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‘Social Movements 2.0’, an article by Brendan Smith, Tim Costello, and Jeremy Brecher from Global Labor Strategies in the last issue of The Nation, presents a good, skeptical, and practically grounded take on the challenges facing online-assisted activism today.

They rightly point out that organizing 2.0 isn’t fundamentally different from organizing 1.0 in terms of the logics at play–social movements have always been about networking, the articulation of shared points of identification, and the definition of shared goals. What is different is that more and more social relations have technical components. The web is becoming a mundane technology, and just as we don’t distinguish between mail- and telephone-organizing, we shouldn’t distinguish between offline- and online organizing per se, but see off- and online pratices as modules that need to work together.

They also point to the fact that increasingly internet-assisted organizing is dependent on tools that are under a mixture of state and commercial control, control exercised mainly from the commanding heights of the post-industrial world, i.e., the U.S. and the European Union. That’s not a problem if a movement is engaged in non-transgressive action or is organizing against a technologically inept and resource-poor authoritarian regime. But if it is up against the powers that be in the Western world, the promise of online tools may be compromised (the article offers examples), and just as many movements in the past found it necessary to found their own papers and develop their own networks for the dissemination of mail, some movements will need to think about their potential dependence on Facebook and other corporate platforms.

I like and respect the work of Clay Shirky, the main source for many of the five advantages of new media that they point out in the article. They basically are that various internet elements afford (1) group formation, (2) scale and amplification, (3) interactivity, (4) the destruction of hierarchies, and (5) low-cost organizing through cheap tools.

I will only add here, as I have argued before, that it is crucial to keep in mind that all five affordances are double-edged, in that they carry their own associated costs. Even if the barriers to entry are coming down, we have to recognize that they whole economics of communications seems to be changing, and that that involves new challenges as well as promises.

So what are the liabilities that come with the five affordances? (1) larger groups generates more internal communications, which requires processing or can generate problems and friction, and lower barriers to group-formation encourage fragmentation, why build a rainbow-coalition when we can apparently each have our own group with little overhead? (2) amplification generates more communication, which again face the limitations of the attention economy, (3) interactivity, and the expectation of interactivity, generates further transaction costs, (4) hierarchies and old heritage institutions, even within movements themselves, are unlikely to walk quietly into the night, and will fight back, generating new problems, and (5) cheap tools means that no one feels obliged to chose and stick to one platform, generating a curious form of fragmentation peculiar to cheap communications platforms, where people use multiple platforms at once without coordinating effectively.

This discussion is not about being a techno-utopian or a techno-pessimist, but about techno-realism, carefully considering the variable practical implications for organizing of our increasingly technically augmented social life.

I officially started writing my dissertation yesterday. I’ve added a little page summarizing my main ideas here. Comments and feedback welcome.

Some clever people at the New York Times are playing around with a tool they call Represent. It helps New York residents figure out who represents them at the various (and many) levels of government, and match them with relevant stories from the NYT, but nothing outside, of course…).

It looks like a good use of increasingly common tools, and agree with Gilbertson at Wired, who argues here that geodata tools can help newspapers localize their content effectively online.

From a concerned citizen and media researcher perspective, they also help make visible how many of our elected officials labor in almost total darkness–countrary to all the talk of the total ‘mediatization of politics’ you may have heard of.

(thanks to Erica S for the tip)

Persephone Miel (Berkman, Harvard) spread the word today that Media Re:public has published their various reports today. They are here. I’ll read and comment later. The April conference in LA was very interesting, and I’m looking forward to exploring the material.

Zack Exley and the rest of the crew hosts a discussion of the future of NOI, what Exley calls “the non-internet hype internet organization”.

Exley suggests that NOI is sort of the “MoveOn of progressive organizing” in that they are very nimble, and have few vested interests in doing things in a particular way. They can move quickly from defining a need to trying to fill it, and leave day-to-day stuff to others who do it better and with more resources. So he asks for suggestions as to what the progressive movement needs.

We discuss a variety of things, and I will just briefly recapitulate the parts of the discussion of organizing and NOI that I took notes on.

People emphasize the need for training, of more regional/local trainings (ideally bringing some of the hot talent to the state rootcamps), ways of bringing new organizing to low-income communities where the digital divide is still an issue in the hardware-access sense, and not only in the skills-sense.

Many people latch on to this discussion and mention that many traditional problems of organizing across class, gender, race, and educational barriers remain central, and are often forgotten in discussions of new technology.

People ask for NOI to continue to function as a repository for the accumulation of data and knowledge on what works, stuff which is usually sitting with the staff, and disappears with them when a campaign comes to an end or someone leaves an organization.

Marshall Ganz was a big hit at the conference, and someone suggests that NOI should make a more deliberate effort of drawing in experienced old-school organizers for future conferences, and to try to keep them there to engage in the conversation. One thing this can change is what one woman in the group describes as the tendency to have a very self-referential conversation, something that generates a need to get someone to challenge assumptions etc.

Exley summarizes the discussion by suggesting that NOI in the future will put more emphasis on a wider introduction to the progressive movement and its history, on offering diversity training and in general expand the trainiing universe beyond hot-now new tech stuff so that even if the progressive movement of today fails in its instrumental goals, it will still generate a cohort of organizers that have both the skills and tools they need and a sense of their place in the history and trajectory of a movement with deep historical roots.

Micah Sifry and Nancy Scola from TechPresident hosts a session on information overload. It is very conversational, so my notes are a bit scattered.

Micah opens the discussion by suggesting that we face both a personal problem of information overload, and a collective/political/societal problem of information overload.

Both individually and as a society, our inbox is too full, we don’t find the time to respond to things properly, and are tyrannized by the inflow and the many distractions that follows from it.

A sort of meso-level version of it is the difficulties the netroots/progressive bloggers, progressives what not had in reacting quickly enough to the bailout plan. There was too much going on, and people couldn’t get their heads around it before it was pretty much over and the agenda had moved on.

He asks people around the room for strategies of dealing with it.

Someone suggests that part of what we need to do is to redefine productivity and accept that “staying connected” requires a lot of work that does not have a tangible outcome. In contrast to ‘networking is notworking’, he essentially says ‘networking is networking’, and without all the work that goes into it, the network wouldn’t be there. Good point.

People offer variuos personal ways of dealing with overload, from limiting the number of tabs they have open on their computers, to being deliberately off-line for some of the day. Others counter that personal solutions are necessary, but that they don’t really get at the pressure that lead to the problem in the first place–being offline does not reduce the amount of things clamoring for your attention.

Erica Sagrans points out that no individual institution has an incentive to hold back and not overload–everyone is afraid of not cutting through the clutter, and will do their utmost to communicate, only exacerbating the problem at hand.

Matt Lockshin adds that an additional problem that is often overlooked is the ‘pollution’ of the networks by actors who aren’t in it in good faith, people who spew what Harry Frankfurter has technically defined as “bullshit”. This I think is a very important point, that the very networks we use to remain attached and act collectively are also the homes of organizing-spam or social-spam, were people latch on to groups for various reasons that the group itself remains indifferent to, and try to insert it into the agenda (of course, it is hard to make a good distinction between honest attempts to change/modify a group/networks behavior and agenda and then more or less malicious practices that essentially function to paralyze networks).

I chip in and suggest that the problem is especially acute for those who have unclearly defined jobs in the parts of the network society that does not operate on the basis of a clear division of labor–say, you are a journalist, but also expected to be a new media producer, or you are a political organizer, but also expected to be able to manage databases, etc etc. Here, the erosion of the division of labor and its institutionalizations in organizations that enforce it that provides one way of dealing with information overload is absent, and combines with the exponential growth of “stuff out there” that comes with the lowered barriers to entry to produce something of a perfect storm of information overload.

Micah ends with a call for networks to behave a little more like networks, i.e. to accept divisions of labor and systems of trust and cognitive shortcuts within a given assemblage, I do this, you do that, and unless I have reason to believe you for some reason won’t do it, or won’t do it properly, I will simply rely on you for that, in short, in a nice phrase, “organize smart crowds in the face of the firehose of information”.

Various people involved in the neighbor-to-neighbor tool used by the Obama campaign are here to talk about it, Jascha from Blue State Digital, who provides the front-end tools, Mark from VAN, who build the back-end tools, and a couple of people from the Obama campaign (I didn’t catch their names, apologies). Katie Allen from the DNC, who pioneered the project back in 2006, is also in the room. Everyone wants feedback on how to improve the neighbor-to-neighbor tool.

The main idea of the tool is to leverage more effectively whatever personal connections, geographical proximity, or other kinds of affinities volunteers may have with targeted voters. Veterans-to-veterans, neighbor-to-neighbor, friend-to-friend, etc.

Also, the tool allows for more modular volunteering with a low barrier to entry, where people have access to what they need (phone lists, walk lists, scripts, etc) from home.

Then the tools has ‘activity trackers’ that both give volunteers a more material sense of what they are doing, and also helps organizers identify their best volunteers.

Use of the tool grew exponentially in the final days of the campaign, from hundreds of thousands of calls in the weeks leading up to E-day to more than a million calls on November 4th.

The audience ask about the usual control and command things, do anybody “check in” with these people, are they on message, were there examples of malicious use, can you block certain people from using it, etc.

The presenters are up-front about that, any open and distributed system allows for malicious use, but detailed control is too burdensome and even with a couple of percent of all contacts made using the tool are fake ones, the amount of additional real contacts it allows should outweigh these concerns. A good one-liner, “you should be concerned about malicious data, but not obsessed with it”.

They add that there were mechanisms in place to control data and the like, and that they were used in practice, especially before everything heated up in the final days.

Someone in the audience asks who owns the tool. The presenters laugh and pause for a while. The verdict is (un)clear: “well… it is a bit… mixed up a little bit.” Ok. Blue State owns part of the code and interface, VAN owns part of it, DNC gave birth to it, so have a say in it, Obama for America used it and bought it, so they have to make some decisions too about its future use and development. Blue State Digital and VAN of course wants to develop this and offer it to their clients, and need to think about where to go. As Mark Sullivan from VAN puts it, it was very much developed for the Obama campaign, “with the assumption that every number would have 6 zeroes after it”–i.e., it was scaled for a very well-funded presidential campaign with tons of volunteers and staffers.

I ask how they imagine it will scale to congressional elections in 2010? There will be less money, fewer staffers, and fewer volunteers. Mark Sullivan says it should be easier to scale up than to scale down. (that’s fine, but is the tool cost-effective on a smaller scale? It’ll have to be cheap or intergrated into standard packages).

This was a very interesting session–I have often marveled at how little qualitative evaluation there seems to be going on in politics–lo and behold, the New Organizing Institute paid a company called Webitects to do usability research on how front-end users experienced new tools for augmented organizing and field work in battleground states.

Paul Baker and Billy Belchev runs through their presentation. They are still in the process of analyzing their data, but they presented some initial findings today on how people actually used the VAN, MyBO, and other tools in campaign offices.

They mainly focus on gap analysis, i.e., identifying what organizers are supposed to do, what they actually do, and what tools they use to get there.

Most of the presentation focus on volunteer recruitment and coordination, and they provide many examples of how organizers use extra tools beyond the systems campaigns provide–they use spreadsheets, stick-it notes, and what not to keep track of things. These tools have advantages that lead organizers to them (they are easy and accessible), but also problems for the organization they work in (they make data sharing harder, increase risk of dissonance).

In addition, even with the tools at hand, many forms of annotation that are important to the organizers and volunteers in their daily work has no place in the databases, or require time-consuming work to store–all that tends to remain on paper or in the head of a particular organizer. Again, data-sharing is a problem, and without data-sharing people get multiple calls, conflicting messages, etc.

Paul and Billy point out that training can solve many of these problems, but that it may not be as practical and cost/effective a solution as technical features, since there are so many people involved in campaigns, and so little time.

Paul gives as an example data entry into the VAN–he has seen volunteers enter page after page of information, and never save. One solution is to train all volunteers better. Another is a technical design solution, have a little box ask the volunteer after each page, “do you want to save the data you entered?”

In the discussion, people ask a lot of questions about security and control, suggesting that many remain suspicious of distributed and open systems in politics.

I hope NOI will make at least parts of the final findings publicly available. This is very, very interesting work.

Mark Sullivan, Jim St. George, and the rest of the crew from Voter Activation Network, the company that provides VoteBuilder and many other interfaces and front-end tools for data analysis for Democrats and progressives, hosted a session on their products.

Sullivan started by pointing out that a lot of the development this cycle was driven by demand from the Obama campaign, and through interaction with their tech people, and people from Blue State Digital and the micro tools they developed for the MyBarackObama site. Now the question is what the VAN should work on in the future: “what would you like to see?”

One thing several people comment on is the proliferation of different databases and tools, and how much easier everyday work would be with integration into one common platform, what someone calls “the holy grail of only one big database”.

Others request more campaign-control, more fields that can be customized with locally relevant information, or whatever else the campaign think is important.

(The two ideas are both reasonable enough, but seems to draw in two different directions, one is for more centralization and streamlining, the other, more decentralization and customization.)

People would also like better tools for volunteer management.

Sullivan underlined that the data available in 2008 was much better than before, that through collaboration with Catalist and various progressive groups, the VAN included often rich data on most of the voting age population, not only registered voters. When people asked for more data and more access, he pointed out that there are not only technical challenges to overcome, but also political problems about data-sharing etc to deal with. That discussion really went nowhere, though it seems to me one of the most interesting. VAN is driving a technical democratization of data access (within the progressive network), whereas many other organizations still hold onto what they have and are reluctant to share (for a variety of reasons stretching from reasonable over understandable to more parochial).

A final discussion was of what technical devices the VAN and its tools should work on, so far, palm pilots and personal computers have been the main, but will there in the future be, say, smart phone applications. Sullivan was skeptical, he didn’t think there’d be enough such phones around for the forseeable future, and pointed out that they are too expensive for campaigns and organizations to provide canvassers with them.

People from the Analyst Institute, AFL-CIO, and Rock the Vote present some of their evaluations of various campaign initiatives in the 2008 cycle, and stress the importance of actual, data-based testing of various theories of what work and what doesn’t.

We are reminded of some old findings: robocalls don’t work, rushed calls don’t work, email doesn’t work for GOTV.

The general lessons are: the more personal, the better, always emphasize local affiliation and personal affinity when making voter contacts.

Some bits from the discussion:

People talk about ‘spill-over’ effects. Apparently, most forms of GOTV voter contact has a spill-over effect of about 60% on other members of a given household. So a campaign may not want to target one supporter living with four people who support the opponent.

There is some discussion of a mail piece that was used in Michigan, where targeted voters got a piece of mail before the election listing their own voting history and the voting history of 12 neighbors, a mention that voting histories are public information, and a line about a similar and updated letter being send out after the election. Obviously, the point is to shame people into voting. The results are mixed–the letter had a lot of impact, but also generated a backlash in the press, via mail and phone complaints, and the like.

A more general, and perhaps more interesting discussion was of under what conditions the findings of these experiments hold up. People express their skepticism on various counts, does over-saturation make a difference, how quickly does the effect wear off, and the general response from the presenters was two-fold, (a) there are always numerous conditions, “we could discuss those all day”, and (b) there are a million things more that needs to be tested (effect of race on canvassing, whatnot).

Regina Schwartz, who was on the panel from the Analyst Institute, pointed out at the end that it is in the best interest of anyone who works in, say, field, to get their results tested and evaluated, so that they are better equipped for internal budgetary fights.