New intro video: 50/50 Make or Break

28 August 2011
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It seems a bit weird to be posting a video about the East Africa drought and famine as a hurricane lashes into New York, but if you feel like taking a few minutes out from the world's biggest real-time extreme social weather event in human history, then please watch this film that introduces the project and its objectives.

And then share the f**k out of it. Please.

50/50: Make or Break from 5050good on Vimeo.

The way the film has been made is a brilliant illustration of how Tom and Dan at Good for Nothing have brought together an adhocracy of makers to get stuff done.

The video above was put together by Max Brown from Hypernaked. Most of the graphics were created by Loz Ives of Because Studio. GFN's Dan Burgess asked Chilly Gonzales to give us rights to use the music, he very generously said yes (please give him some love for this at Facebook and on Twitter.) Made by Many's Alex Harding has been doing some final edits. And Tom tells me we're probably going to carry on tweaking.

Despite the #stormporn orgy, we had to launch yesterday because our 50 days is up on World Food Day, 16th October - which is in 50 days. By that time we hope to have 50 projects, and to be well on our way to raising a million quid (that's 1.6m of your US dollars).

In one way, perhaps #stompornapocalypse provides a very timely launch.

Just at the moment, we seem besieged by a 24-hour life-stream, and drowning in a series of extreme news events. It's pretty exciting - I'm not complaining - but this vast information pressure chamber we now live in makes it hard to hear beyond each new crashing wave of 'news-crisis', and the seething white noise of social amplification that accompanies it. More and more of us are living with *all* our social amplifiers set to 11 - and we're not hearing the voices of people in the world who don't have access to the Internet, who aren't online. This is certainly true of the East Africa emergency. Because a lot of East Africa is so dangerous and out of control, there aren't even that many journalists there.

The question is, how does the world respond to a famine that's bigger than the one in Ethiopia in 1984 that spawned Band Aid and Live Aid with all this other stuff going on? And then, what can we do about it ourselves?

One thing we didn't have in 1984 is the Internet.

Band Aid and Live Aid were a broadcast media response, and they ended up raising £150m from the concerts alone. It would be great if that happened again, but in 2011 surely we now also have new powers. Today, we are the empowered people of the Social Web. 'Prosumers'. We don't need to wait for the rock-stars to start this gig. We are all rock-stars today. (Okay, I'm kind of taking the piss, but you get the point I hope).

What we're hoping to do with 50/50 is create a network effect of participation - not just to raise awareness and drive donations, but to make a network of 50 shareable, playful and engaging objects - each of which raises money, through participation.

Please join us. If you're an internet start-up, developer, designer, agency, company or just a person with a cool spreadable idea that might raise a lot of money, then get in touch.

Thank you to all the amazing people who've already contacted us. I'll be writing up a summary of the projects who've come onboard soon.

The first thing you can do to join us is to follow 50/50 on Twitter, and on Instagram (5050good).