Talk:All Together Now For Great Justice Dot Org

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Old Contributors Section

It would be good to have both a practicianer and a theoretician

Theoreticians:

  • Prof. Yochai Benkler
  • Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody)

Practitioners:

  • someone from MoveOn (Contact via Elana)
  • Tom Steinberg
  • Sean Parker and Joe Green, founders of Project Agape, the start-up that created Facebook Causes
  • Joe Rospars, New Media Director, Obama for America (Elana)
  • Ken Banks, FrontlineSMS (Elana)
  • Sebastian Benthall, TOPP
  • Joshua Gay, FSF
  • Kathy Paur, ActBlue
The Big Think team might be able help secure some of these folks -- hit me up at peter@bigthink.com if you'd like some assistance making contact. PeterH 07:11, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

Old discussion

Of course there are a lot of custom-built tools for mobilizing people online to get things done in the real world. On the other hand, what about more general tools? We've all been invited, via Facebook, to join groups and attend events (the Obama campaign certainly made good use of this); is there a generalizable model here?

Facebook groups dedicated to particular causes remind me of the online petitions that began circulating widely via email about ten years ago: their effectiveness in accomplishing real world change--and even their visibility to individuals capable of affecting the desired changes--are dubious. Is the real purpose of these movements simply to make participants feel like they are being active and involved? What percentage of those who signed email petitions in the 1990s were aware that their signatures were unverifiable and that the widely-distributed emails were unlikely to be collated and submitted to an official authority? What expectations do participants in facebook group causes have for their involvement and its consequences? The facebook group causes are certainly more centralized and visible than the old email petitions, and they provide a better tool for identifying and communicating with supporters in order to mobilize them in an organized fashion. How often is such mobilization attempted, and with what degree of success? As a tool of online activism, is facebook a step forward from chain emails, is it a step in a different direction, or does it just serve the same old functions but in newer packaging? --Gwen 08:26, 29 November 2008 (EST)

Maybe we can invite some of the leaders of the various social networking sites or Jascha Franklin-Hodge, who was an architect of the Obama campaign's use of social technology.

Might also be worth considering SMS applications that interface with the internet in this context especially since cell phones will presumably be the nexus of tech activism in the developing world. See FrontlineSMS or Ushahidi, a web crisis mapping project that let any user with a cell phone text in reports of violence in post-election Kenya as a way to geographically report real-time citizen reporting. (ELANA)

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