All Together Now For Great Justice Dot Org

Topic Owners: Rainer + Elana + Mchua

back to syllabus

Precis

The success of online campagning during the Obama campaign has been unprecedented. But the web is also used for mobilizing people for other kinds of social actions. New tools are emerging for coordinating concrete action and volunteering (pledgebank.org, thepoint.org, zoosa.org) as well as fundraising and matching donors and social entrepreneurs (Facebook Causes, www.betterclace.org, Socialvibe).

What are the success factors of such tools? It seems still unclear if they follow (half-?)established rules of online marketing in the business sector. Or if there are other critical factor. Is it, for example, all about people giving up their anonymity and publicly associating with a cause to mobilize others? What actually spurs people up the ladder of engagement or into offline activism and what does not? Which online structures, tools, networks get people how high up the ladder?

In short: Is there a generalizable model here? If yes, has this model different success factors from the business world? What are cutting-edge examples of successful campaigning/fundraising/mobilization/collaboration? How do they harness different channels and media (www, email, SMS, etc.)?

And even if it works: What are the downsides of this development? First, some companies or platforms might develop into gatekeepers. For example, the head start of Blue Statte Digital is huge. How long will it take competitors to catch up? Second, if participation on these platforms give you more direct access to decisionmakers, donors and civic participation, we might have to worry about a new digital divide. How intensely should Obama listen to the questions posted on change.gov, knowing that they cannot be representative of the (non tech-savvy) population? Third, what new privacy issues are coming up? Every submission to Obama's Open for Question" seems to go directly to Google servers (Article). Do we want a private company to know people's political opinions?

Concrete question(s) of the week

• What makes online mobilization for a cause successful?
• Is there a generalizable model here? If yes, has this model different success factors from the business world?
• Are there currently new gatekeepers and digital divides emerging that restrict the use of respective tools?

Contributors

• Ethan Zuckerman as a more theoretical expert.
• Jonah Peretti as a practical expert.

Session design

The session will be structured as a workshop (and discussion afterwards). Each participant will spend the week working on a cause that they are personally interested in, applying the techniques from readings and class to their own project. Key components of this week:

• 2-3 readings will be sent out beforehand.
• A questionnaire will be sent out beforehand to all class participants so they can frame the most important aspects of their cause. Participants will use the questionnaire to write a very rough draft of a non-profit online participation project for their cause. Some example questions follow.
  • What is the name of your cause?
  • Describe the goal/mission of your cause, in 25 words or less. (For instance, "providing a pet penguin to every dentist in the world.")
  • Describe the mission of your particular project for your cause, in 25 words or less. (For instance, "get all pet penguins in Indiana vaccinated during the month of March, at no cost to their dentists.")
  • What type and how many people do you want to mobilize?
  • How deep should their involvement be / what would you like them to do?
  • What technologies do you prefer to use while working on activism for your cause, and why?
  • What examples can you find of similar projects done by others in the past (matching the above criteria)?
• The role of our guest experts will be to come in as workshop aides; it will be interesting to hear from them what they thinks the most important rules for success are. They'll get to give a short (<10min) intro speech.
• The session will kick off with a workshop where the students will work on their project. It should be an online project designed to raise and deepen involvement and/or awareness for their cause. For instance, they might contribute to the planning of a conference, create an email-blast marketing campaign, host a party that is heavily advertised online, create or spread viral media, compile statistics on online membership for their cause, etc.
• We will follow that with a debriefing to discuss how things went and the theories and best practices that apply.

Readings

We have three types of readings for this session:

Historical resources that come directly from our guests and their experiences.

Guests will be asked to email the class beforehand with a short version of the kinds of things they'd say in a speech to the class, so people know who they'd want to ask for advice during the workshop portion. (Rationale: The time we're together should be spent interacting, there's always plenty of time outside of class for reading.) Guests will also be asked to send the class a link to their favorite resource/article on their project, or something that has informed their own work on their project. Some sample types of resources that might come from this:

• http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2008/12/10/open-for-questions-participation-from-campaigning-to-governing/
• http://publius.cc/2008/12/09/internet-and-politics-2008-moving-people-moving-ideas/

Techniques and tools resources, mainly business books that focus on corporate use of the social web, online communities and marketing, etc. This will be pages and chapters from books like this (used as examples, not a final list):

• Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies Chapters 2-3 (the sections on demographics and technologies).
• Smart Start-Ups: How Entrepreneurs and Corporations Can Profit by Starting Online Communities Most of chapters 1-3, and then your choice of 1 of 4 case studies from the later chapters in the book.

Theory on activism, focusing on cyberactivism. This will consist mainly of scholarly books and papers like the following (used as examples, not a final list):

• (Paper) Technologies of Protest: Insurgent Social Movements and the First Amendment in the Era of the Internet, by the law professor Seth Kreimer. It has some pretty interesting bits -- and some funny moments -- like refrences to John McCain's staff using digital activism in 2001 during his campaign around campaign finance reform. Elana has the PDF.
• (Selection from) A Review of Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice, edited by Martha McCaughey and Michael D. Ayers.
• Philanthropy on the Commons
• Mining the wealth of networks with Yochai Benkler
• Foundations and New Media
• Netsquared
• Benkler: The Wealth of Networks

Examples and Tools

• Pledgebank
• Facebook Causes
• www.zoosa.org
• Citizenbase

The three finalists for the Open Web Awards in the category "Non Profit Causes" are:

• DiscoverScholars
• SocialVibe
• Stop Political Calls