plan community events, join others and act upon their passion to improve the communities where they live and work.”

The company has also announced the Starbucks Shared Planet website, focused on the Starbucks’ commitments to ethical trading, environment and community involvement. Check it out: www.starbucks.com/sharedplanet

The second half of September I spent in Brazil. It was a good time to reconnect: visit V2V office in Rio de Janeiro and work with my team and also visit Brasília, my hometown, and see dear friends and loving family.

Right in the first days in Rio, there was the Annual Meeting of the Global Corporate Volunteer Council, a great initiative promoted by the International Association for the Volunteer Effort (IAVE). The meeting gathered seven global companies to discuss their corporate volunteer programs. It was a great time with very special people. Open and frank discussions about the challenges of managing volunteer programs in times of crisis and how to build creative and innovative strategies in that context.

I had the chance to spoke to the entire group twice. First, a brief introduction of V2V on the breakfast of the first day and, on the next day, a 2-hour workshop about the use of web technology to promote corporate volunteering, exploring a comparative study between Starbucks V2V and Vale V2V (Vale is a Brazilian mining company, the second biggest mining company in the world).

A couple of things were remarkable: the deep understanding and agreement about the importance of bringing the individual to the center of the volunteer program strategy. I saw programs being built considering volunteering as a tool for personal growth and consequent betterment of communities. I participated in insightful discussions about impact evaluation of volunteer projects and saw committed professionals come to terms with the fact that the pursuit for the perfect impact evaluation is immobilizing and that measuring the engagement of the volunteer is sometimes the only possible guidance for evolving their programs.

Also, when talking about social networking web tools for corporate volunteer programs I perceived much less resistance regarding legal concerns than I saw 4 years ago, when I first presented V2V to American companies. Back then, they liked it, but said that the company’s lawyers would never permit such openness and editing power to the employees; this time, when the legal subject came up people laughed about how worried lawyers would be, but, surprisingly, no one mentioned that as a barrier. Lots of companies are investing in social networking tools today and the environment is way more favorable than it was 4 years ago.

As I mentioned in my last post, there is a great opportunity for corporate volunteer programs to better connect to the core business of the company, now that companies are looking for ways to harness mass volunteer collaboration to create better products (for example, My Starbucks Idea or Dell Idea Storm). The people that will collaborate with the company to generate innovation are looking for the same psychic income (good feelings from belonging and validation) that traditional volunteers seek and obtain. Millions of people are already doing that. They might be able to create better and more sustainable products to the hundreds of millions of customers that are coming out of the poverty line globally. This is an opportunity of democratizing production and a tool for reinventing capitalism.

Using similar social web tools, volunteer programs can try and influence employees and customers to also generate innovation and betterment to their communities. The human values that volunteers bring are very relevant for these new collaborative production models.

Will we, promoters of volunteerism, be able to connect these dots??

I’m flying back to Seattle, after exactly one month traveling to participate in conferences and meetings about volunteering in Australia and Brazil.

In Australia, I participated in the 12th National Conference on Volunteering, which theme was: Catching the New Waves. It was my first time in the country and I was really amazed with its wealth and stage of development. Australia is the 53th country in population and the 15th in GDP. The infrastructure of the non-profit sector is huge: there are 700.000 non-profit organizations in a country of 21 million people. The density of organizations per inhabitant is higher than countries like USA, Germany and Spain. Brazil has less than half of NPOs, having almost 10 times more people.

The meeting was really relevant for the Australian volunteer sector. There were 500 people present and the themes ranged from technology and innovation to volunteering in aboriginal communities. I spoke in two plenary sessions, the first in the opening of the event, about challenges and opportunities for volunteering and the other about social networks to promote corporate volunteering.

My main message in the conference was to bring awareness to the changes that are happening in society and how they are affecting the way people are volunteering, mainly with the use of technology. For the first time, I shared some thoughts about the similarities between people’s motivations in collaborating in business networks (like Dell’s customer support forums) and traditional community projects. It’s really astonishing to see that they are both volunteering their time and having the same primal motivation for that: help people and get recognition. I’ve been seeing more and more of that and I’ll comment it here in other posts.

I left Australia with the sensation that people are getting more open to new ideas and volunteer models. I came to know projects of traditional volunteer organizations and governments talk about their efforts in building broader channels for volunteer engagement, including the use of web 2.0 tools, such as social networking platforms for that.

In the next post, I’ll talk about my 2 weeks stay in Brazil, visiting 3 cities and participating in meetings with a dozen of global companies to share information about corporate volunteering.

This weekend the V2V team is going to the Social Media Camp in Seattle. It is an event about Community Based Marketing, gathering top local names in Blogging, Podcasting, Live Streaming and New Media. Looks very exciting!

The advanced track of the event brings tittles like “What is Social Capital” and “Why Should I care”. It’s very interesting to see how social media initiatives are more and more using the same words that people from the social / volunteer sector often use. As business goes social, it might get really more into community affairs. I see this as a very positive thing.

One more example I read some days ago: a start-up called Grou.ps just got their first round of funding and is coming out with an open social networking tool, to fight for the same market as Ning. Grou.ps brings this tagline in its front page: “Take the Lead, Do Something for Your Community!”.

Businesses going social media could raise their awareness over social issues? Are social media initiatives being born already with greater social awareness?? I think so, and really hope so.