We obviously understand that this kind of list has to be representative, rather than comprehensive, and there have already been plenty more people and organisations added through the surrounding debate on the Guardian site.

Most exciting for us, this is a chance to start some new conversations with other people on the list and, over the next few weeks, we’ll be making a point to reach out to some people like Andy Bradley, Dougald Hine and Michael Acton Smith to talk about where the stuff we’re doing might overlap in interesting ways.

“Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected,” he starts.

Corporate missions, vision statements and moments of philosophy have the habit of melting into one big self-deluding façade.

Enron infamously established amongst its core ideas that: “We treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves…Ruthlessness, callousness and arrogance don’t belong here”, which has proved rich material for scriptwriters ever since.

But, there is much more to Zuckerberg and Facebook. It is, in some ways, the ultimate example of incidental social change. It is the most loved and used digital tool ever created and built into it are behaviours that make us more social and connected.

“We hope to rewire the way that people spread and consume information…We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate”, he continues.

But how profound is this stuff?

There is more and more academic work being done on Facebook’s societal impact and that of online social networks more generally, but it’s far from conclusive.

At We Are What We Do, we’re most interested in the behavioural prompts that Facebook has introduced or accentuated, rather than simply mirrored.

Some people do some very good things on Facebook – like collaborate on solar technology or donate lots to charity – and some people do some very bad things – like groom children and bully work colleagues.

But this activity isn’t taking place because of Facebook and Zuckerberg can neither take credit for the good stuff nor be blamed for the bad stuff.  Facebook isn’t a community defined by people doing wonderful things or terrible things. It’s a community defined by people doing ordinary things.

Before Facebook, people shared banal titbits about their lives, gossiped about other people’s titbits and used titbits to chat people up. After Facebook, people will continue to do this – the content of social interaction has not been changed by Facebook.

But the fact that Facebook creates more community and generates considerably more connections around this day-to-day stuff is where its potential to affect society lies. Around this, there are two key questions that are worth more investigation:

Bridging vs bonding social capital

The effect on levels of social capital is at the heart of Facebook’s collateral effect on society. It clearly generates a lot of connections, but of what type and what value? Ellison, Steinfield & Lampe (2007) felt that bridging social capital – the more valuable sort that acts between heterogeneous groups — on Facebook was more prevalent than bonding social capital – between homogenous groups — right through from its initial effect on Harvard’s campus onwards. But their definition of heterogeneous seems a bit ropey. Yes, not everyone at Harvard has the same surname, but its students are unequivocally socially homogenous. Moreover, Facebook’s appeal and growth was founded on exclusive access to social circles. That Facebook networks are dominated by school, college and work friends would suggest that a meaningful effect across social groups – the most valuable – cannot yet be assumed.

Local vs remote connections

There are piles of research into the effect of increased online connections on levels of offline connections. Haythornthwaite and Kendall’s 2010 work, for example, concluded that “online communication always reinforces local relationships and local identities that build networks of interacting individuals who are mutually aware of each other.” But the existence of strong online to offline force seems counter-intuitive when it comes to Facebook as it stands. The site draws you into networks of people you know, regardless of where they live. There are very few forces, overt or latent, that lead you to create new connections with people who live in your neighbourhood but you don’t yet know. This would, undoubtedly, be a very positive force if it did exist.

Ultimately, Facebook has an inherent obligation to defend their users’ privacy and security within the network, but they don’t have an inherent obligation to make more of any of its effect on bridging social capital, local connectedness or any other areas that it could add its considerable weight to.

But, Mark Zuckerberg has done two things to affect our expectations in this area.

Firstly, he has been consistently and, for me, inspiringly, committed to his social mission. This means that neutral incidental effects aren’t good enough.

Secondly, he has wholeheartedly harnessed this collection of 800 million people and 100 billion connections for advertisers. Regardless of his idealistic spin on fostering products that are “personalised and designed around people”, the relationship between users and brands on Facebook is highly advantageous to the latter. Thanks to Facebook, they know more about us than ever before and can exploit this knowledge to integrate themselves into our social networks. This may be a natural step and it has been done very intelligently, but it means that Facebook certainly isn’t a neutral social space, free from external behavioural prompts.

These combine to make the next phase of Facebook fascinating as we watch to see if Mark Zuckerberg can fulfil his commitment to having a genuinely positive effect on society.

Personally, I think he’ll surprise us all. Unlike Bill Gates, who separated his business work from his do-gooding work, I think Zuckerberg will get braver with what Facebook can achieve through its core services.

One of the influences behind this new work has been the opportunity to collaborate with Tom Chatfield, the author of Fun Inc — Why games are the 21st Century’s most serious business, amongst other things. I was at college with Tom (and he is still far, far cleverer than me) and we’ve ended up with the chance to work together ten years after graduating because of the growth of our Historypin project, which is perfectly placed for a whole load of playfulness in its next stages of development.

Beyond this Historypin work (which the Historypin blog will keep you posted on), we’re going to be applying some gaming principles to other social issues that we’re working on.

The first step of this work will be to make sure that we avoid the things that so often go wrong when gaming meets do-gooding and seeking out the right reasons and methods.

On the things to avoid side, you don’t have to look very far and the whole idea of edutainment has something odd at its core.

Firstly, it separates education and entertainment and appoints itself as an innovative meeting place for the two. But when has education ever been good without being entertaining?

Secondly, and mainly as a consequence of the first problem, it presents one activity as fun and the other as boring. So, the logic follows, you can start with some boring ingredients and add a few fun ingredients and end up with something palatable. Unfortunately, what you actually end up with is something clearly pretending to be fun and that children would happily eat their own fingers off to avoid having to “play”. As a result, edutainment crime rates climb every year.

On the flip side, you find the best examples of games with positive social and educational benefits where their creators haven’t separated the two. A lot of the time, they have simply set out to create something engaging, rewarding and intelligent and the incidental educational or socially positive benefits have flowed naturally from this.

Minecraft is a great example. I was introduced to the game by an 11 year old who, by sharing his love of the game, found himself sharing his sophisticated understanding of alloys, compounds and elements, as well as explaining the need for a subtle balance between competition and co-operation. Within formal education, teachers are exploring these features of the game and many more.

Minecraft, and other games like it, can achieve profound, progressive collateral effects on users and society because it is really good and people love it (over 21 million people in fact).

Setting out to create something that is really good and that people love is, as always, where we will start.

We’ve just started working with Sky on some internal leadership events that they run each year and, once again, my budding obsession with the social power of customer service has been given another prod.

Sky has 10 million customers and 6,000 customer service agents.

Sainsbury’s, one of our other close partners, has 20 million customers and 17,000 colleagues working on tills.

Between just two companies, that’s billions of social interactions between customers and employees every year.

Both of these big, successful brands understand the value of these interactions for almost everything that defines their business – sales, customer loyalty, customer satisfaction and many more – and both have been investing more and more in training every year.

But how else could we harness the power of this vast (and growing) mountain of daily human contact and build some social change into customer service?

We’re going to start looking more closely at this and these are some of the things that might get us thinking…

- There are 1.2 million “socially excluded” older people in the UK, who are vulnerable to depression and isolation

- More than 1 in 10 Britons feel lonely “often”

- Helplines like The Samaritans, Childline or Citizens Advice Bureau always need more experienced, patient people on the end of their phones

- The last conversation someone has defines the mood of the next conversation

- The theory of Consequential Strangers and the important role of “weak” social ties and interactions

- My gran, who has a floor covered in ongoing correspondence with customer service departments and only really cares whether or not they’re nice to her (the £3.50 she recently got refunded from Npower gave her no real satisfaction — “the lady was on the telephone very curt”)

Less easy to tune out of is the barrage of fundraising appeals for Africa and this year they seem to be more shocking, emotive and forceful than ever before.

There’s no doubt that life for millions of Africans is very hard or very short. Around 300 million Africans live in poverty and the 28 bottom nations in the United Nations’ Human Development Report 2011 are all African. One in eight children in Sub-Saharan Africa die before their fifth birthday.

There’s also no doubt that the work of organisations like Save the Children in Africa is intelligent and often extraordinary, mixing short-term relief of disasters like the current East African famine, with longer term solutions, lead by local people.

But are their TV appeals intelligent?

They are certainly a desperate response to desperate levels of suffering and is motivated by a passionate belief that we have to do everything we can to relieve this suffering.

But they aren’t intelligent, they’re simplistic. This bombardment of Christmas appeals from organisations like Save the Children, WaterAid and ActionAid — the vast majority of which is not connected to specific disaster relief — presents Africa as a permanently starving, disease ridden continent that needs our help to survive.

During some recent work we did in schools in East London, we talked to 100s of children about how they saw charity and particular causes. When asked about what they saw when they looked at Africa, every response, exclusively, reported visions of poverty, suffering, disease and famine. The odd reference to members of Girls Aloud or Chris Moyles cradling dying African babies was in there too.

Do we get to move on from this destructive, misleading vision of Africa soon?

The real African story has evolved and continues to. The Guardian’s recent report on Africa’s growing middle-class helped tell this story as did The Economists’ “The Hopeful Continent” feature.

The collateral effect of the endless wall of images of helpless Africans, from charity brands that has our trust and respect, is the popular perception that Africa is a place that we give to and feel sorry for, not buy from and invest in. Every economist (and probably most people at organisations like Save the Children) will tell you that it is balanced, well distributed economic growth, not charity, that will lift hundreds of millions more African’s out of poverty and into the middle-classes.

There is always vital work to do to relieve the suffering that disasters bring, all around the world, but this work doesn’t need to come with one sided social marketing that has such damaging, long-term side effects.

Sally Richards is the mother of Jackson West, a young, Canberra-based entrepreneur with a disability, and I was lucky enough to have her as part a group of around 200 people at the We Are What We Do workshop organised by Disability ACT and BLITS last week in the Australian capital.

This audience are all involved in working for better inclusion of people with disability and were made up of campaigners, carers, practioners, teachers and some (very impressive) students.

Cause and effect within this inclusion work is complex and subtle, which made some of the ideas we’ve been working on very relevant – much more so than I realised when I was first offered the chance to run the workshops.

We spent a lot of the sessions discussing what forces within culture and society are incidentally inclusive for people with disability and which are incidentally detrimental to this inclusion.

An example that fell on both sides of the debate was the Paralympic Games, soon to be appearing in London just after the Olympic Games next year. This timing, as well as a series of other issues, were at the heart of the discussion about the Games’ overall effect, which, oddly enough, was elaborated upon by The Guardian just after our sessions, following research carried out by Scope which found that 42% of disabled people did not believe the Paralympics had a positive impact on public perceptions of disability.

Before this, Sally wrote to me with some thoughts which, we felt, couldn’t have summed up the debate, or our work, better.

This month, we’ve launched the draft of our new approach paper – The Incidental Effect — which aims to start some conversations about new ways of changing the everyday behaviour of millions of people.

These new methods lean less on messaging and more on the power of products, tools and services to contain new behaviours, incidental to their inherent usefulness, desirability and credibility.

This blog will be where we’ll have those conversations and over the coming weeks and months, I’ll be offering up potential evidence and potential flaws (more of the former, admittedly) and we’ll look forward to hearing what you think.