Jeffrey Zeldman has an idea.

Just as they once united to stamp out cigarette advertising, radio and TV stations and advertisers must get together and agree that false statements in political advertisements will not be tolerated. If you run a political ad that proves to be a lie, your network will pay a steep fine, and the advertiser will pay an even steeper one.

He prefaces his idea with this:

So here’s my idea. One that could actually work, if America’s networks remember they are Americans first, revenue seekers second. (emphasis mine)

That’s a big “if,” Jeffrey! But the good news is, I don’t think it’s a necessary one. It is we as consumers who grant these networks the right to exist by watching them. If we want them to stop running untruthful ads, we should coordinate our influence as consumers to create an incentive for them to stop.

What if we all promise to watch all election coverage from the first network that pledges to turn away ads that FactCheck rates as dishonest?

If someone starts this campaign on The Point, I’ll join it in a heartbeat.

-Filed in Ideas, 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

Background: An extremely anticipated computer game called Spore shipped this week, albeit with a copy protection scheme (called “DRM”) that ideologically chafed many techies.

Now that Spore is released, how are gamers fighting back? By obliterating Spore’s all-important Amazon rating with an onslaught of 1-star reviews.

This is an wonderful case study in online collective action (I don’t know how it emerged, let me know if you do). I’m fascinated to see where it goes. If 1,000 consumers can influence a seemingly inevitable smash like Spore, imagine what they could do to a product preceded by a more fragile reputation?

Most companies would rather please their customers than endure a beating like this, and The Point is the perfect way to provide that option. For example, this could have been an ultimatum campaign on The Point: “Spore should loosen their DRM restrictions or else we will leave 1-star reviews on Amazon if 1,000 people join.” Few products can afford to choose the thousand 1-stars.

While one can imagine this tactic being repeated to address other consumer grievances, I fear popularity could reduce its efficacy. Reviews are still fundamentally a PR tactic, not a direct economic incentive to change. And so, as the novelty of the approach fades, so may its potency. Additionally, businesses could adapt to block this tactic, perhaps by pressuring Amazon to regulate reviews.

Don’t get me wrong – I think this is great and can’t wait to see what happens. But sustainable, predictable, repeatable tactics for influencing change must create a rational economic incentive by leveraging the consumer’s power to buy (or not to buy).

-Filed in Case Studies, Ideas, 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

When I help people create campaigns on The Point, the first question I ask is, “what’s blocking a solution?” In other words, who or what is stopping the problem from going away? The answer to this question is critical to determining the best approach. I divide blocks into two categories.

Block Type #1: Them (people and organizations)

At times, it’s in someone’s best interest for a problem to persist. Companies often consider it in their best interest to skimp on employee benefits, for example. It’s in the best interest of my upstairs neighbor to practice the piano at 11pm.

Campaigns on The Point are modeled specifically to break blocks like this, by manufacturing the tipping point that makes it in the block’s best interest to get out of the way. In the above example, consumers might organize a boycott against a company that only begins once enough people join (the tipping point) such that the loss of them as customers will cost more than offering benefits to their employees. Or they might offer a carrot instead of a stick, by creating a campaign pledging business to a company that provides exceptional benefits.

Block Type #2: Us (you, me, and everybody)

Certain problems are solved by getting people educated. To reduce the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, for example, we need to be aware of their existence and understand how to prevent them.

While the Web has a proven potential to quickly and cheaply spread information, often those most affected by these problems aren’t online. And I don’t know about you, but when I’m online, I’d way rather be reading about video games than STDs.

So I suggest finding a way to turn an “us” block into “them.” Identify an organization that can help increase awareness, and target a campaign at whatever is blocking them from doing so.

Why I bring this up

While these block categories aren’t a strict dichotomy, thinking about your problem this way helps determine the best tools for solving your problem. And more importantly, it moves us beyond blunt “catch-all” tools like petitions or letter writing campaigns, the potency of which are often at the mercy of PR.

Identify your block, and you’ll find many ways to leverage the power of individuals above and beyond raising a stink.

-Filed in Tactics, The Point

I apologize for the heavy-handedness with the exclamation points, but I am excited to announce that after a rather substantial vacation (in Portland, Ontario), I’m back to blogging.

And do expect a snazzy new update for next week. Make Something Happen will have some exciting and surprising new content for you to chew on.

Any ideas about what it might be, my friends?

I am very excited to bring it to your attention.

-Filed in The Point

It’s been a long time coming, but I’ve finally taken a stab at writing a manifesto for The Point. What follows is a summary to the ideas that underlie our platform. Some, I imagine, are hopelessly abstract to those who haven’t spent the past year obsessively pondering them. I’ll do my best to elaborate on these ideas in future (and more frequent) posts.

Manifesto

The Point is much more than technology – it’s a new way of thinking about group action. While it’s important to us to accommodate trivial or absurd situations, what inspires us is The Point’s potential to fundamentally change the way that individuals and organizations interact.

Our beliefs include the following:

People will do what matters.

People want a way to make a difference, but feel powerless to solve the problems that can’t be solved alone. Inaction stems from a pragmatic judgment that participating doesn’t matter. Not apathy. If we think there are too few people to achieve a goal, we don’t bother. If we think there are too many, we don’t bother. But if the conditions exist for individual participation to be meaningful, we will take action.

It should be easier to care less.

We don’t care how much you care. Our job is to create tools that make it easy and fun to engage at whatever level you want and still make a difference.

Every problem has a tipping point.

Every problem has a tipping point of public frustration that will force a solution. If enough people want a problem to be solved and they have a way to find one another and coordinate action, they will solve it.

Amplifying the old tactics of change is not the answer.

A petition with a zillion signatures is impressive. For now. But as symbols of discontent, petitions derive their value from the fact that they take time to sign. As they become easier to sign, they become equally less powerful. As we grow used to the magnitude of petition and letter-writing campaigns, these tools will become no more useful than when they were handled offline.

The Web offers something more, but we must take a step back before we can move forward. We must correct our tactics to address the underlying problems of collective action and create rational incentives for change. We must break the path dependency on strategies that rely on press attention, and instead develop an approach that channels our collective will into a power that forces change.

A rule is only a rule if we let it be.

If enough people disagree with something, they have the safety in numbers to overwhelm authority. All they need is a tool to safely coordinate their behavior.

We love cute cats.

We believe that the most effective tools of change are neutral, and useful for stuff that has nothing to do with making the world a better place. Or as Ethan Zuckerman puts it, “sufficiently useful read/write platforms will attract both [cute cats] and activists.”

Stop waiting.

If man and the Internet were conceived at the same time, would we choose to pursue change through signing petitions, or writing letters to our elected officials imploring them to pass legislation? Probably not as much. The Web enables like-minded groups to channel their influence into something more powerful, targeted, and efficient. We can now solve our shared problems directly by creating rational incentives for change.

-Filed in The Point

At both Make Something Happen and The Point, we talk a lot about the Carrot Model. For this reason, we couldn’t help sharing this bit from Maureen Dowd’s op-ed in today’s New York Times:

[Sen Obama's] meeting with Angela Merkel taught him a whole new expression.

“When we were talking about Iran,” he told me, “it turns out that carrots and sticks in German is sweetbread and whips, which I thought was a little more evocative.”

-Filed in The Point

In the first two parts of this series, we explored carrot campaigns and the simplified process for starting campaigns. In this final part of our preview, I’ll highlight a few of the little touches we’ve added to make The Point more fun and easier to use, as well what’s on the horizon.

Clean, functional design

We took this opportunity to refresh The Point’s look & feel. The design is simpler and more functional, giving user content the center stage.

Campaigns are less noisy, with a stronger focus on the information a visitor needs to decide if they want to join. Campaign descriptions, which would sometimes run on for pages, now have a hard limit of a thousand characters. The idea is to force the creator to make “the pitch” for joining the campaign inside a space that people will actually read, and then add the details in the discussion, where it can initiate conversation.

Better Discussion

Previously, campaigns had a single threaded comment stream. That got messy, preventing users from holding focused conversations. Now, each campaign has its own discussion forum, with as many separate topic threads as needed.

Further, the new user profile makes it easy to track the discussions in which you participate, so you’ll never miss a reply to one of your posts.

Faster

The anonymity features on The Point added some coding complexity that at times made things a bit sluggish. Our engineers have reworked our anonymity engine, and The Point is now zippy as can be.

Coming Soon

In the next few weeks, we’ll release a campaign widget that will you to embed a campaign in your website, blog, or social networking profile. Your guests will be able to join the campaign without ever visiting thepoint.com. We’re extremely excited about this feature; it’s a key part of our mission to offer The Point as a tool for existing communities to use.

Shortly after that, you’ll be able to search campaigns by location, and we’ll add a community area for site-wide discussion.

After that, you ask? Well, we’ve got a lot of exciting ideas, but we’re interested in what you want Let us know what you’s like to see on The Point in the comments.

And, by the way, if you’re interested in seeing the “sneak peak“ in action, it’s up now. Read the rest of this entry »

-Filed in The Point

I just pledged $100 dollars to the development of a New York City-based “vertical farm.”

If you don’t know about the project, you can check out The Vertical Farm website here, an article on the concept in The New York Times, or this discussion in The Huffington Post on how we can use such a construction project as part of an advanced building block of our future (and national security).

From the campaign: The Vertical Farm is a urban indoor highrise farm that can grow food to feed urban populations in a sustainable way. It’s one of the most innovative solutions to the impending food and environmental crisises we’ll see in the next 50 years.

Benefits include:

• Year-round indoor farming produces 4-6 times more food
• All organic
• Dramatic reduction of fossil fuel use in farming: shipping, tractors, etc.
• Recycles water it uses
• Avoids weather-related crop failures
• New jobs

The best thing about the pledge is that it’s just that – a pledge. I have not yet been charged. I am supporting an idea and only when there is enough support to leverage it into a reality will my money be put to use.

Andrew Mason puts the project into context of The Point’s weekend upgrade:

“Hey there, We launched a major upgrade to The Point this weekend. I’m inviting you a “carrot” campaign — one of our new features. For these campaigns, there are no preset tipping points — people just pile on the money until someone agrees to do something. In this case, we’re trying to get a developer to agree to build a skyscraper farm in Manhattan. Please forward this to New Yorkers you know – I think it’s a really cool idea. You won’t pay a dime unless someone reputable steps up and agrees to build the farm. We’ll probably work something out where you’ll get a return on your investment, either in the form of equity or produce, but it’s too early to promise anything. Help spread the word!”

Please consider supporting the concept, be it by pledge or spreading the word about the campaign, and get behind bringing United States’ food production into the future.

-Filed in Ideas, The Point