The best ideas are always the simplest ones. Take Meetup.com for example. Build a mechanism for people to self-organize get togethers on everything from pug dogs to Elvis to Dennis Kucinich, and get out of the way as millions of people do just that (well, maybe not millions of people meeting up for Kucinich, but you get the point.)

Now take the mechanism of Meetup and combine it with the passion of idealistic activists around the world and you have the Imagine effort just launched by Idealist.org.

According to Ami Dar, the founder and Executive Director of Idealist.org, the world is at a unique “changeable” moment. The process of connecting people to one another has always been the raison d’etre for Idealist. But this moment in time is ripe for a worldwide social change effort like Imagine because it is built on wide-scale connectedness that didn’t exist even a few years ago coupled with the optimism and hope unique to activists. The premise is deceptively simple. Here’s the vision:

We want to live in a world where all people can live free and dignified lives, where any person who wants to help another can do so, and where no opportunities for action and collaboration are missed or wasted.

Imagine has three components: a bold, ambitious description on the Idealist website; the use of the Idealist website as a facilitative platform for participants to discuss the program, and share pictures and experiences, and monthly meetups.

The focus of the Imagine effort is not on specific tasks or immediately identifying new solutions to social problems. Dar describes the process of creating “Global/Local” connections as the key to developing an infrastructure that can support social change efforts around the world. He uses a switchboard or bulletin board analogy to describe the kind of connections his effort is trying to facilitate. It is the very act of connecting, sharing, building a relationship that creates the capacity for sustainable change, he believes.

February was the first month of meetups for Imagine. So, what happened? With no slick advertising campaign or marketing effort, no grant funds for extra staff, 300 meetups were self-organized in 70 countries. About 3,000 people were signed up for these meetings, although a head count of actual participants isn’t yet available. Comments and photos are posted here.

Ami Dar says that Imagine will continue to help organize meetups about every month, they will continue to refine and sharpen the agenda for groups to use to keep local efforts moving forward constructively, and they will continue to help people connect and communicate with one another globally online.

Hey Rockefeller, Ford and Gates Foundation’s, did you hear that noise? It was the sound of thousands of people worldwide dreaming, planning, doing what they want for their own communities, it was the sound of power shifting from institutions to thousands of people at the edges.

Even though the effort is very nascent, there are several important developments represented by Imagine. Perhaps most compelling is the genuine interest that people everywhere have for connecting with perfect strangers in a common cause. This happens over and over again in the Connected Age, but each time we seem to be pleasantly surprise by the sincerity and interest that people have for connecting with one another. Good things happens for people and communities when they come together, in person, meet one another, exchange views, build relationships that can then be extended, deepened, augmented online.

Imagine is the epitome of how the Connected Age works for social change; people meet/talk/email/text about issues of common interest and together, with others, they figure out ways to work together or solve problems or do stuff that makes a difference. But the effort also illustrates one of the greatest challenges to organized philanthropy in the Connected Age, the need to reorient itself from what I call counting heads and counting beds. Philanthropy needs to move from being product oriented to focusing on process instead in order to support efforts like Imagine.

You fund the process through groups like Idealist who are trusted facilitators. Facilitators bring people together as equals who are shapers of strategies, not ATM machines or automatons expected to follow an organization lock step. Only in this way will people come together, and learn to trust strangers, figure out how to move forward together and get things done. What they choose to do, what actually happens, is up to local citizens – but it always has been anyway, hasn’t it? Only when they were not fully and sincerely involved, the answer was that nothing, basically, would happen.

Of course, as all organizers know getting people to participate once isn’t the hardest part of building a movement. Keeping people participating over time is much more difficult. Will the meetup numbers continue to rise or flatten and fall over the next few months? It depends on the ability and willingness of the participants, aided but not entirely fueled by Idealist.org, to become evangelists and recruit their own friends and neighbors to become imaginers in their own communities.