"I think as of 2005, the majority of new Internet users every month, people who have never used the Internet before, no longer speak English as a first language. So there's a huge need for non-English content. We now have our site in 12 languages, and we're working on about 15 others to really meet that demand for further bringing together people with a diversity of language skills."

Michael Furdyk of TakingITGlobal is the 14th interview in our series of chats with the 21 Featured Projects from the 2nd NetSquared Conference (N2Y2).

You can hear an audio recording of the interview on the NetSquared Podcast and hear TakingITGlobal's 5-minute pitch at the Conference, here.

Michael Furdyk: I'm Michael Furdyk, the Director of Technology and Co-founder of TakingITGlobal. We are one of the first social networks for social good and social change focused specifically on engaging young people in important global and social issues and trying to get them to network across cultures and across languages to make a positive difference in their communities, in their countries, and in the world using technology.

Britt Bravo: Where did the idea for TakingITGlobal come from?

MF: From a young age I was a bit of a technology entrepreneur. I got a computer when I was about two and a half years old. When I was about 16 or 17 years old, I sold a startup that I had started when I was in high school, and was on The Oprah Winfrey Show and got a lot of press all over North America. I got thousands and thousands of emails from young people all around the world looking for help, mentorship, advice, support, and offering their own ideas--whether it was a nonprofit project, a club they were trying to start at school, or a business venture they were trying to start.

I saw that there wasn't really a place online, a positive place, for young people to get together to help each other, mentor each other, work on ideas together. All the sites out there were very focused on commercial endeavors and advertising, and run by media companies, like Teen People, and very focused on consumption and fashion and trends and things like that, which have their place. But it seemed like there was a need for a place focused on more than that to really engage young people in things that were more important than consumerism. So that's where TakingITGlobal started from.

BB: Can you give an example or tell a story of how TakingITGlobal has created positive change?

MF: I guess there are two things. One, on a policy level, we've been involved in three major United Nations conferences - both the World Summit on the Information Society, the World Summit on Sustainable Development, and also, last year in the 2006 International AIDS Conference. We helped to bring hundreds, and last year, over a thousand, young people to these conferences, and gave them an opportunity to have a meaningful input in policy and to bring together all kinds of things, that they had talked about online, into an international forum, to really give them a voice. On that kind of broad policy level, we've done a lot of initiatives like that.

On an individual, one-to-one level there have been a lot of members who have, through our site, found opportunities, events, scholarships, and things that ended up changing their lives as a result of them getting a scholarship to attend a conference, or travel to another country to participate in some kind of program or training session. We get great letters and stories and hear about those experiences all the time, about the fact that through finding out about one opportunity it made a huge difference in their lives.

And for me, that was one of the things that I wanted to make sure that TakingITGlobal did, because in school, especially here in North America, it's usually the people who are the most academically excelling, they're the ones that get a lot of the opportunities. But, by letting organizations directly post information and share it online, we can really make sure they reach a broader diversity of young people. So, there's over 12, 000 organizations on our site that use it to post information and share it with young people.

BB: What's the next step for TakingITGlobal?

MF: There is really two. One that we focused on for the last two years has been really encouraging the development of multilingual content. I think as of 2005, the majority of new Internet users every month, people who have never used the Internet before, no longer speak English as a first language. So there's a huge need for non-English content. We now have our site in 12 languages, and we're working on about 15 others to really meet that demand for further bringing together people with a diversity of language skills.

The second is education. We developed a whole social networking platform that, so far, about 600 schools around North America are using. We're really trying to help teachers integrate tools like blogging, and podcasting, and discussion boards, and video chat, and a lot of the things that so many young people love to do on sites like MySpace and Facebook, into classroom learning and into the curriculum.

Combining our global book content - over 300,00 pieces of user-created content from young people in every country - with the kind of tools that students love to use, we think, will make school and education a lot more engaging and interesting. We're also bringing games to the table, developing some really cool interactive games with partners on different topics.

Addressing and bridging the language gap and making education more engaging, those are the two of the focuses that we have today. They're both pretty ambitious, and I think it will take us the next few years to get a significant way through some of our goals in those sections.

BB: What are some of TakingITGlobal's challenges?

MF: Well, I guess one challenge really is that there are so many social networking websites springing up there. And, of course, MySpace and Facebook, and some of the larger ones are starting to venture into social issues and global issues. I think that's great. I think that the more people can be encouraged to get involved in these issues is really important.

I guess our challenge is really staying on top of some of the technology and features that people want to use, and also doing a really great job partnering. I think that's been one of our biggest strengths. Our biggest strength is really building a wide network of partnerships to really support and facilitate increased engagement at international events, and for major international organizations to really let them, and help them leverage TakingITGlobal as a platform for doing that.

I think that we're definitely not competing with MySpace or Facebook, but rather, thanks to the fact that they're bringing social networking into the norm, people finally understand what we do as an organization. I mean, six years ago, trying to explain social networking to a foundation or a company to get funding, it was very challenging for them to understand the value of it. But now we can just say, "It's like MySpace, or it's like Facebook, but for good causes and for a purpose." They finally understand it much more easily. That's really been a challenge in the past.

BB: What was the positive impact for TakingITGlobal of going to the NetSquared Conference?

MF: One of the great things about NetSquared is that it really developed further some of our initial partnership discussions with some of the other organizations. We've begun working pretty closely with Kabissa, in West Africa, on a project that we're doing there, and a few of the other organizations have offered us tools and resources and data sharing agreements and things like that.

It has really helped us strengthen and develop some new partnerships. And also, of course, the exposure around the world of the press releases and the media coverage, and the fact that so many people were involved in voting for it really helped to raise awareness in the social technology arena, which I think we previously didn't do a good enough job of engaging in with some of those people.

Also, our mentor at NetSquared has become an advisor and has continued to give us some tips, and that challenged us to continue to innovate on some of our ideas. So that's been really great as well.

BB: How can listeners help to move your work forward?

MF: Well, I guess one way is just, in general, raising awareness, and letting young people know about the idea. If they have any ways of doing that, that they'd love to share with us, that would be great.

Another one is, in terms of supporting our organization, we are a charity in Canada and the US, and I would say, probably one of our biggest needs is actually technology infrastructure. One of the biggest costs that we haven't been able to get supported yet is actually hosting and scaling up the traffic on our website, which is pretty huge. That's one area that we're looking for, but we've also gotten support in many other areas.

If people are interested, they can definitely check out our website. There are lots of different opportunities to get involved as a mentor, or as an advisor on the site, and to go and respond to some of the discussions that young people have started. We're really trying to encourage an intergenerational dialog. Not just one-way, but getting people to share ideas across generations and across cultures.

BB: Is there anything else you want people to know about TakingITGlobal?

MF: One of the interesting things about us as a charity is that we actually have a sustainable revenue model, which is that we license the technology we've created for ourselves to other non-profits and charities for a really reasonable cost. We've done projects for the United Nations Association, for Oxfam, for Greenpeace... really leveraging social networking to engage their audience as well.

It's not just that we're hoarding all this technology and really trying to use it for ourselves, but we've actually built some sustainability and sharing of this technology with many other non-profits to help them be more effective in the way that they engage with young people on a kind of a social networking and "Web 2.0" level. So, just for people to know that we're really out there sharing some of these innovations and really leveraging them intelligently, we feel, as a sustainability model so we're not 100% dependent on outside sources for funding.