Five reasons the Change Everything community has earned the Webby

Change Everything keeps on astonishing me.

First, it was the amazing clothing drive for the homeless of Vancouver's downtown east side that self-organized on the site during a late 2006 cold snap.

Then it was the saga of EnviroWoman, a Change Everything member who decided to forego plastic for a year and blogged about it on the site. It made it to the big time, even garnering a mention on The Guardian's UK web site.

And now Change Everything is a finalist for the social networking Webby, one of the most prestigious Internet awards out there. Its competition: huge communities like Bebo and, oh yes, a little site you may have heard of named Facebook.

Exactly what is going on here? What puts a 3,000-member community into the same league as a 70-million-member behemoth like Facebook?

I've been talking about it with Alex. And here are five reasons we think Change Everything should win that Webby:

1. It's a community committed to social change. As someone who scours the Internet Movie Database obsessively, I'm the last person to complain that so much of the web is devoted to the trivial and inconsequential. But when a site weighs in with a substantive mission and becomes a real success, it encourages others to follow suit, pursuing real-world results – and for those of us convinced of the social web's potential as a tool for social change, that's powerful stuff.

   By the way, among those real-world results for Change Everything: a warm clothing drive that self-organized on the site in its early days, after a particularly nasty cold snap threatened the poorest and most vulnerable residents of the Downtown East Side. Within a few days, the drive had netted more than 70 garbage bags filled with hats, gloves, scarves and coats – and triggered several spin-off initiatives.

2. It embraces the open-source spirit. Change Everything is built on the Drupal content management system in a sector (financial institutitons) where closed-source software is the near-universal rule. And yet, in contrast to its closed-source Webby competition (with the notable exception of open-source browser Flock), Change Everything isn't just built on Drupal – it regularly contributes back to the development community (most recently releasing the Nudge module).

   What's to stop another credit union or (gasp) bank from using Nudge as part of a site designed to steal Change Everything's thunder? Not a thing... and the fact that Vancity isn't letting that fear stop them is a clear sign they've embraced the community ethos that underlies the open-source movement.

3. It's a Vancity project... but not the Vancity project. Social networking may not be your business, the way it's Facebook's business, but it's not Vancity's business either – and that's why Change Everything is such a success. What Vancity does know is how to serve the needs of its members: not just their banking needs, but their needs for a vibrant, sustainable community. If you're part of an organization with a distinct social mandate, approach and values, your social smarts are needed in the social networking world.
4. It's small and focused. How can Change Everything's 3000 users hope to beat Facebook's 70 million? In sheer numbers, they can't. But there's a quality to be had in a small, focused community: intimacy, shared interest, and perhaps a little more willingness to trust a fellow community member. (Not to mention the fact that you're much less likely to be tracked down by people you've been trying to avoid since grade four.)

   There's room online for both the online giants and the nimble niche or hyper-local communities; each serves a different purpose. But it's about time we started paying a little more attention to those niche communities – while the Facebooks and MySpaces of the web may provide utility, it's the niche communities that are more likely to capture users' passion.

5. The content, in all modesty, kicks ass. Feeling a little tired of pokes, vampire bites and which of your friends is the hottest-looking? Change Everything can give you the often-hilarious story of EnviroWoman, who went a year trying to live plastic-free (and mostly succeeding) – told with wit and humility. It can give you posts like Alex's on plastics and BPA, posted nearly a full year before the media started really taking notice and the Canadian government announced a ban. And it can give you stories like this one, about the difference a simple bicycle ambulance design is making in Malawi and Namibia.

But the best way to understand why Change Everything is to explore the community itself. We've put together some links that represent highlights from the site's life so far:

• Got Hats
  It all started with one blog post. Kate wrote a post sharing her vision to get a car donated and do a round of collections to transport warm things to local shelters. Within 48 hours, over 4000 articles of clothing were donated.
• EnviroWoman
  EnviroWoman gave up plastic in 2007. That means not buying/accepting products that contain or are packaged in plastic. Sounds simple? Think about it….shampoo/deodorant in plastic bottles, toothpaste with plastic lids, toilet paper wrapped in plastic…
• Vancity's BikeShare Experiment
  One of the first 'changes' on ChangeEverything, posted by Senns, outlined a vision for a bike share program here in Vancouver. In response, Vancity launched a successful bike share program last summer.
• This year's resolution contest winner
  1 in 5 of us will have a mental illness in our lifetime. Using comedy, Stand Up For Mental Health empowers those with a mental illness and educates and empowers the community at large, helping to remove the stigma surrounding Mental Illness.
• Degan's inspirational marathon training
  Degan signed up to run the Joints in Motion marathon in Athens, Greece. It's a charity fundraiser that's put on by The Arthritis Society of Canada, where her mother worked before she died a few years ago.