We’re excited to announce that we’ve integrated Facebook Connect into The Point, making it possible for Facebook users to use The Point without setting up and managing a separate account or maintaing a separate login.

Back in December 2008, Facebook announced Facebook Connect – a service that lets people use their Facebook login and identity on third party sites that provide integration, like The Point.

Connect!

If you already use The Point and have a Facebook account (who doesn’t!?) clicking the Facebook Connect button will link your account on The Point to your Facebook account and you’ll be able to use your Facebook login from then on.

New users of The Point can just click the Facebook Connect button when joining a campaign for the first time, and a quick Facebook login is all it takes – no account setup, no account activation.

Your Facebook login information is never sent to or shared with The Point in any way; it’s entirely handled by Facebook.

Your Portable Identity – You Can Take it With You

Once you’re connected, your identity on Facebook – your name, profile pic – even your friends – will be available on The Point.

Tired of that profile pic?  Change it once on Facebook and it’ll be visible on The Point.

Your Facebook profile information is subject to the same privacy controls on The Point as you set in Facebook.

Let Your Friends Know What You’re Up To on The Point

When you join a campaign on The Point, we’ll ask if you want to publish a Facebook feed item to share it with your Facebook friends.  You’ll see a preview of what the feed item will look like, and have the chance to post it or, of course, say ‘No Thanks’.  It’s up to you.

You’ll also see your friends’ activity on The Point on their feeds so you can keep up with what they’re up to.

What’s next?

Of course, what’s Facebook integration without friends, right?  We’ll be adding features over time to let you see which of your Facebook friends are also using The Point and let you invite them to connect.

For example, you might want to know which of your Facebook friends are already members of a campaign you’ve joined.  Or maybe you want to invite your Facebook friends to a campaign on The Point.

What about Groupon?

For those of you using Groupon in Chicago (and soon Boston, and beyond!) to get great deals through the power of collective buying, you probably know that Groupon is powered by The Point.  We’ll be making the Facebook Connect features of The Point available to all Groupon users in the coming weeks.

-Filed in Groupon, News, The Point, Uncategorized

We’re excited to announce our newest site section: Community.

Community is a one-stop-shop for you to keep up on what people are saying and doing on The Point.   The goals for Community are to help you find people to connect and collaborate with, and to inspire you by highlighting success and recognizing people who are doing great things at The Point.  Community includes the latest discussion, top contributors, new members, success stories and more.

There are lots of useful features wrapped up in Community, with more to come.  We hope you like it – stop by and let us know what you think or give your suggestions on how we can make it even better.

Here are the highlights:

Discussion

Keep up on the discussion going on within campaigns at The Point, start your own conversation by posting your campaign idea to the Brainstorm forum, or join the General Discussion.

You’ll always see the latest posts in all forums right on the main Community page, and be able to dive in with a click.

We also gather all discussion happening within all campaigns into a single view called Campaign Discussion, where you can see what people are saying elsewhere all around The Point.

Find People

You can do a quick search to find people you want to connect with on The Point.  We’ll be expanding this in the future to help you find people by geographic location, your address book entries and more.

Success Stories

From time to time, we’ll be featuring people who are having success with The Point, and we’ll talk about what made their campaigns tick.  We think this will help you find ways to make your campaigns more successful, or inspire you to start a new campaign.

Each time you visit the Community page, you’ll see a randomly-chosen Success Story.  You can click to see another, or click-through ‘Read More‘ to see a mini case study.

New Faces

You’ll see the newest members of The Point on the Community page.  We only show new members with profile pics, though.  Generally speaking, we find that people are more successful when they have a visual identity online – even if it’s a picture of your dog with a party hat – so we’ll be favoring people with a profile pic when we feature members around The Point.

Top Contributors

We like to give recognition for a job well done.  Here we’re showing people who are having the biggest impact on The Point.  We use a scoring system that gives points for creating successful campaigns, joining campaigns, and recruiting others to join campaigns, and contributing to discussion.  The Top Contributors leader board is just a start – we’ll be adding more ways to recognize our members’ great work in upcoming releases.

Successful Organizers

People who have run successful campaigns are given some time in the spotlight here.  Like Success Stories, we randomly choose a group to show each time you visit Community.

The Point Blogs

Finally, at the bottom of the Community page, you’ll find the most recent posts from here on our blog.

-Filed in News, The Point

Next Monday, I’ll be speaking about activism and The Point at the Chicago New Media Summit. CNMS is billing itself as “Chicago’s TED,” which I guess means I have to wear a t-shirt and use swear words. Anyway, I’m thrilled to be part of an event that’s highlighting so much of the exciting work happening in here in Chicago. I’m especially looking forward to (in chronological order) Jason Fried(37 Signals), Ross Kimbarovsky & Mike Samson(CrowdSPRING), and Bumper Carroll(Second City), whose voice-over work is featured in our introductory animatics.

Here’s what I’ll be talking about:

The Internet has a proven ability to shift the balance of power between individuals and organizations. But for online activism to reach its full potential, we need to do more than port offline tactics to the Web. We must step back, revisit the challenges of collective action, and consider what the Web offers that can help overcome them. Andrew Mason explores what the world could look like in five years with tools like The Point.

It’s sure to be a stimulating couple of days – register here.

-Filed in News, The Point

Over the past few months, we’ve been beavering away on the 1.0 version of The Point, making campaigns more flexible, improving the visual design, boosting performance, and a whole host of other improvements.

Now that we’ve delivered our 1.0 and are on a more steady schedule of delivering new features and improvements, we’ll be announcing what we’re up to here on the blog.  We’re just getting started – we have a lot of great stuff in the works!

Our aim is to release improvements to the site every week, some big, some small. Here are some highlights of what we’ve delivered in the past few weeks:

Embeddable Campaign Widget

Anyone can now embed a widget into their blog or website that allows people to join a campaign directly from there.  Today, the widget can be used for campaigns that aren’t raising money, but this week we’ll be delivering an update to allow people to join fundraisers as well.

Related Campaigns

We now show you a list of related campaigns in the left sidebar of the main campaign page, helping you find other campaigns that you might be interested in checking out.  Relationships are based on similarities among campaigns such as the same organizer, a high number of the same members or tags, etc.

Follow Campaign Discussion

You can now follow a topic or the entire discussion within a campaign.  If you turn on ‘Follow’ for a topic, you’ll get an email for all new posts to that topic.  If you turn on ‘Follow’ for the campaign discussion, you’ll get an email for any new topic that’s created or any new post.  You can turn ‘Follow’ off at any time with a single click, or from a link in any of the email that you get.

If you’re the organizer of a campaign, you’ll automatically be set up to ‘Follow’ the discussion as a convenience.

Invite People to a Campaign from your Email Address Book

The campaign invitation page now has an option to send invites to anyone in your Yahoo!, GMail, Outlook, AOL or Plaxo address book.  We never ever see nor save any of your email account information.

-Filed in News, The Point

Do you love the idea of conference-going, but hate schmoozing, bad food, high ticket prices and sterile atmospheres? For many conference-going types, there is something left to be desired by the overall exchange that happens at these annual face-to-face festivals of education (and sometimes self-congratulation). Also faced with high-admittance-rates, people who might have otherwise just stayed home and uninvolved are hitting up Second Life mirror versions of the real-life events.

In the blogging arena, many folks are discussing the upcoming Netroots Nation and its place in the virtual arena Second Life. Here, “Miss Unsocial” discusses “taking charge of Social Events” at the virtual event. She says that there’ll be streaming video, the creation of virtual buildings, ballrooms, exhibition booths, and all sorts of other conference staples.

I am a total type-A, socializing socio-path with a penchant for collective back-patting, so I admittedly don’t get into the whole pixelized version of real-life thing. I like face-to-face discussions and don’t hate bad food. I am typically allowed to get in as a member of the media, so I don’t have a lot to complain about with regard to real-life conference hopping. However, for those who can’t afford the tickets or cant get into the atmosphere, a solution to simply not-going may be attending in the world’s favorite virtual alternative universe.

[Check out this post at Participant Media about conferences, Second-Life, and the paradoxical meta-ness of it all]

The Netroots Nation in Second Life wiki explains how attending the Austin-based gathering online is free and worth checking out. This is a great alternative because it obviously brings the ideas to people who would otherwise go without seeing/hearing them and gives users an arena in which they can discuss the ideas being circulated.

This blog discusses the speakers who will be available at the virtual events. And also, speaking of Second Life conferences, if this is your bag, do check out the Second Life Education Community Conference, available to both real and virtual attendees (as per usual, real lifers have to pay), which is scheduled to take place September 5th through the 7th.

-Filed in News

According to an article published in IT Business, Canadian consumers, outraged by what they consider to be an over-priced Rogers Wireless iPhone plan, are protesting the phone’s release today. Perturbed that the Canadian plan costs more than it does in the U.S. and U.K., 60,000 Canadians signed an online petition at the website RuinediPhone, maintained by Oilchange.com, a Toronto marketing company. The petition, which has gained the support of an MP and much media attention, will be delivered in hardcopy form today, upon the phone’s release there.

The delivery of signatures will be accompanied by a podcasted interview with David McGuinty, a liberal MP, discussing his support of the protest. Rogers Wireless has been asked by those involved with the movement to comment, but a Rogers spokesperson suggested, “We generally don’t respond to petitions or polls.”

The sentiment is interesting, of course, as Rogers is suggesting that they generally “don’t respond to the will of customers.” What they likely mean is that they generally don’t respond to petitions or polls until sentiment is manifested in sales.

The movement’s petition is better organized than many other internet petitions, as it is being offered in hard copy form with enough media attention to propel said delivery. The involvement of a member of the MP doesn’t hurt, either, as it brings with it further press attention. [Note to petition organizers: Get to know your representatives.] It has been suggested that Rogers has already accommodated consumer complaints by adding to the package an inexpensive data upgrade. In direct contrast to their sentiment regarding petitions, Liz Hamilton, the same company spokesperson, said, “This is in direct response [to] what we heard from our customers.” David McGuinty, the liberal MP in support of the protest, has suggested that the promotion is temporary and merely a PR move.

The RuinediPhone appears to be on its way to sustaining the movement. Delivering more than just a petition, their multi-dimensional, press garnering approach is drawing a lot of negative attention to Rogers Wireless. Perhaps, persuaded by the number of signatures, the detail of press and now government attention, signatories and other customers will be convinced to hang back on their eagerness to pick up the phone and see if Rogers budges.

We will soon see if lackluster sales, which the company presumably does respond to, will be influenced, in part, by the RuinediPhone action.

Also in eAction News:

• Peace and Dignity Journey for Trans-Continental Unity

-Filed in Ideas, News

Despite puppy mills being legal and licensed in the U.S. by the Department of Agriculture, animal activists in L.A. are gearing up to take on pet stores they claim are in business with said mills. Rather than engaging in theatrics, the group will operate education tables outside of the stores they have indicted.

Last Chance for Animals and Best Friends Animal Society, two animal welfare groups working together on this issue, will set up education tables outside of pet stores where they will inform patrons of the origins of where the animals come from. They will feature photographs of the conditions in which the animals are purportedly bred and offer shoppers general information about puppy mills.

In contrast to the action we highlighted yesterday’s news report, this technique is especially interesting. Yesterday we highlighted a protest organized by the I.W.W. Starbucks Union—one that placed some focus on the theatrics of political theater. This back and forth between the effectiveness of tactics reminds me a bit of the debate inspired by the piece by Sally Kohn published in the Christian Science Monitor last week (that nearly the whole of the Millennial activist community chimed in on) about whether or not modern activism is effective because it doesn’t have the Situationist sheen of old activism.

Yesterday I stated that it would seem it makes more sense to bring a large group together and inform/impress with a presence rather than to bring together a small group of people and turn off spectators with confused imagery and political theater. Confusion is fine if irony and chaos is what a group is trying to convey, but if there is a message and it is distorted by an unwillingness to connect with onlookers, this is an unnecessary waste of resources. While political theater is not being denied recognition of its importance, applying it to every protest scenario might be ill-advised.

The animal groups appear to be striking an interesting middle ground by coming together to provide a small collective interested in educating the public rather than overwhelming the public or establishment with a presence. As it seems the group’s goal is to discourage support of puppy mills, and since they likely won’t be able to set up a stick-and-carrot model in which supporters agree to buy X so long as the store doesn’t provide Y (in this case, milled puppies), this appears to be a sensible way to engage with patrons.

In your experience, which is the better way to demonstrate? Is theater necessary for informing onlookers? Or is a more concentrated, person-to-person effort important? What, as an onlooker, do you find you’re more compelled to pay attention to when passing a demonstration?

Also in eAction news:

• Public art and collective action.
• Folks come together to fund their own candidates.

-Filed in News

The termination of two Starbucks employees has led to demonstrations in Manhattan, Grand Rapids, and other cities throughout the world, a New York Indy Media article reports. While reports about turnout and influence of the demonstrations is being celebrated by bloggers who covered the event and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), organizing around the impact of the protest rather than around the issue being demonstrated against could have been a more influential way for the organizers to gather in support of the issue of the terminated employees.

Twelve demonstrators met in front of a Manhattan Starbucks to protest the termination of two employee union organizers. About a dozen protesters gathered in front of the Starbucks on 17th and Broadway on Saturday July 5, Industrial Workers of the World Day. The protest was one of many IWW protests that took place on that day all over the world.

The two terminated employees had been working to gain more benefits for Starbucks employees.

According to Daniel Gross, a former Starbucks barista and an organizer with the IWW, “Starbucks is as anti-union as Wal-Mart,” hence this “strategic” protest. One of the two fired employees had been told by the store manager “on several occasions that she must have nothing to do with unions

This blog details the protest that took place in Grand Rapids. They explain that “The coverage was surprisingly good for mainstream media.” They describe the demonstration:

“There was a 4 ft. Starbucks cup which symbolized Starbucks union-busting, poverty wages, lies about social responsibility, etc. And there was a bat which symbolized globalized solidarity.”

Photographs on the site display imagery that seems commonplace with union political theater. Pictures show a demonstrator in denim shorts and a backwards baseball cap “smashing” the cup, symbolizing, no doubt, how globalized solidarity will smash union-busting, poverty wages, and lies about social responsibility.

While the site suggests this protest was a success, by using the model of demonstration organization utilized by The Point, protesters might have been more successful by organizing around high numbers of demonstrators rather than placing a too-heavy reliance on the pageantry of protest [in addition to the bat and cup number in Grand Rapids, it is said that the drumming of protesters in Manhattan was met by strange looks]. Organizing around assembling an overwhelming turnout is more compelling, interesting, and persuasive than focusing on organizing around the issue alone. While pageantry is necessary, organizing in response to having a substantial and overwhelming number of supporters is ultimately more convincing than organizing simply because there is a cause to rally around. Doing the latter can ultimately result in low-turnout that leans towards a compensation by way of a 4-foot cup and a bat, which, while it feels triumphant to those who get to smash the prop, looks sillier to the onlooker than a bustling crowd might.

Also in eAction news:

• Citizens in a Rhode Island town come together against a windmill
• Collective Action and the gift or irrationality

-Filed in News

In New Delhi, a BPO [call center] employee’s “e-union” has come about with the intention of taking the worker’s fight out of the streets by bringing it directly to share-holders. The group, only a month old, has chosen to remain anonymous for the time being because of negative stigmas that are attached to unions in the country.

According to this article, the BPO union plans to talk directly to shareholders in hopes their conversations will directly affect stock prices. Further, they claim they will go straight to clients to let them know about the repression of employees in the companies. The anonymous union head explains, ‘‘Clients should know the negative PR against the vendor could spill over to their own brand. Also, it could affect them if we ever suspend work with the vendor.”

The group is not presently actively looking for members, but they will soon start an email registration collection where they can collect a database of supporters. Further, while they have taken their fight offline, they have not written off entirely the possibility of taking the fight to old tactics if they see it necessary against “very stubborn offenders.”

A while back, MSH talked with Morton Bahr of the CWA about how laborers in the U.S. were organizing online. He said that be believed that while there was some organization happening with “the new work force,” that there’s no substitute for mouth-to-ear, face-to-face organization. Stories like this one in New Delhi display a continuing contention where activists and organizers continue to struggle to find a middle ground while using new and old school techniques. In this case, it appears that the old school (unions) have a perceivably negative face and the new school (the Internet) is, to this point, a relatively un-utilized resource. The e-union might find great success organizing the BPO’s nearly one-million-strong workforce

While the jury remains out on whether or not—as Mr. Bahr had said earlier—Internet-organizing will be a proper substitute for “mouth-to-ear, face-to-face organization,” the organizer-to-shareholder attitude held by these organizers is reminiscent of corporate campaigning, which we discussed with Ray Rogers a few months back.

Also in eAction news:

• Russian Hacktivist strike?
• Companies read blog consumer complaints to avert sales slumps

-Filed in Ideas, News

The Facebooker Who Friended Obama, a piece published in this morning’s New York Times, paints an extremely flattering picture of Sen. Obama’s Internet presence and strategy. Orchestrated with some help by Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook, Sen. Obama’s campaign has treated the Internet “as the connective tissue” between online organizing and offline action.

“Mr. Hughes wanted Mr. Obama’s social network to mirror the off-line world the same way that Facebook seeks to, because supporters would foster more meaningful connections by attending neighborhood meetings and calling on people who were part of their daily lives.”

Sen. Obama’s embrace of the Internet stems from his belief “that real change comes from the bottom up” (beliefs cultivated, of course, when he was a community organizer) — “And there’s no more powerful tool for grass-roots organizing than the Internet.”

While the piece does not highlight how Obama supporters are using Obama’s social network to question the Senator’s policy decisions, it does suggest that a vote for Obama might be a vote for official technological change in the Oval Office: “Mr. Obama has pledged that if he is elected, he will hire a chief technology officer.”

The piece also highlights nicely the way the campaign is trying to connect on and offline efforts on the part of the candidate’s supporters — one of the hardest-to-accomplish tasks with any organizational action that is executed online. They to nicely synthesize these two worlds, and has consciously worked to do so especially after realizing that after the primary by helping their users to more-easily phone bank and go door to door in search of other supporters. While Sen. Obama’s campaign has taken a lot from the world of small grassroots campaigns, that world can now take some cues from his campaign, which has had the luxury of the money and minds necessarily for figuring out how to best integrate communication technologies into setting collective action into motion.

Also in eAction news:

• Collective intelligence doesn’t necessarily make us smarter
• Chinese bloggers’ victory against government

-Filed in News