Can we make voting for candidates and advocating for issues more social? And more specifically, can we make the whole process of supporting and endorsing candidates in advance of an election, or promoting a position on a bill, more transparent and sharable, in ways that get voters and activists to keep coming back to a website because it makes them more influential? That's the holy grail of a number of interesting startups, two of which--Votizen and DemDash--are getting a serious try-out next Tuesday around San Francisco's mayoral election. Votizen is better known, as it's already lined up some serious venture capital from investors like Ron Conway, Peter Thiel, and Sean Parker, and is getting usage by several mayoral candidates, including Ed...
Archive: Year: 2011
As an open source movement, Occupy Wall Street keeps getting lucky with the ideas and creativity of its supporters. That's because there's no organization telling people what ideas are okay, no consultants conducting focus groups, and little of the soul-killing decisions by committee that prevent most traditional organizations from trying new ideas. Yes, each individual occupation has its own general assembly and working groups, and doing things through their modified-consensus decision-making process can be time-consuming. But the larger movement is wide open to all kinds of ideas and proposals; the good ones spread because they resonate with lots of people on their merits. That's how to think of the latest tactic to bubble up from Occupy's grassroots, a campaign to "Keep...
On Monday, I heard Scott Heiferman of Meetup.com give a great five-minute rap to a group of foundation and nonprofit types on the relationship between communities and movements, with a focus on the surprising parallels between the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movement, which I managed to video on my iPhone. Having watched 100 million people RSVP for ten million different Meetup events, he offered this observation about what happens after people connect: "Once people meet up, they usually follow that with a 'let's do this' statement," and out of that comes all kind of social action. But then he went further. With a stream of live Meetup RSVPs scrolling on the screen behind him at the rate...
Rob Stuart at the second annual NTEN conference, Chicago, 2005. Photo: NTEN/Flickr Last Wednesday, Rob Stuart, the founding president of Evolve Strategies and the Evolve Foundation, a long-time leader and activist in the non-profit technology community, passed away suddenly from a heart attack. He was 49. We asked Jed Miller and Allison Fine, longtime friends and contributors to PdF, and two of Rob's friends and collaborators, to write the following appreciation of his life and work. By Jed Miller and Allison Fine Late last week, and far too soon, our friend Rob Stuart passed away in Philadelphia. Rob was the hub that connected dozens, hundreds, of us that work to build communities and create change through digital technologies. “It’s all about...
Here's another interesting online effort that's popped up around the Occupy Wall Street movement: OccupyWishList.org, a simple platform where people who want to give direct support to occupiers in need of things like blankets, batteries, sleeping bags and the like can connect with each other. Built and supported by MoveOn.org, the site is just starting to see some usage, with 187 items provided by 58 people to 8 sites so far. I spoke with Daniel Mintz, MoveOn's campaign director, who offered some background about the project. "The big challenge is less on getting people to help; the bigger challenge is on getting in touch with all the occupations," to make sure actual needs are being expressed and met. He noted that...
While the focus of the Occupy movement is obviously Wall Street, and the bulk of the media attention is on the people encamped and encircling Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan, the other big story of the OWS movement is how rapidly it has spread to dozens of other cities, large and small. One illustration of the vibrancy of these other encampments is the ongoing Twitter conversations using their hashtags. Below are two charts provided to techPresident by Gilad Lotan, VP of R&D at SocialFlow. (He and his team wrote a very interesting article last week examining how hard it is for a hashtag like #OWS to trend on Twitter, and a follow-up post on how the #OWS hashtag spread online.) This...
Egyptian democracy activist and blogger Alaa abd el Fattah (and friend of PdF*) has been summoned by the military government to face charges of inciting violence and destroying public property. Alaa, as he is widely known (his Twitter handle is @alaa), is appearing tomorrow at the inaugural Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference, appropriately enough. He says the charges are "trumpted up," that the military is "avoiding investigating its own crimes," and that "the best way to help me is raise alot of noise about the injustice of civilians facing military trials in Egypt." So far, according to Human Rights Watch, more than 12,000 civilians have been brought before military tribunals since the departure of Hosni Mubarak. That is more that the...
Overall interest in the Occupy Wall Street movement appears to be cresting at the moment, with affiliation through the nearly 500 Facebook pages that we've been tracking starting to top out and organic interest in the topic also showing signs of calming down on Google search. Overall interest in the Occupy Wall Street movement appears to be cresting at the moment, with affiliation through the nearly 500 Facebook pages that we've been tracking starting to top out and organic interest in the topic also showing signs of calming down on Google search. At the same time, the movement--which deliberately has avoided appointing leaders and spokespeople--continues to expand its networked base. Nearly 250 of those Facebook groups have at least 1,000...
Times Square, Occupy Wall Street rally, Saturday, October 15, 2011. Photo by Micah L. Sifry Here's a question to ponder: Did Occupy Wall Street succeed simply because it was non-hierarchical in method, had smart framing in tune with public anger about the economy and Wall Street, and made really effective use of social media? If that was all it took to ignite a self-organizing movement for economic justice, then why didn't a very similar effort, called "The Other 98%," take off last year? Why didn't the US Uncut movement, a spin-off of an ongoing street protest movement in England, take off here this past winter? Why didn't Van Jones' new "Rebuild the Dream" movement, which was launched this summer with the...
Bertellsman "Future Challenges" blogger Ulrike Reinhard came by the PdF office yesterday and recorded this conversation with me about the Occupy Wall Street movement. Consider it a record of my thoughts in progress. There's at least one error in my remarks, where I say that the largest Tea Party rally was 100,000 by their claims--I believe the Tea Party movement claims that they had more than a million at one rally in DC. Also, to my friends on the right, when I refer to Obama negotiating with the "terrorist" wing of the Republican party, I am obviously speaking metaphorically. Sorry if the term gives you indigestion....