Dave Haynes

Every January I love to look back at the year just gone. 2008 was pretty awesome. I became a dad, I started working with the amazing team at SoundCloud and I founded OpenMusicMedia. It was a year of hard work but rewarding beyond my expectations.

I also love to look ahead to the year to come. Set myself some goals. Re-focus on the things that are important to me. This post is about one of those things and it comes in the form of one of my New Year’s Resolutions.

On 1st January I resolved to help raise more for charity than I earn myself during the year. I’m not exactly sure what drove me to this resolution. Perhaps the introduction of my son into the world made me wonder how I could help make it a better place? Perhaps I felt like I needed a new challenge away from my work life? Perhaps subconciously there are also some selfish reasons for doing it? If I think about it, it’s probably a mix of all of these things to a greater or lesser extent.

So the challenge is on. And to further quantify the challenge I’d like to make it a round £50,000 (I’m not really sure how much I’ll earn in a year). That might be setting the bar a little high but if I just resolved to raise ’some’ money for good causes then I’m less likely to rise to the challenge. I’m not too afraid of failing, if the end result was only making a quarter or a tenth of this figure then it’s still a net positive. Also, I’m cheating a little bit - all money that I ‘help’ to raise counts. It doesn’t have to come direct from my own pocket or directly to me, as long as I’ve helped create that fundraising activitiy or project. I’m hoping to do a lot of the fundraising using mainly online tools.

It occurred to me recently that so much of my time is spent using so-called social media tools. These tools have helped me achieve a lot in 2008 and I’ve really seen the power of them in action. But what really interests me is how the power of these tools can be fully harnessed for good causes, rather than for a stream of ego-driven displays of what music I’m listening to, what news I discovered first, what cool people I’m hanging out with or how many contacts I have. Let’s face it a lot of people seemed to be totally consumed by massaging their ‘twegos’ on Twitter. I have no ideas how things will pan out but it’s hopefully gonna be a lot of fun finding out. And I can’t do it without you! You can make a large impact by doing small things.

The first project of the year comes in the shape of Twestival.fm which a digital music bolt-on to the amazing work already being done worldwide for Twestival. I’ll be explaining more later this week…