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, 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.org, thepoint.org, zoosa.org) 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 (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

  • Is there a generalizable model for succesful online mobilization? If yes, does this model have different success factors from the business world?
  • 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?
  • 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?)
  • 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?

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.
  • 2nd guest with a more domestic focus. Possibly from Obama campaign, MoveOn, etc.

Session design

The session will be part workshop, part traditional classroom discussion that will hopefully blend structural/theoretical concerns with more practical/tactical discussion. 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)?
    • How would you measure the success of this project?
  • The role of our guest experts will be to both speak about their work and perspective on the field and to serve as facilitators for the workshop.
  • All students will receive copies of all submitted project ideas. However, in the interest of time and quality of discussion, our guests will each pick two proposals from the group and open with a few comments on the proposals. We will follow that by breaking into four groups -- one for each selected proposal -- to work collaboratively to strengthen the proposed project.
  • 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 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.

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/Context 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

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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