Notes: Distributed Activism Session
- Andrew Stocking (care2.com)
- What has been demonstrated as potentialy distributable
- fund raising
- move on
- "traditional" activism
- letter writing
- Current projects
- distributed datbases
- updating of press database by Martin Kearns and Green
Media Toolshed - What's the value of social networking to NPOs
- increasing loyalty of members
- those who belong to organizations along with friends are
more likely to participate - viral growth potential
- better personalization
- target categories, demographics, etc
- distribute work
- customer support
- craigslist, MoveOn
- messaging
- Group Leadership
- community building
- What does it take to make a campaign viral
- campaign taps into intrinsic belief of audience
- examples: chemical dumping, going to church, marriage
ammendment
- empowerment
- promote sense of power over both personal and external world
- MoveOn superbowl, visual indicators of campaign
contributions online - Social Norm
- create an atmosphere where people believe
activism/participation is the norm - Structure of constituent groups
- overlayed interconnected interpersonal, issue and
institutionaly organized networks - Care2
- membership
- ~80% women,
- avg age 35 (MoveOn 50/50 gener, avg age 45)
- often skews positive relative to suspected state membership
(% membership from state compared with % of national pop) - socially networked initiatives can be more efficient at
penetrating hostile environments by networking friends - serves as a lauunch pad for disemination of messages even
outside the care2 community - upcoming: karma
- users rated baed on criteria such as how many of their
messages are opened, how many are followed up, etc. - important for reducing inbox overload
- attracts many who lack strong social networks
- Green stars
- initiative launched without any instruction, just enabled
the ability to grant green stars to other - (stars expire)
- has kept much of the community active
- gives people a sense of participation in community
- There are individuals online willing and excited about the
ability to aide in many maintenance, etc. tasks - filtering of obsene content
- How do networks affect NPOs
- envolvement in social networks doubles participation
- each post/new group membership results in a 2% increased
likelihood to take action. - Justin Rueben (MoveOn)
- MoveOn is in a sense a model of centralized system
- distributed work which is centralized work
- coordinated and conducted in unison
- principle: "if we all do the same thing at the same time we
can have a greater impact" - Left currently like the Empire Strikes Back
- Election Story
- Basic problem which move on sought to address in the election
- maximize impact of 1 million members in swing states
- goal: enable canvasing
- gold standard of canvasing is peer to peer
- how to motivate individuals to canvas in swing neighborhoods
- most canvasing was centralized (phonebanks, etc) because of
lack of infrastructure - only labor and parties have such infrastructure
- plan: 500 organizers to contact 500,000 voters in 10,000
precincts - developed web ap to manage canvasing
- combine instructions with functionality to enable those
with little political or tech experience to use database of local
precinct targets - one could log on, select targets for canvasing and then
"check them out" of the system so others would not be assigned to
contact those individuals - q: potential to sabotage?
- decentralized systems hard to sabotage, would take too
much work - Challenge of recruitment
- canvasing a much more chalenging volutneer position than
others - individuals scared of talking politics with neighbors
- time intensive
- volunteers consistently inspired and surprised by finding
submerged network of others with similar views
- strategies
- standard emails
- community meetings (w/ roleplay)
- paid staff publicity campaigns: phone drives, etc.
- precinct partners: offload work to those outside
locality, such as phone contacting those who door-to-door canvasers had
been unable to contact - calling partied thrown together at last minute
- 1.2 mil phone calls made in last day
- emails important to provide narrative and sense of
involvement in larger process - need to distribute support of technology
- 800 number used to route calls to individuals who could log
in to web system - coordinated by chat room staff superpvisors
- even international volunteers became involved (enabled 24
hour support) - heroic volunteers crucial to success
- success
- 500k MoveOn motivated voters counted at polls
- 1.2 mil contacted
- Q's:
- advocacy
- what is learned
- community building was thought secondary but was actually
crucial - operation democracy aimed to build on lessons
- next time will start earlier
- Lynn Benanders (cooperative life, CoOpLife.com)
- federation of cooeratives and grassroots organizations working
for progressive movements - aims to utilize food coops, CSAs, farming coops, etc. to
effect policy initiatives
- Tom Murray: use of training systems to enable ??
- goals
- to build sustainable economy in north east
- encourage localy owned, group-based and democratic
businesses - more apt to be "just" in terms of labor, environment and
community values - group-capital important because capital is mobile, and
the threat of relocation is mitigated by cooperative ownership - CoOps in NYC were often a product of labor initiatives
- CoOps
- over 10k coops in New England and New York
- currentl tools
- aimed primarily toward sharing opinions
- initiation of new ideas inhibits productive meetings
- technology tools well suited to allowing this process outside
of meetings to form a basis for action - enable distributed decision making online
- group consesus allows decisive, centralized action in the
future - group ownership requires technology
- in order for large organizations to remain responsive to
their members - online support of public-policy meetings
- provide resources for meetings in centralized repositories
- based on communispace
- online community services coupled with personal contact and
support networking - lessons learned from attempts to organize Co-Op power using
online tools - simply building resource not sufficient to garuntee
involvement - needed agressive support initially
- tech support
- contact "lurkers" and invite participation (do not use
the term "lurker" however, following onsite content important first
step in involvement) - required 10 hour a day person to facilitate community
- "meta-cognitive tools" to shape the nature of content which
is posted - forced labeling of posts as such categories as "question"
"agree/support" "disagree/concern", etc. causes people to rethink posts - limit brief posts
- based on plone
- sucesses
- used to generate possible sites for wind turbines by
publicizing criteria for sites - participation now exhibits high level of ownership and
education due to available materials and concrete shared vision - alignment allows for bolder moves decided from bottom up than
would be possible if proposed from top down - resulting decision process
- maintains respect while processing diferences
- allows creative conflict resolution
- promotes transparancy and reflection
- Dan Keshet main programmer
Submitted by ethanw on April 16, 2005 - 2:05pm.
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