Category: Social Software

I’ve read and participated in various discussions contrasting the top-down, direct-mail, action-oriented approach to polical action, and the blog-and-forum , bottom-up, decentralized, discussion-oriented approach.
This classic by Alex Steffen at Worldchanging predicts a “move from centralized, mass-market NGOs to advocacy networks driven by members.”
This month’s Personal Democracy Forumessay praises efforts at TrueMajority and Common Cause to open the traditionally centralized advocacy culture to solicit member input.
I don’t think the approaches are as far apart as they seem, and we’re just wanting a few new tools and models to get “best of both worlds” power to swarm and act.
Today, self-organized groups can easily and cheaply publish and discuss with blogs and mailing lists.
Where the pros have the advantage in the member database behind the mailing list and action alerts. Yahoo groups and similar tool lets an administrator see who’s a member and set moderation policies. But they don’t have features to track how many people have responded to an action alert. Also, they don’t have a good way to manage overlapping memberships.
The world needs hosted and open source tools that give this power to bottom up groups. I think we’ll start seeing this in larger of blog activist communities, starting with groups like Kos and maybe TalkingPoints Memo (to pick a couple of left-of-center examples). In those communities, sub-groups will start creating and managing action alerts as segments of the core group.
Today, this approach seems unthinkable for today’s centralized groups, which manage their mailing list like Fort Knox. But when you look closer, the fortress has a few doors. Today, it’s possible for a grassroots group to traverse the social network to get an action posted in a major group. But it takes old-fashioned social networking.
The fortresses are not going to become public squares any time soon. But there will be acknowledged ways for building trust. Volunteers will be able to progress from clicking through on an action, to writing blog posts and co-ordinating other volunteers, to managing sub-campaigns.
It doesn’t seem that hard to me to bridge the “action gap” — the tools are well-known, and just need to get cheaper and more accessible. The value is really obvious — letters and dollars.
Alex Stephen also foretells the rise of bottom-up social networking.

advocacy networks encourage relationships. Advocacy networks want their members to connect to each other. Advocacy networks are a form of social software, like Friendster, Tribe.net or the Omidyar Network. That means, at the most basic level, that your working relationships are not subject to the control of any third-party organization.

This approach seems further away to me, because the basic tools don’t quite exist yet. The Friendster/Tribe/O.Net systems that exist today are too centralized and tightly coupled. We need the equivalent of a permalink, subscription format, and hosted service for linkable mini-nets.
LiveJournal but more extroverted.
The non-corporate solutions I’ve seen in the space have been targeted at different problems — easing the single sign-on inconvenience (IDCommons, SXIP), declaring one’s relationships (XFN) — rather than easily snapping one’s profile into a new group.
Probably the fastest way for this to happen is for one of the existing, popular services to create profile permalinks and a published data model.
In the areas of action, fundraising, and networking, the pyramid can get a lot flatter. New organizations will grow up pioneering these methods, and older organizations will adapt.

Online organizing sites of all political stripes often include petitions to sign.
What’s bizarre is that these petitions are sometimes posted at the same time that there is a live bill making its way through the legislature.
If that’s the case, why would a constituent want to sign a petition, instead of contacting their representative directly?
The reason is that the organizing organization is primarily interested in capturing your email address to re-use. In some cases, the organization includes a privacy policy, telling you that you’ve just signed up for a mailing list. In other cases, such as the online appraisal petition, there is no privacy policy posted.
Since the early days of internet commerce, many consumers have gotten justifiably wary of contests, coupons, and other excuses to get signed up for an endless flow of spam.
Online organizing is in an earlier stage, and citizens are probably more trusting of the intentions of groups who are helping them take action.
The message for citizens is to be skeptical of petitions that don’t have privacy policies, and to contact your representative directly, instead of signing a petition.
The message to advocacy organizations is to be honest. If you’re giving citizens the opportunity to stay informed by joining a mailing list, say so upfront.

The technology brainstorming by the Politology blog has some interesting implications for connections between political tactics and social software. The next few posts explore the connections.

The Politology post suggested that political activists adopt the tools typically used by open source projects to manage large projects with decentralized contributions.
The article suggests:

A public issue-tracking system: These have existed for software developers for a while – bugzilla; mantis – but they’re so obtuse that only geeks get into them. Plus, they tend to only be for actual bugfixing of existing issues. There needs to be a new system where a community can

1. Identify an objective
2. Start working to publicly create tasks supporting that objective
3. Assign those tasks to willing community members
4. Track progress and make reports It’s similar to bugtracking, but instead for public use and activism.

This suggestion raises questions about the organizational processes for using these tools effectively. Open source projects use various different organizational structures for managing releases and maintaining quality.
A bugtracking tool alone doesn’t drive an open source project, and an action tool alone won’t drive a campaign. The tools enable large-scale, effective collaboration, but they don’t cause the collaboration — leadership and organizational processes do.
Similarly, the politology article calls for:

A better “volunteer tracking” system. A marketplace for matching up projects with specialized needs, with people that have specialized skills. Someone who needs a thirty-second music soundtrack for their political ad, or a large tab-delimited text file of precinct data put into a mysql database, should be able to define those needs somewhere for someone else to snap up. I can do either of those things, but no one would know it without that service.

There have been a number of these volunteer markets already — does anyone know how effective they are? Do any of them have critical mass in a domain area? Any metrics about successful matches made?
Since people engage in political action as part of broader motivations for affiliation and purpose, one might think that a “volunteer market” might be most effective in the context of a broader social network — either centralized by an organization like MoveOn, or decentralized like a network of blogs. Or perhaps, as part of overall flea market like Craig’s List, where you can find volunteer opportunities along with apartments, jobs and lovers.
Yochai Benkler’s classic “Coase’s Penguin” theorizes that “peer production” will arise where there is a vast supply of decentralized skills, low transaction costs, and low communication costs. It stands to reason that these dynamics will come into play with political action as well.
The “issue tracking” and “volunteer tracking” tools described in the article are part of the toolset used to co-ordinate large peer-production projects.
And yet. The “invisible hand” of Adam Smith’s capitalist free market allocates resources effectively in complex societies. Despite the “invisible hand” there are many business schools that teach people how to set up and succeed at a capitalist enterprise.
Similarly, the “peer organizing” enabled by cheap coordination requires its own set of learnable organizing practices. Web-based organizing tools have promise, but they require human organizing to make them effective, just like any other domain.

The weblog and syndication model enables a “remix culture” — information is readily available, freely discoverable, and easily recombined.
Two of the politology suggestions for activist technology imply this model, and can be extended further along these lines.
Politology suggests:

A congress tracking system: There should be a system where any bill can be readable as text, annotated by the public, with discussion underneath. It should be hooked up to a congressperson-tracking system so we can track how they have been contacted by the public, what they think of the bill, and how they are likely to vote. It should be easy to look up a congressperson’s complete vote history.

Yes and… this suggestion doesn’t go quite far enough. It would be even more valuable for bills to have “permalinks”, and to create RSS feeds with bill updates.

For readers who aren’t steeped in weblog tech: blog entries each have “permalinks” — stable web addresses that enable the post to be referred to, commented on from another site, and discoverable later on with search engines. Weblogs typically provide RSS feeds that enable readers to subscribe to a blog. Smarter use of syndication/aggregation technology enables items to be discovered and recombined with finer-grained control

So, in addition to a central discussion, weblog remix tools would enable any number of decentralized discussions, that could in turn be aggregated and connected.
The politology post goes further in this direction with its suggestion for an “action aggregator.

Right now we’re being bombarded with tasks to call about this or that, and it’s like they are competing with each other. It’s nonsense – a service could be created to let people subscribe to daily missives for all the causes they care about.

This isn’t hard at all, and could be done easily with today’s technology. Organizations providing action alerts, like Consumers Union and EFF (to mention a few I work with), could create an action alert feed. Then, individual activists could subscribe to the specific feeds, instead of being inundated with action email.
These models fit nicely with patterns of networked action — people learn and are influenced in groups that are geographically or topically close to them, and then band together to have a greater and more far-reaching impact.

Politology has a great post brainstorming about activist tools that should exist but don’t yet.

• A congress tracking system: Thomas sucks. There should be a system where any bill can be readable as text, annotated by the public, with discussion underneath. It should be hooked up to a congressperson-tracking system so we can track how they have been contacted by the public, what they think of the bill, and how they are likely to vote. It should be easy to look up a congressperson’s complete vote history.
• A public issue-tracking system: These have existed for software developers for a while – bugzilla; mantis – but they’re so obtuse that only geeks get into them. Plus, they tend to only be for actual bugfixing of existing issues. There needs to be a new system where a community can
  1. Identify an objective
  2. Start working to publicly create tasks supporting that objective
  3. Assign those tasks to willing community members
  4. Track progress and make reports
     It’s similar to bugtracking, but instead for public use and activism.
• A better “volunteer tracking” system. A marketplace for matching up projects with specialized needs, with people that have specialized skills. Someone who needs a thirty-second music soundtrack for their political ad, or a large tab-delimited text file of precinct data put into a mysql database, should be able to define those needs somewhere for someone else to snap up. I can do either of those things, but no one would know it without that service.
• An action aggregator: Right now we’re being bombarded with tasks to call about this or that, and it’s like they are competing with each other. It’s nonsense – a service could be created to let people subscribe to daily missives for all the causes they care about.

The SaveMuniWireless.org project has three main pieces:
* a public blog (SaveMuniWireless.org) – for reporting news, posting action alerts, posting municipal network profiles, and linking to reports. The blog becomes the source of news and background research.
* an action mailing list – for busy people to get action updates
* a coordinator mailing list — a high traffic list for people coordinating nuts and bolts like photocopies of information packets
* a private wiki, for planners coordinating fact sheets, gathering information about projects around the state, building materials for the press.
I also use the Technorati blog search engine to find out who’s linking to us and discover the extended conversation.
This basic set of tools is used again and again in different projects. Today, there are three separate pieces. We’re using Movable Type for the blog, Mailman for the mailing list, and Socialtext for the wiki.
It would be great to have a packaged toolset, so people who were less tech-savvy than Chip and me could set things up.
And would be great to have closer integration between the tools
* publish content from the wiki to the blog
* single signin among the private tools
* single search among the public tools

The SXSW panel was called “decentralized social networks”. The title was a bit of a misnomer — I wish there had been a panel on distributed social networks.
The presentations by danah boyd and Jonas Luster covered the well-known flaws of centralized social networks such as Friendster and Orkut — their awkwardness, explicitness, and lack of privacy.
These networks were the rage last year, but time has already proven what we guessed — without a business purpose like LinkedIn, or creative purpose like Flickr, social networks are a fad.
Tantek Celik discussed XFN, a relationship notation that really is decentralized, but bears the drawbacks of explicitness and lack of tool support.
Joyce Park had a hypothesis that the explicit definition of relationships is more appealing to men than women. Joyce speculates that women are more reliant on “little white lies”, and more hesitant to explicitly categorize their friendships. (this hypothesis doesn’t fit set of men and women I know, including men who tell white lies and women who manage social networks like collectibles).
Rather than beating up on Orkut, Friendster, and males for for being overly explicit, I’d rather see a discussion of really distributed social networks, where relationships are assembled incrementally and often implicitly.
* the patterns of conversation and interaction that are revealed by the social network analysis of collaboration through blog links, blog comments, wiki authorship, and other public trails
* comparing these patterns to the patterns in other discussion media such as mailing lists and usenet
* patterns of affiliation in creative networks such as Flickr and LastFM, where connections are draw with a combination of explicit invitation and implicite taste-sharing
Since mandatory explicitness is clearly a mismatch to realworld relationships, it would also be fascinating to:
* discuss of the social uses and time-series changes of subtler intimacy gradients in social networks like LiveJournal
* fast-forward a few years, and see whether and how the correlation of identity provided by IDCommons or a cousin has had any impact on cross-network social integration.
I must admit that I didn’t stay all the way through the panel. I was impatient for the next-generation panel — maybe next year.

Two presentations at SXSW on trust and online communities could not have been more different.
At the panel Mary Hodder facilitated, on Social Software and Shades of Trust,, Ka-Ping Yee at Berkeley and Alex Russel of Informatica and described the perpetual alphabet soup of digital trust standards and projects, from the late lamented p3p, through Liberty, IDCommons, and others.
Trust was seen as a feature and a subsystem — an engineering problem that could be overcome, someday, with the right combination of usability design, standards, and architectural decomposition. There wasn’t a strong explanation for why the same technical conversation had been going on for a decade, with few signs of successful implementation in the real world.
The canonical examples of trust involved formal programs and features — Ebay’s reputation system, the formal privacy statements on web sites, the desire for single signon between community websites.
At the panel facilitated by Molly Steenson on How to Grow Online Community, Craig Newmark of Craig’s list and Matt Haughey of Metafilter both talked about trust as a social issue. Craig talked about the Craig’s list assumption that people are generally good, and about the processes they use when people stop being good, from unintentional misbehavior to criminal fraud and spam.
Matt talked about the social difficulties of introducing moderation for some discussions, and the challenge of determining the right lightness of touch. Both Craig and Matt noted that when a poster misbehaves, the first step is to speak with that person directly; reasoning solves the problem about half of the time.
Where the previous panel looked to Ebay’s formal reputation system as the trust model, Craig used the metaphor of a flea market, which is a combination of transaction marketplace and place to socialize.
Both Craig and Matt apologized about the lightweight, uncomplicated, “first-generation” nature of their systems, lacking the sophisticated design and features of later-developed social software. Yet Craig’s list is one of the most successful online ventures in the world, and MetaFilter has been a longstanding and highly successful online community, fostering 3d communities in different cities, friendships and marriages.
I can’t help thinking that the social-first approach to online community is the right primary approach.

The Skype crew are innovating and popularizing digital voice applications.
This is an area where innovation has been waiting to happen for a long time. I hope they have a good runway before they get bought, so they have some time to keep innovating, before somebody pulls them into 18 month product cycles and the good developers leave.
Whoever buys Skype will have a large influence on the pace of innovation in the area. I hope that it’s a company that has a vision for open, diverse voice communication apps, rather than a walled garden with incremental, closed services.