Civic Media

You’re More Powerful as a Customer than as a Citizen (and that’s bad)

Posted July 25, 2012 by Matt Stempeck

If you’re an early adopter, you likely sign up for a wide range of new products and services. A number of these startups inevitably fold, and then you receive their closing-shop emails. The correspondence making up this genre tends to be fairly upbeat and concise, painting over what are surely far more lurid tales of unrealized dreams and blown investments. The email I received announcing the demise of Moxy Vote broke with this pattern and offered an unusually candid, clear explanation of how and why they failed. And their failure points to a strategic problem today’s would-be social changemakers face.

If you’re frustrated by the state of our country and the world, and have been thinking about the need to operate a wider range society’s levers to create social change, Moxy Vote was for you. It was one of those ideas so brilliant, you end up evangelizing it despite having no ties whatsoever to the effort. Something like a third of all publicly traded shares are owned by your average retail (armchair) investors. Because each of our 401ks represents such a small percentage of a major corporation, we ignore our shareholder voting privileges even more than we ignore our citizen voting privileges. Moxy Vote was based on the premise that if we were to get together in any meaningful numbers, we could begin to have real sway with the powerful corporations that we are, at the end of the day, investing our earnings in. They sought to allow retail shareholders to vote online, and even automatically vote in support of positions taken by personally trusted nonprofit groups (e.g. environmental organizations). This shareholder organizing successfully pressured a number of corporations to make decisions that were better for board diversity, division of power, animal rights, and the environment, among other victories.

Shareholder rights is an avenue of activism that has received significant attention because of the disastrous Citizens United decision that opened the floodgates for corporate spending in our elections. If our voice as a citizen is completely drowned out by SuperPACs, the thought goes, perhaps our voice as a consumer can still resonate. Fittingly enough, Moxy Vote’s tagline was “Let your voice be heard.” Today, fulfilling that promise requires stock ownership.

We’re seeing this strategy play out on a number of fronts. Corporate lobbyists have successfully filed down the teeth of most government regulations, but many consumer-facing companies are still quite sensitive to their brand reputation. In today’s world, we’re more likely to convince a company to do the right thing with our Twitter accounts than with our federal government. Advocacy groups like Greenpeace have realized this twist of fate and adjusted accordingly, shifting their attention to consumer-driven brand campaigns, from Apple to Barbie to Shell. Change.org, for its part, enables a long tail of citizen-driven public pressure campaigns and regularly helps petitioners adjust their sights towards still-sensitive targets (think movie studio press offices rather than congressional committee chairs).

The institutions we trust to run our society are broken (See: SEC oversight, congressional inaction, etc.). We’ve adjusted by shifting our energy from our increasingly symbolic civic powers to our still relevant consumer powers. Campaigns like Bank Transfer Day focus on specific, concrete financial actions that consumers can take to create impact with or without the permission of co-opted public offices. Billions of dollars were transferred to local credit unions as part of Bank Transfer Day. Nearly 200,000 people signed up for the (admittedly wonky) Moxy Vote service.

Yet Moxy Vote’s demise highlights the limits of this approach to activism. First, our agency as citizens in a democracy should outweigh our capabilities as customers in a market. But more immediately, the significant changes we need still require going through our slow and probably corrupted public institutions. Moxy Vote was a brilliant idea to allow us to create change through our capitalist identities rather than our democratic selves, but at the end of the day, they ran into the same bank-controlled quagmire that controls the rest of our economy:

1. Individual shareholders have no legal grounds to compel their brokers to deliver ballots electronically to internet voting platforms. And, unfortunately, many brokerage firms have stated clearly to us that they will send them only when required to do so by regulators.
2. Proxy distribution/collection agents are presently charging significant fees to internet voting platforms for vote collection – a fee that should be paid by public companies and one that proves substantially more burdensome to individual voters than institutional voters.

In the face of institutional inaction, we naturally pivot into the areas where we still wield some power. While these efforts are exciting and lately, the only approach that seems to work, this cannot be our ultimate strategy.

Technology to Improve the Speaker-Audience Relationship

Posted July 24, 2012 by Matt Stempeck

Liveblog of Drew Harry‘s (@drewwww) MIT Media Lab thesis defense (with readers Wanda Orlikowski, Judith Donath, and Chris Schmandt).

Drew’s thesis presentation covers a range of projects that tell a broader story about complementary communications systems and how people use them. A complementary communication system is simply how a group talks about their shared experience together. From the whisper to the written word, communication’s been around forever, but technology has changed who we reach and how we behave. We sit in rooms with technology interwoven in our presence: our laptops open and projectors whirring.

There are a multiplicity of communication systems, with official front channels and informal back channels of conversation. Anyone who’s ever had to speak in front of a Twitter stream understands the difference between these channels. Drew reframes the relationship as main stages and side stages on which we project our identities. Stages are more intimate than channels, and there’s a stronger feedback loop between the front stage and side stage. The backchannel can be covert and counterproductive, as seen in the tweeted uproar during Sarah Lacy’s interview of Mark Zuckerberg at SXSW 2008, or it can be incorporated into the main stage.

Designers of communications systems have long sought to conquer distance with technology. Replicating face-to-face communication is a huge goal and area of investment, from CISCO’s telepresence strategy to Apple Facetime. But Drew argues that technology can also improve upon the face-to-face experience. Face-to-face is a very difficult medium to compete with; we drop our technology when we can simply experience the rich interactions of face-to-face contact.

But there are downsides: not everyone is equally comfortable participating. Simultaneous speaking is viewed as impolite, so larger groups only sustain a single speaker, leaving out others’ voices. Lastly, you’re stuck with the identity you were born with, which can hinder your ability to be heard.

Drew reviews the checkered history of virtual spaces like SecondLife. Anyone following technology in 2006-7 will remember the hype behind it. And yet the promise of the limitless virtual world often resulted in replications of our existing worlds:

“We can do anything!”

“What should we do?”

“Build virtual houses and offices to live in!”

Drew built new environments in SecondLife where your physical location in the virtual space could signal your feelings. A football field with two endzones marked AGREE and DISAGREE allows individuals to vote with their virtual feet. There was friction in this interface, though. People were used to the real world models of coming into a room and sitting down in one place.

Backchan.nl was a project in 2009 to reconfigure the relationship between a conference speaker and the audience. The project sought to improve on the inefficient social contract that puts us all at the mercy of the first person at the Q&A microphone. Backchan.nl allowed anonymous identities and crowd up-voting of questions, with questions deteriorating over time.

The tool was put online, where it was used for 791 events, from conferences to classrooms to business meetings. The MIT Admissions office used it for their information sessions with remote applicants.

A key consideration in designing these tools is managing attention. We’re all competing with screens, but Drew argues that there are a million ways to ignore the main stage, from sitting in the back of the room to staring at the speaker but zoning out inside your head. People see relevant side stages as a way to keep themselves engaged with the main stage of communication. Additionally, the existence of a backchannel on which to raise concerns and otherwise be heard provides audience members with a sense of agency and control, and a path to improve the conversation, all of which mitigate the traditional attention problem. Allowing the audience to surface shared problems, whether it’s a broken microphone or an overactive air conditioning system, creates awkward moments that force those on the main stage to address the backchannel.

Tin Can is an iPad app to support the flow of attention and participation in more intimate classroom discussions. Students are told that the app keeps track of time, ideas, and topics that come up in the discussions. But its designers were also interested in student engagement, participation in discussion, and awareness of their fellow students. The app shows a roundtable of conversation participants and lists of topics and ideas. Students felt rewarded when their app content made it into the actual conversation, and overactive minds were OK when not every idea they submitted made it to the main stage. The professor brought it all together by promoting individual quotes and ideas from students without necessarily focusing the entire class’s attention on a shy contributor. Students who don’t participate turned out to be very self-aware of their lack of verbal contribution, and appreciated their ability to contribute and interact with the professor without becoming the center of the group’s attention.

The app raised the question of defining the main stage itself. The main stage might be a boring Powerpoint slideshow, while the Tin Can app hosted a more compelling conversation. Drew sees the app as training wheels for the classroom environment, where it can pick up the slack when the main stage’s communication fails the audience, but it can clearly also be a distraction.

ROAR blows up the scale of the online audience to stadium-level proportions. There are two levels of interaction in a stadium, Drew says: the small group of people you came with, and the much larger crowd around you. Drew sought to determine the broader activity levels across the larger crowd: What are they interested in? What are the immediate trending topics and reactions across the large audience? The Pulse feature scans the realtime chat for keywords and highlights them in the fluid stream.

Drew compares and contrasts the key variables across these tools. Is the main stage mediated? Is the side stage publicly displayed, or is it private? How frequently is the side stage expected to be used? And what’s the scale of the audience?

Abstract:

We have long assumed that being face-to-face is the best environment for social interaction. But is “being there” the best we can aspire to? One common approach to improving face-to-face contexts is to add new communication channels — a strategy often described as creating “backchannels.” In my work, I use a series of novel complementary communication systems to show both how adding communication platforms to collaborative situations can be useful while also arguing for a new conceptual model of side stages (in the Goffman sense) that contrasts with the traditional model of backchannels. I will describe a series of projects that embody this approach and explore its limits. This will include work on virtual world meetings and presentations, an audience interaction tool for large groups (backchan.nl), a tablet-based system for small group discussions (Tin Can), and a platform for connecting huge distributed audiences (ROAR). In each of these projects I will trace my three major research themes: understanding how conversational grounding operates in these environments, how non-verbal actions complement text-based interaction, and how people make decisions about how to manage their attention in environments with multiple simultaneous communication channels.

I’m at the GlobalVoices Citizen Media Summit in Kenya

Posted July 4, 2012 by Matt Stempeck

I’m in Nairobi for a few weeks, primarily for the GlobalVoices Citizen Media Summit, a biannual conference with many of the network’s top bloggers, translators, and editors, who hail from all over the planet. Here are a few liveblog posts I wrote the last couple of days to give you a taste of what we’re talking about:

More to follow, mehopes.

The Internet Exposes Tensions and Opportunity Between Nations and their Diasporas

Posted July 4, 2012 by Matt Stempeck

Liveblog from the Global Voices Summit (#gv2012) here in Nairobi.

Diasporic communities can now take virtually full part in national political and civic life in their countries of origin, thanks to new media. From the academic and activist perspectives, what are the consequences?

Left to right: Gershom Ndhlovu (Zambia), Elaine Diaz (Cuba), Susan Benesch (American University, School of International Service), Nanjira Sambuli (Kenya), Fred Petrossian (Iran)

In addition to teaching at American University, Susan Benesch is a human rights lawyer and journalist in the US. She argues that the issue of diasporic voices are the story of the 21st century. It is the story of migration, and many of the Global Voices bloggers here this week are migrants themselves, living and writing in new countries. It is the modern human experience to travel to a new country, temporarily or permanently, and live in a different culture while still thinking and dreaming and remembering another country, culture, set of songs, language, and politics. Those of us whose grandparents or great-grandparents migrated in earlier centuries might recall that they almost never went back. If they had communication with people in their former countries, it was by letter, and this is where we see letters that speak of streets paved with gold. Gradually over time, 3 enormous technological changes have affected how diasporic communities stay in touch with the people and culture in their countries of origin:

Cheaper airfare, so people could physically return
Cheaper telephone communications, so could people could talk
Technology and social media, which radically changed how people who have moved can communicate with those in the country of origin

We have on the panel members of the diaspora as well as people who still live in their countries of origin, where they feel the impact of diasporic communications.

Fred Petrossian (@fredpetrossian | bio) is an editor at Global Voices and from Iran, as well as a professional journalist based in Prague working with Radio Free Europe. He sees many Iranians forced into political exile by waves of political repression and mass executions. Not all Iranians left for political reasons, but a significant percentage of the diaspora is outside of the country because of political beliefs.

Fred has seen examples of how a diaspora can successfully help those still in the country, but also how it can hinder local movements. The internet in Iran is very slow, by government design. The diaspora plays a very important role in amplifying the message. Demonstrations after abductions or executions, or to save a dying lake, pass through the diaspora, where the word travels quickly on social networks. This is very helpful, and in some cases even a matter of life and death.

But sometimes the diaspora is trapped in its own bubble, and their knowledge of what is occurring is influenced by the media they are consuming in their new country. They sometimes have to rely on television and radio to understand what’s taking place in Iran. When they look at Facebook, they see an overwhelming revolution bringing about the regime’s last day. But the security forces have access to social networks, too.

Diasporas can talk online and spread messages quickly, but the heart and the soul of the country must be involved or nothing will happen. Fred sees a slacktivist aspect of diasporic involvement online, creating a disconnection and a gap with those still living in Iran. But diaspora do play a critical role in putting international attention on cases of political persecution, thus protecting activists.

Nanjira Sambuli (@NiNanjira | bio) introduces us to the Kenyan diaspora’s “Call Washington” mentality. Local consulates have information about the home country for those living in the diaspora, but this information is only periodically updated, and technology moves quickly.

The Kenyan diaspora online is segmented based on where they are. The online communities often started as email listservs, and grew from there. Following the election and subsequent violence, though, divides between tribes had a severe impact on the online diaspora, and killed discussion in many fora. The diaspora has blogs, but rarely have people in Kenya been involved with them, and vice versa.

Last week saw a “love protest” in Nairobi by Boniface Mwangi, bringing people out into the streets to unify and call for an end to the nation’s culture of impunity. For the first time in 45 years, the diaspora was able to see the events unfold in real-time on Facebook and elsewhere online without calling Washington for information. They actually participated, in at least a minimal way.

There’s sometimes alienation between those who left and moved upwards economically, and those still here. It’s important that the diaspora bring money home to invest, and continue talking to people here so their information is accurate. The “Call Washington” mentality, at least, is fading away.

Elaine Diaz (@elainediaz2003 | bio | blog) speaks to us in Spanish, with Susan translating. As a professor at the University of Havana, and as a blogger, she has a unique perspective on the role of the diaspora online. In order to understand the relationship between Cuba and its diaspora online, you must understand the same relationship offline. It’s a very difficult relationship. Large numbers of Cubans migrated to the US following Fidel Castro’s rise to power, particularly Miami.

Only 14% of the Cuban population has access to the internet, so it can seem that even talking about the relationship between Cuba and its diaspora online is a dream. Of that 14%, most are only using email. So it might seem like a dream to talk about a relationship between Cuba and its diaspora online. But that’s not the case. There are many Cubans using new technologies to communicate, inside and outside Cuba. Social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and open source blogging on WordPress are popular means of communication and ways to talk about the harsh realities of the Cuban experience.

The online space for Cubans is a battlefield between the diaspora and those still living in Cuba. The #cuba hashtag is an open political battle between government sympathizers and opposition.

A younger generation of Cubans online are looking for new spaces to communicate with one another. There are some common points of agreement, particularly around immigration reform within the Cuban government. In spite of political differences, everyone agrees it’s necessary to eliminate the exit permit the Cuban government currently requires, among other migration-related issues. Another interesting point of agreement is around access to the internet and the sorry state of internet penetration in the country. Cuban civil society is demanding access to the internet not only for commercial services like email, but also for public participation in society. They seek the ability to debate, but also a role in decisionmaking. As a scholar of the Cuban blogosphere, Elaine finds this consensus meaningful. Although we don’t live in Cuba, we can assist. We can watch it unfold online.

Gershom Ndhlovu (@GNdhlovu | bio) is a Zambian living in the United Kingdom, with firsthand experience of life in the diaspora. In the last 20 years, Zambia has changed presidents four times. The Zambian diaspora understands what’s going on at home. Those Zambians working in the media understand local events up to the very minute. Many are fighting for dual citizenship. Most of the Zambians who have migrated in the last 20-30 years have gained dual citizenship in their new countries of residence. Unlike the other panelists thus far, Zambians migrate primarily for economic, rather than political, reasons.

Zambia is currently rewriting their constitution, and the diaspora is seeking inclusion of a clause about dual citizenship. Much of the government sympathizes, but the new president who took power ten months ago opposes the provision. Last year’s constitution included the clause, but was defeated in Parliament. With that decision, the dream of dual citizenship went with it. Diasporic Zambians are also seeking a right to vote and be directly involved in the political process. “Ours is a straightforward case.”

Q&A

Markos: If online communications facilitates contact between exiles and the home country, does it make it easier for journalists and others to leave the country in the first place? And how would you define good journalism conducted from exile? What advantages and disadvantages does being outside of the country pose?

Fred responds that he monitors local Zambian news websites, and runs an online news station where they interview Zambians still in the country. They’ve reached the point where Zambian newspapers actually monitor their show for news, indicating a level of trust despite their physical location outside of the country. They have built credibility.

Kenyans on Twitter (#kot) are trying to change the rest of the world’s perception of Africa, and of Kenya in particular.

What happens when a particular person in the diaspora becomes a voice representing the home community? When the international media seek them out to speak for others? In effect, how does the diaspora community deal with representation?

Elaine says it would be extremely difficult for Cubans living on the island to accept a representative voice in the diaspora as legitimate, because they are the ones living their lives in Cuba. When she found herself at a conference in Rio de Janeiro for a couple of weeks, she found herself having nothing to write about Cuba on her blog. She argues that being physically present in a place is mandatory to forming an authentic opinion about events there. You can really only know what’s going on in Cuba when you’re there, when you get a feel for what’s really going on on the ground. Susan points to Yoani Sanchez’s Generation Y as another example of a blogger who no longer claims to represent Cuba, having left the country.

Nanjira says that Kenyans in the diaspora have a duty to communicate about the country to the rest of the world. The real story gets oversimplified. For example, there are several advisories against traveling in Kenya right now due to recent grenade attacks, and that’s what gets international press. But there’s also the Global Voices Summit taking place this week. Journalists and others in the diaspora need to tell that story to the world, and counter mainstream media organizations like CNN, whose coverage is sometimes completely inaccurate, or at best incomplete.

Nanjira warns that anyone in the diaspora who takes a preachy, condescending approach when talking about the home country is not very highly regarded at home. People in the diaspora write op-eds for foreign newspapers, but these individuals rarely engage online. Kenyans still in the country try to get in touch with them, but they never hear back. There’s little conversation that continues, such as in the comments sections on online newspaper op/eds.

Overall, new media is having a huge effect: the diaspora goes to new sources for breaking news and information (e.g. the Red Cross for on-the-ground news from grenade attacks) on the same online platforms on which they are engaging.

Nanjiru responds to comment from a Kenyan (who’s lived in the country and in the diaspora) about generalizing others’ experiences: How do you bridge the gaps in the current engagement between those here and abroad? It starts with the dialogue, and social media can help. She says Kenyans are very divided as a people, both here and abroad. We need to have a “think tank”, to have that dialogue as a people and unify.

Upworthy’s Content Goes Further Than Yours, and Not Because It’s Better Content

Posted June 11, 2012 by Matt Stempeck

Sara Critchfield and Adam Mordecai‘s talk at Netroots Nation (#nnupFTW) was less-than-standing-room only, so I’ve combined the parts of his talk we were able to catch with a similar talk by their colleague Peter Koechley at the Conversational Marketing Summit. Thanks to Deepa Kunapuli for her notes.

the Upworthy kitten Upworthy’s goal is to amplify content worth spreading online. If you mixed the earnestness of a TED talk with the brevity of a LOLcat and Coca Cola’s distribution network, you’d end up with something like Upworthy’s network of crack content. They don’t necessarily produce the content themselves, they just make sure it goes places. While we debate the impact of technological tactics like SEO and A/B testing on the future of journalism, the Upworthy team is working to harness these new (and always changing) algorithmic tactics for social change.

Peter Koechley (@peterkoechley) thinks about virality as a product of the shareability of the source content and the clickability of the content’s packaging. Everyone who’s spent the last ten years paying consultants to produce viral content will be relieved to know that the latter part of this equation, the clickability of your content’s packaging, is much, much easier to optimize than the content itself. But people don’t spend enough time on this part of the process.

Your Headlines Matter

Sara and Adam, Peter’s colleagues at Upworthy, explain that we’re spending all of our content production time in the wrong places. We slave over the wording in the 12th paragraph of the blog post, and then write a throwaway headline that no one ends up clicking. If we care about people finding our content, we need to think generationally, or keep in mind not just our readers, but also what our readers’ friends will see should the gods of the feed place your work before their eyeballs.

an example of the Onion's headlines on Facebook

Peter walks us through the three schools of headline optimization on the web. Peter started at the Onion, where hilarity depends almost entirely on the headlines. Unfortunately, because the entire joke is contained in the headline, users can get their giggles without actually clicking through to the site. So headlines from the Onion perform rather poorly in terms of driving traffic back to the website.

The second category of headline optimization is your traditional search engine optimization, where the headline contains all of the right keywords, and again, spells out what the page is about. Google loves proper nouns, but humans find them pretty boring.

Social optimization breaks from these two approaches and hits the user with just a taste of the content, worded in a compelling way, and often with an emotional tone. You may have noticed that brands are learning to generate interactions with their Facebook posts by asking for their followers’ opinions, because if they’re successful, Facebook rewards them by increasing the visibility of their posts. But anyone optimizing for click-throughs rather than comments should be considering the degree to which the headline teases and entices the reader while refraining from giving away the meat of the content. Peter calls this the curiosity gap: too vague, and I don’t care, but too specific, and I don’t need to click the link.

Peter shows a case study of two takes on the same 3-minute video about gay marriage. The video of Zach Wahls’s moving testimony about growing up with two moms reached a million views without Upworthy’s help, and without a great headline. The original video was titled “Zach Wahls speaks about family,” which, Peter points out, is bad because you don’t know who Zach is yet, and you might not particularly care about family. Even though it had already gone viral once, the team at Upworthy decided to try spreading the video again with an improved headline. Angie Aker at MoveOn.org came up with “Two Lesbians Raised a Baby And This Is What They Got” and made the video their daily share. The result was 20 million additional views of the same video, and a headline that regularly beats actual porn results for Google searches for “two lesbians”. A good headline teases, but also appeals to different audiences for completely different reasons. Even homophobes were intrigued enough to click that link. Upworthy will sometimes write 25 different headlines for each piece of content, and test response before selecting a finalist.

Greasing the Tracks of the Internet

For someone studying how ideas spread these days, Upworthy’s facilitation is interesting in a number of ways. First of all, Upworthy has taken after the Instagrams of the world and eschewed the traditional website-as-hub model. Where Instagram pushes everyone to their mobile app, the majority of Upworthy’s existence is in followers’ Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest streams. Upworthy also has some rather prominent share buttons to help you connect the dots:

Upworthy's share buttons

Adam and Sarah also advised that we spend 55 minutes on emotion for every 5 minutes of fact. And, as cognitive studies have proven, images work much, much better than text. The default image that gets shared with the link on social networks is particularly important (you can control this with Facebook’s og:image tag).

How the Social Networks Stack Up
(for the content Upworthy has tested — your mileage may very well vary):

Twitter: Not great for actually driving people to your content. Facebook accounts for about 90% of the traffic in their tests. (It’s not clear to me if they’re only counting Twitter.com traffic, or all Twitter clients, as well. This divide has historically depressed measures of Twitter referrals). Twitter users like to share facts.
Facebook: If you have a limited budget, focus everything here. Photo posts get three to four times the interaction of regular posts, but don’t necessarily drive traffic. Close-ups of faces perform well, as do visual dichotomies, in ads as well as posts.
Reddit: Good luck. If you crack it, you are a god.
Pinterest: Hey ladies! Pix please.

Testing Virality

Adam says you must test because you are dumb. We are all dumb. Our intuition means nothing, and Upworthy’s two biggest headline hits were written by interns. You will be wrong 90% of the time.

Peter will pay you $1,000 to popularize a word that describes these phenomena other than ‘virality’.

[Video and slides of Peter’s presentation, with Sara and Adam’s presentation to follow shortly]

Upworthy’s Content Goes Further Than Yours, and Not Because It’s Better Content

Posted June 10, 2012 by Matt Stempeck

Your Headlines Matter

The Onion's headlines - perfect, except for driving traffic from Facebook

Greasing the Tracks of the Internet

Upworthy's battle-tested share buttons

How the Social Networks Stack Up
(for the content Upworthy has tested — your mileage may very well vary):

Testing Virality

Adam says you must test because you are dumb. We are all dumb. Our intuition means nothing, and Upworthy’s two biggest headline hits were written by interns. You will be wrong 90% of the time.

Peter will pay you $1,000 to popularize a word that describes these phenomena other than ‘virality’.

Video and slides of Peter’s presentation. Sara and Adam’s slides are pretty great, too:

Upworthy: 10 Ways To Win The Internets

8 more innovative political and civic technologies

Posted June 9, 2012 by Matt Stempeck

There was another Tools Shootout session at Netroots Nation (#nn12) today. We’re all a bit more exhausted than Thursday’s session (13 of the Newest Political and Civic Tools), but Dan Ancona held it down and showcased another round of shiny new tools. Here are the ones I didn’t cover in the last post:

Democrats traditionally outdid Republicans online until 2010, when Republicans matched the voter file to browser cookies and targeted ads like direct mail. Jim Walsh introduced the Democratic answer: DSPolitical‘s cookie. In addition to giving out blue-frosted cookies all weekend, the tool allows campaigns to target voters online based on their voting record and 42 segments. The result is more accurate and efficient advertising (and probably a pending Filter Bubble nightmare).

Eric Ruben provides an overview Salsa Labs. The founding organization, DemocracyInAction, works with 2,200 organizations, including the AFL-CIO and many other progressive groups. The suite includes mass email tools, donation pages, a CRM, events, advocacy and contact-your-representative tools, and third party plugins.

Marci Harris founded PopVox after years as a congressional staffer. There are two ways to move legislation: move money, or move people. But there’s no good way to measure people. Counting people is hard, Congress only wants to hear from constituents, and Congress is overwhelmed by the messages generated by online tools. Congressional offices have the same number of staffers that they had in the 1970’s.

The voice of the people is diffused and frequently unfocused. A letter asking Congress to Save the Whales is not the same as asking Congress to pass HR 1234 banning whaling ships. PopVox works with Congress to deliver the people’s voice in a clean, organized format. There’s XML tagging and the messages practically sort themselves once they reach congressional offices. Individuals and organizations go through the site or its embeddable widget to support or oppose bills. All positions and counts are mapped publicly on their site. At the moment, their community is 53% Republican and 47% Democrat.

ElectNext (@electnext) is building an eHarmony for voters to find candidates they might support. They translate political data into tools that help create a more informed electorate. If you’re in the political data world today, you have access to tons of information about voters (250 unique data points). But when you flip the equation and look at what the American voter knows, consistently less than half can tell you anything about Congress, candidate positions, and other information. Where’s the average voter’s political database? ElectNext has pulled together 15 million datapoints to determine where over 4,500 candidates stand on issues. They’re live with US Senate, House and presidency and hope to expand to every US election. They also have a widget with issue and voter-candidate matching features.

Jim Pugh of Rebuild the Dream shows us Control Shift Labs, a platform to allow their members to create their own campaigns. It competes with Change.org and Signon.org, also here at the conference. As an organization, Rebuild the Dream is using the self-service campaign platform as a mechanism to identify members within their ranks who are ready to step up and assume a leadership position. This, in my opinion, is a hugely underserved area within online grassroots organizations.

Leif Utne‘s at WareCorp, which runs the SoapBlox blogging platform. It powers 80 political blogs with millions of monthly views across the network. They’ve relaunched SoapBlox.net as a media property that aggregates content. The new technology they’re announcing today is the idea of paying bloggers for content (with 50% of the advertising revenue they receive). You can become a contributor here.

Oh, and I showed off LazyTruth, which is launching imminently. Sign up at LazyTruth.com.

13 of the Newest Political and Civic Tools

Posted June 7, 2012 by Matt Stempeck

Netroots Nation had a New Tool Shootout session to highlight all of the cool new political tools, sponsored by New Media Ventures.

BlueStateDigital’s QuickDonate tool (now live on BarackObama.com lets your constituents save their payment information for frictionless giving. There’s also a mobile edition that pulls from the same saved credit card information, which prevents the mobile carriers from taking a cut of the donation. Even new users are spared from entering their data on a mobile device. It’s available to any organization already using BSD.

Paul Schreiber, “the TurboVote kid,” makes voting as easy as renting a DVD from Netflix. The US is 138th in voter participation. We vote on Tuesdays and generally make it hard for people to vote. Oregon introduced statewide vote-by-mail. TurboVote uses the internet to make voting as easy as buying a pair of shoes online. If the states are the laboratories of democracy, their registration requirements and forms and websites are the meth labs of democracy, Paul says. Rather than visit crappy state election board websites, you simply use TurboVote’s wizard to register to vote and/or vote by mail. When you’re done with the wizard, it generates the appropriate PDF for you to print and mail. TurboVote also has a mobile site, and partners with Voto Latino, the League of Young Voters, and other such groups.

The Voter Activation Network is working to synchronize its voter records with voters’ online social media profiles. The tool, Social Organizing, will enable organizers to reach people where they already are, rather than interrupting dinner with a phone call. There’s a strong overall trend around social organizing, and letting people bring in their real-world networks is believed to be better for all parties than a randomized call list.

Mike Sager’s working on Repurpose, a system of incentives and frequent flier miles to reward organizers who take action. They’re not just empty gamification points and badges, though; these points will direct the spending of a SuperPAC. You earn your points by doing political organizing work like canvassing, and can then redeem them to help campaigns and adbuys of your choosing.

Stephanie from SignOn.org, a free petition site created by MoveOn.org. All of the petitions created are tested with a segment of MoveOn’s huge email list, and some are further promoted within relevant segments of that list. Petition creators themselves can message the signers about anything except fundraising appeals. They’ve designed sophisticated testing systems for each petition, which is micro-targeted to others based on the petition’s signers, geography, and virality. The end result is that MoveOn is sharing their progressive email list across a wide range of progressive causes.

Tim Lim introduces his Precision Network online advertising targeting system. They can target on a number of electoral, demographic, consumer, and behavioral factors — more here.

The Agenda Project takes on the battle of ideas in American politics. Indices like http://policyexperts.org/ have always been important in national politics. The Agenda Project’s TopWonks project pulls together a stable of solid, rational policy experts all in one place. TopWonks has a profile for the progressive thinker expert you’re looking for, whether it’s municipal tax policy or developing economies. National news brands have already begun consulting the site.

Rally lets anyone with a cause share their story and raise money. The “cause” here can be a man trying to get his fianceé to move to his city, or saving a community’s church from fiscal insolvency. You can follow causes, which gives them your email address, and donate (Rally takes a 4.5% cut of donations). The system lets you send out email fundraising appeals, and shares analytics with you (donation emails with photos and videos perform better than text-only appeals). They’re also implementing a one-click donate button.

Seth Bannon introduces Amicus, which is looking to solve the problem that most of the communications in the world of social change happens between two strangers. (phonebanks, info@ email accounts, canvassers). Amicus finds your existing Facebook friends and looks for potential matches in the official voter file. Users confirm the matches, and are then asked to contact them. After you work through your list of friends, the tool connects you with friends-of-friends as well, as you still have a much better context for knowing each other than being randomly assigned a phone number. In addition to phonebanking, the system also lets you send emails and mail postcards. On the organization’s admin side of things, you can cut a list based on the target group you’re looking to contact — young women in New Hampshire, for example. Volunteers level up as they complete actions, and group administrators can reassign the weighting of various actions. If calls suddenly become vitally important to the campaign, the admin can assign more points to calls (and so far, volunteers have responded to the re-weighting). AFL-CIO and about ten nonprofits have used the tool.

Amicus demo at the Oct NYTM from Seth Bannon on Vimeo.

Eric Hysen, from Google’s Politics and Elections team, introduces google.com/elections, Google’s main elections hub. Google’s polling place gadget (powered by Voting Information Project data) shows up in Search results whenever people search for “where do I vote” “polling place” and other election-related queries. The gadget is also embeddable with a single line of code, can be customized with pre-populated addresses, and has been featured on many official campaigns’ sites. An API is available to developers, as well. This time around, they’re adding ballot information and voter ID requirements. The goal is to help voters get everything they need to vote from the tool. It appears across Google Search, Maps, and News.

Colin from LoudSauce acknowledges that most of us hate advertising, and says LoudSauce’s goal is to repurpose advertising to make it meaningful for society. Advertising favors large, entrenched, monied interests, and lets them win the attention game. But the internet allows us to transform the medium, which has historically fueled consumption, to fuel civic engagement. The politically engaged are like technology’s early adopters: they jump in early, long before the rest of society. Crowdfunded advertising allows us to reach the laggards.

The anti-consumerist video Story of Stuff, produced in 2007, was a huge win online. But most people across broader society have still never heard of it. They raised money with their supporters online and purchased national TV ads using Google TV Ads, at under $3,000 a spot, and drove many more people to the site. Only 82 donors drove 2 million additional viewers.

Their new features allow people to set up their own media-buying campaigns and activate their personal networks to raise the money to extend the reach of their video. It’s Kickstarter for amateur media. And it’s not limited to small TV buys. You can purchase video ads on MTV, CNN, Current, and YouTube. The Redditors and Upworthies of the world might be interested in this platform. Occupy Wall Street supporters produced 12 Occupy Spots ads, covering Occupy Wall Street, Occupy the Hood, and other organic messages at http://occupyspots.com/. Creative politicos created the Meh. Romney campaign and are seeking donations to bring it to the Republican convention. [LoudSauce is onto something: Facebook is reportedly toying with a similar pay-to-promote feature to allow users to expand the reach of their content across News Feeds].

DemDash is a democracy dashboard to educate activists and voters on candidates and issues. It’s in alpha and currently covers only California politics, but will be expanded to include information from the Ballot Information Project.

John Brougher talks about NationBuilder, a complete suite of well-designed organizing and activist tools available for a low monthly subscription fee. They’ve been focused on scalability since day one, resulting in the low $20 / month (and up) cost.

Christie George introduces New Media Ventures, a fund investing in progressive political and civic startups. They support nonprofits as well as for-profits, but have noticed a lack of funding in the nonprofit space for new ideas. So, this summer they’re issuing an open call to nonprofit entrepreneurs using technology to creative progressive political change. Their three criteria are that your venture be scalable, revenue generating with a sustainable business model, and creating progressive political change. They’ll be awarding grants of $25,000. Follow @newmediaventure and @christiegeorge.

Bonus tool! via Nick Grossman: Thunderclap lets you coordinate mass amplification of the same message. Right now it works by asking people to pledge to retweet, but the same strategy could work to juice YouTube views and other social media sites. I’ve actually heard from unscrupulous commercial marketers who have gamed YouTube’s top video playlists’ algorithms, to the point that they can use Mechanical Turk to get a video onto the trending videos lists, where the video then gains many, many more organic views. Thunderclap could be the grassroots version of this tactic. Although, if you’re not going to get enough amplification of the message to break the Top Whatever lists threshold, it might be better for a campaign to spread the amplification out over a period of time than to do it all at once.

Study Grader

Posted May 9, 2012 by Matt Stempeck

For my final Participatory News assignment (and because one can never have too many projects), I’m going to try to build this semi-automated grading rubric for shoddy science journalism over the next couple of weeks:

I’m interested in nutrition, and health in general. As a result, I’ve read a lot of really shoddy nutrition and health news over the years. I’ve noticed that the mistakes journalists make usually involve coverage of a single scientific study. For example, correlation is presented as causation, making us all a little dumber. You can see for yourself over at Google News’s Health section, where you can see a variety of takes on the same study results. A study on the mental benefits of expressing one’s feelings inevitably produces the clickbait headline, in one source, that Twitter is better than sex.

What if readers and journalists had a semi-automated grading rubric they could apply to media coverage of medical studies and drug development?

I started looking around, and found that science journalists are concerned with these problems. Veterans like Fiona Fox at the Science Media Centre have even shared some specific red flags for the skeptical observer. I was also fortunate enough to meet with two of our classmates (who also happen to be Knight Science Fellows), Alister Doyle and Helen Shariatmadari, who, in addition to significant personal experience, pointed me to great additional resources:

Gary Schwitzer’s Health News Review
Materials from the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships‘ own Medical Science Bootcamp, held in December, 2011

I’ll also be meeting with science writer Hannah Krakauer tomorrow.

I’m pulling out as many “rules” (in the software sense) as I can from these recommendations, and will then attempt to build a semi-automated grading rubric for these types of articles. It’s important to note that there will still be user involvement in producing the score.

: (click image to expand)

I hope to present the results in the spirit of HubSpot‘s Grader.com series of tools for grading website marketing, books, and Twitter authority. The tools themselves vary in utility, but the format of the results embeds an educational layer into the score review (unlike closed-algorithm services like Klout). I am more interested in training journalists and readers to develop a keen eye for the hallmarks of high- or low-quality science reporting than the actual numerical score on a given article. By asking for readers’ involvement in scoring an article, I might be able to augment the automatic grading with human input, but also help teach critical thinking skills.

Down the road, it’d be interesting to incorporate other journalism tools. rbutr integration could allow us to pull from and contribute to crowdsourced rebuttals of misinformation, while Churnalism would let us scan the articles for unhealthy amounts of press release.

Better Know a Classmate

Posted February 29, 2012 by Matt Stempeck

Our news class assignment this week was to Google-stalk, and then interview, a classmate. I got to know Eugene Wu.

Tracking My Media Diet

Posted February 21, 2012 by Matt Stempeck

I’m taking Ethan Zuckerman’s News and Participatory Media course this spring. This being MIT, the class approaches the production and distribution of news as an engineering problem. Look at this syllabus! I wrote my undergraduate thesis on how participatory media has disrupted traditional journalism, and this class is a great excuse to revisit many of the questions I came across in 2006.

Check out my takeaways from a week of tracking my own media diet, or just consult the giant bar chart, below.

My Media Diet

What would a nutritional label for the news look like?

Posted October 6, 2011 by Matt Stempeck

Cross-posted from the Center for Civic Media blog.

The standard US FDA nutrition label is well-known here in the states because it is both consistent (for better or worse) and ubiquitous: you’ll find it on almost all packaged foods, excluding certain foods like fresh meat (until 2012) and fresh baked goods (creating an opening in the market for cupcake detectives).

As we consider the equivalent of a nutritional label for information consumption, I’d like to strike a balance between the consistent, widely-recognized FDA label and the far more creative, dynamic approaches to visualizing information all over the internet.

Our MediaRDI project is underway, and we’ll have two classes of “newstritional” information to display (don’t worry, I won’t use that word again). Our first phase will be to display information about a given news provider, such as the New York Times or CNN. A news consumer such as yourself could see, at a glance, what sort of topics a source provides, and what you might be gaining or missing by reading it exclusively. This could also help professional journalists by visualizing what they’re covering and what they’re missing – they could even advertise their breadth of coverage or depth in a given topic.

Further down the road a bit, we might focus on visualizing the news consumption of actual individuals across their entire media diet. First, we’d have to track media consumption across web, podcasts, TV, newspaper, Twitter, and so on, and then we’d have to parse and visualize it. This phase might be most exciting to the most people, especially if we can make it easier and prettier to display aggregate information consumption.

Visualizing Media by News Provider

One example that immediately jumps to mind is an old favorite, the treemap visualization of Google News (Markos Weskamp went on to bring us Flipboard).

How it’s done:

“Google News automatically groups news [s]tories with similar content and places them based on algorithmic results into clusters. In Newsmap, the size of each cell is determined by the amount of related articles that exist inside each news cluster that the Google News Aggregator presents. In that way users can quickly identify which news stories have been given the most coverage, viewing the map by region, topic or time. Through that process it still accentuates the importance of a given article.

“Newsmap also allows to compare the news landscape among several countries, making it possible to differentiate which countries give more coverage to, for example, more national news than international or sports rather than business.”

This approach is interesting for a couple of reasons. Treemaps are great at visualizing distributions of information in a constrained layout. They also happen to resemble the traditional newspaper column layouts we know and love. Here’s a mockup I did with LabGrab’s treemap of science news:

This visual format could be used to display the categories of news offered by a single source. The name of the news source could remain in the familiar masthead location. We could also add a dynamic slider on the right to allow the user to adjust the timeframe of news coverage represented in the treemap. A user could compare how this news provider’s coverage distributes over the last few years versus the last few weeks.

A great way to visualize the depth and breadth of topics in the news might be stream graphs, like this view of box office returns by the New York Times:

As Nathan says, they look sort of like latte art. Check out Lee Byron’s Streamgraph generator on GitHub.

I’m particularly interested in what happens when you restrict the area of a Streamgraph to something relative, like visualizing 100% of the news in a given paper, creating a Stacked Area Graph. This form allows you to see how one category of data affects another:

If we’re interested in displaying the geographic reach (or lack thereof) of a given news source, it’d be great to be able to show a heatmap of the world, with intensities representing news about those areas. We’re not necessarily able to accurately say which articles cover which geographic areas yet, but I’d enjoy this visual if I were looking to expand my international news consumption (just as the Where I’ve Been Facebook app set off a tidal wave of users visually charting where they’ve traveled and where they’d like to visit).

heatmap of continents
Heatmap image by igrigorik shared under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

Another approach to the world map visualization is the telling visual Alisa Miller used in her TED Talk about our news diets:

It makes one think to actually see that, as far as our news diet goes, huge swaths of our planet and fellow humanity don’t even exist to us.

Visualizing News by Personal Consumption

Given that information consumption is an exercise of the mind, first and foremost, it might also be fun and useful to display a treemap in the form of a human brain. I imagine I’d be compelled to change my habits if I could see that a large chunk of my mental intake consisted of iPhone 5 rumors.

a visual of media consumption projected onto the brain

Original brain image shared under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

Of course, a pie chart is a simple and great way to display percentages of a whole. Maybe we put it in a stopwatch housing to gently remind the user that the data represents how they’re spending their time, for better or worse.

a pie chart in a stopwatch
Original image created by lookang shared under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

One of the most useful personal information tools I use is Mint.com. Sure, they get every detail of my financial data, but I’m not convinced the banks didn’t have this anyway. At least with Mint I, too, get to see what my consumer profile looks like over time. Mint was wise enough to realize that financial information can be pretty boring if left to programs like Quickbooks, and has therefore prioritized visually attractive displays and interfaces. Perhaps that’s why Intuit bought Mint for $170 million.

Mint helps individuals view their personal finances from a number of angles. First, you load all of your financial accounts, including checking, savings, loans, and credit cards. Having everything in one place allows Mint to aggregate every transaction, eliminate duplicates, and provide an at-a-glance overview of your complete financial record.

Replicating this for media consumption would likely require plugins and devices for the myriad ways we consume media, but wouldn’t be impossible. A browser extension and Twitter client could automatically log time spent with various news (like RescueTime), although certain media might require manual logging using a mobile app (like going to see a movie).

Mint also lets users set a monthly budget by spending category. This method could certainly be applied to media consumption. The budgeted categories of media and amount of time allotted to them are entirely up to the individual’s unique goals. Here’s a mockup of what this might look like:

mockup of information consumption goals

You can also see your spending, by category, on pie and bar graphs:

Things get interesting as you dive into the compare-by-city and compare-by-state features:

bar graph comparison of individual spending to average state spending

Of course, not everyone has the time or inclination to dive in this deeply. For this reason, when you first log in, Mint serves up important alerts based on your activity:

Alert notifications from Mint.com

Mint also selects and offers additional financial products depending on your activity. While I don’t need another credit card, I might be interested in a subscription to The Economist if I’m trying to bulk up on my international news diet.

credit card offers from Mint.com based on usage

Lastly, as we’re considering personal metrics, we should also look at FitBit and Nike Plus and how they display fitness information. Both services are loved, not only because they track and display your personal metrics, but because they build in motivational tricks that exploit human psychology to encourage healthy habits.

FitBit LED flower Like Mint, FitBit offers in-depth analytics for true data hounds, but also an at-a-glance display of your personal metrics. In practically every review I’ve read, the FitBit device is lauded for the little blue LED flower.

Sure, FitBit’s sensors capture all sorts of data that can later be uploaded to and analyzed with their web service, but the immediate payoff for wearing the thing is a Tamagotchi-style flower that thrives or withers based on how much you move or sit. I’d be willing to bet that concerns for the flower’s health motivate more people than the number on a chart of a web service.

Nike Plus’s primary motivational force is peer pressure. At first, the promotional video offers “an endless parade of information” about you and your runs, and the service does offer maps, metrics, and exercise plans. But sports are competitive, and Nike Plus rightly focuses on the social element. You can directly challenge (or cheer on) friends who also use Nike Plus, not to mention brag on Facebook and Twitter.

Do you have more ideas on how to best display the numbers behind our news? Let us know in the comments, if you would. The nice thing about the MediaRDI project is that this data will be open, so designers far more talented than myself could create visually compelling interfaces for exploring our personal information metrics.