All Together Now For Great Justice Dot Org

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Topic Owners: Rainer + Elana + Mchua

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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 waht 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

It would be good to have both a practicianer and a theoretician

Theoreticians:

  • Prof. Yochai Benkler
  • Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody)

Practitioners:

  • someone from MoveOn (Contact via Elana)
  • Tom Steinberg
  • Sean Parker and Joe Green, founders of Project Agape, the start-up that created Facebook Causes
  • Joe Rospars, New Media Director, Obama for America (Elana)
  • Ken Banks, FrontlineSMS (Elana)
  • Sebastian Benthall, TOPP
  • Joshua Gay, FSF
  • Kathy Paur, ActBlue
The Big Think team might be able help secure some of these folks -- hit me up at peter@bigthink.com if you'd like some assistance making contact. PeterH 07:11, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

Session design

Our current idea for session design is 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, selected from the above.
  • A questionnaire will be sent out beforehand to all class participants so they can frame the most important aspects of their cause. (For instance: What are the aims of your cause? What technologies do you prefer to use while working on activism for your cause, and why? How many people do you want to mobilize? How deep should their involvement be?) Participants will use the questionnaire to write a very rough draft of a non-profit online participation project for their cause.
  • 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:

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):

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):

Examples and Tools

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

Old discussion

Of course there are a lot of custom-built tools for mobilizing people online to get things done in the real world. On the other hand, what about more general tools? We've all been invited, via Facebook, to join groups and attend events (the Obama campaign certainly made good use of this); is there a generalizable model here?

Facebook groups dedicated to particular causes remind me of the online petitions that began circulating widely via email about ten years ago: their effectiveness in accomplishing real world change--and even their visibility to individuals capable of affecting the desired changes--are dubious. Is the real purpose of these movements simply to make participants feel like they are being active and involved? What percentage of those who signed email petitions in the 1990s were aware that their signatures were unverifiable and that the widely-distributed emails were unlikely to be collated and submitted to an official authority? What expectations do participants in facebook group causes have for their involvement and its consequences? The facebook group causes are certainly more centralized and visible than the old email petitions, and they provide a better tool for identifying and communicating with supporters in order to mobilize them in an organized fashion. How often is such mobilization attempted, and with what degree of success? As a tool of online activism, is facebook a step forward from chain emails, is it a step in a different direction, or does it just serve the same old functions but in newer packaging? --Gwen 08:26, 29 November 2008 (EST)

Maybe we can invite some of the leaders of the various social networking sites or Jascha Franklin-Hodge, who was an architect of the Obama campaign's use of social technology.

Might also be worth considering SMS applications that interface with the internet in this context especially since cell phones will presumably be the nexus of tech activism in the developing world. See FrontlineSMS or Ushahidi, a web crisis mapping project that let any user with a cell phone text in reports of violence in post-election Kenya as a way to geographically report real-time citizen reporting. (ELANA)

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