danah noticed the massive security hole that exposes private email addresses to any friends of your friends: apophenia: orkut pissyness, round 2.
She has other criticisms as well.
January 2004 Archives
But the dating chapter is going to have to deal with some of this stuff frankly, such as this thing someone just forwarded to me: Lessons I Learned From Casual Encounters w4w - w4m
Caterina Fake explains why the backlash against social software among the most thoroughly wired blog technorati elite distracts from the fact that social software tools are useful for people who don't have long-crafted online social presences, in Caterina.net: Continued Enthusiasm for Social Networks.
The CAMPWARE initiative is a project of the Center for Advanced Media-Prague (CAMP), the aim of which is to develop and aggegate open-source software solutions for independent news media organizations. "CAMPWARE intends to provide a platform for collaborative software development, as well as financial support through project-related developments and a fellowship program." They have three main products so far:
We are pleased to announce that the 2.1.4 version of CAMPSITE, Campware's multilingual, Unicode-based web-content-management system for news sites has been released. ...
LOWLIVE is the streaming remote control to on-air FM transmitters. Developed primarily to allow radio transmissions to go on-air in crisis situations with minimal personal risk to journalists and station management, LOWLIVE can be used in any situation where remote access to a sound device is necessary. Audio content for the FM transmission will be delivered over the Internet. Accessing a computer connected to the radio transmitter from anywhere through the web, radio producers can upload their own content from remote for high quality transmissions, or simply relay existing web broadcasts to the remote transmitter. LOWLIVE allows to build continuous playlists or scheduled one-off events. ...
Campware is pleased to announce the 1.0 release of Cream, a free and open-source customer relationship management (CRM) system designed specifically to meet the needs of media organizations. ...
LOWLIVE is the one of the three with a real-world component, using the Internet to get on-air from locations and events where transmission might not otherwise be possible.
CNET covers both sides of the question—the Net alone can't elect you; it's hard to get elected without the Net—but the sidebar reads, "Bottom line: While Dean may not win the race, his success in raising money and awareness through the Internet has proven technology's strength as a tool in political campaigns."
Not much new (though the "so last year" line is good)—but have we already noted XFN "rel" tags?
Social networking sounds like a roundabout term for dating, and in some ways it is. A new Web site, Friendster.com, connects friends of friends in an ever-widening spoke-and-wheel linkage that draws on but goes beyond elements of pioneers Classmates.com and Match.com.
Despite its founder's protests, though, Friendster retains the feel of friends "setting up" friends online.
In some ways, Friendster is already so last year. Tribe.net may be the true friend connector, purporting to connect people looking for all kinds of things in common. A lot of its tribal connectivity has to do more with transactions, however, than sociability.
For Web loggers, XFN—the XHTML Friends Network—enables coding links to other bloggers with a "rel" (relationship) tag. With enough participation, tagging eventually can permit virtual friendship-building.
Also includes name-drop of Meetup, MoveOn, and Freecycle. (Via Online Business Networking Blog. Links added.)
NYTimes feature "As New Hampshire Nears, Few Can Recall a More Frenzied Final Weekend" says,
Bob Mulholland, a longtime adviser to the California State Democratic Party, came to Manchester on a candidate-shopping trip this weekend, and with a friend from the British Labor Party, he managed to sneak into the Dean event through a back door. He, too, expressed surprise [at the crowded conditions]. "I think the Internet has changed crowd-building completely," Mr. Mulholland said.
[via filchyboy at rfb] Wanted: personal social network coordinator:
newyork.craigslist.org > manhattan > admin/office jobs > Wanted: personal social network coordinator last modified: Mon, 26 Jan 12:50 ESTemail this posting to a friend
Wanted: personal social network coordinator
Reply to: job-23123114@craigslist.org
Date: 2004-01-25, 10:33PM EST
Permanent full-time position for a personal social coordinator for a New York-based web designer.Your responsibility will be managing my accounts with various online social networking sites including, but not limited to, Friendster, LinkedIn, Tribe, Orkut, Ryze, Spoke, ZeroDegrees, Ecademy, RealContacts, Ringo, MySpace, Yafro, EveryonesConnected, Friendzy, FriendSurfer, Tickle, Evite, Plaxo, Squiby, and WhizSpark.
Specific duties include:
- approving or rejecting invitations of friendship
- managing a database of usernames and passwords for each of the social networking sites
- sending out friendship invitations
- keeping my social network synchronized; that is, invite friends from one social networking site to be friends in all of the other social networking sites
- handling requests by friends to be introduced to another friend that they might not know
- keeping track of my current likes & dislikes and updating my personal information within each service accordingly
- writing testimonials for friends
- various "damage control" functions when rebuffed "non-friends" become upset due to non-acceptance of their offers of friendship
- continually browsing my friends' 1st and 2nd degrees for potential new friends and business contacts
- participating on any of the sites' message boards on my behalf
Future duties may include discouraging companies and individuals from starting new social networking sites so that additional staff won't be necessary in the future. Past employment as a bouncer, "heavy", or hired goon may be helpful in this regard.
Benefits include addition as my friend in all of the social networking sites I belong to.
Copyright © 2004 craigslist terms of use privacy policy feedback forum
Not since dotcomania have I worked as long hours without minding it. Lately, between writing a book and volunteering with Oakland for Dean, I've been working 70-100 hours a week, days evenings and weekends, and having a great time at it. Still the tension and stress and anxiety of trying to be "on" seven days a week eighteen hours a day does take its toll. My neck is stiff, I am bursting with pent up physical energy. Desperately need to exercise outside (but now it's raining) and do some yoga, and rest and relax more, but that's hard to do without weekends.
Friday evening I was at Kinko's copying talking-points walking-pieces and stocking up on Manila folders, Friday night I was squinting at Yahoo maps and printing out precinct-walking routes without realizing that custom maps sent to me attached to email was at the time caught in the limbo of my bulk-mail folder spamfilter also provided by Yahoo in this case to my Enronesque service-provider, SBC (in the former Mexican parts of the US, the Texas utilities keep making California utilities their bitch).
Saturday morning I hosted a precinct walk out of my house, and walked part of a precinct myself, in the area I (and only I) call South Lake. I've really come to enjoy precinct walks. That same afternoon we had the first serious Oakland get out the vote (GOTV meeting) and came up with a precinct-captain structure and identified some potential leaders to step up. With just a little more structure, enough to delegate reporting and enable people to take responsibility for manageable tasks, the volunteer campaign should run much more effectively. It looks like we have some office space too, not an official campaign office but a place to store material and stage walks and use for meetings. I agreed to spearhead the Oakland GOTV effort in concert with a small strategic group, currently consisting of four people but with a number of others identified whom we'd like to involve at the strategic planning level, some of whom may bring their own established bases of support to the effort.
Sunday morning, I got up and made scrambled eggs a la Jacques Pepin with toasted bagel half for B and then headed into Berkeley for an interview for the book. I expected to talk for about an hour but we sat in the coffee shop for nearly three hours, with my scribbling furiously in my notebook whenever she was talking. She added another layer of understanding to my grasp of my topic and agreed to peer-review some or all of the manuscript, so that was great.
After a quick dinner of the squash soup that B had made Sunday afternoon, I ran back out to attend an outreach meeting trying to connect East Bay for Dean with the African American community in East Bay. We discussed the group itself late in the meeting, when only half the people were left, and there was general agreement among the black folks that the group shouldn't restrict participation in the group to African Americans but continue being an open group dedicated to the outreach effort and not necessarily an affinity group or lobby. Still the white folk (or "European Americans" as one of the group's founders is fond of saying) don't feel comfortable taking leadership roles. I know I want to participate and contribute my energy and support, but I want to take direction in this area, not give it.
That meeting broke up just before 9 so I dashed over to Piedmont Ave for my weekly writing evening with Cecil Vortex where I was pleased to see the Reverend Bill, who was working his way through a stack of Steve Martin and Woody Allen paperbacks, but admitted that something about the tea shop (the lighting? the acoustics?) wasn't conducive to work for him. One problem might be that Cecil and I are so heavy into politics right now that we sort of grok-lock and start speed rapping and that can make it hard to concentrate all by itself.
I got a little work done on my book that night, mostly framing the fourth chapter and noting some interview that still need scheduling or followup. That was a long day, that Sunday.
Yesterday, Monday, I was exhausted and not that productive. I made some calls and took some calls, did some blogging, and tinkered with the chapter. I was also obsessed with trying to figure out what flavor second-place finish will keep Dean afloat long enough so that New York and California can play a decisive role for once.
Today, Tuesday, I am on tenterhooks and needles. The New Hampshire primary is today, my publisher's marketing meeting for my book is today, and my next chapter is due (and I forfeit a piece of the advance if I miss any deadlines). I shouldn't even be blogging right now, except I promised I'd go back to logging at least the important stuff more regularly here in my online journal.
Ever the contrarian, over on Many-to-Many Clay Shirky asks Is Social Software Bad for the Dean Campaign?
A few choice quotes:
We know well from past attempts to use social software to organize groups for political change that it is hard, very hard, because participation in online communities often provides a sense of satisfaction that actually dampens a willingness to interact with the real world. When you're communing with like-minded souls, you feel like you're accomplishing something by arguing out the smallest details of your perfect future world, while the imperfect and actual world takes no notice, as is its custom.
and
When the Clinton campaign used an MIT-furnished e-mail list in the 1992 campaign, they didn’t use it socially, they used it as a fast cheap fax, and they used it to help them manage the traditional news cycle. Many of us assumed that this was the crack in the dam, and that online tools would become critical to organizing the voters themselves, first in 1996, and then in 2000, and we were surprised when they didn’t.
Finally, when Dean (and Trippi and Teachout and Rosen) came along, we thought “This is it – these are the people finally making it happen!” And in a way they are, by providing the model –- all top 3 finishers in Iowa use MeetUp, and they all have weblogs. But the Dean campaign used those things organically, while everyone else is playing catch up. And many of us (self very much included) thought that the inorganic adoption of social tools by Kerry, Clark, et al left them at a disadvantage.
Now, though, I’m not so sure. Maybe the adoption of those tools by a traditional campaign is a better way to fuse of 21st century organizing and 19th century “Get out the Vote” efforts. This would be especially true if these tools, used on their own, risk creating a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction that doesn’t translate to driving down to the polls in freezing weather.
Here comes President Kill again, surrounded by all of his killing men. Telling us who, why, where and when, President Kill wants killing again.
Hooray, ring out the bells, King Conscience is dead. Hooray, now back in your cells, we've President Kill instead.
Here comes President Kill again. Broadcasting from his killing den. Dressed in pounds and dollars and yen, President Kill wants killing again.
Hooray, hang out the flags, Queen Caring is dead. Hooray, we'll stack body bags, for President Kill instead.
Ain't democracy wonderful, them Russians can't win! Ain't democracy wonderful? Lets us vote someone like that in.
Here comes President Kill again, from pure White House to Number 10. Taking lives with a smoking pen, President Kill wants killing again.
Hooray, everything's great, now President Kill is dead. Hooray, I'll bet you can't wait, to vote for President Kill instead...
now playing:
"Here Comes President Kill Again" by XTC [Oranges & Lemons]
Marc Canter defends the notion of hosted FOAF-speaking soscial network services in a dispute with those who argue for a more "distributed" approach. He is responding to
Cory Doctorow (Towards a non-evil social networking service) who quotes Foe Romeo (My social network ideal).
In his comments, I suggest that these two goals are not really at odds. The really issue is interoperability between hosted and distributed implementations.
(A note on chapter assignments to blog entries: Many technologies apply to both 7 (business networking) and 8 (dating), so I will log some entries to one category when they could as easily come up in the other. Multiple categories are possible but cumbersome.)
Think I ought to try to interview the Dean Goes Nuts guy? Perfect example of a spontaneous Internet community proposing an alternative narrative frame from the one that the TV-centric media apparatus is offering.
Here's the latest bit of hilarious collaborative creativity: Dean-Reloaded.mpg (video/mpeg Object)
Once consequence of my "damn the torpedoes" approach to web presence is blundering ahead and trying stuff without knowing what the final shape will need to be. I hope to learn from the consequences and if my tools make the work malleable enough and I pay attention, things will keep getting closer to what I would dream of if I didn't have insomnia.
So, I am about to do a little renaming among my personal sites. At various time I've kept my personal journal (stuff about my life, stuff I only expect people I know to find interesting, but stuff nonetheless that I am willing to have anyone know about me) under various names: Breathing Room, Still Breathing, Shallow Breathing, bodega, x-ism, and most recently X-POLLEN. More recently still I rededicated xianlandia.com to be a multhithreaded view of my various bloggish writing (anything I'm managing on my own server, with links to stuff hosted elsewhere).
But originally X-POLLEN wasn't supposed to be a journal blog. It was one of the names I toyed with for my e-publishing presence, and in fact my Movable Type content-management installation run from that domain. It just makes more sense to me that the more whimsical, less semioticky xianlandia (pronounced the way Latino DJs say "discolandia" - "ehhh-see-own-lon-deeyaaa!) should be the name for my drivellous personal blog, and let x-pollen go back to being grand central station for stuff i'm doing and connections I'm making. So be it and so it will be.
For the six readers of my various blogs, this may be momentarily confusing. people looking for monolog may find my personal journal there instead, and not notice the absence of scintillating political analysis, blog gossip, and anemic arts news. People used to reading my personal blog will find at that address or in that RSS feed the whole panoply of stuff I write about ("who knew Christian was an anarcho-syndicalist entrepreneur?") and not notice the large sign i'm sure to add to my templates saying "looking for my journal? it's now at xianlandia" at x-pollen and "looking for my full feed? it's now at x-pollen.com" over at xianlandia).
There may be a few bumps in the road, but now, all six of you, you can't say I haven't warned you when it starts happening.
Sunday's NYTimes carried an article ("Politics of the Web: Meet, Greet, Segregate, Meet Again") claiming that the Internet suppresses the exchange of differing views. Bowling Alone's Putnam is quoted to the effect that the Internet is a tool and the verdict is still out on whether it will be for good or evil. But otherwise all quotes and examples given are on the side of this thesis:
Online political discussion has become so fragmented so quickly that some public policy scolds warn that the Internet is in danger of narrowing the spectrum of debate even as it attracts more participants to it. The same medium that allows people to peruse a near- infinite number of news sources also lets them pinpoint the ones they want and filter out the rest.
Blogger Jack Balkin disagrees:
Unfortunately, this article continues a meme that I have often found among progressive people-- that the Internet is bad for democracy. I think that this view is deeply mistaken. The Internet has its strengths and weaknesses, just like the traditional mass media have. The question is not whether the Internet is good or is bad for democracy. The key question is how the Internet changes the ways that democratic activities of organization, discussion, protest, and decisionmaking occur, and how the code of the Internet can be altered in different ways and different contexts to promote these different forms of democratic activity.
Had a great, nearly three-hour face-to-face interview with Mary Hodder today. We covered a lot of ground and I'll still be digesting what we talked about for years probably. One thing touched on was Orkut. More than once she mentioned blog entries she was partway through writing. She just emailed me to say that she had finished this one: Napsterization.org: Building a Social Network in 48 Hours
Mary would be a good candidate to peer-review the book. I'm thinking it might also be a good idea to get multiple people to each review single chapters as well.
I'll update with further links related to the interview when I have time. Off to a campaign meeting....
I'm interviewing Roger Karraker of 95346.com about the genesis of his site, its intentions, and how it works. We're doing the interview in the context of his blog. Here's a quotation from Roger's answer to my first question:
[Stewart] Brand surprised us all one day by saying that if he had his life to live over that he would want to be the editor/publisher of a village weekly. He thought that would be the most productive role possible.
The Scobleizer has a blog post on a March 29-30 conference on social computing and e-democracy that will include Joi Ito, Steven Berlin Johnson, David Weinberger, Scott Heiferman, Zack Exley, and a ton more.
Got a call from Whitney Otstott, a Corporate Communications Manager in the PR group at Convio, which makes custom-relationship management (CRM) software for nonprofits. They are powering the Avon Foundation's breast-cancer run, and their same "TeamRaiser" software module powers many other walks and similar fundraising events, as well as the "personal fundraising bats" at the DeanforAmerica site.
Whitney is sending me some of their case studies so I can tell her which I'd like to ask them more about, and she is setting up an interview for me with their CEO where I'll try to get a broad overview and maybe some history: how Convio found its way into this niche, and where they see it going.
The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society's Team in Training Program recently expanded so that people in remote areas, or in areas where there's not a local chapter, can train for races through an online program. They can still meet up with people on the weekends to practice, but they get their day-to-day coaching online. (A Sybex editor has some contacts at the SF chapter.)
A Sybex editor reports that a group of EastBay-ers who play kickball had been organizing their team meetings and adminsitration online, through the World Adult Kickball Assn. (WAKA). This is apparently huge in San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, and N.Y.
CNET news is reporting the launch of a personal project by a Google engineer, orkut.com, a trusted-network service similar to Match.com or Friendster. Article has a variety of insider bits about Google's possible expansion into social networking, including "Google itself has offered to buy Friendster, according to sources. Google declined to comment on rumors."
Online registration for my neighbors here in Oakland.
I asked Findory.com News why it was showing me this story:
Why was an article marked * Personalized * for me? Findory News thought you would be interested in the article "Injectable scaffold aids rebuilding of nerves, www.newscientist.com, Thu Jan 22 14:03:12 2004" because you read the following related articles: "Woman has giant tumour removed, news.bbc.co.uk, Thu Jan 22 09:01:52 2004."
It consists mostly of names, people I've spoken to or will email or have chatted with or plan to, many of whom I plan to quote, have interviewed already, or are being featured in some other way. There's also the web and radio marketing plans to think through. TV would be good too. People have been very forthcoming so far and generous with their time. This is my favorite form of research. Interviews sprout stories. Writing this book has been an intense and in some way methodical process so far, somehow exhilarating. Marketing the book should be even more fun. When the writing's in the can, that's when you can really start dining out on a book.
Terri Gross interviewed Wes Boyd and Eli Pariser from MoveOn today and mentioned a right-wing advocacy group called RightMarch, run by a William Green, which took out an ad denouncing a MoveOn ad that accused (in the words of the family of a soldier in Iraq) Donald Rumsfeld of betraying his country.
Boyd also said that politicoes view MoveOn's fundraising as equivalent to direct mail except free, but Boyd insisted that it was a two-way (not broadcast) medium they were using interactively to learn from their membership and not just to raise money, although he allowed that it is easier to raise money this way than with direct mail (which he characterized as requiring extreme messages and dire warnings to stimulate people to give today).
A former Dean supporter who posted to the Blog for America that Dean's "scary" concession speech from Iowa had turned him off to the candidacy ended up being quoted in the New York Time today. He elaborates about it in a Daily Kos discussion thread.
We can now start to think about Chapter 2 in terms of outcomes and not just inputs. Dean's finish has to be part of the story; yes, he did a great job mobilizing people in real ways (babysitting, for crying out loud! As the Guiness ads say, "Brilliant!"), but we have to acknowledge that elections, at their heart, are about personalities, issues, and campaign styles. As just one placeholder link among many, here's today's Chronicle:
...Neither Dean nor Gephardt, who spent much of the campaign cutting each other in nasty political ads, was able to stop the bleeding.
...It was a very different Kerry on the stump the past few days. Instead of attacking Dean, he talked about his hope for the future and blanketed the state with ads that featured his war-hero past. ...
I'm sure the good turnout was in part the result of a competitive field, but was it partly due to Dean? Should be on the lookout for analysis:
More than 120,000 Iowa Democrats, twice as many as four years ago but still only one in five of the state's registered Democrats, braved the cold and snow to show up at the caucuses. A Fox News entrance poll showed that nearly half of those surveyed were attending their first-ever caucus.
Full Circle Associates is a consultancy focused on fostering online communities. It offers this Online Community Toolkit as a good jumping-off place for related resources.
Another organizing technique is Power mapping. This was developed originally by Ralph Nader's PIRGs. Here's a good link to the concept: Power Mapping: How to Identify and Contact The Key Individuals who will Help You Achieve Your Goal
Community asset mapping is a powerful organizing tool that involves identifying stakeholders in a community and then trying to find ways to involve them in your organizing campaign. I haven't found one single definitive reference for the topic, but here are a few links that explain the concept further: Asset Mapping: A Powerful Tool for Communities, ACVE - Community Asset Mapping, Youth Action Effecting Change - Mapping Manual.
O'Connell also told me about the pros and cons of the Parks 2001 NYC campaign, and her involvement in its Internet organizing aspect for Partnership for Parks.
Christine O'Connell, from Partnership for Parks in New York, gave me the benefit of her Internet organizing experience with Green Corps, specifically her role and the tactics used in the Heritage Forests Campaign to protect roadless areas in national forests.
In my conversation with Howard Rheingold, we talked about a three-part process, starting from people finding a virtual community in order to address some need, then - if possible - meeting face-to-face to plan activities, and then finally commiting to take some kind of collective action.
We talked about the motivating factors that can encourage people to cross over the threshold of seeking other likeminded people online and Rheingold encouraged me to take a look at Abraham Maslow's theory of a "hierarchy of needs".
Daniel Drezner (a moderate Republican) admits, in This is pure genius, "I confess to being in absolute awe of this Dean campaign tactic."
Roger Karraker is using TypePad and a number of other technologies to host a community site for Forestville called www.95436.com.
Political Wire: Shopping for a President Online:
Political Wire gets a nice mention (though they messed up my name) in an Atlanta Journal Constitution piece by Jeffry Scott. "Shopping for a president online won't change our electoral mechanics; the next president will still be elected by voters going to the polls. But the Internet empowers Americans to circumvent the political machines and barking-dog political analysts to appraise the candidates on their own."
blogforamerica links to an NPR story about Senior for Dean volunteers who have together written over 1500 letters to Iowa voters, in Keep Those Letters Coming!:
This morning National Public Radio profiled Daniel and Marie Riehl of Seniors for Dean, who have sent more than 1,500 handwritten letters to seniors in Iowa. Listen to it here. As Zephyr reported this morning from the People Powered Iowa Road Trip in Iowa:
C.B. told me about a seniors meeting they went to yesterday. One woman brought all the mail she'd gotten that day, all glossy stuff. She held it up and said, "look at all the money we're spending on this -- and then I got this personal, handwritten letter, and it really made an impression on me.""She kept repeating that it was handwritten," C.B. laughed, "it was HANDWRITTEN."
You've sent more than 170,000 letters to Iowa, and each one matters. But Iowa is just beginning. You've shown the commitment to fight for every single and caucus in this election--and no one said it would be easy. We've been piled on by the Washington establishment, the Bush Administration, and the national media, but we're still standing. We're in this thing for the long haul.Let's keep up our momentum rolling, and point your pens toward New Hampshire, and tell them why it's important to join your campaign and vote for Howard Dean. And sign up for Victory Days letter-writing events on January 18 and 25, when we'll be expanding our address list to South Carolina voters.
I had a good phone interview with Howard Rheingold this morning. A nice complement to the chat interview with David Weinberger. Talking to these guys who've done a lot of heavy thinking about social software and virtual community is a huge help in clarifying the important elements of these phenomena. I'll clean up my phone notes and email them to Pete and Cecil, to keep you guys in the loop.
Rob Morse wrote up Kos in today's Chron:
On a modest street in the flats of Berkeley there's a little yellow bungalow behind a shabby fence. It's one of those places you expect to find a pit bull, but instead you find a bright young mayor of a city of about 70,000 liberal activists, writers, kibitzers, kidders and some folks who clearly have a lot of time on their hands.
The city that Markos Moulitsas Zuniga runs isn't named Berkeley. It's called Daily Kos ("Kos" was Moulitsas' Army nickname) and it's a city in the metaphorical sense, reached by mouse and keyboard. ...
But he messed up the reference to Meetup (note "meet on the Web" instead of "use the Web to meet face-to-face"):
"We convinced Dean that they had to use the meet-up strategy," said the 32-year-old Moulitsas, referring to the process where like-minded people meet on the Web and get together to swap ideas and strategies. "Every time Trippi sees me, he'll point and say, 'It's your fault.' "
Someone in the tech4dean group pointed out this indyvoter.org tech documents site. Apparently, these are people who worked on Matt Gonzalez's (unsuccessful) insurgent SF mayoral campaign.
Meet the Press (Sunday, Jan 11) included a segment where the reporters (Tim Russert, David Broder, Roger Simon, Chuck Todd) explained, defined, and dissed blogs and such. Among the conventional-wisdom memes that turned up:
- Blogs are just online diaries. ("look, a true blog is I woke up this morning, I decided to skip chem class, now I want to write about the last episode of Friends.")
- Isn't all this jargon hilarious? ("MR. RUSSERT: But now people who don’t like Howard Dean have occasionally gone up there and said some negative things and they are called trolls. / MR. TODD: You love this term, don’t you? / MR. RUSSERT: Correct? / MR. TODD: Yes, it is the term. / MR. RUSSERT: Roger Simon, when I say troll, I think of you. / MR. SIMON: Well, thank you very much.")
- Dean is Joe Trippi's Manchurian Candidate.
Amazingly, given his prior comments, Broder treated the Internet with the least disrespect. And at the end of the segment they did come round to the real-life-contact meme:
MR. SIMON: Dean has been accused for a long time of being just an Internet phenomenon, and his response has always been, “If you think that’s true, come out and see my crowds.” You know, the Internet may have gotten 12,000 people to come out to a rally in Washington state, but people actually had to go and do it. They had to leave their basements and push aside their Burger King wrappers and actually get out in life, in public, which some of them don’t want to do. And they do that for Howard Dean. His crowds are almost always overflow crowds.
MR. TODD: And this letter-writing thing that you talk about - that was done at the meet-ups, these monthly meet-ups. They write these letters. They’re handwritten letters. You know, they did a poll, the Dean campaign, to find out how many likely Iowa caucus-goers said that they had received a handwritten letter to ask them to support any candidate; 70 percent said they had received a handwritten letter. That’s stunning.
Jeff Jarvis follows up on Johnson's post, noting that Deanspace (taken loosely as the aggregrate of Dean Internet presence and community tools, as opposed to the specific DeanSpace initiative) has thus far been more about process than substance, and proposes that the next president could appoint a Secretary of Interaction to help people's ideas "bubble up" from the grassroots.
Steven Johnson (founder of Feed, author of Emergence) wonders how Dean's web-presence would translate to a presidency in Internet-Era Democracy.
This reminds me that I wanted to interview Johnson for the book. Onto the list he goes.
In chapter 2, I talk about how the Blog for America functions as (among other things) a virtual "war roon" for the Dean Campaign.
E Pluribus Unum expands on this idea in "Annoy the media. Swing the bat.":
# This mechanism takes the "rapid response" of the Clinton campaign War Room look quaint. Clinton (or more accurately Carville and Stephanopolous) understood that charges must be answered in the same news-cycle in which they were made. They got very good at reaching their constituency through the mainstream news media. Go rent "The War Room," and excellent documentary account of the Clinton campaign of '92. You'll see what I mean.
# The Dean machine goes that one better by bypassing the mainstream media altogether; they don't seek to dominate the airwaves with expensive ads. No, the Deaniacs have their own network, a better way to reach their constituency -- free from bothersome regulations from the FCC, et. al. It evolved, not from the top down like the Bush machine, but rather everywhere, all at once, like crystals forming on an icy windowpane.
Let me put it another way -- in the early 60's savvy politicians understood that television was an advertising medium after all. Buy the time, advertise the message, reach your constituency. That idea transformed political campaigns for the next 35 years. It transformed the two-party system into the one-party system. In other words, unless you belonged to the Television Party, you weren't going to be elected.
To the Deaniacs, the Television Party and its supporting infrastructure (the "mainstream media") is irrelevant; furthermore, they probably hold it in as much contempt as the Bushies do. "Annoy the media. Swing the bat." They coalesced around another technology; the Web. They used the web to help them organize and communicate. And, unlike the mainstream media which relies on one-way broadcasts, the Web is two-way -- send directly to your constituency and receive back directly from your constituency. You bypass all the bothersome layers and gatekeepers in-between.
Academicians have a fancy word for this: "disintermediation." This is what the Internet has meant to the Dean campaign -- the mainstream media has been effectively bypassed and/or removed as an intermediary between candidate and constituency.
It ain't a new phenomenon. Rush Limbaugh figured this out decades ago when he popularized the current talk-radio format. What, after all, is talk-radio except a fusion of radio broadcast technology fused with the two-way channel called a "telephone."
Dean's people (many of them young and very much at home on the Web) are figuring out a new paradigm now. They are popularizing the use of blogs for campaign organizing and fund-raising.
Where right-wing constituencies have dominated talk-radio, left-wing constituencies have an early jump on dominating campaign blogs.
Win or lose, the Deaniacs have pushed political campaigns into the next phase. The 60's paradigm of harnessing the advertising medium of television is now history, it's old school.
Oddly enough, very few in the mainstream media (Frank Rich of the NYT is a notable exception) realize the enormity of what Dean's supporters have achieved. Oh, I know -- conventional wisdom says the Dean is the "techie candidate." I'm not talking about that, because even that misses the real point (as evidenced by a recent poll debunking that silly idea).
Dean is not the "techie" candidate any more than FDR was the "radio" candidate or JFK was the "TV" candidate. Those candidates understood and exploited the technology to carry their message to their constituency. But they still had to have a message that called their constituency to action.
Writing at TomPaine.com, political operative Richard Blow (former editor of George) says Dean is unelectable; what's relevant for PoM is this bit of conventional wisdom:
A lot of Americans read the Bible. Somehow, I don't think that Howard Dean is one of them. 'Netheads may not care, but Internet geeks aren't exactly a big voting bloc. Religious people are.
Should have blogged this when it first appeared. While Everett Ehrlich's WaPo article, Q: What will happen when a national political machine can fit on a laptop? A: See below (washingtonpost.com) makes the erroneous assumption that Dean is potentially building a third party, his article was nonetheless rather influential when it appeared (it is also rebutted to some extent over at GreaterDemocracy.org).
Here's a key excerpt:
For all Dean's talk about wanting to represent the truly "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," the paradox is that he is essentially a third-party candidate using modern technology to achieve a takeover of the Democratic Party. Other candidates - John Kerry, John Edwards, Wesley Clark - are competing to take control of the party's fundraising, organizational and media operations. But Dean is not interested in taking control of those depreciating assets. He is creating his own party, his own lists, his own money, his own organization. What he wants are the Democratic brand name and legacy, the party's last remaining assets of value, as part of his marketing strategy. Perhaps that's why former vice president Al Gore's endorsement of Dean last week felt so strange - less like the traditional benediction of a fellow member of the party "club" than a senior executive welcoming the successful leveraged buyout specialist. And if Dean can do it this time around, so can others in future campaigns.
Joan Blades suggested that this Salon article (requires premium subscription or viewing of an interactive ad), MoveOn moves up, by Michelle Golberg, is "one of the best at describing MoveOn."
Note that the Club for Growth, which is making headlines right now with its advertisement attacking Howard Dean's supporters in Iowa as a "tax hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show," has started its own organization, MoveRight.org, whose name seems to be an homage to MoveOn's.
Since I'm digressing, Atrios wondered how his mirror-image taunt might be received:
Double Standards on Regional Bigotry
Imagine if I ran an ad which went something like "George Bush should take his negro lynching, anti-intellectual, pig feet eating, sister-screwing, wife beating..." before the farmer's wife then finishes the sentence: "... KKK-loving, right-wing freak show back to Texas where it belongs."
Mine's slightly more over the top than the actual Club for Growth ad, but it's no more incorrect. For some reason it's perfectly valid to make just about any regional stereotype about the Hollywood and Northeastern "elite," (which, we should remember, was just code for "JOOs and Negro-lovers"), but people get all sensitive when one stereotypes the South and Texas. I don't think such regional stereotypes are particularly enlightening or useful, but nor do I think their invocation should provoke the kind of outrage that genuine racism should. But, why the double standard?
Of course, the amusing thing about the Club for Growth ad is how wrong it is - Vermont is not part of the "elite Northeast" to the extent that it exists, it's a small rural farm state.
...for the record, Vermont has precisely two Starbucks for all those latte drinkers to go to.
Aldon Hynes, of Greater Democracy pointed me to a few of his essays, including The Internet and the Large Group: Technological Possibilities in a New Age, a paper presented to the Association of Internet Researchers about how Aldon decided who to support in the 2004 Democratic primaries, and " ... some old stuff about Social Networks and Neural Networks. Random thoughts that I never completely got together.... ".
Mitch Ratcliffe's blog has a New Year's Day post about finding a middle method between the anarchy of plebiscites and the totalitarianism of party hacks. Again, his work is all about politics and not the broader uses that The Power of Many will dig into, but he's on the mark that politicians don't have enough motivation to listen to ordinary voters, and that intiatives and recalls are overreactions to this.
Noted on the Well (and at my breakfast table): More media coverage of Howard Dean and his campaign in this week's New Yorker, and in today's Salon.
In the BlogAds weblog, Henry copeland writes:
I had lunch last week with Ed Cone last week in Greensboro. Ed took the first and most exhaustive look at Dean's Internet Strategy, and lots of journalists have since followed in his path.
We debated whether Howard Dean's Internet tactics might work in local campaigns this year, specifically for the NC campaign of
ChesterErskine Bowles for Senate.I think Ed is right that blogs + Meetup could make a big difference in the NC contest, particularly in a tight race. I agree that a little effort could catalyze dozens of 'Bowles blogs' by June. But I'll stick to my guns on my third argument: well-established institutions and inside players are too often willfully blind to new tactics and technology, particularly when the technology upends the power structure they've built their lives and bank accounts around.
So, no Bowles blogs this year in NC unless someone outside the Democratic apparat pushes them.
During the awkward transition from the Draft Clark movement to a more formal campaign, Stirling Newberry wrote this open letter to the Clark Movement warning about the dangers of taking the grassroots support for granted.
(Stirling still posts to the ClarkSphere blog, as well as to the Blogging of the President site run by Christopher Lydon and Jay Rosen.)
From Eschaton:
I passed up the opportunity to participate in a live Clark Chat (I can never come up with decent interview questions). But, a bunch of bloggers are going to be asking questions of the general and you can "listen in" using IRC at 5PM EST today.irc://irc.forclark.com Read-Only Channel: #wireside You'll need an IRC client like MIRC. Or, I think you can just watch it live on this page.
This paper, by Joi Ito, Emergent Democracy, is another influence on the book and a candidate for inclusion if we do incorporate an appendix of essay-reprints from the Web.
A sign of the times? Welcome to Ex-Deaniacs for Clark!
Stop Howard Dean Now - Don't Drink the Kool Aid (there's also a YahooGroup for this "movement").
The Second Superpower is Jim Moore's influential paper from last March.
Along with Joi Ito's Emergent Democracy paper and Ed Cone's Marketing of the President article, I would nominate this as a candidate for inclusion in toto in the book, if we do decide to reprint essays as part of the content.
Either way, it is influencing my thinking.
Des Moines Register columnist Marc Hansen writes about the handwritten letters Deansters are writing to Iowans at their Meetups:
Dear Howard Dean backer,
Thanks for your personalized, handwritten, single-spaced, two-page letter. No, it wasn't addressed specifically to me. And at first I wondered what was going on - some guy with perfect penmanship and a California return address writing my wife out of the blue. Whom does she know out there that I don't?
But when I gently ripped the letter out of her hands and read it, my mind was at ease. It was obvious, Pen Pal, you were only after her support in the Iowa caucuses.
Since then, I've heard from other Iowans who received the same kind of anti-form letter. Do the Dean people miss anything? Such attention to detail has to be a big reason their man leads the pack as Jan. 19 approaches.
I can't remember exactly what you wrote about your favorite presidential candidate, but I do remember marveling at the time and effort. Even if you wrote the same letter to a dozen of us here in Caucusland, it still beats the standard mass mailing.
A few Iowans might tell you to mind your own business. Some of us hate it when outsiders tell us how to think. We're funny like that. Still, it was a nice touch.
So I thought the least I could do was write back and let you know how it's going on this end.
It's true what the pundits are saying. Yes, they're freezing their laptops off. Yes, Sunday's debate went well for your man Howard.
As the front-runner, he weathered the attack everyone knew was coming. He held his ground. He talked up a storm about health care, tax cuts, free trade and other issues. He showed the usual command.
Joe Lieberman was outspoken old Uncle Joe. Hard-nosed and relaxed at the same time.
John Kerry had a cutting anti-Bush line about actually knowing what it's like to be on an aircraft carrier. Everyone was so busy ganging up on Dean, though, you wondered if anyone noticed.
Dick Gephardt, who's been in Congress since St. Louis was considered the West Coast, talked about the important bills he helped pass and the important people he can call on to help get things done.
Dennis Kucinich and Carol Moseley Braun were likable yet hopeless underdogs.
Lots of people fell in love with the boyish charm of John Edwards. As soon as the national media figure out he's really only 29, though, he's through.
Which brings me to the meat of this letter. Things are going well for Dean, but they can always get better. Is there any way, for instance, you can thaw him out, loosen him up a bit?
He talks a decent game. If he doesn't really know his stuff, he sounds as if he does.
But whom are we dealing with here? Who is this guy? Give us a glimpse of the man.
The average voter is as interested in NAFTA as the next semi-alert citizen of the free world. But what the average voter really wants to know is what kind of person he's dealing with.
If the trust is there, the free trade takes care of itself. Can we trust Howard Dean?
One of the more telling moments Sunday came when the candidates were asked about the biggest mistakes they've made as elected officials. It's the classic job-interview question. The idea is to take one of your strengths and trot it out as a weakness.
Edwards voted for the No Child Left Behind bill, mistakenly believing, he said, the president would take it from there.
Lieberman said that as a young state senator he was more concerned with the rights of criminals than victims.
Gephardt said he voted for the early Reagan tax cuts.
Kerry failed to defend himself under "withering attack" in the first race he ever ran.
Braun learned the hard way the opposition would criticize her even when it wasn't deserved.
Dean said he misquoted Edwards.
"I wrote him a letter of apology, and I apologize again today."
Not bad, but not as good as Kucinich who, as the mayor of Cleveland, fired the police chief live on the 6 o'clock news.
"On Good Friday," he added, asking whether anybody could top that. "But let's say that in the years since, I have learned a certain amount of diplomacy."
Even though nobody on the panel agreed with him about pulling out of Iraq, Kucinich instantly became more genuine, more likable, more truly human.
You told me, Pen Pal, why Dean deserves Iowa's support. I'm telling you how he might be able to nail it down. Just trying to help.
"Gina in Texas" posted this reply to the Blog for America comment thread (on an unrelated matter, today's NPR radio-only debate):
I emailed a response to the Des Moines Register opinion column by Marc Hansen today. The link was posted in a previous blog thread by anamericanabroad and pointed out again by Larry in Austin, thanks. Click my name if you want to read the piece.
My response started out as a short note, then something happened.... oh well, I guess I needed to get it out on paper. Virtual paper, anyhow! It follows for anyone who cares to read through it--I actually doubt Mr. Hansen will!
Peace
--------------------
Dear Mr. Hansen,I'm one of those out-of-state Dean supporters who is handwriting letters to Iowans. I of course wonder how they will be received, and thanks for letting us know what at least one Iowan thinks about the idea!
We appreciate the "thaw him out" advice too, although it's funny: Even today, we still hear criticism from pundits and politicians that Dr. Dean comes off as _too_ angry or hotheaded. His supporters don't think he's "all about anger." I'm not on the campaign plane with him, but I would say the doc is showing a calmer--one might almost say, "kinder and gentler"-- side to blunt such criticisms.
I realize some Iowans won't appreciate their letters, but I trust that most take them in the spirit in which they are intended: We outside Iowa know that y'all have a huge say in who becomes the Democratic nominee, and we just can't help wanting you to have the views of the nation on a topic of national importance.
I don't know what the California man who wrote the letter to your wife said, but I point out in my letters (I've written seven, all a bit different) that I have never before volunteered in any political campaign. I feel encouraged to get involved, on one hand, by my feeling about the current administration. No, it's not anger, though sometimes I do get angry at some events or pronouncements. It's more like disdain, or maybe disgust... Frankly, the best way to describe it is that I'm appalled, and there doesn't seem to be a noun for that (apallation, appalledness… I wonder why there isn’t one?).
I feel encouraged to volunteer for another reason: The Dean Campaign itself, which consists not only of "HQ" but of the thousands upon thousands of people of all ages from all walks of life, across the political spectrum: Progressives, Independents, a big cross-section of Democrats, Greens, Libertarians and even a sizable chunk of Republicans fed up with the administration's warping of what they thought their party stood for.
We're a big group, creative, generous with our time and money even when that time and money are already stretched to the limit by our own private lives. We're passionate in our support. "HQ" gives us trust and opportunity to take the ball and run with it, and that empowered feeling is a breath of fresh air for the Democratic Party.
We also, like our candidate, are not perfect, like all other human beings on the planet. But we are in there slogging to collectively out-think, out-organize and, well, "out-inspire" any other candidate. No matter what the outcome in November, we have built and are continuing to build a political community that I believe will be a force to reckon with for many years in American politics. More people, more diversified, more informed, more engaged, more connected.
And connected not just by the Internet, though that is a wonderful tool, but by personal outreach transcending all borders and social strata. People from California and Texas and dozens of other states are not only writing letters, they are getting on buses and planes and driving their cars into the Iowa winter to shake people's hands, talk to them, look them in the eye, connect with them.
We've done it in Arizona and New Mexico as well, and will do it in every state. Doesn't matter if some "expert" has written off the state as unwinnable for Dean or the Democrats; we will be there, largely under the radar of the news media, encouraging people to take back their power: one person, one vote, one newly aware and engaged individual at a time.
Dr. Dean and his campaign have awakened me and many others from our slumber, where we dreamt we would always have the freedoms this country was founded upon, and the opportunities, if we bothered to exercise them, to affect political life. We are ready now to go to work for those freedoms and for a true representative democracy of, by and for the people, with executive leadership accountable to _us_, not just a handful of big donors and major corporations.
The evolution of this movement is continuing, and no one can say for sure what it will look like in a year, or five. It is my belief that the awakened grassroots will thrive. With empowerment retaken and methods learned, we will find more dragons to slay, and I daresay a few windmills at which to tilt. But we will do it together, creatively, welcoming all who want to rebuild America as a ... [post gets cut off here]
Posted by: Gina in Texas at January 6, 2004 03:27 PM
Condemnation of Hitler ad and MoveOn.org.
craigblog: reinventing government? or, am I fooling myself?
Hey, if you're curious, I've just agreed to help the city take a look atthe way SF city departments plan to use information tech to provide bettercustomer service and other stuff.
Specifically, the biggest deal is a problem tracking system for the city.You would be able to report a problem, get a tracking number, and actuallysee that it gets resolved.
I'm also interpreting this as helping city department managers makethemselves more accountable to the people who work for them. (I alwaysassume that line workers know more about their jobs than their managers.)
I'm a little worried that this exercise could be taken as a photo op or something like that... but I'm committed to something much more than that.
Does this make sense?
Observations from the first meeting:
First thing... I wonder "what am I doing here?" That's my inner nerd talking.
The crowd is very ethnically diverse, which might not mean anything beyondthe short run. It does remind me that whatever one does on the Net maynot benefit people without access.
I see a lot of people who are also wondering what this is about, and get astrong sense that people are here out of a vague sense of civic duty. They want things to be better, but have little sense of power.
Some of the more populist folks, including myself, gather together to protect ourselves from unanticipated conservative dangers. We wonder if this is a sting operation designed to separate us from the herd.
I remember the joke about not wanting to know how sausage or law is made.
One reason I'm here is because I trust Mike Farrah, who will either becomethe Leo McGarry or Joshua Lyman for the city. I feel like Toby: I'm the guy who does the thing. Am I fooling myself? Should I dive incompletely, or give myself a day or two off?
More to come ...
Tom Coates has thought a lot about moderating and facilitating online communities:
A few months ago I responded to a site that claimed The Internet is Shit with a reposte designed to illustrate that although our networks might contain difficult and unpleasant material, they also contain enough of value and facilitate enough legitimate and real communities to be able to state pretty conclusively that The Internet is not Shit. Note - not that it's perfect, not that it doesn't have flaws, not that bad things don't go on in it, but that pound-for-pound it's more useful and valuable and community-generating than it is useless or damaging or culture-destroying.
Over the last few days, the post has turned into a bit of an argumentative arena, with various posters weighing with positions on what constitutes utopian rhetoric versus what constitutes a reasonable and rational position about the possibilities of (among other things) online communities. Throughout this article various people - myself included - have stumbled in our logic, presented clumsy opinions and misunderstood each other. Nonetheless, I want to pick up one particular fragment of these arguments - a fragment that I feel strongly about and am prepared to fight vigorously about. It's about the authenticity or otherwise of online 'communities'. At a certain point in the debate, my sparring partner posts:
"We're not talking about abstract information - which is expedited magnificently over the internet - we're talking about flesh and blood people. An actual meeting is far more meaningful than tapping on a keyboard. It is substantially different. Physically congregating with other folk is the same as being on the internet as is reading a book about Tibet compared to actually going there. Or reading a menu and eating the food. You can't reduce and flatten the physical, sensory, emotional, kinaesthetic and social world in that way."Now I'm going to agree with the premise that the particulars of the medium through which people communicate can add a timbre to a community and that they can faciliate certain parts of the exchange more effectively than others. On the other hand, I'd also argue that the qualities of the community space are supprted by the software that they run on, and that quite possibly that software hasn't yet - in the ten/twenty years that it's been being developed - quite achieved the elegance and sophistication that we take for granted in some other social spaces. But the one thing I will not stand for is this sense that online communities are somehow inauthentic because they are unphysical - or that the truncation in social 'signal' somehow reduces them down to a point of uselessness or redundancy. So excerpts from my reply follow:
Your analogies are hideously flawed for a start - if I communicate on the internet or by phone with someone, it's not like a transcript of that person or a decription of that person. You're talking as if whenever you talked to people who weren't present physically (say via the telephone), that what you were actually doing was listening passively to bloody recordings! Of course they're not - it's not bloody radio! People are talking to each other!
Now obviously there are things that you can do in person that you can't do physically online. It's harder to guage someone's mood, it's harder to have sex with them, it's harder to get intonation or a tone of voice. But it's still communication! And the possibility of community still exists! I mean, there are many circumstances in which certain elements of the experience an interaction can be truncated - if you're on a phone for example and can't see the person concerned, or if they're wearing sunglasses so you can't see their eyes, or if you're actually bloody deaf and are forced to lip-read, for Christ's sake! But none of these things stop the possibilities of communication, and none of them stop people being supportive, helpful, useful, friendly or even forming communities through them. I work on the internet, and often my first experience of people is online. Sometimes my only experience of them is online. And yet we can be friends! Most of them have helped me out in some ways in the past, and I've helped most of them out in the past as well. Those I haven't met, I'd like to and those I have I see regularly. But that our relationships have moved sometimes from purely online to a mix of both online and off doesn't mean they weren't real to begin with.
You talk about 'tapping on a keyboard' as if touching keys was the entire point. You're confusing the method of communication with the communication itself. It would be like me saying, "There's a substantial difference between communicating with someone (online) and just causing air to vibrate with your vocal chords". It's trivialising, innaccurate, clumsy and - frankly - stupid.[I should apologise at this point for resorting to name calling in the final line - put it down to frustration.]
There's a lot more to the argument that's worth reading and talking abotu on the post itself, but I just thought I'd ask do people still think that the term 'online community' is necessarily an oxymoron? Do you really think that the fact you're interacting through your fingers dramatically limits the strength of the relationships you can make?
[plasticbag.org]
Like most normal people, I was just having an interesting telephone conversation with a friend of mine (at 2am) about Google, Yahoo, Friendster, on-line marketplaces, approximate searches, and some secret stuff. Along the way I got to thinking about some of the fundamental similarities between Google (those who mapped the relationships among web pages and put them to use) and Friendster (those trying to map human relationships and put them to use).
It occurred to me that Friendster needs FriendRank. Like Google's similarly named dead technology, PageRank, think of FriendRank as a way of providing a measure of influence among "friend nodes" in a social network. Imagine, for example, that Howard Dean wants to convince me to vote for him. He can either advertise in the hopes of reaching me, or he can be a savvy Internet sorta guy and try to use my social network (thru the Internet, of course) to do the job.
At first you might think okay, that's easy. You just need to find the shortest path thru the network from Howard Dean to me. Then you'd figure out who along the way he needs to contact to try to get to me. Well, maybe. Social networks aren't that simple. They don't always use the shortest path--at least not in the "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" sense. Often times they use the most well lubricated path. Or the path that may result in reaching the greatest number of people who are "close" to me. Or those that have more influence with me in matters of politics, as opposed to something complete unrelated like cat grooming.
You get the idea. Like PageRank, it's a multi-dimensional measure that could prove to be quite powerful if applied properly. It's like a routing problem with different dimensions involved.
FriendRank would quantify that stuff. It's the algorithm used to find paths of social influence in various contexts, for various purposes, and in varying networks. Or maybe it's the value that algorithm produces for a given set of inputs. Either way, it's the idea that counts, right? Initially. Then comes the implementation.
Now, if you go search for references to FriendRank, you'll see a few. So this term (and idea?) isn't exactly original. But some of the real possibilities just clicked for me about 10 minutes ago, and believe me, this example is the tip of the iceberg. Some of the discussion here is really, really missing the point. So try not to get sucked into that void.
(Yes, I'm purposely not saying a lot of what I could yet. It needs time to percolate...)
On a semi-related note, it's too bad there's no Friendster web service API I can use to get the data needed to prototype this, huh? That could be a lot of fun. Or really frustrating, as most hard problems are... :-)
On the other hand, Friendster is not a necessary component in the equation. (Or Tribe.net, or LinkedIn, or...) It's just damned convenient since it's big and centralized. If I could get access to enough IM buddy lists, blogrolls, and so on, it'd be doable but much, much harder.
Okay, bed time now.
[Jeremy Zawodny's blog]
Derek Powazek, of fray.org and many other community projects, announces his engagement on his personal site: She Said Yes.
Probably want to talk to him at some point.
I had three goals for today:
- Blog the whole backlog of links (accomplished)
- Contact everyone needed for Chapter 2, and as many other desired names as possible (partially complete so far).
- Outline Chapter 2 (accomplished, at a high level).
I expect to write about ten pages a day tomorrow, Wednesday, and Thursday, mixing in interviews each day as well, so I can wrap up the first draft of the chapter fairly early (target is 35 pages) on Friday.
If some people prove elusive, may need to drop in placeholder notes here and there pending getting some feedback, quotations, insights from those missing names.
Pete:
Donald Wildmon is the founder of American Family Assn, , has a big Action Alert network and is very effective at getting members to communicate to politicians.
Lou Sheldon is chairman of Traditional Values Coalition.
I don't know about TVC's grassroots success or effect, because Sheldon is a very big media hog and gives the impression that his is a one-man show; Wildmon started out that way, and still signs a lot of press releases, but otherwise keeps more to the background now. (Wildmon was originally a Methodist, Sheldon originally a Presbyterian. But both are now much more fundamentalist than those denominations.)
Wes Boyd is, of course, cofounder of MoveOn
townhall.com ("The Conservative Movement Starts Here") reports on
conservatives using Meetup.Other random political groups but without knowing whether they're relying
on digital tools:right:
Christian Coalition (Pat Robertson), Family Research Council (Gary Bauer)
Pete:
Various sites are set up for kids to go and play, chat, learn, build their own webpages. Some also act like personal organizers. A friend pointing me to Kiddo Net led to me finding that they're categorized on Google as Kids and Teens: People and Society: Online CommunitiesOn carpools, all I'm able to find are regional transit sites, like Rideshare Online, not smaller-scale group organizing sites, though there are software makers with scheduling apps for carpools and such.
(FastCompany article from 1999 on organizing busy families but of course, that's two Internet ages ago... though it does remind me about WatchMe! and other sites that let working parents look in at day care centers, something that seems to have dropped off the meme-dar.)
Pete:
Almost every kids' soccer league in California has its schedules (field and referee assignments, dates/times) and tournament data on a website:
CCSL, Yourth Soccer.Little League online, not much more than info.
Tons of companies offer Web site construction and forum/community tech for
sports teams: eTeamz, League Pro, HotStat.
CHARITY: Potential main case study: breast cancer two-day walks. ... keep track of meetings, arrange buddy training walks, enlist donor pledges there.
Pete also wrote
I found the "arts orgs go online" reference that's been nagging me. It's an old program, though, no longer kept up: OpenStudio.
I knew of a couple of Bay Area theater groups that explored this in the late 90s; I remembered it as more "connected" than simply building better websites. The main idea was, if we train some folks how to build sites for their organizations, it'll be part of their brief to go out and train folks at other organizations.
Most of the arts groups that have something actually happening online (beyond informational sites, box office, and perhaps discussion forums) are either digital galleries or basic volunteer sign-up.
Online fundraising for nonprofit arts orgs (Idealist.org is a wider civic-action site).
Resources for arts orgs:
Colo Arts, Oriscus, Amer Assn of Community Theatre,
Network for Good.
Liza Sabater at Culture Kitchen is working on some online arts projects as well.
online chat sessions with local candidates or candidate info
Online help (with audio) for students who failed state testing
Sierra Club. International has a page to let visitors send boilerplate letters to politicians on various topics. N.J. chapter has a Sierra Activist login feature but I didn't test drive it. Source: EnvSite.
OA has find-a-meeting plus info pages
Veterans.net also has an online pager network.
Soldiers Radio lets visitors record a message on an 800 number, which can be played back by soldiers with web access.
Many webrings and chat rooms for veterans...
CyberFeminism: Univ.
thesis project site encourages women and girls to use the Internet for
feminist activism and for finding feminist resources.
Pete wrote:
Another possible case study (though it's yet another big organization instead of a grassroots effort) is the American Red Cross: they use their database to send reminders to blood donors, to schedule appointments at the next blood drive, and to recruit donors to other activities like disaster preparedness training. Blood drives are at GiveLife.org; int'l HQ is at RedCross.org.
moveon.org gets dinged by fox and the WSJ for having a short movie on their site that compares Bush with Hitler. Could be an anecdote re the risks of decentraliziation -- they had no idea the movie was even posted, but folks react as if they'd made the movie themselves.
Bob Jacobson, from Dean Leaders, notes:
Yahoo! Groups : onlinefacilitationIt's amazing how little examined Yahoo Groups are, given their centrality to the Dean campaign.
I did a search and turned up this moderated Yahoo group, Online Faciliation, which I've joined. (I've not yet confirmed.) The messages are rich, plentiful, and from recognized experts.
This looks very good. I recommend other DLs running YGs consider becoming members, also.
Full Circle Associates, organized around expert Nancy White, could be a source of help, although it's a commercial enterprise.
For more general info, I recommend that DLs read WELL co-founder Cliff Figallo's most recent book on online community. Cliff lives in Sonoma County and should be accessible to us for occasional consultation.
Howard Rheingold was the guy who set Trippi off in the first place. He's in Mill Valley, CA, and likewise should be available for occasional help, maybe an online seminar for Dean Leaders: Rheingold Associates
Rodney pointed out this game/chat/virtual world service: welcome to blah! usa.
Aldon Hynes (of Connecticut for Dean and DeanSpace and Tech4Dean and Greater Democracy) outlines some of the principle of Open Source Peer to Peer Democracy at the Greater Democracy group-blog website.
Andy Baio's open, RSS-generating shared event-scheduling service, Upcoming.org.
Eric Raymond's famous The Cathedral and the Bazaar essay on open-source philosophy is often quoted by people in the Dean campaign's tech corps (and probably the Clark people as well). Rayne of Rayne Today, one of my contributors at RFB, pointed to it as a good template with many political anologues worth exploring.
A reminder to try to contact someone at the Open Society Institute and Soros Foundations Network, possibly my old schoolmate Justin Burke, who works at Soros Foundations Network.
George Soros would be a great name to write a foreword, but then again someone like Craig Newmark may have even wider, less politically polarized appeal.
My own essay from Radio Free Blogistan continues to generate new incoming links, from increasingly influential nonprofit- and activist-oriented weblogs, such as this one: WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Weblog Strategies for Non-Profits
Mitch Ratcliffe is working with Jon Lebkowski on an Emergent Democracy book project for O'Reailly: RatcliffeBlog -- Mitch's Open Notebook: Some notes on emergent democracy
Ed Cone's hugely influential article, The Marketing of a President covers a lot of the key elements of the Dean Campaign case study (along with the subsequent Wired article, blogged earlier - I'm catching up on the our email backlog of link-exchange that preceded the book proposal).
Howard Rheingold writes,
My name is Howard and I am a Technorati addict
in BlogPulse: More Emergent Stuff, a journal entry at TheFeature (motto: It's All About The Mobile Internet).
Also via Susan Mernit.
PLINK - People Link (via Susan Mernit's blog)
John Robb points out that intentional actions are required, and not just a hub-and-spoke architecture. (via buzzmachine)
David Weinberger (guesting at Many-to-Many) points to a problem inherent to social software:
[R]eal social networks are always implicit. The ones constructed explicitly are always - yes, always - infected with a heavy dose of social bullshit. It’s like thinking that the invitiation list for your wedding actually reflects your circle of friends and relatives. No, you had to invite Barry-the-Boozer because he’s your cousin and you couldn’t invite Marsha because then you’d have to invite her husband Larry-the-Ass-Grabber and her daughter Erin-the-Snot-Flinger. Explicitly constructed social networks not only lack the differentiation that makes relationships real, they are falsehoods built to reinforce spectral relationships and to avoid ending shaky ones.
From dmasson on the Well:
This looks like a mistake. In case the link is taken down, it says:
AP Kills Limbaugh Painkillers Story
The Associated Press
Saturday, January 3, 2004; 5:06 PM
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - Please kill the story Limbaugh-Painkillers, V9991. Rush Limbaugh has not been charged with doctor shopping.
A kill is mandatory.
Make certain the story is not used.
Oops!
Continue reading Make certain the story is not used.
File under "you learn something new every day":
The transition to full night happens when the sun is 18 degrees below the horizon.
Source: Joe Flower in the Well's 'current' conference.
A commenter writes re The Decembrist: Dean's Penguin, or Technology and the Nature of Political Interaction:
I think you've identified the real innovation here, namely the decentralization of the campaign. Everything else just a tool to bring it about.
Oddly, the example is a hacked LiveJournal account: SecurityFocus HOME News: Defenses lacking at social network sites
