Topics covered:

1. Meeting and flaking on an interview with the fabulous Wendy Cohen.
2. The intersection of on and offline establishment of trust and how one works off the other.

Meet Wendy Cohen, the interviewee I neglected to record.

Like the technical genius that I am, I talked with Wendy Cohen of Participant Media and Screening Liberally for nearly an hour, and I did it all having forgotten to hit the record button.

We discussed our love for Jay Rosen, adoration for Larry Lessig, and talked about how she organized the first Screening Liberally event, organized around the film Thank You For Smoking, back in New York. We talked about her time as a community manager at the Huffington Post (she was their first), where she worked on increasing the volume of user participation and on-site chatter. We discussed her present role at Participant, where she has the same title but works in a capacity that is not focused strictly Internet community development. How does she keep up with the demands of a job that doesn’t necessarily have a consistent, set-in-stone job description? She says that she’s had great mentor and consistently reads up what’s being said about the subject online

Based on her contrasting experiences, I asked if an increase of tangible, face-to-face social capital better facilitates online action? Are you, Wendy Cohen, more willing to sign onto an Internet protest or fundraising campaign I am organizing than you were before we met face-to-face and only knew me via email? And if so, do you think that this is the case for most people

Wendy suggested that yes, she would be more interested in participating in some sort of online action that I initiate after having actually met me, but that the dynamics of getting to know people are becoming so much more multifaceted that it is becoming easier to feel like know know someone that you have never met face-to-face. Perhaps this is closing the gap between the need-to-meet-to-trust people and those who give/participate more freely than others.

Nice to meet (/trust) you.

We discussed Wendy’s efforts with Screening Liberally, a social event she co-created that organizes folks online to get together and watch socially liberal independent films offline. We discussed the conversation the meetings breed and bonding that face-to-face meetings facilitate. Screening Liberally stemmed from Drinking Liberally, a similarly structured event that Cohen had been attending for a few years. She also organizes Net Tuesdays in L.A., a NetSquared event that organizes in a similar way to the “Liberally” events (bringing folks face-to-face using Internet technologies), though it concentrates on non-profit and tech issues. Part of the bonus of both events is camaraderie and networking built around an issue as well as the educational component. The strengthening of trust, based wholly on meeting someone face-to-face, can be beneficial when eventually trying to mobilize someone to act online.

Internet-organizer communities continue to rhetorically treat the off and online as binaries — as if they don’t overlap each other as one: When I am my offline self, I am not my online self. When I am my online self, I am not my offline self. However, social transactions are based upon perceived loss and gain on the parts of each participant. For some, getting a person to act online may require little more than a compelling cause and an easy avenue for action. For others, it may require a level of trust unachievable by a call for action alone. In the past week, of the past ten people I have asked who have given money to a cause online in the past year, every one said that they are more likely to give to someone that they know. Even though my ask went out to friends and Internet associates alike, with the exception of one donor, every person who gave me money for a Point campaign aimed at helping my cousin who had lost her home in a fire, a seemingly compelling cause, is someone I have met, if only briefly, in person. Even Warren Buffett has been known to work to restore trust with his fellow company-folk by meeting with them face-to-face.

We chat, We vlog, We tweet.

While the ways with which we are able to get to know each other online are becoming more and more diversified in both their depth and distribution apparatuses, thus transforming the ways we build and assess trust, for some, the willingness to give time, money, or action is contingent on getting to know that the face on the other side of the screen indeed belongs to a human being. The Internet is special in its ability to accelerate the speed of our message, the mechanics of our campaigns, and the depth of our ability to organize. Meetings, connection, and person-to-person resonance, while absolutely possible for many to achieve online, is still a more-quickly absorbed process off. By adapting our off and online behaviors to embrace all tools — by focusing on building social capital in both spheres — we strengthen our leverage in both worlds, both as individuals and part of a greater social wholes, as well as leaders of movements architected in this digital world we’re finally starting to get a grasp of.

The next time you have time to do so, head on over to a gathering of the like (or differently) minded, be it at a Screening (or Drinking or Living) Liberally event, or a gathering of Net Tuesday organizers. While your online fundraising prowess might be in competition with rock stars like Beth Kanter (thanks to her suggestions for successful community maintenance and fundraising), it can’t hurt to connect with those who might potentially participate in a future something, if only they know who you were.

[Edit // 10:30 pm EST] Here, a few hours after posting this, I just came across this blog post. It discusses this study [doc]. While it doesn’t necessarily drive home my point, it does discuss the importance of offline shared experience, online connectivity, and to The Point’s point, fostering “a feeling of ’strength in numbers”:

There is great potential for the youth activists to build a Global Potential alumni network, one grounded in the offline shared experience of activism and action, on Facebook that will help”connect one another online and in person,…[fostering] a feeling of ’strength in numbers’ a common space in which to [feel] comfortable and supported in their activist work”.

For tomorrow: I’ll discuss the pros and cons of providing incentive for group participation, and take a look at what can happen when added incentive brings more participation than productivity.

For the comments: In your experience, how does face-to-face, offline networking and participation augment your online organization?

-Filed in Ideas, People

At Netroots Nation 2008, Dr. Lawrence Lessig spoke as a keynote and presented Change Congress, his new initiative to use connective tools to help steer the government body into a new direction. I asked Lessig why, after 10 years of tackling copyright and intellectual property issues, he had decided to move on Congress. He responded, “We had hit a level of success, the issues were no longer hard, and I felt like I was getting lazy so I said ‘I’m going to throw everything I am doing away and do something different.’”

Even more amazing, he explained, “And I in fact said, ‘I am going to do that every ten years. Every ten years I am going to throw away all of my intellectual capital and work on something new.’” And so here he is, trying to corral Internet grassroots activists on the left and right to act against what many consider to be a failed government body. Here, he discusses using the carrot model to change the government, how true change has to be “purple” and how he plans to attract the attention of the not-so-obvious audience.

Make Something Happen: Outside of a crowd like those at Netroots Nation, which is predisposed to being supportive of your work, how do you plan on bringing the attention of the public to Change Congress?

Lawrence Lessig: We’ve got a big push now to grow a list of people who want to participate in as many different ways as we can. Part of what the Trippi organization is doing is helping us think about how to parse, simplify, or extend the message so that it can reach a wider range of people than those who are otherwise coming to events like [Netroots Nation].

I spent an enormous part of my life speaking and not all of the speeches are ones that I give for 2000 person audiences, so I speak in every venue I possibly can to get people to think about that. Everything I produce, I make available for other people to use as well.

I think that’s as much as we can do right now. As this thing gets going and other people who are running campaigns begin to incorporate this message into what they’re doing, I think that will be another kind of leverage point that will be very important to us as well.

MSH: Is public dissatisfaction with Congress correlative to the public’s feeling of disengagement with the process?

Lessig: I think there’s a number of things that plays into it. Some people are skeptical that [9%, the number of constituents happy with Congress's performance] is a meaningful number. The important thing to do is to see how it has changed over time. So if you don’t think it’s 9% and you think that it’s 15%, the one thing it’s not is 40%. Just after World War II, it was above 70% so part of it is that people have become disengaged. Part of it is that they just don’t have faith that there is any integrity in the system — that Congress is just particularly bad at drawing lines and fighting this particular president on certain issues, that they’re so quick to think that it’s worse to be seen as an obstructionists. But I think it’s better to be seen as an obstructionist of bad policy than I think it is to support this policy of the present administration. But even the best leadership is not going to restore the type of faith in this institution that we need — that’s fundamental to reform.

MSH: Are there any examples or success stories where you have seen people use connective technologies to spread awareness or illicit reaction? Stories where you realized that your mission is now possible?

Lessig: I think that some of the things Sunshine does with lobbyist [issues]. Bloggers like Matt Stoller, who put up the voting record and asked people to fill out information about the particular things [with regard to voting records]. Models like Wikipedia — What’s interesting about this is that they invite people to participate in their pajamas, meaning it is in a context where it is very easy to be connected and doesn’t require a huge demand, but then gives you a feeling like you’re making a contribution to something that is public and important as the inspiration. We’re seeing more and more of that.

But there’s been no organization that has really achieved the percentage of efficiency that I think is possible. We still have a lot of learn and to build from.

MSH: You noted in your presentation that Change Congress will have a panel of bloggers intended to be critical of the organization. Why do you find doing that important?

Lessig: It’s the ethic of the net. When you look at what happens on the net, [participants that] adopt an ethic of openness, [can help protect] from criticism. When you contrast that with a corporate ethic and a corporate website, where everything is closed and just great, I realize which side of the divide we’ve got to be on. So that wasn’t conceptually hard.

What’s hard is organizing it in a way so that it’s not self-destructive because it’s so easy for critics to take over space and to drive other contributors out. Figuring out how to architect that to the best advantage is not easy to do.

MSH: What concerns and criticisms about the model are you hearing back from this community?

Lessig: There is a concern about the substance of particular things, and this is likely because we haven’t made the message clear enough. My response to that is that we haven’t endorsed as much as we have made available. We might expand those and it might turn out that some are not relevant. If nobody cares about earmarks in the end, then maybe earmarks disappear. Making clear that what we’re doing is trying to facilitate a language with which we can understand, criticize, and change Congress. Not having a set of Ten Commandments is a hard thing to get people to be able to do.

MSH: How is Change Congress using the carrot model with regard to leveraging political activity?

Lessig: It will make it very easy for people to focus on the flavor of a forum that they care about, and then go out and support particular people who match that. Right now we’ve got a list of [supported] candidates, or you can go to an ActBlue,or a Slate Card page eventually, where you can support all of the candidates. What I want it to be is basically you make your representation that takes you to your ActBlue page and then you can make a choice to support all of them or pick which ones you’re going to support individually so that it’s just a simple 1, 2, 3 and then you support it so that candidates begin to say, “Wow. Where is this money coming from? Oh. I see there are people in my district who think this is important and they do something about it.”

MSH: Do you think that Congress knows what’s coming?

Lessig: No. And that’s our chance. They have a vague sense, but they don’t have a chance to focus on it because they’re still focused on getting funded in the old system. So I think we have eight years to build the alternative before it penetrates enough before they figure out how to co-opt this as well.

MSH: Does anyone in there get it?

Lessig: There are particular people who I am inspired by. Tennessee Democratic Congressman Jim Cooper is one; (Massachusetts Democratic Congressman) Ed Markie understands a lot of these issues. I wouldn’t say that my list of candidates is actually comprehensive enough.

MSH: You have said that you think that this change is purple (supportable by both the left and the right). You really believe that both sides are going to be able to work on this issue?

Lessig: I think that’s the only way we succeed. When RightOnline had that conference and wrote me and said, “You know, we’re having our conference at the exact same time [as NN08],” I wrote back and said, Why didn’t you invite me to talk?” They responded that they can’t invite everybody so I just said “OK.” [laughs]

We’ve got to learn how to speak about these issues in a way that includes the widest range. This is a matter of the constitution. We have to pledge support for reform of the constitution that makes it so the system functions.

[Lessig discusses Change Congress at Personal Democracy Forum 2008

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=_obGaWfkDgs[/youtube]

-Filed in People

In a somewhat predictable occurrence, I bought headphones on JetBlue (as I left my set somewhere in the Austin Convention Center) and they didn’t work in my computer/recorder so I am still without the text of the Lessig interview.

Netroots Nation was helpful by way of shining a light on Internet activism and action, though it felt a little long by the time Sunday rolled around. For those unfamiliar with the structure (ie. likely anyone who wasn’t there), the conference is part education, part networking opportunity, and part rally for the netroots generation. In retrospect, I find it unfortunate that I was unable to make the right wing net conference, also occurring in Austin over the weekend. It would have been particularly interesting to compare the attitude and atmospheres at each happening (although apparently Michelle Malkin there shouldn’t be a “self esteem problem” in the blogosphere of the right). I am also interested to find out whether or not, in the case of an Obama presidential victory, next year’s conference will be as large and energized without a campaign or a figure to rally around.

The panel that explored how video can help a cause/issue/campaign was great, though I had to leave it early. The milblog session was excellent, though somewhat disappointingly under-attended. It helped put into perspective how military use of blogs and other communication technologies are changing the perspectives of American’s with regard to what’s going on in Iraq. It was also inspiring to see that by way of VoteVets, exposure was shined on the poor living conditions at Fort Bragg, ultimately leading to political action.

Oh. And I was awed to see San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, a true rockstar politician who garnered the stumbling attention of anyone with a pulse.

As per usual, there were so many interesting sessions and only so little time to see them all. As can be the case at conferences, some of the attitude was self-congradulatory, though that’s largely attributable to the fact that the conference isn’t strictly educational. Further, I wonder what these communities are ultimately going to gain by continuing to ask avid Internet activists year after year how we plan on bridging on and offline activism.

I do, though, think we need to talk differently about how we look at online action, new organizing, etc. Let’s just do it, as it were.

-Filed in Uncategorized

I will be excitedly live blogging from this year’s Personal Democracy Forum, which is taking place in Manhattan over the course of the next two days. The conference, something of a who’s who (and a who’s doing what and how) in the world of “user-centered politics,” is expected to bring to light plenty of refreshing examples of how folks are effectively organizing and ultimately making things happen

Tuesday

5:14 pm: Notes on the closing plenary:

• Obama girl was here.
• Obviously. Also, we were led to sing through a Twitter-themed version of a Pete Seeger song. I am an instructor at a leadership camp so I am used to singing like an idiot but it was, admittedly, a slightly painful. But a good pain? Josh Levy did, though, rock the acoustic guitar.
• Influenced by Rushkoff’s speech this morning, PDF announces that they are changing Personal Democracy Forum to Participatory Democracy Forum.

Panel: Redefining Leadership in a Networked Age w/ Scott Heiferman, Craig Newmark, Joe Trippi, Brian Behlendorf, and Gina Cooper:

• Heiferman: We believe in the power of self-organized groups.
• Heiferman: What do groups of groups look like? Structure is underrated. The social network can’t get everything done.
• Cooper: We have to be our own leaders. We have to talk with each other. We have to inspire one-another. We’ve seen people-powered-politics. What will people-powered-government look like? How will Barack Obama fight the bureaucracy once he gets to Washington?
• Cooper: The burden is on us; it’s not going to be done for us.
• Newmark: There is a difference between having a boss, who tells you what to do and you do it accordingly, and having a leader.
• Newmark: Many people are seeing 2008 as a year potentially as notable as 1776 with regard to the new ways in which participatory democracy is introduced to governance.
• Newmark: I want there to be a fair fight between both candidates so that this can be a true participatory year.
• Newmark: Change, of course, is a cliche in this election cycle. But candidates do have to get the message that they are not the boss.
• Newmark: The kids are alright.
• Heiferman: #pdf2008 Decentralized power! WWFD (what would Foucault do)?
• Newmark: Part of leadership is knowing when to get out of the way of the people.
• Cooper: Once people have a voice, they’re going to continue demanding to have that voice. Obama’s brand and authority will be lost if they do not heed the will of the people.

3:52 pm: Notes on Ideas that Spread Win: Going Viral Online featuring Jason Calacanis, Jonah Peretti, Ami Dar, and Sean Parker:

• Peretti: High quality content does not often get a viral push. Quality content is sometimes a liability.
• Calacanis: It is dangerous to put something up online, making it look authentic, then finding that it is not actually authentic. Dar: Authenticity is THE biggest thing.
• Dar discusses a phenomenon in Budapest where some social activists put their ideas in the public eye by coordinating 500 people to wear a related t-shirt — real-life virality.
• Calacanis: YouTube stills come from the exact middle frame from the video, so marketers are now using that frame to put woman or shots of cleavage to up their hits.
• Dar: Even if a message is going to 3 million people, one person is opening the email. So it is important to write the message to the one human being who is reading it. When the few people who will then get back to you actually get back to you, you respond directly. And people actually remember that.
• Peretti: The Bored at Work Network (BWN) is a network of people who are at work and bored enough to make all of this stuff popular. Also, cleavage makes people click links, but not forward (because forwarding says something about the forwarder). So forwardable links should resonate with users.
• Peretti: The problem, though, is that contagious media is usually silly (the opposite of your cause). Also, what goes viral is radically unpredictable.
• Parker: Something can be viral, even if the viral exponent is less than one. Paypal is a good example, as receiving money from senders required recipients to join.
• Calacanis: Two schools of building a case - a) get big logs together, dump some gas, and strike a match b) get some kindling or coal, continue to add necessary components, build it up, and then it finally explodes. Throwing gas around is inauthentic and ineffective in the long term.
• Dar: Lots of ideas spread and don’t win. It is not actually true that ideas spread will necessarily win. MoveOn is big, but how many battles have they actually won? Very few.
• Calacanis: Engagement is the new virality.

2:07 pm: At the local blog breakout session, here are some concepts thrown around:

• Dynamics on the local level versus the national level are different. On the local blog, you’re more likely to learn about local politicians, neighborhoods, hearings, etc. On the national level, it’s partly about entertainment.
• IP tracking shows that servicemen and women are staying in touch with their local community by using local blogs.
• Community activists can’t keep meeting exclusively in a church or community center — Blogging can keep people, information linked accordingly.
• Ed Cone: “What happens online is only as valuable as what happens off line.”
• Colorado Independent: Corporate Media, “as we all know”, does not do a good job of covering local politics.
• Colorado Independent: “What’s happening on the ground [at the political conventions]? Nobody gives a shit about pageantry.”
• Izzy of the Sam Adams Alliance: “We, as bloggers, are here to win. We’re not here to educate. We’re here to put information out there, hope people take it and run with it from there.”
• Ed Cone: Destroying and winning is less popular when it comes to local politics; hyper-partisanship is big on the national level. It is less fun to attack your neighbor in the same way you might go after a faceless person in blog land.
• Bob Cox of the Media Bloggers Association (in the audience): Most dangerous thing to do for a freelancer is investigative reporting. You’re very likely to face litigation as a result. Be advised that litigation is a reality. Check out the Media Law Resource Center.
• Audience member: How much traffic do you need in order to be considered a contender of any kind? Liza Sabater of the Daily Gotham: To get to those massive amounts of traffic, a huge amount of money is put into that effort and success is manufactured. But even with less traffic than those sites, I look at where visitors to the site are being referred from and traffic is coming from the government and the military, etc. And that makes me realize that I have some influence.

12:25 pm: It’s not really called 2.0 anymore, is it?

11:19 am: Just talked with Ben Geyerhahn [from Click To Blue] about what is actually required of bloggers who wish to monetize their model. “It’s a small business,” he says. “It needs to be looked at it that way. 70% of time should be spent on content, but then the other 30% should be focused on development and getting people to look at the site.” He will be talking more about the topic on a panel later on in the day.

10:56 am: I just chatted with Bernard Sifry, conference co-chair Micah Sifry’s father. He expressed great pride in all of his children and talked a bit about Micah as a kid. The elder Sifry exposed his boys to computers at early ages, going back into the late 70s. He had me laughing a great deal, and he said, “Look - I got you laughing. And at my age, that’s the best thing to get people to. Laughter is the best medicine.”

10:36 am: Was just interviewed by MobLogic.tv and was asked: “What do you wish to declare independence from?” I answered by saying that I wished to “declare independence from apathy” and then waxed unpoetically about why that is the case.

Pictured left is MobLogic’s attractive and, by all appearances, competent host Lindsay Campbell interviewing someone who is not, in fact, me.

10:15 am: Steven Clift, a builder of e-democracy, talks about US policy on participatory, networked democracy:

• We need Democracy.gov to promote bottom-up democracy. He suggested this, but was told by someone in the State Department that it exists, but it is essentially part of our propaganda presence outside of our borders.
• There are interesting examples in Estonia, Japan, and Australia regarding positive policy for facilitation of e-democracy. Though there aren’t many examples of e-democracy policy anywhere in the world - including in the US.
• Americans need to ask ourselves why this isn’t happening here.
• There are no public forums on Government websites.
• All public meetings must be announced online. They should be online immediately after they occur. All public media should be recorded in digital form.
• We need to invest in e-democracy tools in government. E-notification, working like Google Alerts, are necessary. We also need public hearings online.
• Government needs to be able to listen and we need for them to provide tools that we can talk to.

9:50 am: Jonathan Adelstein, the present chair of the FCC, discusses information and the transformation of government [hilariously, he opened by playing the harmonica so that he could tell people that he's played at Lincoln Center]:

• If jobs are being outsourced via broadband, why can’t we increase broadband usage in the US to insource it here?
• In 2000, 3 million people gathered to fight further media consolidation.
• The Internet was formed on ideals of open neutrality.

9:45 am: Larry Lessig is somewhere right around amazing. His slide-show is unbelievably amazing:

• “The government gets it wrong; destroys conditions of trust.”
• Bribery was not a crime in Congress until 1853. In some districts at the time, 25% of voters sold their vote.
• Things are better today, as individuals are better but the problem is that corruption is much worse. It is more pervasive. “The government’s fingers are everywhere.
• “Money destroys the opportunity for trust.”
• We need something more than an every-four-year “hope fest.”
• Change Congress is a bi-partisan reform movement. Driving reform to begin to make this system different
• Rather than just focusing on “change,” Lessig wants to focus this ideal on a system that nobody trusts: Congress

9:12 am: Morley Winograd, who has written extensively about the rise of the Millennial/Civic Generation, talks about the Millennials and the rise of the civic generation:

• Millennials identify with Democrats at nearly 2:1.
• 38% of Millennials think this country will be better after the 2008 election.
• First generation in more than four decades where a plurality identify as liberal, not conservative.
• There is a departure from “independent” identity.
• Generation in which “girls rule and boys drool.” [I am not exactly sure what this means].

8:50 am: From Rushkoff:

• “It’s not the network, stupid. It’s the people, stupid.”
• “You can either be an in-charge individual, or in charge collective.”
• “The glory is in the doing; it is in the continued, actual participation.

Roundup: Writing is like voting. You can do it anywhere, from the safety of your own home. Though we need to reprogram our culture; it is an open-source culture. The thing we should want in ‘Age Obama’ is that Democracy is a participatory event. They are there to create the conditions where we can do stuff for one another.

8:33 am: Back in business. Sitting in the Rose Theater, anxiously awaiting a speech by Douglas Rushkoff. I have been a big fan of Rushkoff’s writings and thoughts since a friend brought them to my attention a few years ago. From his site: Democracy as we know it was built around the notion of the individual. Democracy as an open source phenomenon needs to be something else entirely - and it may look and feel strange to those of us raised on Enlightenment ideals of individual rights and possession of property. It’s a collective phenomenon that requires intelligence, participation, knowledge, and collaboration.

Monday:

1:39 pm: Josh Levy and Danny Moldovan of Change.org discuss decentralized organization, social movements, Foucauldian power and more. Questions asked: Will Obama heed the will of his supporters, or will he use “people power” to leverage a different agenda? Why are movies still following a narrative in which only one person is responsible for saving the world? 12:30 pm: There is sort of a fight between a former-Edwards online coordinator and a McCain online coordinator. “You don’t need to use a computer to know how the Internet is influential,” the McCain coordinator casually suggests. “That’s the point, though” exclaims the Edwards coordinator. “You do.”

11:50 am: Paul Downey stands with his illustration of how openness works on the Internet. He discusses user tendencies and wonders whether we’ll ultimately use our new networking capabilities for good or evil. We discuss how radio was used to mobilize atrocities in Rwanda and opposition in the Balkans. We’re both bummed out that we’re not watching Clay Shirky speak. Downey works for BT, thinking through issues related to openness.

10:50 am: Shaun Dakin of StopPoliticalCalls.org discusses with us his (and the rest of the country’s) aversion to robocalling. As the founder and CEO of the National Political Do Not Contact Registry, he has been invited to speak on the Senate floor on the behalf of American’s who are infuriated with phone harassment. “Robo-calling,” he says, “has become like the nuke race. I have talked with politicians who want to stop using them, but they feel as though they can’t possibly stop if they think their opponent will keep using them.”

10:04 am: Scott Heiferman of Meetup and Andrew Mason of The Point discuss site re-design and a upcoming panel discussion. A ton of non-creepy schmoozing is going down at present. Folks are hocking their wares. If you’re here, feel free to stop by. 9:30 am: Everyone is milling about accordingly. Talked briefly with Joe from blogads and touched base with the Electronic Frontier Foundation at their stand. We’ll talk with them in a bit. Any question suggestions for that?

-Filed in Ideas