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I just got back from New York City, where TckTckTck and Avaaz, with the help of dozens of our other global NGO partners, and hundreds of thousands of people around the world, pulled off something truly remarkable yesterday. Watch this:

Here's how it happened. The TckTckTck campaign has been together for about 6 months now, but we only "went public" by launching our website a month ago. The global climate talks, and their culmination in Copenhagen this December, were barely on the radar of the global public or media. So we knew we needed something big to launch the campaign.

About 3 weeks ago Avaaz took the lead to try and pull off what they've never done before: ask their 3.6M members around the world – many of who are not hard-core activists but "regular people", to organize a massive, distributed action, in the streets, to kick off the climate movement.

Global Wake Up Call 1And here's the coolest part of the story. Rather than cook up this idea in some boardroom and foist it on their members, Avaaz first polled their members to ask them if they wanted to do this kind of thing.

98% of them said yes, so they went full out on it. And, lo and behold, 3 weeks later, over 2,600 largely self-organized events were held in 134 countries around the world, the media took notice, and the world woke up!

For generations, peple in my field have asked, why do so many well meaning, and important, NGO actions fail to even reach a hundredth of that kind of impact? Why don't more people join in?

Perhaps the listening part is the key. Avaaz actually asks their members what they think is important, and whether they care about an issue enough to take action on it. They don't push out, the pull in. They listen.

We know that listening is one of the deepest core values of our rapidly changing, web-based world (as we spoke about earlier in this post).

But this isn't just the story of one organization, it's about the open campaign that TckTckTck is running, that invites all NGO's, faith groups, labour, citizens, and even businesses to collaborate. The cost of participation is easy: we set a simple but strong goal (a FAB climate deal in Copenhagen), offer some guiding principleGlobal Wake Up Calls (use our logo, however you want it, run an online pledge campaign, and be creative), and let go so the network can do the heavy lifting. And it's working.

As of Sep 21, 2009, politicians around the world now know (because thousands of people flooded their phone lines) that the global climate movement is here, and we're demanding a deal now.

If you're interested, here are some stories our TckTckTck team wrote about the day. I hope we see more NGO's take these radical new approaches in the future, you can't beat these kinds of results. And besides, we're having more fun!

1. Media Coverage:

2. Our stories of how the day unfolded around the world

3. On the Human Countdown Kick-off event (with a great video and photos)