All Together Now For Great Justice Dot Org

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Topic Owners: Rainer + Elana + [[User:Mchua|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

Focusing questions

  • What are the core principles of traditional marketing for activism, and do they apply to the decentralized activist initiatives enabled by the internet?
  • If so, how? If not, why not - and what principles do apply?
  • What implications does this have for the legal profession?

Briefing

The briefing needs work.

Introduction

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.)?

Marketing basics

(to go here.)

“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.” (Source: http://iplot.typepad.com/iplot/2009/02/obama-inc-web-activism-for-profit.html)

Decentralization basics

(to be cleaned up.)

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)

Case studies

(to be finalized/linked-to)

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


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.

Additional questions

Internet Activism:

Instead of trying to define field too tightly -- dividing by content, tool, etc feel too reductive -- approach through diverse but curated set of examples used to examine "core questions"

1) who is in/who is out? equity. access of participation -is the ability of internet activism to create feelings of community/identity specific to these online tools? Social capital creation.

2) starfish/spider -loss of message control, impact for activists -- i.e. hillary/apple ad mashups

3) effectiveness/impact -key sub issues: how does internet allow activists to create more effective ladders of engagement? does it encourage a shallow type of engagement? (facebook causes, great schlep) how do you measure effecitviness and impact? what is the ask? how valuable on are online "attention/awareness" campaigns?

Examples to be applied to these core topics: should include both positive and negative (both negative in terms of goals like al-qaeda, and possibly negative in terms of a failed project) could include: pledgebank, sms/citizen journalism in ukraine or kenya, something terrorism related, Obama, Nike sweatshop emails

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?)

(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?”

Will in future only the tech savvy be able to raise their voice?

How can a government deal with 500 petitions or 5m signatures a day?

Should Facebook (be able to) block petitions it does not like?

Can people with more “weak ties”/social capital mobilize more people through these means than those with less ties?

How can the power of a decentralized movement be harnessed for a government with centralized structures (see OFA right now)?

Are decentralized movements against ruling authorities (e.g. in autocratic regimes) more legitimate/effective than centrally controlled ones?

Who should have the privilege to use “hacking software” and get access to the necessary skills to use them?

Can centralized judicial systems deal with distributed malicious attacks?

To which degree should authorities allow “legitimate” ddos attacks (analogous to sit-ins or demonstrations)?

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