For some reason, this screenshot from MySpace's homepage captures the disconnect for me.
One of the longer-distance runners in this search for the holy grail of social change organizing online is Ben Rattray of Change.org, who Josh Levy and I wrote up back in December 2007. Back then, Change.org was going through its first major re-design, shifting from focusing on individual users looking to connect with specific causes, to a platform for organizations looking for a ready-to-use social network toolset tuned to their members. The elevator pitch Rattray used with us was that Change was "Ning for non-profits," and he thought the new approach would not only meld well with the site's 50,000 members but would also, through subscription revenue, help float Change.org's boat.
Well, now Rattray is on to a new vision and strategy to expand Change.org's reach, and as close readers of this site already know, he lured Josh away with promises of untold riches and seventy virgins to help him build it out. (No, we are not bitter.) Earlier this week I had a chance to chat with both of them about this new approach, and here are my notes on the conversation.
]]>One of the longer-distance runners in this search for the holy grail of social change organizing online is Ben Rattray of Change.org, who Josh Levy and I wrote up back in December 2007. Back then, Change.org was going through its first major re-design, shifting from focusing on individual users looking to connect with specific causes, to a platform for organizations looking for a ready-to-use social network toolset tuned to their members. The elevator pitch Rattray used with us was that Change was "Ning for non-profits," and he thought the new approach would not only meld well with the site's 50,000 members but would also, through subscription revenue, help float Change.org's boat.
Well, now Rattray is on to a new vision and strategy to expand Change.org's reach, and as close readers of this site already know, he lured Josh away with promises of untold riches and seventy virgins to help him build it out. (No, we are not bitter.) Earlier this week I had a chance to chat with both of them about this new approach, and here are my notes on the conversation.
The fundamental strategic move that Change.org is making is to recognize that search is THE dominant way people find stuff on the web today, and that when you search for issues like "global warming" or "homelessness" or "animal rights" the top results rarely point you to links that answer the question, "how can I do something about this?" A Wikipedia entry on global warming may be very useful if what you're doing is writing a term paper on the topic or just want to brush up on your understanding of the issue, but by definition Wikipedia pages don't offer advocacy suggestions. So Change.org is gunning to win the search fight around issues, by hiring expert bloggers who will act as daily guides, or curators, around each topic. Says Ben:
"I see the old Change.org as a failure, but full of lessons. It’s extremely difficult to build a critical mass of people AND content, as Project Agape has shown. If you look at DailyKos, it’s an awesome example of a hybrid approach of top-down and bottom up. On the old Change.org, the user experience kind of sucked. You could get lost, not finding the community conversation.
So, we’re approaching this from this starting point, 'I care about an issue like AIDS in Africa, or global warming, or human trafficking,' and no one is really helping you figure out what you can do. You Google those terms, and you don’t really get good results."
Josh adds, "I should be able to search 'human rights' and get more than static pages from nonprofits." And that's the second key part of their strategy: to win in search, they will offer a ton of dynamic, up-to-date content around key issues. Says Ben: "We want to aggregate and filter and provide context. If I care about human rights, what do I need to know, what’s going on in this space, and how do I connect to others. And the big difference is rather than have everything happen on Change.org, we want to point out to most compelling content on the web or the most useful actions. Rather than thinking of other sites as competitors, they’re our content. We want to be a media hub for social action."
That said, they are planning to do more than blog the news of the day on an issue, or list hundreds of available actions a motivated reader can take. Each of their topic bloggers will aim to provide real focus to readers. Ben says, "I don't want to see 8500 campaigns about global warming." And Josh adds, "The idea is to create trusted sources on each issue."
If this sounds a lot like what Jason Calacanis or Nick Denton might do if they cared about politics, that's no coincidence. Says Ben, "This is very much a Weblogs, Inc. strategy. I really want to own this space." He adds:
There’s two audiences that we want. In a fragmented media landscape, there are blogs that will promote causes, and we can work with them on competitions, contests, and other special events. In addition, we have a real opportunity amongst the 50,000 to 100,000 people who really care about global warming, or the 20,000 people who care about human trafficking. If you have a daily blog covering that space, naming names, you get a huge influx from those niche communities.
This is not to say that Change.org is abandoning its social networking roots. The site has ported over all of its old member-originated content, and thus if you are one of the 120,000 people who created an account there in the past two years, you'll find you still have a profile that tracks the money you've raised, the actions you've taken and the number of people you've recruited to your causes. Like Facebook, the site lets you friend other users and track each other's activities. And Change.org still draws on a huge database of more than 1 million non-profits, so participants have a lot of latitude to use the site to rally support for groups they like.
I think that Ben and Josh and crew may be on to something. There's no question that most, if not all, advocacy organizations are poorly designed for the web. Organization websites are invariably static billboards written in an impersonal voice. And they're absolutely right that on many issues, a Google search doesn't produce satisfying results.
But it's far from clear that a blog intensive strategy will succeed in getting Change.org's cause pages to the top of search results. Heck, Denton has been running Consumerist for more than a year now, but if you search for "consumer" or "consumer outrage" or "consumer rip-off" you won't find it on the first page of results. Ben and Josh are going to have to pay close attention to SEO as they go forward to make this strategy work.
I also think they've got to make each Change.org landing page really engaging. If they're right, and people will come to the site looking to answer the question "What can I do about this issue?" then they've really got to highlight immediate actions that visitors can take, or somehow draw them in to a vital conversation about that issue that will make visitors want to stick around. Can individual blogger-curators do this? Well, obviously people like Markos Moulitsas have shown that it's possible--but it's not easy.
Change.org also has a bigger problem to address: on many of its chosen causes, the actions suggested are hardly up to the task at hand. The top action on the Humanitarian Relief page is a call to, I kid you not, literally stand up "between 9pm GMT on Oct. 16th and 9pm GMT on Oct. 17th and be counted towards a Guinness World Record for the most people to Stand Up and Speak Out for a cause." It might feel good to do this, but it ain't going to thing to actually end extreme poverty. The ...but doesn't exactly help the visitor find one.
I hate to end this post on such a tough note, but it needs to be said. If Change.org is going to grow as an online community and a web portal for people searching to get involved in issues and causes, it's going to have to struggle with the same problem we all have when it comes to social change. Beyond giving busy people a five minute action like making a donation or signing a petition or forwarding a message, how do we get salient numbers of people organized in support of actions that have lasting, systemic effects?
The answer that partisan political websites give is, win a majority of seats in Congress. The answer that sites like Idealist or Kiva or Donors Choose give is, make a donation of time or money. Change.org's team may come up with a new answer, something like, "band together through this site to see your individual actions combined into something greater." Will that be enough to get people to keep coming back, and to spread the word? Time will tell. Good luck Ben and Josh!
]]>From the Voter Files: Passed in 2002 in the wake of the election debacle two years earlier, the Help America Vote Act required that every U.S. state establish comprehensive voter registration databases. The goal? To help people vote by keeping clean, standardized data at the state level, instead of with local elections boards. Good databases are a solution. But bad databases -- and putting faith in them -- can spell real trouble. What's the status of those voter rolls today? Well, long answer short: we dunno. The chairwomen of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission recently said that without real knowledge of what states have accomplished on the database front, "we're boxing in the dark." But what we do know is that legitimate voters being dropped from the rolls without cause. We've talked a great deal about data this cycle, from Obama's use of Catalist and VAN to the Republican National Committee's vaunted Voter Vault. And this election may indeed be the election of databases -- but it might be the states' voter databases we're talking about on November 5th. #
Your Map of the New Media Landscape: It's amazing what you can learn about new media while waiting in line at your local bagel shop! Thirstin' for a mid-afternoon iced coffee yesterday, that's where I picked up a copy of the free L Magazine's usefully detailed guide to the new media political landscape, from Wonkette to Townhall. It's savvy enough to include Mudflats, which until five weeks ago (a.k.a. B.P.E.) was a little-known local Alaska political blog. (A bonus, for some of you, at least -- there's a meaty accompanying interview with MSNBC's Rachel Maddow.) #
The Candidates on the Web
Obama Mastering the Modern Art of Interfaces: The Nation's Ari Melber has a comprehensive rundown of Obama's "web-savvy voter plan." One line in particular about the campaign's Vote for Change mini-site caught my eye. "The spare bilingual homepage," writes Ari, "looks more like a search engine, soliciting information and helping visitors register, request absentee ballots or find polling locations." Indeed. When it comes to Team Obama's data operation, not only is what they're attempting do on the backend more ambitious than campaign's past. But the polished, intuitive interfaces that the campaign gives supporters to engage with that data -- from the iPhone app to MyBarackObama to Vote for Change -- may well make it the first campaign to truly master the modern art of interfaces. And the White House might be their prize for it. #
Won't You Be My (Similarly Voting) Neighbor?: A playful new video aims to demonstrate how the Obama camp's Neighbor-to-Neighbor tool makes fitting outreach into your life a piece of cake. With Neighbor-to-Neighbor, the video implies, persuading your peers is well within your reach -- even if you happen have a squirmy toddler on your lap. Or are solving a Rubik's Cube. Or are, um, playing a friendly game of Twister with your blockmates, as I often do. ("Right foot on green? Sure! By the way, have you checked out Barack's broadband rollout plan yet") The peppy video doesn't make everyone smile, though. In an email, Shaun Dakin of the National Political Do Not Contact Registry says the video represents his "worst nightmare" -- "a screaming baby calling me." #
Vroom, Vroom: Political Ads Jump into the Gaming Space: Some intriguing political billboards are popping up around Paradise City. Why so compelling? Because Paradise City isn't a town in Ohio or Pennsylvania -- it's the setting for "Burnout Paradise," a popular Xbox Live car-racing game. Game Politics Dennis McCauley shares a report that the Obama campaign is running road-side billboards in the game alerting gamers that early voting has begun. One advantage in-game ads have over traditional billboards is that, since XBox Live is connected to the Internet, the ads can be updated remotely. When it comes to politics, video games may be an untapped market, but some big players like Google and Microsoft are already exploring the potential of in-game ads. Though the tactic does raise a question. When people are already dropping fifty bucks for a game title, how receptive will they be to seeing a billboard for Candidate Jones as they go racing by? (Thanks Brett Schenker) #
TechCongress and Beyond
Legislative Handles = Small Step to a More Open Congress: One of the more infuriating aspects of THOMAS.gov, the Library of Congress's online legislative archive, has long been that actually linking to a document on the site wasn't easily done. Yes, you read that right. THOMAS's records were based on search results that often produced messy -- and temporary -- URLS. In another victory for the Open House Project, the Libary has announced the launch of Legislative Handles, which are human-readable, standardized web addresses that are much less unwieldy than the GET and POST commands that Hill staffers seeking permalinks wrestled with since time immemorial. Some parts of THOMAS still remain link-unfriendly. But if full bill profiles are what you're after, link away. #
In Case You Missed It...
Nancy Scola looks at Tech for Obama, a last-minute push for reluctant technologists to embrace and evangelize Obama.
]]>The Six Million Question Question: The enormous number was breathtaking: six million people sent in questions through the Internet for Tom Brokaw to pose to John McCain and Barack Obama during Tuesday night's presidential town hall in Nashville. Breathtaking -- and entirely wrong. The actual number turns out to be, according to MySpace, the online partner of the Commission on Presidential Debates, just over 25,000. We've done some digging and found out how a casual mention at a luncheon morphed into a nugget of bad news that spread across the globe, from New York to Australia to Tajikistan and beyond. #
Twitter Election Protection Tagging Update: Building on what seems to be growing momentum behind using Twitter as an election protection tool, online organizer Jon Pincus has detailed possible standardized tags that expand the geographic tags proposed on techPresident to include incident type, alert type, and party information. This is an idea with legs; no less than Joe Trippi has said "this could really work." We're reaching out to other groups and allies and should have some updates soon. Stay tuned. #
The Candidates on the Web
Obama Organizers Leaving It on the Field: New Organizing Institute co-founder and president Zack Exley has a remarkable first-hand report on the Obama campaign's field operation from on the ground in central and southwest Ohio. Calling what's happening in the field "what many netroots-oriented campaigners have been dreaming about for a decade," Zack describes an operation that's both top-down and bottom-up. Based on locals, the Obama approach doesn't try to shove square pegs into round holes. Instead, it taps and develops people's unique abilities and interests -- creating something potentially sustainable after election day. Zack's lengthy piece really is a remarkable work of, as our Micah Sifry calls it, "engaged journalism." So pour yourself a second (or third) cup of coffee and give it a read. #
Is Felony Charge Warranted in Palin Email Case?: University of Tennessee student David Kernell has now been indicted for logging into Sarah Palin's Yahoo! email account and posting its contents to the forum site 4chan. (And as if breaking into a vice presidential nominee's email isn't enough to make this digital privacy case newsworthy, Kernell is the son of a Democratic state legislator in Tennessee.) Kernell's facing up to five years in jail. But as Fred Stutzman discusses on techPresident, some legal minds are startled by how what appeared to be a misdemeanor offense turned into a felony -- without, it seems, any explanation by authorities of what additional crime Kernell was guilty of, as the more serious charge requires. On the Volokh Conspiracy, University of Colorado law professor and specialist in computer crime law Paul Ohm offers his succinct opinion: "Strange, strange, strange indictment." #
"We're Looking to Build an Ecosystem": That's Vijay Ravindran, CTO of the progressive data firm Catalist, as quoted in a new piece by Washingtonian's Garrett Graff on the modern state of political datamining and data management. Catalist's modest goal, reports a company official, is to compile "a complete record of every American over the age of 18." Aiding that quest is an advancement in data best practices which tags every citizen with a unique ID that they can carry for life. The Democratic Party has come a long way since the days when, as Garrett colorfully describes, its databases were riddled with junk and errors. And advocates for the sort of microtargeting good data enables say that profiling to detect political inclinations is enormously powerful. With it, they say, campaigns and causes pluck a much-coveted blue household or neighborhood out of a sea of red -- or, of course, vice versa. Skeptics, however, think that past a certain granularity, microtargeting voters is hooey. After November 4th, there's going to be a great deal of interest in figuring out who's more on target. #
Is Tech World Obamaland?: Using donor data from ten large tech companies as a representative sample, ZDNet's Robin Harris finds that tech employees support Obama to McCain at a rate of nine to one. For example, 96% of all Googlers who made contributions to one of those two candidates chose Obama. Similarly, 98% of Apple employees went the Senator from Illinois's way. Still, only 174 Applers chipped in to the coffers of either major party presidential candidate, so there's some untapped political potential in the hills of Cupertino. One company where McCain did quite well, nearly reaching parity with Obama was EMC. Never heard of it? Me neither. Turns out it's a fairly major S&P 500 data storage solution company based in eastern Massachusetts. #
TechCongress and Beyond
Congrats.org!: Our former Associate Editor Josh Levy is now Change.org Managing Editor Josh Levy, and Change.org has just launched an exciting new incarnation as a social blogging network. For a look at what motivated the relaunch and where Change.org goes from here, give a watch to this video of Josh explaining the changes. Newsweek's Brian Braiker has an excellent profile of the new Change.org in which he frames it as a mechanism for harnessing the energy and passion of this election towards achieving long-term social goals. We're biased, yes. But we think the new Change.org is breaking some exciting ground in wired activism. #
We saw glimpses of the potential for this kind of organizing campaign in MoveOn's 2004 and 2006 volunteer operations, the Dean Campaign and even the Bush and Kerry campaigns. And there are great examples of this kind of organizing if you go back to the social movements of several decades ago. But the Obama campaign is the first in the Internet era to realize the dream of a disciplined, volunteer-driven, bottom-up-AND-top-down, distributed and massively scaleable organizing campaign. For anyone who knows how many times this has failed to happen, this is practically an apocryphal event. Marshall Ganz, who is an advisor to the national field campaign, and one of the main architects of the team model, said he's been waiting 40 years for it.
A well-run organizing campaign is the most beautiful thing in the world: people know what they're working for; they have little successes everyday; they prepare for problems ahead of time and have great fun attacking them when they happen. Everyone is in a state of constant euphoria. In the end, win or lose, you have built something that gives you hope for the future—hope that humanity can, as it turns out, work cooperatively towards a better future and succeed.
Zack's writing is the best kind of engaged journalism. Kudos. He's involved in the story, but knowledgeable enough about the contours and detours of grass-roots organizing to illustrate just how and why what the Obama campaign is building is so significant, and to compare it unblinkingly to the failures he saw close up in the Democratic campaign efforts of 2004.
Of course, it's all aimed right now about getting Obama elected. But once you create this kind of self-generating, self-correcting organizing model, and teach thousands of people to successfully use it, you plant very powerful and subversive seeds. We're going to need these kinds of organizers and organization in the coming months and years, because as the economy goes down, social desperation will go up. What's being built by Obama's organizers offers suggestive promise of a something we haven't seen in this country in decades: a genuine organized movement for economic fairness and social solidarity. Or, perhaps, on the basis of Zack's reporting, maybe I should say, Solidarnosc!
]]>Debates' Commission Masterminds Most Somnolent Event: Last night's presidential "town hall" in Nashville hosted by Tom Brokaw was a bust, suggests Micah Sifry. First things first: the word on the street yesterday was that six million votes had poured in through MyDebates.org, the love child of MySpace and the Commission on Presidential Debates. You might remember that we expressed a bit of skepticism about that rather enormous rate of public participation yesterday, and yes, we're bragging, because last night Brokaw pegged the number at a far more plausible "tens of thousands." No matter how many there were, only four "from the Internet" questions were actually asked during the debate. (Answered is a different story -- both candidates made Laila Ali proud with their ability to bob and weave.) So, Micah, how do we fix it? Luckily, he's got ideas, and they center around finally grasping that we have the tools to handle living in a world of abundance. (By the way, we'd love to ask the CPD how many questions actual came in online, but their website lists no contact information -- or even a debate schedule. Democracy!) If you're newly interested in the idea of debate reform, Open Debates is a good place to start. #
Forget Ohio Undecideds -- Debate Feedback for Everyone: NPR social media bloke Andy Carvin's launched an intriguing last-minute "distributed dial testing" Twitter experiment yesterday. To participate, you simply included a one to ten rating of the candidates in your tweet, set off by asterisks. (For example, like what the Republican nominee had to say about Pakistan? Tweet "Amen on Waziristan *McCain 8.5*") Using the brand spanking new Twitter visual charting service Plodt, the dial test experiment pulled in 824 submissions from 84 people. A commenter on NPR.org had praise for the effort: "Watching debate used to be pretty 'passive.' Twittering has definitely made this whole experience so much more active." As Andy acknowledged the results should be taken with a grain of salt. On number of followers alone, Twitter is clearly Obama territory. His average rating last night was a healthy 7.2. By contrast McCain's was just 2.2 -- skewed, it seems, by a fair number of goose eggs. #
The Candidates on the Web
Web Video: Like Press Releases, Only More Awesome: Online video ad spots offer campaigns the chance, of course, to push the edges of the envelope without dropping the coin it would take to do the same on the teevee box. But National Journal's Amy Harder explores the message and meaning of web video and, interestingly, finds online experts in complete disagreement over who campaigns are attempting to reach with their videos -- the media, undecideds, the base? (We suspect the real answer is along the lines of "Those people who responded? Yep, that's who we were after.") Conservative consultant David All smartly says that web ads are "the new press release," able to raise "the specter of [an] issue a degree or two above what a press release would do." (On the topic of web video and keeping up with our Keating Economics watch, that 13 minute documentary has been viewed 1.1 million times since its release Monday.) #
In Case You Missed It...
Justin Oberman reports that video micro-blogging service Seesmic and the Washington Post have just formed a partnership, eager to see if traditional media and new media can make beautiful music together.
And Zephyr Teachout asks us all for thoughts on how marshal the facts needed to respond to an email from Mike Huckabee that falsely claims that former Fannie Mae chief Franklin Raines is Obama's "Chief Economic Advisor." "I know where to go for falsehoods," writes Zephyr. "What's the best place to go for truth?" Got ideas for Zephyr? Be sure to drop them in the comments.
]]>For some reason, this screenshot from MySpace's homepage captures the disconnect for me.
Citizen Debate Qs are One in a Million: "At least six million questions have been submitted via the Internet to be asked at the town-hall-style presidential debate Tuesday," reports the New York Times' Katharine Q. Seelye. "The moderator, Tom Brokaw of NBC News, is sifting through those millions of questions to find six or seven that he might pose." Yeah, um, let's hope Brokaw has a posse of twelve thousand interns, because there's no way he's getting through those alone. (While we're on the topic, six million does seem like an awfully large number of questions to come in through MySpace.) Seems a shame that the Presidential Debate Commission didn't choose to partner with, say, Digg or 10Questions.com to lend eyeballs and judgment to the effort. And given that Barack Obama affirmed his "support [for] the use of such technology" in the debates, we have to wonder why they didn't push a bit for that sort of arrangement. Aside from Brokaw's questions, about a dozen more will come from the 100 members of the Nashville-area audience, hand-selected by Gallup to find who are "truly uncommitted." #
Which Boogeyman is Besting Google Trends?: Just after the Obama campaign launched its mini documentary on Charles Keating yesterday, and with team McCain (and particularly running mate Sarah Palin) hitting away on Bill Ayers, Politico's Ben Smith reported that a snap shot of Google's Hot Trends was showing much more interest in the S&L figure than the former Weatherman. Perhaps, but at least one keyword query on Google Trends shows more sustained interest in Ayers than Keating. In other web metric news, the, frankly, somewhat dry and meandering "Keating Economics" mini doc has been viewed more than 600,000 times. #
The Candidates on the Web
Woo: GOP Brings a Bullhorn to a Strategic Invasion: Responding to CIO Insight's Ed Cone's recent series on the presidential candidate's ground campaigns, the Berkman Center's Gene Koo argues that, when it comes to the Internet, the GOP is doing it all wrong: "The Republicans' use of the Internet as a marketing space rather than a networking space reflects their strategic emphasis on the 'air war' over the 'ground war.' This is a mistake, not only because a similar strategic calculation put the Democrats on the defensive for the past several decades, but because the Internet is NOT broadcast television or radio." #
McCain's Mastering the Art of Ghost Videos: Campaign videos like the McCain team's "Celeb" ad may air as paid TV spots only a few times and in a handful of markets, but they can still be seen by millions -- both as earned media when news shows rerun them and on YouTube. That's powerful bang for only a few bucks. Here's our own Andrew Rasiej, in a piece on the power of web video by the Dallas Morning News' Karen Brooks: "The McCain campaign has skillfully taken advantage of the phenomenon of ghost videos... They put them online knowing full well that supporters will distribute them for them, regardless of whether the campaign continues to promote them or not." #
TechCongress and Beyond
With New Regs and Congressional Twidget, Time for Hill to Twitter: Now that the powers-that-be in the House of Representatives have revised internal web rules to free congresspeoples to start Twittering, the Sunlight Foundation has whipped up a Capitol Tweet widget. Embed away! While Congresspedia has an evolving wiki of governmental Twitterers, I've got my own list Capitol Hill characters I'd love to hear from first-hand. Let's see. Barney Frank. Orrin Hatch. Eleanor Holmes Norton. Barney Frank. Arlen Specter. Jan Schakowsky. Scott Garrett. Dick Durbin. Tom Davis (well, for the next couple months, at least). Leave your own in the comments. Dearest @Congress: Only half the American population doesn't think we'd get a better legislature picking names from a phonebook. So it's not like jumping on the Twitter bandwagon is going to exactly hurt your reputation. Now's a good time as any to get yourself a copy of David All's Twitter 101 guide. #
In Case You Missed It...
Nancy Scola and Allison Fine explore the idea that Twitter just might prove to be a hundred-and-forty-character election protection powerhouse.
Micah Sifry has a look at Internet Attention Deficit Disorder and...hang on, lemme just check my Gmail...okay, sorry...and asks...ooh, a new Facebook friend request!...and, we're back, apologies...if we're all part of a networked community or a hyperconnected mob.
]]>Over Labor Day weekend, I spent some time with a very smart group of engineers, quantitative analysts, and e-activists, all of whom were wrestling with the question of whether the internet could contribute to solving the climate crisis, and while everyone had something to say, we didn't do a very good job of thinking together. As we all sat with our laptops open, half-listening while we tapped away on our email or Twitter-feeds, I wondered, have we all caught Internet attention-deficit-disorder?
Now we're all watching Wall Street's continuing meltdown, and thousands, maybe even millions, of us are trying to answer that age-old political question, "What is to be done?" But the spike in online discussion of the economic crisis--Ari Melber noted in The Nation a huge surge in references to the bailout in the blogosphere over the last week--hasn't exactly resulted in clarity about what to do.
As Nancy Scola posted a few days ago, uber-geek Robert Scoble is throwing his hands up in the air at all the armchair punditizing going on, and declaring his intention to turn his attention back toward the very elites who supposedly had their hands on the wheel steering us into this mess! (Not David Brooks, Scoble!)
The problem with information overload, and interaction overload, may well be hardwired in our brains--the so-called "Dunbar number" of 150 being the rough limit of how many people we can actually have a real relationship with. But we can definitely do a better job building and sharing better filters for dealing with these overloads. Now, more than ever, we need to take this problem of collaborative cogitation seriously--otherwise all the web is doing is making it easier for more people to talk to each other, but not necessarily to listen to each other.
As Mark Pesce, who keynoted PdF this year with a provocative talk on the new age of hyper-mimesis and hyper-connection, says in a fresh post on his blog:
Four years ago, when I began my research into sharing and social networks, I asked a basic question: Will we find some way to transcend this biological limit, break free of the tyranny of cranial capacity, grow beyond the limits of Dunbar’s Number?
After all, we have the technology. We can hyperconnect in so many ways, through so many media, across the entire range of sensory modalities, it is as if the material world, which we have fashioned into our own image, wants nothing more than to boost our capacity for relationship.
And now we have two forces in opposition, both originating in the mind. Our old mind hews closely to the community and Dunbar’s Number. Our new mind seeks the power of the mob, and the amplification of numbers beyond imagination. This is the central paradox of the early 21st century, this is the rift which will never close. On one side we are civil, and civilized. On the other we are awesome, terrible, and terrifying. And everything we’ve done in the last fifteen years has simply pushed us closer to the abyss of the awesome.
We can not reasonably put down these new weapons of communication, even as they grind communities beneath them like so many old and brittle bones. We can not turn the dial of history backward. We are what we are, and already we have a good sense of what we are becoming. It may not be pretty – it may not even feel human – but this is things as they are.
Mark argues that we are caught between our need to belong to real functioning human-scale communities and our tendency to be sucked into larger, mob-like behavior, and offers a way out of this nightmare: make our communities smarter by harnessing the power of the mob, i.e. crowdsourcing.
...every time we gather together in our hyperconnected mobs to crowdsource some particular task, we become better informed, we become more powerful. Which means it becomes more likely that the hyperconnected mob will come together again around some other task suited to crowdsourcing, and will become even more powerful. That system of positive feedbacks – which we are already quite in the midst of – is fashioning a new polity, a rewritten social contract, which is making the institutions of the 19th and 20th centuries – that is, the industrial era – seem as antiquated and quaint as the feudal systems which they replaced.
It is not that these institutions are dying, but rather, they now face worthy competitors. Democracy, as an example, works well in communities, but can fail epically when it scales to mobs. Crowdsourced knowledge requires a mob, but that knowledge, once it has been collected, can be shared within a community, to hyperempower that community. This tug-of-war between communities and crowds is setting all of our institutions, old and new, vibrating like taught strings.
I think that Mark is right that we're constantly discovering and playing with new patterns for collaboration. Everything from the rise of the netroots to the rise of Twitter #hashtag campaigns are examples of new forms of self-organization and collaboration. But here's the thing: we're in danger of rushing so fast into the future of networked communication, playing with our new tools and inventing new ones, that we'll never get really get the crowdsourcing-->community effects refined that we need. ("Dean done right," some people used to call it.)
Anthony Citrano, one of the founders of PopTech, expresses part of what I'm thinking in this post, which he titled "Breadlines and Battlecries." Addressing A-list bloggers like Scoble, he wrote:
I’m not asking you to give up your gadgets nor to stop blogging about blogging. Social media is unquestionably transforming our global culture and our politics. But let’s devote less energy to the tools themselves and more to the fuller realization of their potential. I suggest a little less time navel-gazing and a little more time using your voices, tools and networks to catalyze broad, deep, honest conversations about public policy. And it will be contagious: in doing so, you will set an example for the millions who will see and hear you.
Citrano's point is that we need more focus and less chatter; more signal, less noise; more attention to serious civic issues, less on ephemera. I think we also need better tools and practices in how we use the social web to make sense of our times, and it's time for political technologists to make more of an effort to congeal that conversation. Do you agree? If so, will you join me in such a conversation, if, for example, we were to pick a time for a monthly conference call for everyone who might be interested in joining in?
]]>SSA has just posted a press release on this situation. My favorite line is this:
"Delaying the shutdown into 2009 would pose a small, but not insignificant, risk of a major interruption of service..."
A few problems here. No one that I"m aware of it asking them to postpone the maintenance until 2009 -- just three weeks beyond the original date. And it's it's such a small risk, well, then what's the problem with waiting a few more days -- you've already waited all year to do it.
This gumming up of the process is exacerbated by the increase in early voting. Twenty-three states have early voting starting very soon, 14-18 days before the election. Most states also now have no-fault absentee or mail-in voting that is starting very soon as well - at least the application process for absentee ballots has started in many states. All of these processes will be slowed for some voters because of the delay at SSA as well.
]]>We know. It sounds ridiculous at first. But it might not be as crazy as you think. For far too long, the job of election protection has fallen largely to lawyers schooled in election law. But there's an opportunity before us right now and through Election Day for thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of citizens to identify and rectify voting problems in real time. Enter Twitter.
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We know. It sounds ridiculous at first. But it might not be as crazy as you think.
Why not? Well, here’s what we’re thinking. We all know that American elections can be messy affairs. As longtime online organizer Jon Pincus recently noted, "voter suppression relies to a large extent on information asymmetry." That imbalance, if not corrected for, can create just enough hoops that discourage all but the most motivated among us from jumping through them on our way to voting. From voter caging to misleading fliers to faulty machinery to the long waits exacerbated by poorly trained poll workers, it's often a lack of knowing that jams up the process.
And for far too long, the job of election protection has fallen largely to lawyers schooled in election law. But there's an opportunity before us right now and through Election Day for thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of citizens to identify and rectify voting problems in real time.
Enter Twitter. In its few years of existence Twitter has proven amazingly adept at one thing: empowering its users to move around 140-character-or-less chunks around quickly and agilely. How Twitter is being used for political ends is constantly evolving. And while Twitter is easiest to use on the Web, it's a one-to-one and one-to-many and many-to-many communications powerhouse available to anyone with a cell phone in his or her pocket. That's powerful, potentially game-changing stuff.
We believe that Twitter can be instrumental in this election in correcting for some of the information imbalances that plagues American elections:
There are obvious reasons why Twitter won't work as an antidote to all of our election troubles. And there's the ever-present risk of the Fail Whale making an appearance. That charming cartoon that alerted users to a downed system was far too familiar in the service's early days. That said, Twitter has been markedly more stable in recent months. (Though not, alas, without problems.) And tens of millions of Americans will be casting ballots at over 200,000 polling places on November 4th, making the monitoring of events nationwide overwhelming.
However, there is an intersection of heavy voting registration (coinciding with large number of young voters) in battleground precincts in Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina Ohio and Colorado where Twitter can best be put to use to direct Tweeters to specific information or actions in specific election districts.
So, let’s begin. To get the ball rolling, we’re suggesting one standardized format for hashtagging election protection tweets to use as voting registration is drawing to a close in most states and early voting is starting. It goes like this: [state] + [first four letters of the county] + [precinct, if known]. So, in downtown Cleveland, for example, the hashtag would be #OHCuya07. Of course, that format won’t work for every election problem. But we know the web can come up with something.
(Thanks to Jon Pincus, Slate's Christopher Beam, The Progressive States Networks, and others for ideas and inspiration.)
]]>One Million's Moneybomb: Can a loosely-organized Facebook group best the biggest name progressive blogs when it comes to fundraising? That's the question that longtime online organizer Jon Pincus is asking. And it seems possible that a moneybomb effort launched by the One Million Strong for Barack Facebook group, which has pulled in nearly $28,000 from more than 850 people, might indeed put the group on the leaderboard ranked somewhere alongside MyDD and OpenLeft -- though below the Daily Kos empire's Orange to Blue campaign that has pulled in (some $800,000 so far, reports Jon). Though, it should be noted, those campaigns are for a full slate of Dem candidates, not just Barack Obama. #
Catholic Battle Over Votes Moves to YouTube: Ever since Obama selected Joe Biden as his running mate, we're heard a lot about the role that the Catholic vote will play in states like Pennsylvania and Michigan. But when it comes to who Catholics might cast a ballot for, Church officials and advocates aren't letting the campaigns dictate to them -- or be the only ones using social media to persuade voters. Time Magazine recently reported that YouTube is home to "a wildly diverse collection of pastors, rabbis, imams, gurus, and pious laypeople." And with the battle over which party's ticket better captures Catholic thinking heating up in places like Biden's hometown of Scranton, churches around the country are embedding on their websites "Catholic Vote 08," a somber 3-minute YouTube video that doesn't endorse a candidate but declares that the most important issue this election is simply put, "life." #
The Candidates on the Web
Obama Tries to Connects the Dots with Keating Doc: The Obama campaign has kept its powder dry on the so-called Keating Five scandal -- the savings and loan controversy from the early '90s which found John McCain criticized by the Senate ethics committee for his relationship with California S&L figure Charles Keating. Until now. At noon ET today, the Obama campaign is releasing a 13 minute documentary shot in a polished doc style that would do Errol Morris proud. Politico's Mike Allen has more on the strategy behind the campaign's Keating focus. With a microsite built around the film at KeatingEconomics.com, what could have been dismissed as a dredging up of ancient history actually ties the Keating scandal to a powerful theme: that the crony corporatism witnessed during the S&L mess is still at play during our current economic crisis. That's a tough case to make in 30 second TV spot or two minute web ad -- much easier to lay it out in a 13 minute mini-film. And hey, why not launch it right at lunchtime east coast time, when people are looking for a little entertainment? The innovative technique all but guarantees it will attract attention: the trailer for the film has already gotten more than 270,000 views. Worth nothing is the contrast between this and how the McCain camp is treating the situation involving former Weatherman Bill Ayers -- as much as McCain would love to highlight the connection between Ayers and Obama, neither his campaign nor the RNC has produced anything like what team Obama is doing here with Keating; a search for "Ayers" on JohnMcCain.com, for example, produces this: No documents were found."#
New Site Boils Down McCain: Do the elves in the Obama web shop ever take a break? The campaign has launched a minimalist but visually striking JohnMcCainRecord.com that displays three simple things team Obama thinks every voter should know about their opponent on Iraq, education, energy and ten other critical issue areas. Pick a topic, and the nuggets of information display bam, bam, bam. Each is linked to a primary source -- whether video or text. And, natch, a link to the Obaman take on the topic in question. It's old content in a shiny new package, but it works. #
Your Social Data Dashboard: If you find yourself drowning in the tidal wave of social media data that's constantly being produced around this election, have a look at Perspctv's dead-simple charts. They're a dashboard on what's being said and done about the presidential candidates doing online. (Thanks Shaun Dakin) #
TechCongress and Beyond
Hoekstra Tweets His Angst: Twitter has revealed an honest congressman, says the Municipalist's Craig Colgan. Just before the House vote on the revised bailout bill last week, Michigan Republican Representative Pete Hoekstra tweeted: "Deciding what to do on bailout bill.What a disappointment that Ds put junk into the bill and that Rs leadership supported it.Pathetic. [sic]" Why' does Hoekstra's impassioned tweeting make Craig such a fan? "This humanizes him, and brings him down with the rest of us, frustrated, angry, worried, tired of partisanship for its own sake." (FWIW, Hoekstra ended up voting yes.) #
Protection Wiki Moves to Election Mainstream: Picking up on an idea launched by Jack and Jill Politics's Baratunde Thurston, the non-profit, non-partisan Center for Media and Democracy has launched its own Election Protection Wiki. #
In Case You Missed It...
Luigi Montanez asks if a Republican National Committee's FEC filing against Obama is actually based on a fake email.
Michael Whitney highlights An Obama Minute, today's ambitious effort that aims to raise a million dollars for Obama from noon to 12:01, "helped along by an interactive billboard in Times Square."
"[F]rankly it's f---ing brilliant," says Micah Sifry about a huge electronic billboard that the California Democratic Party arranged to display text messages during a Sarah Palin speech in L.A. -- a gambit that was then streamed back to the web via UStream.
Nancy Scola looks at how the largely closed second presidential debate happening tomorrow night in Nashville has one teensy-weensy opening: a chance to whisper in moderator Tom Brokaw's ear.
And, finally, Allison Fine follows up a post on the five reasons you may have trouble voting this fall with an update on how the Social Security Administration is shutting down its databases right at the time it'd be most helpful for verifying ID-less voters.
]]>According to the SSA, this is the same time of year that it has updated their database for sixteen years. But, as the Senator's staff pointed out, this is only the second time since the (HAVA) regulations have kicked in requiring states to use the SSA database to verify citizenship for people without state-sponsored ID (meaning, mainly, driver's licenses.) It happened in 2006, but the voter turnout was not nearly as high then as it will be this year. A meeting is starting right now, 4 pm on Friday, in DC that the Senator's staff organized between the House and Senate subcommittees on election administration and a representative of the SSA to discuss this issue further.
The SSA shutdown has the potential to be a devastating blow to states and local municipalities that are frantically preparing for huge voter turnouts on November 4th. And, of course, to disenfranchise millions of voters who have done their part in filling out the voter registration paperwork.
Stay tuned, I'll report more when I hear it from the Senator's staff.
]]>Short Bursts of @Politics: Medill Reports's Jason M. Breslow has a roundup of how Twitter is being used for politics these days. We're seeing folks use it to debate, to share ideas, to organize (though, as Jason mentions, we're not seeing either Barack Obama and John McCain use it to good effect). Witnessing the evolution of how people are pulling and shaping Twitter to fit their own political purposes is downright fascinating. It feels like watching an otter figure out how to open an oyster with a rock. Perhaps no Twitter experiment was more fascinating during last night's Sarah Palin vs. Joe Biden debate than NPR's Fact Check. Those of us watching the debate were invited to spot questionable claims, link them to a primary source, and tweet the package with the #factcheck hashtag. Also on the evolution-of-Twitter front, Nancy Scola (nee me) suggests that -- forget websites and domain names -- hashtags are the new new way to organize the world: "like OpenID for ideas." With that mind, we're building a compendium of active political hashtags; please drop your favorites in the comments. #
Spread It to Your Closest Friends: With appearances by such luminaries as Leonardo DiCaprio, will i. am, Dustin Hoffman, Jennifer Aniston, Eva Longoria, Ellen DeGeneres, Forest Whitaker and more than a dozen other celebs, the new "5 Friend" voter video is like lunchtime at the Ivy. Pointing viewers to the most excellent Google Maps voting information interface, this video really, really wants to go viral -- "5 friends" is a reference to how many people you should be sending it to. (Though those efforts may be hampered by the fact that the five-minute piece seems a little endless. I guess you don't tell Leo to zip it.) Sarah Silverman, as per usual, cuts to the chase: the goal here is to make sending around the video "rampant, like herpes -- but for positive." #
The Candidates on the Web
With iPhone App, Obama's Wins by Letting Outsiders In: While we showered some praise yesterday on the Obama iPhone app, techPresident contributor Michael Whitney asked why bother with little over a month left in the campaign. But conservative consultant Patrick Ruffini is a much bigger fan. He leads his comprehensive review by saying "it's good." After a few more iterations, predicts Patrick, it will be "a truly killer political app." What's most remarkable here is that the Obama iPhone app is actually the fruit of a relationship between the Obama campaign and a team of ten or so volunteers, led by iPhone developer Raven Zachary. Using a suite of open source goodies, the team whipped together the app in about a month. The project marks a clever tapping of Obama's tech-savvy creative-class supporter base. There's is a decentralized/centralized campaign with internal nodes willing to harness the power of that network -- in this case, the Obama campaign's Director for External Organizing Scott Goodstein, who came out of a grassroots organizing background. Team Obama let a thousand flowers blossom, spread a little fertilizer of their own, and then picked the prettiest ones. Brilliant. Groundbreaking. #
Ground Game Case Study: Nevada: The Christian Science Monitor's Ben Arnoldy asks the million-dollar question: can people-powered outreach really win presidential elections? It's tough to know yet, because polling doesn't always pick up activity at the margins. But Ben takes Nevada as an example, and has some interesting findings. First, the Obama campaign's program there has produced one tangible gain: by a 93,000 voter margin, more Democrats are registered to vote than Republicans. That's a flip-flopping of Nevada's traditional breakdown. And second, the McCain campaign is having success pin-pointing their outreach with a "high-tech, streamlined approach." (Details in the piece.) "It’s not where you live, it's how you live," says the head of McCain's Nevada campaign." Ben gently pushes back by saying that "some experts...consider micro-targeting to be mostly hooey." Ha. Hooey. What a great word. I should use that... #
Is Behavioral Targeting Hooey? Or Just Creepy?: National Journal's David Herbert notes that a poll released Thursday from Consumer Reports National Research Center found that 54% of respondents said they were troubled by the idea of their online habits being tracked. And while Congress has concernedly held hearings on behavioral targeting, political campaigns from the presidentials on down the ballot are, reports David, using making use of the practice this election cycle. Might behavioral targeting fall into the realm of what technology makes possible but maybe we shouldn't do until we understand it better -- you know, like making monkey-human hybrids? #
TechCongress and Beyond
House Web Regs Enter 21st Century: They said it couldn't be done. But the House of Representatives has indeed updated its web regulations to loosen restrictions on Members of Congress communicating through third-party websites, whether that be Twitter or YouTube or Qik or what have you. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is rather pleased, and thanks the Open House Project in her remarks. Some habits die hard, though. The House is still insisting on an archaic "exit notice" telling visitors when they're leaving House.gov and entering the wilds of the Internet. Honestly, does anyone who knows how to use a computer in 2008 ever really find themselves befuddled about where they end up on online? "Sweet Mary, a minute ago I was visiting Congressman Smith's virtual office, and here I am now on somethin' called the YouTube..." #
When You Care Enough to Send the Very Snarkiest: If you're still searching for that completely jerky way to push your lazy friends to vote, look no further. BotherVoting.org, a project of someecards and other partners, has that perfect pro-vote message, whether it's "sorry the country is so [fouled] up that you need to bother voting" or "voting is the perfect way to not feel like an [doofus] when someone asks if you voted." (via Ruby Sinreich) #
Enormous efforts have been made by campaigns and public interest groups to register people to vote on November 4th. According to the Election Assistance Commission more than 2 million poll workers will be working at over 200,000 polling places this election. Unfortunately, what these new voters don’t know is that just registering to vote may not ensure that they are able to vote on Election Day or that their vote will be counted. Here are the top 5 ways that voters will be disenfranchised before and on Election Day.
1. Twenty-seven states close their voter registration the first week of October; another 12 will follow shortly thereafter. Too many states continue to cut off registration just as most people are beginning to tune into the election. Election Day Registration (EDR) in nine states (Maine, Wisconsin, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Iowa, North Carolina) has demonstrated that it is an efficient and problem-free way for 10-12% more citizens to participate on Election Day.
2. The Social Security Administration is shutting down its database, the one needed to verify registrations for people without state-issued IDS for three days in mid-October. This “routine maintenance” putting in jeopardy the ability of forty-one, slow moving states to verify millions of new registrants in time for Election Day for voters without state-issued IDs. (Here is a letter sent by the National Association of Secretaries of State asking the SSAS to move the maintenance until after November.) Millions of people may have properly filled out their registration forms but not make it onto the roles if this maintenance continues as scheduled.
3. Voter Purge, a report released from the Brennan Center for Justice this week reveals that, “election officials across the country are routinely striking millions of voters from the rolls through a process that is shrouded in secrecy, prone to error, and vulnerable to manipulation.” Millions of names will be struck from voter registration roles in advance of the November 4th election – and your name is struck in error you won’t know until you show up at the polls – and it’s too late to change it.
4. As I have written before, the new machines are no better than the old machines which were much worse than hand ballots. During the primary season, municipalities were testing optical scan machines, and many failed. Others have been furiously buying new machines that won't be tested before November 4th. The new machines are no better than the old machines which were much worse than hand ballots. How many times will we hear on election night that votes have been cast and lost or just plain lost? Moreover, how many elections are we going to keep hearing this?
5. You remember those pictures form 2004 and 2006 of voters waiting for hours to cast their ballots – up to 12 hours in some cases in the rain and cold. Our voting system is a mechanical engineer's nightmare. The biggest bottleneck in the process of voting is checking in to ensure that voters are registered to vote – this is a human interaction that is slow and tedious. It’s the same reason that the lines at Starbucks are so long. I spoke to a person in the registrar’s office in Fairfax County, VA who told me that they had increased the number of recruited poll workers from 2,600 in 2004 to 3,100 this year, with more to come by the deadline on Monday. Monday coincides with the voter registration deadline in Virginia which has already seen an almost 6% increase in voter registration statement from January –September 15th. But here’s the real problem: There is no way to know until Election Day if they will a) show up, b) been adequately trained for the job and c) are enough of them to account for the expected surge in voting in critical voting areas like Cuyahoga County, OH, Palm Beach County, FL.
So register to vote -- and then cross your fingers that you your vote will be cast and counted on Election Day - in some states your chances aren't so good.
]]>Finding a Voice, Using It: Now's a good time to ask, what the heck happened with the defeat of the bailout bill on Capitol Hill on Monday? Our own Micah Sifry has an intriguing look at whether we've witnessed Washington shaking loose a bit from the grasp of Wall Street and the power of big-money donors being balanced by an re-empowered electorate. "Ordinary people," writes Micah "want more of a say in the process, so they're starting to pool their money and their voices, and they've learned--thanks to the Internet--that they can have an impact." Zephyr Teachout suggests that modern decentralized campaigns a la Ron Paul and Howard Dean have created "cultures...strongly opposed to the shift to massive executive power over the purse as imagined by the bailout proposal." To appropriate a concept from the Berkman Center's Ethan Zuckerman, maybe all these years we've spent posting cute cat pictures on the Internet have developed muscles now being flexed to put pressure on Washington. #
The View from the West Coast: That said, a FriendFeed debate captured by Valley Wag shows some prominent Californians wrestling with the question of whether all that cat-picture posting is somehow trivial. FastCompany TV's Robert Scoble is fed up with empowering amateurs: "I find I'm looking to experts and elites more and more, because the crap I'm seeing out of all of our mouths is just so, um, wrong." Robert took a swipe at Anthony Citrano, perhaps best known as the co-founder of the Pop!Tech conference, who responded with his own view of what a wired citizenry should do in our uncertain economic times. "I'm not asking you to give up your gadgets nor to stop blogging about blogging," writes Anthony, "but... I suggest a little less time navel-gazing and a little more time using your voices, tools and networks to catalyze broad, deep, honest conversations about public policy." Interesting debate. #
Googlifying the Election Process: Ooor, use those techie chops for good! Google has jumped into the electoral mix a new Google Maps-powered voter registration interface. So much of what ails elections in the U.S. can be traced to information deficit. Google knows how to handle information. You, as they say, do the math. The League of Women Voters is populating the effort with data, but the execution is pure Google. I sloppily put in just my street address -- no city or state -- and Google quickly flung back details on how long I have left to register to vote. Google's also behind the Voter Information Project, an admirable effort to standardize hodgepodge of state voter materials. #
Playing the Debate Game: Debate? What debate? Oh, there's a debate tonight. The Internet has bubbled up some ways to play along with Palin vs. Biden. There's the #bidenshot hashtag on Twitter, an organic and evolving game that lifts a jigger every time, as Dave Winer explains, the Democratic VP nominee "says 'Ladies & Gentleman' or calls McCain 'John.'" With Palin Bingo, mark a square every time the GOP VP candidate utters the words "pit bull," "maverick" or "gotcha journalism." PalinBingo.com also supplies handy blank cards, so you can craft your own game. #
The Candidates on the Web
Obama in Your Pocket: Wow. The Obama campaign has released a gorgeous new iPhone app. Its coolness: 1) it organizes your contacts according to swing state and keeps track of who you've called to stump for Obama; 2) a "get involved" feature uses the iPhone's built-in GPS to direct you to the nearest Obama campaign headquarters and local campaign events; and 3) it comes loaded with a pocket policy guide that gives one-touch access to the Obama plan on everything from civil rights to women's issues. #
TechCongress and Beyond
In Case You Missed It...
David All reports that John McCain has joined Twitter, "but not really." David has suggestions for how McCain can catch up to Barack Obama on the Twitter front.
Nancy Scola details how proponents and opponents of California's Proposition 8 on same-sex marriage are waging the battle online.
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