All Together Now For Great Justice Dot Org

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Topic Owners: Rainer + Elana + Mel - it's worth noting that we have a KSG student, an MBA student, and an engineer in our group, and no lawyers or law students, so expect this session to come from a slightly different perspective.

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Precis

Activism is "intentional action to bring about social or political change" ([1]). In this sense, activist have used the web for mobilizing people for all kinds of social causes, ranging from the tremendous success of the Obama campaign's online efforts to post-election crisis mapping mash-ups in Kenya to your basic online petition or full-scale and often illegal hacktivist activities. New tools are emerging for coordinating concrete action and volunteering (Pledgebank, The Point, Zoosa) as well as fundraising and matching donors and social entrepreneurs (Facebook Causes, DonorsChoose, Socialvibe), and other tools not explicitly designed for social action in particular ([www.twittercom Twitter], collaborative document editing, IMs and text messages) are being pressed into service by tech-savvy grassroots organizers, sometimes to great effect.

Sandor Vegh has suggested three categories of "Cyberacticism":

Category Uses Examples Tools
awareness/advocacy Blogging, petitions PETA Websites, mass mailings, podcasts, RSS
organization/mobilization Campaigning, fundraising, volunteering, community building Moveon.org, pledgebank.org, al qaeda; Myanmar uprising Websites, mass mailings, mobile applications, online/offline hybrids
direct online action/reaction Electronic civil disobedience, hacktivism xxx DDoS, website vandalizing, trojans, mass mailings

Classifications help to structure our view on the landscape of online activism. But many questions are still unresolved. Here are four of these "issues at the frontier":

  1. An issue of tactics: What are the success factors of online activism tools? Is it true that, "while marketing has always been the art of turning friends into customers and customers into friends, it is now the art of finding, befriending, and 'activating' the like-minded for a common cause, for the common good, for profit." ([2])? Have the rules for online activism changed in the same way they changed for for-profit marketing. Or is there a fundamental difference between advocating a cause (or a candidate) and promoting a product? Is there a generalizable model here? What are cutting-edge examples of successful campaigning/fundraising/mobilization/collaboration? How do they harness different channels and media (www, email, SMS, etc.)?
  1. How dow we define and measure success in the first place? Is it the number of viewers, of adresses on your mailing list, of Facebook friends for your cause?
  1. Compareed to offline activism: Who is in now and who is out? Who has access and who still may not have it? How do digital divides play out? To what extent do these tools allow us to subvert hierarchies of power or to what extent do they create new hierarchies and gatekeepers?
  1. Online activism often creates decentralizes organizations. Which advantages and risks do they offer?

Core Questions

  • 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?

  • How do we measure success and impact? (What does # of viewers, # of Facebook friends for your cause, etc mean if it means anything at all?)
  • Who is included and who is excluded by these new tools?
  • Which advantages and risks are currently emerging with decentralized forms of activism online?

Decentralization basics

Based heavily on the book "The Starfish and the Spider" and its reference list. (It's an easy read, but a good one.) Something would have to be done to find more in-depth theoretical readings, hopefully some legal-related ones, that tie into the concepts here.

The book is structured around 3 major lists, the first being the defining characteristics of starfish vs spiders.

  • Starfish: circles; people give ideas/feedback/resources to each other. Spiders: pyramids; top-down hierarchies; all resources trickle up and are allocated back down.
  • Starfish: catalysts; influential members who set an example. Spiders: CEOs; formal leaders whose orders you agree to obey
  • Starfish: ideology; your service is not to an organization or a person, but around a shared mission or ideal. Spiders: loyalty to a person or an organization
  • Starfish: tap into and partner with pre-existing networks (clubs, interest groups, etc.) Spiders: start from scratch

The second list is qualities of a catalyst.

  • Genuine interest in others.
  • Numerous loose connections, rather than a small number of close connections.
  • Skill at social mapping.
  • Desire to help everyone they meet.
  • The ability to help people help themselves by listening and understanding, rather than giving advice ("Meet people where they are").
  • Emotional Intelligence.
  • Trust in others and in the decentralized network.
  • Inspiration (to others).
  • Tolerance for ambiguity.
  • A hands-off approach. Catalysts do not interfere with, or try to control the behavior of the contributing members of the decentralized organization.
  • Ability to let go. After building up a decentralized organization, catalysts move on, rather than trying to take control.

The third list is how to fight a starfish organization (interesting note: when attacked, spiders hunker down and get more centralized; when attacked, starfish get more decentralized.)

  • change its environment (reducing gang violence by increasing the economic mobility of the citizens in a slum town)
  • turn it into a spider (giving the respected members of the community - the catalysts - a scarce resource to control and allocate)
  • become a starfish yourself (giving funding to a citizen militia to combat terrorists)

Contributors

  • Ethan Zuckerman, Berkman Center Fellow, Co-Founder of GlobalVoicesOnline.org, providing both practical and theoretical expertise with focus on applications in the developing world.
  • Nicco Mele

Session design

Activity intro (10 minutes)

The middle part of the session will consist of a rocket pitch workshop where students will roleplay the parts of teams assigned to create internet-based projects for various activism scenarios (to be explained at the start of class). Teams will compete to create the best 1-minute rocket pitch of their project idea. This is the part where we explain the ground rules of the workshop and introduce the 3 scenarios.

Guests present case studies (30 minutes)

Next, our guests will give short case study examples of projects they've worked on and tactics they've used. During this part of the session, students are encouraged to write down (on pieces of paper) questions they'd like to bring up, and to save those papers for the discussion after the workshop.

Workshop (50 minutes)

  • Split into groups.
  • You get 30 seconds to set up and 1 minute to present.
  • Each group gets 3 big sheets of paper ("slides") and a marker for each round. You do not have to use the paper. However, projector setup will count against your time...
  • Groups can use any resources (including computers) and work anywhere they want.
  • Your presentation can be and use any things or people you want.
  • 20 minutes: First scenario prep
  • 10 minutes: First scenario presentations
  • 10 minutes: Second scenario prep
  • 10 minutes: Second scenario presentations

Discussion (30 minutes)

Students are now encouraged to bring out the questions they had earlier; we'll use these as the basis for a followup discussion.

Readings

Mandatory

  • The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, pages 133-158 on "taking on decentralization"

Optional

Theory/Context on activism, decentralization, and marketing, to be used as pre-reading. This represents the 3 different non-law fields our team has backgrounds in. The following list is still examples and is not final.

Case studies, historical resources that come primarily from our guests and their experiences. 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. We will also include a few links documenting interesting popular examples of internet social action so that we can have a shared vocabulary. Students will pick one case study, so people will enter the class having read different ones.

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):

Examples and Tools

Examples to be applied to these core topics: should include both positive and negative (both negative in terms of goals and possibly negative in terms of a failed project

Some examples:

We may curate a list of more specific Tools.

Additional questions

  1. is the ability of internet activism to create feelings of community/identity specific to these online tools? (Social capital creation)
  2. how does the internet allow activists to create more effective ladders of engagement?
  3. does it encourage a shallow type of engagement? (facebook causes, great schlep)
  4. how do you measure effectiveness and impact?
  5. what is the ask?
  6. how valuable on are online "attention/awareness" campaigns?
  7. Is there a generalizable model for succesful online mobilization? If yes, does this model have different success factors from the business world?
  8. To what extent does the internet and internet activism allow us to flatten traditional hierarchies of power? Does it replicate those hierarchies? Or does it create new hierarchies and new gatekeepers?
  9. How do we measure success and impact? (What does # of viewers, # of Facebook friends for your cause, etc mean if it means anything at all?)
  10. How does the digital divide play out with respect to internet activism? Do the tools of internet activism give disproportionate representation to those with disproportionate access and how concerned should we be about this?
  11. 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?)
  12. (Source: http://iplot.typepad.com/iplot/2009/02/obama-inc-web-activism-for-profit.html) If a for-profit company did the type of work that non-profits often do, but did it more efficiently, would people trust it the same way they trust non-profits?
  13. Will in future only the tech savvy be able to raise their voice?
  14. How can a government deal with 500 petitions or 5m signatures a day?
  15. Should Facebook (be able to) block petitions it does not like?
  16. Can people with more “weak ties”/social capital mobilize more people through these means than those with less ties?
  17. How can the power of a decentralized movement be harnessed for a government with centralized structures (see OFA right now)?
  18. Are decentralized movements against ruling authorities (e.g. in autocratic regimes) more legitimate/effective than centrally controlled ones?
  19. Who should have the privilege to use “hacking software” and get access to the necessary skills to use them?
  20. Can centralized judicial systems deal with distributed malicious attacks?
  21. To which degree should authorities allow “legitimate” ddos attacks (analogous to sit-ins or demonstrations)?
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