Have you ever been in a class where the teacher says something that you don’t understand but you don’t want to say anything because you think everyone else understands and you’re just stupid and then someone else asks a question and it quickly becomes apparent that no one understood?

Ever wonder how many times no one worked up the courage to ask that first question, and everyone left the room perplexed?

That, to me, is a big part of what The Point is about — creating a better way to break the ice, abandon pretense, and say what we feel. It’s a way for people to dream big about what would make the world a cooler place, and a lot of times, find that everyone else thinks it would be cooler that way too.

And most importantly, it’s a way for those people to come together and actually make it happen.

-Filed in The Point

The Point is a great way to buy services as a group and get things done cheaply and efficiently. For example, the folks in our office ran a campaign to bring in a barber if seven people would get a haircut. Everyone paid a little less, and avoided the hassle of a trip.

Why not create a campaign to get a landscaping discount for you and your neighbors, bring a chef into your office to cook lunch, or get a group discount at your local gym?

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This is the second in a series of posts introducing the campaign types on The Point.

When I first started thinking about online ultimatums, I was amazed there wasn’t already a website for them. The Web seems like an obvious evolution of collective action; a way for scores of individuals to coordinate small actions that add up to something big and force change.

The makeup of an ultimatum

I’ll start with a quick description of how ultimatums work on The Point. There are four main components:

• Target: A company, organization, or person that you want to behave differently
• Goal: A discrete change that you want the target to make
• Action: What each campaign member will do if the target refuses to change
• Tipping Point: The number of participants that triggers the action

These four components combine into a sentence that reads like this: “[Target] must [Goal] or else [Action] if [Tipping Point] people join.” In other words: do something, or else, we will do something that will force you to do it (if we gain enough participants to deliver the necessary force).

Ultimatums can be customized to fit most circumstances. When organizing labor, for example, finding the first mover — that courageous person who is willing to risk their job to take a stand — is often the greatest hurdle. The Point is the first tool to make that concern moot through its conditional anonymity feature. You can start or join a campaign anonymously, and identities are revealed upon reaching enough members to provide safety in numbers. Creators can also notify stakeholders as their ultimatum grows, control who sees or joins it, set a tipping deadline, and more.

The tipping point

The tipping point is when the cost (to the target) of group action exceeds the cost of change. For example, when a boycott becomes more expensive than building a waste treatment plant, or when the cost of bad press is greater than the cost of following product safety standards.

By making action conditional on reaching a tipping point, The Point implicitly takes the following position: it often¹ takes a critical mass of people acting together to force change. Further, we think that knowing action will have an effect inspires a motivating sense of empowerment in people that will increase participation. It’s a simple risk analysis; reduce the chance that an action will be wasted, and more people will take that action.

As an example, consider this Harper’s article calling for all Americans to participate in a general strike unless George Bush resigned or is impeached. Yeah, right. Try telling your boss that you’re staying home from work until George Bush resigns. This is a perfect example of an action that “tips” — if only a few people participate, the participants are punished. But if enough people participate that it becomes the norm, the participants are actually rewarded by not needing to work. The Point is the tool for bringing actions like this one to their tipping point.

Finding your problem’s tipping point

For some campaigns, these elements are obvious. Others require some research. The campaign creation guide is a helpful guide when the answer isn’t apparent.[work on this bit]

The challenge is quantifying the two sides of the equation. How do you find out the cost of a waste treatment plant? What is the cost of a single boycotter? Are there other factors that come into play — the target’s sensitivity to their public image, for example?

We’ve created several tools to help answer these questions. First, the campaign creation guide outlines the thought process behind creating ultimatums. Second, there’s the Problems area, a collection of wiki pages where people can gather intelligence and brainstorm strategies to solve shared problems.

Conclusion

We see ultimatums as enabling a deeply held American ideal — the right to peacefully organize — to the point that it’s virtually painless. It’s a big idea, and I’ve only scratched the surface in this post. What will the world be like when organizing a massive group action is as trivial as clicking a button?

-Filed in Uncategorized