All Together Now For Great Justice Dot Org
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.
back to syllabus
Before class
To prepare before class, please do the following.
- Read the #Precis, which will introduce you to the main topics of the session.
- Read and consider the #Core questions we will be discussing during the session.
- Read and complete the #Workshop prep exercise. This should take you no more than 20 minutes.
- Read the #Mandatory readings; there are 4 total; 2 are short, and 1 can be skimmed.
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 (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 | Cyberattacks during the 2008 South Ossetia war | DDoS, website vandalizing, trojans, mass mailings |
Core questions
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":
- 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.)?
- How do 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? Do they indicate more than a shallow degree of engaggement? Is it the level of engagment (attention - advocacy - actions/donation) that supporters of your cause display?
- Compared to offline activism: Who is in now and who is out? Who has access and who still may not have it? How do old digital divides play out or new ones emerge? To what extent do these tools allow us to subvert hierarchies of power or to what extent do they create new hierarchies and gatekeepers?
- Online activism often creates decentralized organizations. Which advantages and risks do they offer? The book "The Starfish and the Spider" contracts centralized organizations ("Spiders") with decntralized organizations ("Starfish") in the following way:
- 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
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, IOP Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, founder of EchoDitto, former Internet Operations Director of Gov. Dean's presidential primary campaign in 2003
Session design
Workshop prep
To be done before class.
Activity intro (10 minutes)
We will first explain the ground rules of the rocket pitch workshop which will be held later in the session and introduce the 3 scenarios involved.
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)
During this workshop, students will roleplay the parts of teams assigned to create internet-based projects for various activism scenarios. Teams will compete to create the best 1-minute rocket pitch of their project idea.
- 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
- Technologies of Protest: Insurgent Social Movements and the First Amendment in the Era of the Internet, by the law professor Seth Kreimer.
- Ethan Zuckerman's Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism (This is available in .mp3 format for free in podcast section of the iTunes store --CKennedy)
- From the Bottom-Up: Using the Internet to Mobilize Campaign Participation by Dana Fisher, a short article that compares the strategies of Obama and McCain's online campaigns. (skim)
- The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, pages 133-158 on "taking on decentralization," which argues that conventional attack tactics fail against decentralized activism, and presents several strategies that can be used instead. Mel will upload this later tonight.
Optional
Theory/Context
- A Review of Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice, edited by Martha McCaughey and Michael D. Ayers. (This book is difficult to get hold of, but good supplementary reading if you're interested and can procure a copy.)
- Rebooting America: Ideas for Redesigning American Democracy for the Internet Age
Case studies
- 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/
- The Internet and the 2008 Election, The Pew Internet + American Life Project
Techniques and tools