Archive: Author: The Management

Sarah Lai Stirland, Photo: Peter Krogh We're pleased to announce that starting next week, Sarah Lai Stirland will be joining the Personal Democracy staff as senior writer for techPresident. Sarah has long experience covering tech and politics, most recently for Talking Point Memo's Idea Lab section as its technology reporter and editor, and before that as Wired.com's politics and technology writer on its Threat Level blog. I'm particularly thrilled to have Sarah join our team because back in 2007-08, she was one of the only writers on this beat who--I have to admit it--beat us to stories that we wanted! Check out Sarah's archive of reporting here if you need a refresher. She'll be joining me and Nick Judd, who is moving...

Jim Pugh, CTO of Rebuild the Dream (and before that director of analytics and development with Organizing for America), recently shared with techPresident some slides from a New Organizing Institute training that he's done, that help illustrate the difference between viral and sub-viral growth. We all throw around the term "viral" with little distinction, and it's helpful to put some definition on it--especially as we see many references to the Occupy Wall Street movement's viral growth, or similar earlier talk about the Tea Party. Virality, says Pugh, is all about how many new people each user recruits to a cause. (Or, how many new views result from a person sharing a video, or the number of new clicks when someone shares...

In the wake of the rapid spread of the "We are the 99 Percent" meme, on October 5th, right-wing blogger Erick Erickson started a "We are the 53 Percent" response. One side says that the top 1 percent of the population has too much concentrated wealth and power; the other side says that nearly half the population doesn't pay income taxes and is making unfair claims on the output of the 53 percent who do. That's not an argument we're going to settle here. But we can shed light on which meme is doing better online. For example, in terms of organic interest, "We are the 99 percent" has consistently been topping "We are the 53 percent" on Google search. The same...

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...

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...