As the Executive Producer at Omidyar Network, Thomas Kriese focuses his talents on social capital and social networks. Kriese previously managed omidyar.net, Omidyar Network's online community, through its three-year lifespan from July 2004 to September 2007. The community allowed members to share information, discuss different ideas and viewpoints, and collaborate on projects to make the world a better place.

Omidyar Network was established by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam, based on the belief that every person has the potential to make a difference. Initially launched as a nonprofit foundation, Omidyar Network now functions as a "philanthropic investment firm," making both grants and investments that create opportunity for people to improve their lives. Omidyar Network supports likeminded organizations in areas such as microfinance, social media, and transparency in government that embrace market-based approaches, technology, and individual initiative as key drivers for large-scale social impact.

Omidyar Network is unique in that it is composed of a 501(c)(3) and a limited liability company. Why did Pierre Omidyar switch to this model? And how has this approach helped support the mission of Omidyar Network?
Operating as Omidyar Foundation meant that Pierre could only give his money to 501(c)(3) organizations. He looked at lessons learned from his experience with eBay, which has taught millions of people to trust complete strangers. And millions of strangers trusting each other is a good thing. So, he began to wonder, "Aren't there other businesses out there that can have a positive social impact?" By operating under this mixed model, Pierre can now make investments in both for-profit and nonprofit opportunities.

Talk a bit about your experience with omidyar.net. How did it operate? And what did you learn?
We launched omidyar.net in 2004 as an experimental online community built around an activity-based feedback system. We didn't give people explicit directions on what to do, nor did we moderate them -- they moderated themselves. We simply said, "If you want to change the world, do it however you want, and you can use the tools of omidyar.net: discussions, Wikis, and the feedback system." We only asked that people adhere to three basic rules: You're here because you want to make the world a better place, you treat each other with respect, and you believe everyone has something to contribute.

And we found that people began using our platform to find each other and do such good things as buy a fishing boat for tsunami victims in Thailand, or get together humanitarian supplies to send to Africa, or organize buying a generator for a program in Uganda. As a community, people participated in funding projects with us to distribute more than $500,000 in grants from Omidyar Network.

So why did you decide to shut it down?
We hosted the omidyar.net community for three years, and we felt that was the right amount of time to assess what we'd learned over the course of the experiment. We felt the best way to unleash the great work that was being done on and through omidyar.net was to help the community find or create platforms to more narrowly focus on their specific interests and in the style of their choosing. Put simply: it was time to help the community find new platforms on which to base their work and help the community members move their content to these new platforms.

So what now? What is your focus as executive producer?
Now that Omidyar Network is out of hosting its own community platform, I'm focusing on finding ways we can live up to the network part of our name. How can we best understand who we know, what they know, and how we get to them? How can we find these niche communities that are hyper-focused on topics Omidyar Network is interested in supporting -- something that's more targeted than just "I support microfinance writ large"? We find that people get passionate about very specific interest areas. And if we can find a way to tap those passions, that's where we're going to get the biggest bang for our buck.

And how are social networks helping you find the answers to those questions?
Social networking tools allow people to broadcast the things they find interesting. And we're now seeing some people shift from blogs, which provide individuals an open forum for personal expression but usually in a retrospective "this is what I did/discovered/experienced today" way, to things like Twitter, a "micro-blogging" tool on which you can continually update those in your network with your whereabouts and things of interest to you as they happen.

So what we're starting to see is that if you begin posting these brief, 140-character entries on Twitter about what you're doing, you immediately start a conversation with others in your network, and you begin to discover commonalities. And so your social interests start exposing you to people you otherwise wouldn't have been exposed to. And it provides you links to people you wouldn't necessarily have looked for using the tools that have been built to traverse the business world's infrastructure, such as networking events, interest groups, LinkedIn, etc.

We're used to these social things happening face to face during the in-between times, where we're having a conversation with a colleague about something that's not work-related while we wait for a meeting to start or while standing in line at the cafeteria and they say, "Oh, a friend of mine's wife has a charity that focuses on this particular interest." It's those kinds of serendipitous interactions that Twitter is leveraging, just on a much broader scale with people we didn't even expect to be listening. These areas of common interest are what provide the foundation upon which we can build trust with each other, and that trust in each other leads to our doing good things together.

So tools like Twitter really are helping redefine how we communicate and network.
I think so. I read a really great blog post recently by Clay Shirky, the author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. His post was actually the notes for a speech he gave in which he reminded us that media in the 20th century was run as a single race -- consumption: "How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you'll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon -- it's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share."

So now multiple people are being inspired by the same content, and each of us then has the power to produce our own media and share it with each other. And where this gets really interesting is that people who are all-consumed about a niche topic can now become the expert on that topic. And they can start to attract a community around themselves. And with the community comes energy to actually make change.

I'll give you another example. I used to be a big proponent of live blogging from conferences. If I could attend an event that my co-workers couldn't, I would take notes during it and publish them to the web. Now, I'm a big proponent of live "tweeting" -- using Twitter to post updates -- from events I attend. With Twitter, I can update my followers with 140 character posts while the events are happening, and I can also now see who's in the same room and read their own take on the information from the session I'm attending. And that way, you get a bunch of different takes on the same event.

So why does that matter? Because it used to be one person deciding that their version was the official record of what happened. And that's just fine, unless it's a little different from what actually happened. Now, with more and more people publishing their own version of an event, you get closer to the truth. No single person's view of an event tells the exact story, but you get enough different views and you can pretty well triangulate in on what really happened.

I would assume it's too early to have any real numbers, but what is your sense of whether these online tools like Twitter are leading to actual interactions and real, on-the-ground action?
It's too early, yes. But look at it this way. How much time do we spend organizing cocktail hours or other face-to-face social gatherings? And how much are we using metrics and return on investment on those kinds of social interactions? I feel like it's premature to try and put an ROI on the social media investment, when we're not doing the same thing for all these other efforts that have gone unmeasured before.

It feels like we're tapping into the same kinds of social behaviors we've been engaging in offline, so let's keep going. And while it's still at the anecdotal stage of learning, we're getting enough of these serendipitous crossing of paths that it feels like it's still fruitful. I've learned that by giving people the resources and the time and the opportunity, they will end up doing the right thing.

Bio
Prior to joining Omidyar Network, Thomas worked for America Online and AOL Time Warner. At AOL, he created content programming models for short-duration network programming and then went on to launch AOL Hometown, the home pages community where members publish their own web page content. Thomas later joined the AOL Time Warner Foundation, where he worked with nonprofits like MENTOR and PowerUP to provide easy and innovative access to their content for online audiences.

Thomas received a bachelor's degree in linguistics from the University of California at San Diego. He lives in Redwood City, California with his wife, two daughters, a dog, and two urban chickens.