All Together Now For Great Justice Dot Org

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Topic Owners: Rainer + Elana + Mchua

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Precis

The web is used for mobilizing people for all kinds of social actions, including the recent success of online campagning for the Obama administration in the United States. 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), and other tools not explicitly designed for social action in particular (twitter, collaborative document editing, IMs and text messages) are being pressed into service by tech-savvy grassroots (and not-so-grassroots - witness the use of Skype during discussions on Oprah) organizers, sometimes to great effect.

There are many questions that might be articulated in this area, and part of the challenge of online coordination of social action is that these questions are still young and in the process of formulation. What are the success factors of such tools? Some say they are different ways of following old rules of marketing in the business sector; others say they are creating new ones. Some say the web enables centralization, others say it enables decentralization, others say anonymity is key, and yet others claim that giving up anonymity and publicly associating with a cause is what mobilize others to do the same. What actually spurs people up the ladder of engagement or into offline activism (and is offline activism always the end goal)? Which online structures, tools, networks get people how high up the ladder (and is there a ladder to climb)?

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? For instance, some companies or platforms might develop into gatekeepers, or a new digital divide might be created if participation on these platforms gives a certain sector of the population more direct/privileged access to decisionmakers, donors and civic participation. (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 primarily 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 will include both documents geared specifically towards online activists as well as chapters from books that focus more on corporate usages of the social web, online communities and marketing, etc. (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):

  • (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.
  • Benkler: The Wealth of Networks Chapters 2, 5-6, plus an interviw about the book, Mining the wealth of networks with Yochai Benkler.

Examples and Tools

As part of the survey, students will be asked to visit at least 5 websites of online social activism projects or collaborative internet tools, and write 3-5 sentences summarizing the strategy and/or technology elements of each, and what type of projects certain elements of those strategies might be particularly suited for.

Some examples:

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

And then there are Tools that have been used for a variety of causes and events.

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