Liveblog of Ethan Zuckerman’s Future of News keynote, composed with Nathan Matias. Errors are likely ours.

The usual conversation about innovation in journalism held by people who work in journalism assumes that there’s one main problem in the space: if we could just work out the revenue issue, we’d be fine forever. But it’s also not the case that cross-subsidies from lighter matter will help us support the journalism we need for people to be effective civic actors.

What if we’ve got the problem wrong? Sometimes the stuff we think we’re good at–producing high quality journalism that helps people figure out what they might do in society–turns out to be stuff we’re not nearly as good at as we thought. This may well be one of the core problems of journalism.

Ethan offers two fairly easy arguments, and a fairly difficult one:

1) journalism matters (goes mostly unchallenged in this room)

2) civics is changing (particularly for younger people and for people who identify with the internet as their native medium)

3) journalism needs to change

Ethan invokes Michael Schudson, and his essay, “Six or Seven Things the News Can Do for Democracy” in the book Why Democracies need an Unlovable Press. Schudson wants us to focus journalism on the hardest problems in democracy, and to use journalism as a way to move forward.

Schudson establihes six or seven functions for news in a democracy:

The professionals are still play a critical role to inform us. We’re all interested in how we get informed by news, and figure out what has happened or not happened. There are reports of police raids of the opposition party’s headquarters during elections in Ghana, but we’re unable to verify if this has actually happened. We rely on journalists to verify, with trusted sources and interviews and eyewitnesses.

For investigations, journalists tend to lean on large organisations, often because it’s an enormous amount of work and requires a lot of legal protection. Hearst once said, “The news is the stuff they don’t want you to print, and the rest is advertising.” Investigations are one of the most difficult, precious things journalists bring to civic dialogue.

Analysis has shifted radically in online, but it actually shifted much earlier. We often decry partisan media, but it’s prevalent because it’s the cheapest television out there. It’s easy film people with a loud mouth, a lot of opinions, and a book to sell. There is no shortage of analysis, an area where citizens can do a great job; talented amateurs can do a much better job than professionals — Nate Silver’s humble origins are a great example of this.

Public Fora is an area where we’d think citizen media would really change things. We can let everyone share their opinion now, and as a result, we’ve stopped reading comments sections. The barrier to entry of sending a letter to the Editor may have served a basic, if minimal, filtering role for constructive thoughts.

Social Empathy is the idea that, in a representative democracy, not everyone is going to have a voice, and not everyone is able to use their voice. We often speak and act on behalf of people who cannot vote, whether because they’re children, or felons, or live other places and are affected by our foreign policy. Social empathy is the role journalism plays to get us to pay attention to people we might not otherwise pay attention to. Documentary film does a wonderful job in this role, but a lot of media has had a difficult time achieving social empathy. The organization Ethan co-founded, Global Voices, attempts to do this by sharing stories written by bloggers around the world.

Mobilization can drive people nuts. Is advocacy journalism journalism? Does solutions journalism undercut the mission of journalism? Schudson reminds us that we hope that every so often the news gets us sufficiently incensed that we decide to do something. That’s more than voting. It involves creating change in whatever form is needed.

If we take change seriously, we need to accept that participatory media is more than participating in making media. With ‘participatory media,’ Ethan’s looking for a term that’s richer than ‘social media.’ Participatory media, for Ethan, is media which supports us in having a voice. Media industry people thought that this was going to be the revolution — that the news would include a much wider set of participants.

The actual transformation has been much greater. Participatory media goes beyond media to involve people taking action, and the role media serves to enable that action. To understand why we might not have the problems with journalism fully worked out, we need to think about the kinds of action that journalism can support.

A potential seventh role for media is to promote representative democracy. The structures we already have at hand in our democracy can be seen as a path towards mobilization.

Civics is changing, Ethan argues. The latest presidential election involved some big changes in American politics. We elected our first lesbian senator, our first buddhist senator, and our first Hindu representative. The US is becoming more diverse, more multicultural, and we’re seeing more faces in politics. If 2008 was about Obama as president and America dealing with those historical wounds, then 2012 was about America dealing with what it means to be a rainbow nation.

Why did we miss that chance to reflect on this remarkable change? Almost imm after the election, we went straight to the fiscal cliff discussion. Why’s that? We have a very dysfunctional Congress that’s dragging its feet unable to get things done.

Ethan grew up with a different version of democracy, instilled by civic education like Schoolhouse Rock. This model of how a bill becomes a law is wildly outdated, and is probably better described by Senator Bob Graham’s America: The Owner’s Manual. But for this blueprint to work, Congress needs to be interested in passing law and capable of passing law.

If you believe the levers of democracy have basically rusted into place, it’s no longer believable that calling your senator will lead to any change. Ethan isn’t the only crazy person who thinks like this, showing a a slide of the Tea Party, Occupy, Anonymous, and WikiLeaks.

If you look at where politics is going over the last decade or so, many of these movements that have gained momentum were movements that expressed a lack of confidence in Congress’s ability to enact change. The Tea Party and Occupy sees legislative demands as beside the point. Anonymous says that real power is in corporate hands; maybe media power can create more change than political power. Wikileaks, meanwhile, posits that secrets legitimize government, and sharing them can provoke an allergic reaction.

Ethan isn’t convinced that any of these are the right way to create change. But for a lot of people, it’s not convincing to tell them that Congress is going to create change. If you can pass law, it’s probably the best way to get change in an open society because you have the full weight and force of government behind you. But if you’re not in an open society, this is a lousy way to seek change.

Stymied by an obstructed political pathway, people are looking for other pathways to produce change.

One approach is to appeal to authority, or to change that authority. But the human rights, democratisation, and anti-corruption communities in Egypt may have been missing the point. At the end of the day in Egypt, the only authentic change people were hoping for was a change in leadership– one that has been more harrowing and complicated than anyone anticipated.

Attention, and particularly, media attention, is another theory of change. This method is represented well by KONY 2012, for all its strenghts and flaws. Their video destroyed every viral video we’ve known in terms of how quickly it accelerated to a hundred million views. It was nine times the audience of the largest show that week in the Nielsen ratings.

What does 100 million views mean? For the KONY 2012 organizers, it got them exactly what they wanted: a huge amount of media attention, new Senate allies, and a reconfirmed commitment from the Obama Administration to keep advisors on the hunt for Kony. It succeed, although it was simplistic, and left many in Uganda feeling voiceless.

Culture change is another theory of change. Ethan shows us an image of the TV show Cheers. The people at Harvard’s Alcohol Project wanted to get people to start adopting the idea of designated drivers. Instead of making a single episode about designated drivers, they just started dropping it into Cheers. Ethan tells us about a collaboration with Nollywood, Nigerian’s film industry, to get bed nets into films and convince high class people to think that it’s fashionable to sleep under bed nets. The KuweniSerious project in Kenya goes after the culture of political apathy, and reminds Kenyans of their responsibilities.

DIY is another theory of change. Ethan shows us images from Occupy Sandy– people involved in Occupy Wall St who tried to organise relief efforts in Brooklyn and Queens to complement what FEMA was doing. Do-It-Yourself can range from complete lack of faith in government, to augmenting government efforts, to simply wanting to get one’s hands dirty and provide help directly. Ethan shows us a slide from a Russian Fires map, which offered a way to find people in need. It also offered a visual argument against the ineffectiveness of Putin’s policies.

The LowLine is an example of a growing Civic Crowdfunding movement to directly subsidize or fund public goods. One on hand, a lot of public funding should come out of government coffers, but we also don’t want to turn our back on innovative new platforms for citizen engagement around civic projects.

Ethan thinks that the older generation believe mostly in appeals to authority. We understand political change, even if we fail to produce it. But we’re pretty skeptical of these other approaches.

The Center for Civic Media recently hosted Carroll Bogert of Human Rights Watch. Carroll’s message was that Human Rights watch is looking for the small number of media outlets who can influence the 100 people who can actually create change. If Human Rights Watch can reach the people with sway through NPR, the Financial Times, and other media they read, then we can influence them. It makes terrific sense and it’s a great theory of change. It drove my students nuts; they asked her question after question, saying “we’d like to help, what can we do?” Her eventual response: “if you have a million dollars, we’d take it.”

We need a better answer than that. Journalists do an incredible amount of investigative reporting to expose corruption like that of Teodoro Nguema Obiang, son of Equatorial Guinea’s ruler, who was building a giant yacht with a shark tank feature. But no one was there to help Ethan or other outraged readers over the bridge from awareness of corruption to doing anything about it.

Susan Sontag says journalists know how to generate compassion, but compassion is a volatile emotion, and needs to be intelligently channeled. And if we don’t talk about solutions in our journalism, we’re generating strong feelings amongst our readers without helping them do anything about it.

Are America’s youth so addicted to their own sense of power so that newsrooms have to change so the audience has something to do? Ethan argues that this is something enormously old, going back to the Greek notion of civics. Ethan tells us about Isocrates, a “rhetor,” the guy who’s trying to persuade. We are suspicious of him because most of what we hear from him is from Plato, the guy running the rival school at the time. Plato believed that if he had enough time with you, you could become incredibly wise in the true ordering of things, become a philosopher king, and earn the power to run Athens. Isocrates, on the other hand, wanted to train people to be civic actors. At that time, civic action involved the ability to use your voice in the public sphere of the Athenian democracy. He’s viewed as a teacher of speech, when at that time, he was a teacher of participation.

This seems antiquated because the idea of someone standing up in a town meeting seems like it can only happen in a Norman Rockwell painting. Examples of radically participatory democracy are often edge cases, such as Iceland’s crowdsourcing of its new constitution. Whether it’s commenting, organizing, or protesting, the challenge to all of us is to produce effective citizens using media.

Ethan points us to shining examples like Harry Potter Alliance, PolicyMic, OpenIDEO, and Matt Stempeck’s forthcoming Master’s thesis on enabling pro bono skills donations in times of crisis.

Ethan sums up. If journalism matters and civics is changing, what do we need to do? Firstly, we need to find better ways for people to participate. It’s scary and it can go wrong, and we need to figure out how to make it reasonable. Media is an amplifier, and thus a target for manipulation. We need to get smart about how media and influence interact, and how people look to use media as amplifiers, especially in an environment where content is plentiful and attention is scarce.

When we look at a project like the Trayvon Martin case, we’re interested in how the massive amount of attention generated allows activists to latch onto the story for their own purposes. Today’s USA Today is still asking the question, was Trayvon a teen or a troublemaker? Why do we keep falling for these agendas injected by activists?

Secondly, we need to stop thinking that solutions journalism is a descent into rancorous partisanship. At least two things are happening when people pick brands. Sure, people are looking for confirmation of their beliefs. But they’re also excited about taking action. Journalism does this sometimes. When the New York Times reports on Hurricane Sandy, they include things that people can do to help. Where else can we take this model to find ways to mobilise, advocate, and put solutions on the table.

Ultimately, we need to help a next generation, which may not be convinced that social change happens the way we grew up thinking it happens. We need to help them figure out how to do civics in this new space. And I hope you’ll work with us on this.

Q&A:

If the system’s broken, and with Citizens United, corporations own the process, what can we do to fix it? And organizations like MoveOn and Sum of Us are rallying citizens to act as consumers to organize against companies that are still responsive to this pressure?

Ethan: I believe the levers are stuck in place, but not necessarily that we need to go around Congress. Take regulations of corporations. The government has said nope, not going to regulate there. Then you go to the next theory of change, and approach Wal-Mart directly. And organizations like MoveOn are definitely moving into this space, with buycotts and boycotts and the like. But if we’re going to teach people civics now, we have to teach all of the toolkits: how to influence the political process, how to harness attention when you can’t, and how to affect culture or take direct action. A lot of the new interest and new talent happens further down the chain from political legislative change.

Q: If you report, and encourage people to take action after publishing it, aren’t you biased?
Ethan: I don’t buy unbiased. It can be an aspiration to grow towards, but I think when we sit down to watch the news, we’ve already shown our hand in terms of prioritizing which stories are important. That choice, to put Trayvon on the front page today instead of Mali, is bias. I certainly agree that we don’t start with the most divisive, rancorous issues and only talk about one solution, but there is a disconnect between talking about problems and letting people know that there are solutions. I understand this is a controversial thing to say, but I think we need to put that provocation out there if we want readers to be active citizens.

Q: There’s uneven access to media, and people with money, power, and influence.
Ethan: The same analytical rigor a journalists puts into writing a story and framing a problem could be applied to identifying and vetting potential solutions.

Christopher Stone, Open Society Foundation: Are you worried that it’s a very atomized vision of civic engagement that you’re proposing? So many of the examples you like are very Americanized individualistic, and not helping people find the power of the organized collective?
Ethan: We’re seeing a lot more new work around an individual rallying people behind solutions than we are creative work bringing groups and civil society together. Projects like Iceland writing internet constitutions are easy to posit, and hard to carry out. The dream of putting everything on a wiki has proven to be a poor theory of change. I’d like to help organizations and coalitions of organizations work together to manipulate all five levers, not just the traditional lever of legislative political change that’s usually pursued by social change movements.

Q: How does this affect people taking local action?
Ethan: There’s enormously exciting stuff going around on the DIY front, and the person who’s probably most knowledgeable on that front is Christina Xu of the Awesome Foundation. They don’t just make philanthropy more participatory, but also build up an entire network of people working to help build and scale very creative local models. Can a coffeeshop sell special privileges to finance its next patio?

Written by @mstem & @natematias with help from our peers. See also Ethan Zuckerman’s take on the event.

It’s Election Eve here at the MIT Media Lab, and we have a well-stocked panel of political observers (“The Harvard Law Faculty Lounge is a very lonely place tonight,” says Aaron). The MIT Center for Civic Media and Department of Urban Planning are hosting a conversation with Steven Johnson, author of “Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked World.” Moderated by Aaron Naparstek, visiting scholar at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, the conversation also features Harvard Law School’s Yochai Benkler, Susan Crawford and Lawrence Lessig, who spoke at the Media Lab earlier this year. Most of them have books for sale.

The theme of the night is moving beyond the left-right divide in US politics. We begin with Steven Johnson, who, in addition to publishing several books, is involved with Outside.in, a hyperlocal startup recently acquired by AOL. His most recent work features a series of stories with a shared set of values and even political world views. In his book Emergence, Johnson wove together ants, neuroscience, cities, and software to illustrate systems that thrive without traditional hierarchical control structures. Towards the end, he cited the anti-WTO protest movements of the late 1990’s, but it was not an inherently political book. At least, until Johnson found some guy blogging about the political implications of the book. That guy was current Media Lab Director Joi Ito.

Over the decade that followed, Johnson found more and more people inspired and animated by the spirit that built the Internet. The tools and strategies that helped build Wikipedia and open source communities were being reapplied outside the technical arena.

We’ve agreed as a society that there are a few basic coherent ways to organize human beings. We rely on the market and the state, despite individual variations across these institutions. These twin poles set up our basic framework for society. Inspired by Benkler’s thinking on peer production, Johnson argues that there’s an additional structure to society, the peer network, that does not borrow from the state or the market.

Peer networks involve a decentralized, free exchange of ideas, usually with a diverse range of perspectives inside the network. The idea is that “the Internet is the role model.” In the past, the ideas behind peer networks could have been derided as communal hippie utopian dreams. But the Internet has served as a powerful example that this method of organizing people can actually be much more effective than traditional approaches. Johnson mentions examples from Kickstarter, which expects to raise more money this year than the National Endowment for the Arts.

In the local civic space, SeeClickFix and Neighborland allow citizens to not just surface problems, but also suggest solutions. Citizens organized against New York City officials’ abuse of parking privileges by crowdsourcing photos of their transgressions, resulting in new policies.

Municipal 311 systems offer a compelling window into communities. Citizens can call in for information about recycling, to complain about noise, and other daily needs, in over 180 languages. Over 100 million calls later, New York’s 311 system tied high-end hotel chains in customer service surveys. A key feature, Johnson says, is that the service is two-way. The city repurposes citizens’ calls as data to create a dashboard, deputizing every individual as a sensor in their network.

The Maple Syrup Incident in New York triggered fears of biochemical attacks. Residents called 311 to complain that “It smells like breakfast in Chelsea.” For years, no one could figure out the source of the smell. But when city officials compared 311 calls and prevailing wind conditions, they were able to pinpoint the source: a flavor plant in New Jersey. It turns out they could have also asked Jay Leno.

The 311 system was not built to identify maple syrup mysteries, but it is a flexible network structure that allows us to adjust to new conditions. The system is distributed, decentralized, and diverse, unlike top-down governance. And it doesn’t rely on clear economic incentives as the market might predict.

How do we describe this emerging class of projects and actors? “Peer progressives” is a term Johnson has coined to describe them. They believe in progress, and use new tools and strategies to achieve it. As a descriptor, ‘Peer’ works on the civic level (“a jury of our peers”) as well as the technical level (peer-to-peer networks).

A peer network is not halfway between the market and the state; it is its own entity. We rely on peer networks more than ever, and there’s something oddly optimistic about recognizing their presence in our lives.

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Yochai Benkler says that we’re in a new era which is in search of a new idea of organisation. We’ve already tried rationalization, where we seek to improve society through rational organization. We started with the state, and moved on to the self-interested rational individual acting based on market incentives. Benkler argues that the height of the market-based incentive is not Reagan and Thatcher, but actually Clinton and Blair’s acceptance of the argument. By 2008, Benkler says, we’ve recognized that relying on the market to solve everything is a mistake. By this point, we have the lived experience of networked individuals working together in collaborations to create things from the very structure of the Internet to the things we rely on in our daily lives. And this discipline is couched not in the language of utopian communes, but cutting edge technology and emerging research fields.

Benkler cautions that those of us who have already “bought in” need to ask ourselves something. We might think that Kickstarter giving away more than the National Endowment for the Arts is great, but then you see how much Kiva is giving. Grameen Bank is massive, and it just does work primarily in Bangaladesh and then you look at Hurricane Sandy and ask what’s happening. We are not measuring many things in the social realm and many forms of volunteerism may go unnoticed. But Occupy Sandy is real work that’s happening, and Ushahidi mapping is really happening. How do we compare the relative proportion of that work between that and what FEMA is doing, or what the insurance market is doing?

If we’re going to understand this next stage of our political life, we need to figure out how these new structures are going to interact with the government. 311 is a great example of that cooperation, because it opens the state up. But in some cases projects like recovery.gov push back on the state. It’s important to find ways to plug these new structures into older ones.

Politics is more open to these new structures because they fundamentally rely on information, Benkler says. Basic questions of how we structure education, disaster management, and other state roles will require a lot of work as we attempt to build a social alternative to the market-based solutions we relied on just 12 years ago.

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Susan Crawford notes that often visionaries describe things that happen in the past. And here we are describing what mainstream progressivism was at the turn of the century. She turns to a personal story about her grandfather in New Jersey, who felt negative towards unions for standing in the way of development.

Mainstream progressivism has recognized the importance of the role of the state plus technology. We can work together to solve some problems, but not all problems. The key thing according to Crawford is that we don’t abandon government agencies but use technology to improve them. The kickstarter example is showing a way of improving the NEA, not demonstrating that the NEA is When it comes to wire and dirt, and the ability to control a connection to the house or raise prices, that power hasn’t gone We don’t abandon the NEA because Kickstarter has inspired a new way; we make them better.

Monopolies still exist on the market side, even if the internet allows each of us to publish our own blog. The wires we transmit information over might be owned by one large company. Crawford argues that we cannot simply accept our current party structure, or our current market-state arrangement. We should take Johnson’s book as inspiration to mobilize.

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Lawrence Lessig admits that he’s often the pessimist in the room, but found hope in Johnson’s book because it offers clear challenges to work on? In a few decades, we might sit on the same stage and celebrate that this happened, but right now, relative to the political landscape we have today, it’s hard to imagine how we’ll change the system.

The SOPA PIPA debate was a powerful example of peer organizing. A lobby that was one of the most powerful in Washington saw its agenda defeated. A bipartisan movement that had been knit together for a year exploded onto the scene and stopped it. The victory led to some observers’ belief that we’d finally built the one button we need to press to fix things in Washington.

We are fighting forces that are command forces, that have deep pockets. These forces flourish by getting people to hate the other side. And they’re very effective in achieving their objectives pushing this dynamic.

What is the inspiration to overcome these forces in a “peer progressive” model? It’s not clear to Lessig that the incentive exists to mobilize a peer to peer network counterforce. He was dispirited when

Lessig describes one of his e-books that outlines the emergence of read-write culture that returns us to a culture that existed prior to the 20th century. This is what we are seeing in the context of politics too. But this will not be a simple button push to get there. Lessig doesn’t want to be too pessimistic but still does not see a way forward to counter the forces of money, lobbies, and hate.

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Johnson has been trying to look at failure points for the existing systems (market & state). He is concerned about the capacity for the bottom-up systems for long-term goals like urban planning. Can peer to peer networks plan for 5-, 10-, 100-year plans? He has not seen examples of this. Perhaps central planning is still the answer in these cases.

Benkler responds that it depends on how close you want planning and authority to reside. If we rely on decentralized thinking for long-term planning — the problem is bridging between planning and action. Now we are in the battle of connecting these two things. Planning is already being done in a decentralized way by universities, people in think tanks, and so on.

Lessig pushes back on Benkler, but says we’ve totally failed to deliver on those plans on the issue of climate change, for example. There has been no mention of this issue whatsoever in the current election.

Crawford argues that the enormous civic energy that has been generated to assist government has failed to actually change peoples’ lives, because it is not adequately connected to the levers of power. The connection between the civic app hackers and the technophobe elected officials and policymakers is weak. She’s concerned that there will be a bust in the energy going into improving governance when it fails to have the desired impact.

Lessig points to the wave of appointees and staff who came to DC with the Obama administration in 2009, only to see their hopes smashed upon the shores of bureaucracy.

Benkler says that what they are disagreeing about is the politics question, not whether planning is already being done in a peer-to-peer decentralized way. The question in his mind about SOPA-PIPA is whether it’s an outlier, because it was mainly organized by a generation who grew up on the Internet with ideals of free culture. He thinks it is too soon to tell. It’s unclear how to repeat that experience with a different issue. Benkler mentions the Trayvon Martin controversy mapping from the Center for Civic Media and how they found a different set of stories emerging from that case.

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Johnson points out that “the button” of networked activism is often a manifestation of opposition rather than a positive, generative initiative. That’s why he focused on Kickstarter in the book — it’s about actually getting stuff done. We need to find positive initiatives like participatory budgeting that we can build around peer networks. Perhaps if people see that participatory local government works, they might become more excited about peer organising online.

Crawford raises the bar: Could we build the Hoover Dam? Stephen thinks that big industrial things are hard to do. But the decision to build those things could be made.

Naparstek asks, “Is the peer network fundamentally good? Is there a peer conservativism?” Lessig responds that he thinks the Tea Party was a peer network. Although he doesn’t like what they did, they did describe themselves as an open source movement: tea party patriots who organised themselves with technology and thought of themselves as a bottom-up movement. That’s why he thinks so much is at stake.

That’s a good peer network, Benkler says. It’s an example of a group of people who feels their views weren’t taken into account by government and try to bring those views into a major political party. Bad networks are oligarchical networks of stifling power, or mobs.

Johnson says that the main difference in the “new” peer to peer networks is that they are “diverse” in a way that goes beyond the multiculturalism from the 80’s. He claims that diverse groups can make better decisions that non-diverse groups, in the long run.

Our media is becoming more fragmented, so we see more instances of crazy people with soapboxes who didn’t have them before. But most of us agree that diversifying the ability to publish and be heard is a net gain for society. It’s not a far stretch from the experiment of democracy, where crazy people were given the vote, but the net effect was a crowd intelligence.

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Amy Robinson, who works for Sebastian Seung’s crowdsource science program (we wrote about it here), asks how we can share innovations that individuals develop to participate in a particular crowd. People in TED and TEDx are doing much more than just organizing events, but it’s hard for them to share what they learn from that experience.

Johnson responds that when these networks work and encourage participation – how can we learn from those successes? In the case of Wikipedia, it is extraordinary that so many people are willing to contribute even though there is no reputation system or way of getting “credit” for your contribution. One powerful thing is the way that Wikipedia uses stubs – which say “there isn’t an entry here for this but there should be”. This creates a signaling mechanism in the network. Some people might be good at pointing out the problem and others at fixing it.

Lessig mentions the example of TEDx. The way the communities form to listen to these events is powerful and interesting. The brand let go in order to enable this. There’s a local TEDxBeaconSt who’s interested in figuring this out and brings people together to do this. Will the bottom-up innovation continue to be endorsed by the top-down?

Benkler thinks there’s an exploding field in cooperative human systems. For example, here in the Media Lab many of us are studying behaviour on Wikipedia or Scratch, and other cooperative platforms. He asserts that we’re at the beginning of a social science revolution in understanding how peer cooperation works.

Johnson claims that the Internet is a force for good because it enables creativity and experimentation. He alludes to Cognitive Surplus, this playground where we can let a thousand flowers bloom. The net’s experimental quality is one of its greatest affordances.

Occupy Sandy is working with Recovers.org and 350.org, but the pages aren’t well interlinked. And what about the economics?

Crawford states that although she loves technology, one of the greatest problems in America right now is inequality. She worries that we are speaking mostly to ourselves. What is happening right now in the Far Rockaways? How can we bring everyone to the conversation?

Benkler acknowledges that there are several volunteer donation sites and a quick read of these materials is hard. This is the class of problems where we’ve had the opposition between government response versus state/local control or versus giving it away to the market to handle. There are boundaries to how far you can scale a mutualist system before it encounters tension with the state. Johnson notes that he thought about including a section about anarchism but ultimately decided against it.

Johnson notes that the tech sector in the US is unrivaledly awesome and everyone agrees with that. Why? Those structures were organized in a peer-to-peer way. They had wealth-sharing structures and thus were more egalitarian. They ended up distributing the wealth they created more equally than their predecessors. This became a positive feedback loop. There is a strong economic incentive for companies to organize in a peer-to-peer way.

Chris Peterson: We’ve used the word “peer” a lot today. We’ve celebrated how “peers” can provide useful, decentralized, distributed feedback to the government, questioned whether “peers” will be necessarily progressive or possibly conservative and how to manage or appreciate those dynamics, and so forth.

It occurs to me that, as Stephen himself said, that we thought we resolved these questions 200 years ago with democratic theory. In fact, with all of the issues we’ve talked about today, it seems like we could simply substitute “democratic” in for “peer” and they would have been substantively the same. Had the Founders been writing today, they might have debated whether ordinary people could solve Climate Change through democracy as well.

So why are we drawing this distinction between “peer networks” and “democracy”? Aren’t they the same mechanisms under different names? And if they are, could it be because while we love the idea and ideals of democracy, we’ve lost faith in the institutions democracy has actually produced, and so we are casting about for another, different word to describe the same fundamental dynamics, a word or a frame not yet sullied by the inconveniences of lived experience?

Stephen responds that democracy has more or less become synonymous with representative democracy. And that’s not how Linux is made. Wikipedia isn’t a bunch of people elected to be elite encyclopedists. Lessig thinks that democracy is too tightly associated with professionals. One of the hardest things in front of us is the need to revise amateur politics: people who are involved because they have a love for service and being citizens. The distinction between professionals and amateurs has blown up in many other areas. We often are more excited about amateur cultural producers online than professional cultural producers. Might the same thing happen to politics? The term “peer” expresses that enthusiasm in ways that the term democracy can no longer express.

Benkler points out that there’s a problem with our use of the term of democratization. The state requires a certain amount of power, and democracy is a way of directing that state. Peer production focuses on the capacity to act together in the world independent of the state.

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Naparstek asks the speakers to sum up the conversation with new ideas for the future of peer progressivism.

Lessig argues for publicly funded campaigns. We’ve concentrated the funding of elections into the tiniest fraction of the 1%, just as in the 19th century we concentrated voting privileges into the tiniest fraction of the 1%. We need to democratize the funding of elections the way we democratized voting itself.

Johnson argues that the solution isn’t to ask the state to fund all campaigns, but to diversify the funding pool with private and state support. “That’s the kind of thing we should build buttons for.”

Crawford says that she doesn’t see the state or the market going away. What we might be better off working on is how individuals can feel a greater sense of agency and autonomy within these systems.

Liveblog of the first Media Lab Conversations event of the semester, with help from Nathan Matias and Molly Sauter. You can view tweets from this event here.

“We’re a nonprofit, and we’re moving into the media business.”

Carroll Bogert (@carrollbogert) is the Deputy Executive Director for External Relations at Human Rights Watch. She also spent more than a decade as a reporter, bureau chief and editor of international news at Newsweek. Since 1978, Human Rights Watch (HRW) is one of the leading human rights organizations.

There are two threads of international advocacy. You have researchers in the field, traveling and gathering information much like a journalist, pen and notepad in hand. And then there are the people who meet at tables in suits. HRW’s work stretches all the way from the personal testimonies collected in villages to strategic meetings at the upper echelons of international institutions.

How big is Human Rights Watch? Their annual budget is $64 million, none of it from governments. They have 358 staff spread across 48 locations worlwdide

To illustrate research, she shows us a photo of a Human Rights Watch researcher interviewing people who are experiencing the Naxalite conflict. To illustrate advocacy, she shows a meeting between HRW and the Mexican president Calderón about people who have been affected by the drug war in Mexico.

How can research be applied to create social change? Carroll boils the process down to three steps:

• Investigate (gathering)
• Expose (communicate)
• Making Change based on facts

Their researchers arrive in places like Sierra Leone and conduct research, gather interviews, and fact-check to determine whether or not an event like a massacre has taken place. The facts they uncover are heavy, and can have impact in the world if they are then reported and communicated more broadly.

Specific facts and information can be used tactically, at the right place and right time, to create change. Carroll tells us a story from her journalism days. In a room with the leader of a country that had violently repressed protests, the conversation with journalists was going nowhere. Then, someone from HRW stood up and offered a pointed question based on well-documented research. The leader squirmed, the reporters focused, and the dialogue was shifted.

Information and communications is central to the methodology of HRW’s work. Other NGOs come to media as an afterthought, when it comes time to fundraise. HRW takes pride in sharing some DNA with journalists as fellow information-providers. The group is happy to adopt the newswire style to help their reporting blend into the broader media environment. They structure their press releases like news pieces, complete with ledes and compelling quotes, and have seen steadily rising media mentions as a result.

The web has made their work more visual and opened new audiences to human rights content. But at the same time, it’s blown a hole in the budgets of traditional news organizations and hampered their ability to conduct international news-gathering.

HRW has used photos from photographers like Brent Stirton, Tim Hetherington, Marcus Bleasdale, and Platon. Carroll attributes the involvement of such talented photographers’ to the basic human need to share the awful things you’ve seen with others. Photographers want to be involved in the solution to the atrocities they’ve witnessed.

• Platon’s Pictures from the Revolution
• Brent Stirton’s work on Papua New Guinea Gold and Kenya Justice
• Marcus Bleasdale’s Peabody Award winning video Dear Obama: A Message from Victims of the LRA
• remembering Tim Hetherington

The organization now produces multimedia releases, with edited and disaggregated formats of video available. News editors can grab finished, produced pieces, or take and use raw footage for their own pieces. We watch a BBC story that makes use of HRW-provided video as well as a live interview with a HRW correspondent.

Other news organizations have lifted their video without attribution. This doesn’t bother Carroll in her role as an HRW employee who wants to disseminate the videos far and wide. But it raises questions for journalism, she says, when news organizations gather footage from third parties without identifying their sources.

The group has released a report on torture taking place in Syria. It includes extensive maps, gps coordinates, witness statements, and photographs.
Again, a press release of an embeddable interactive map of toture centers in Syria provides a hook for news organizations to further amplify the report’s findings.

Carroll has drawn on her experience as Russian editor for Newsweek to work to spread the Syria report in that country’s media. Russia provides a complicated media environment for HRW’s work. The country has free newspapers, but there are also clear pressures from the government.

Carroll considers HRW an original news producer in today’s complicated media environment. Google News now treats the organization as a news provider like any other, and they’ve won two Peabody Awards for their work.

Distribution remains a major challenge. They still reach the largest audience if the mainstream media picks up a story. Mainstream media coverage also reinforces social media discussion.

HRW.org reaches 600,000 unique visitors a month, and they maintain a YouTube Channel and Arabic, French, Japanese, Spanish, and German Twitter accounts. They have a lot of Facebook fans, but aren’t sure yet what this means.

What is the right balance between the short form content that the Internet requires and the long form content that HRW is known for, which gives them their credibility? They don’t want to follow the mainstream media into a “hail of Twitter bursts.” They want to be a bulwark against culture. They want to do heavily-researched, time-invested work that others aren’t doing.

HRW is accustomed to producing around 100 reports a year. That’s now falling as they diversify the formats that they’re producing. What’s the right number? They also want an audience, but their purpose is not to inform the public: they’re not targeting a mainstream audience. At the end of the day, they want their information to change the minds of people whose choices make a difference. That’s why they try to occupy the information sources that people in power pay attention to. This “acupunctural advocacy” is different from having the widest possible audience.

Given their limited resources (and a digital team of 3), what is the right strategy for engagement? Should they focus on supplying the mainstream media with content, or should they reach out directly to new audiences online?

Questions
Ethan begins the conversational portion of the talk by contrasting HRW’s targeted audience strategy (targeting decision-makers) with KONY 2012’s pursuit of huge numbers of easily-influenced teenagers. Advocacy organizations are working very, very hard to get attention and sway the minds of policymakers, and there is some diversity in how careful these groups are with the facts. Who wins between HRW’s dense reports and Kony 2012’s slick documentaries? (See Ethan’s post on Kony2012 and his followup post. Listen to Michael Poffenberger of TheResolve.org talk about the Kony2012 campaign at the MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference earlier this year).

Carroll says that HRW is certainly aware of the KONY effect, and have produced their own video postcards, using video to allow victims in the Congo to appeal directly to US President Obama for military intervention. The group doesn’t know if it affected any policy, but do know the video was watched by people in the White House. Kony 2012, likewise, has generated millions of views and set records, but it’s not clear if it has changed US policy.

Ethan hones in on the tension between the production of compelling video and staying true to the facts. He mentions a recent rap video by FARC which claims that they’re undefeated and keen for peace. How does HRW navigate this landscape? And doesn’t it get complicated when countless other organizations are producing videos to gain a finite amount of attention?

Carroll responds that because HRW’s strategy is to influence decision-makers, they would never make a video as sensationalist as KONY2012. They rely on the media as intermediaries between themselves and the public, and focus on reaching reporters with verified content. The organization is quoted in the New York Times on a near-daily basis.

Ethan mentions his last interaction with Human Rights Watch, over the mismatch between HRW’s research cycle and the speed of bloggers over the story of an Israeli attack on Lebanese Red Cross ambulances. Misinformation moves quickly online, and groups like HRW do the long, difficult research work. Carroll quotes a HRW researcher who summarized this balance to her: “Carroll, it’s your job to make my work shorter, punchier, and faster, and it’s my job to resist you.”

There are atrocities happening around the world, Ethan says, but we’re more likely to pay attention to some than others. How does HRW think about agenda-setting and balance their spotlight across all of the global crises?

Carroll admits that there are more human rights abuses than they have time to cover. They use four criteria to determine their agenda:

1. How serious is the abuse, how badly are people being hurt?
2. Does HRW have the resources and staff and knowledge to address the situation?
3. Do they have the right partners on the ground who will stay on the issue and run with the report?
4. Is the time right? Is there something in the zeitgeist that suggests HRW’s involvement could make a difference?

HRW is OK covering subjects that most people aren’t going to read. They want their work to be covered, but refuse to determine their agenda based on perceptions of what will interest a wide audience. Their researchers need to be ready to pounce at the split second the global media is suddenly focused on their specific area of expertise.

Audience Q&A
Alex wonders how the group’s reporting of the Nigerian story (A Heavy Price: Lead Poisoning and Gold Mining in Nigeria’s Zamfara State) was designed to effect change.
HRW’s Health and Human Rights division produced the video and showed it at a conference of health professionals, where it resonated deeply. Attendees were thankful that the video was able to transport these peoples’ voices from their homes to the conference.

George wonders about the different forms of influence that HRW aims to achieve, and how they go about it.

When Carroll thinks about expanding the audience of HRW, she is thinking about expanding the people in power who pay attention to them.

She tells us a story from Samantha Power’s book A Problem from Hell: the Human Rights Watch researcher in Rwanda is put off by the “politician’s dodge: my phone isn’t ringing about it.” Carroll doesn’t think it’s possible to make that phone ring.

The group conducted a survey at the State Department and on Capitol Hill to find out what these policymakers read (report PDF). The New York Times’ international reporting remains hugely influential, but there has also been a dramatic shift to mobile. If The West Wing were shot today, the walk & talk scenes would see the characters staring at their iPhones. If you can’t communicate your message to that attention span, you’ll fail to communicate.

Ethan responds: isn’t this the case for the limits of Human Rights Watch? Aren’t there times where there needs to be a major policy shift quickly? If you have a major shift in public will, do you think you might have a different outcome? What if we got people on social media talking about it, might that start to matter alongside the New York Times?

Carroll doesn’t think so. Public pressure on complex situations, by the public, is not something she thinks she’ll see in her timeline. She asks us: why, as an act of foreign policy, did Clinton go to war in Yugoslavia? He didn’t do it because it was popular in the United States. He did it because of a steady drumbeat in the New York Times and Washington Post that made him feel like that was the best thing to do. Carroll points out that there are a lot of problems with so called humanitarian military intervention. But she does think that articles in the mainstream media are of primary importance in influencing power.

Charlie De Tar says there’s a dichotomy between gathering facts and actual research. If the organization knew which of the two was more effective, would they drop one or the other, and what would those metrics look like?

Carroll’s focused the definition of impact. They consider impact to mean a long-term change in law or policy or international treaty or enforcement. Freeing an individual person from jail is less interesting to them than changing a long-term policy that will affect many.

Carroll notes that our children can have a powerful influence on our behavior as powerful adults. Teenage sons and daughters judge our actions, and Carroll hasn’t ruled out giving a talk at certain schools in Washington, DC, where certain policymakers’ children are students.

Nick Patterson of the Broad Institute points out that human rights violations are sometimes justifications for going to war. He wonders if they noticed that policymakers are also using them.

Carroll says that they have in fact noticed this and that they sometimes call for investigations of US policymakers for acts of torture and other ill-treatment of detainees. They don’t have any way to protect themselves of being used, but they are in fact able to

Sasha Costanza Chock: The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, higher than Rwanda and Russia. Human rights abuses are rampant inside this system.

Research has a key role to play in challenging the ballooning for profit prisons. For example, today the National Justice for Families Coalition and datacenter.org released this report about youth incarceration. Does HRW face special difficulties getting attention in the US press for human rights abuses here in the US?

Carroll responds: No. It’s always hard to get media attention, but it’s easier to get attention if their stories are in the United States. They actually release more reports about the United States than any part of the world (not because the US is the worst violator of human rights). All the same, it’s hard to get policy impact, particularly for their work on immigration. In general, the media everywhere are more interested in their own countries.

Marco asks if the group’s focus is too broad, or if they would do better to foster community with a more narrow focus. Carroll remains skeptical of working to accrue large numbers of followers on online platforms like Twitter when compared to reaching the few people who will truly change policy.

Ethan wonders if the common man and woman reading the New York Times are just collateral damage on the path to reaching policymakers. Is it a missed opportunity to reach and educate them, but leave it at that?

Carroll asks us to contribute our time and knowledge and energy to take the information Human Rights Watch has made available and make it travel. If you have the online skills or an audience, you would do HRW a favor to help disseminate their research. HRW is not a membership organization; they are a highly professionalized NGO with a very small staff doing very specific things. But outsiders can help, and making HRW’s information move is one clear way to do so.

An audience member asks about the Russian media: how does Human Rights Watch overcome the standard narratives that dominate media coverage?

Carroll responds that Russian media are often very surprised to hear from Human Rights Watch. They have been more successful than they expected. More generally, individual journalists have their own tendencies and ways of seeing the world. Human Rights Watch tries to reach individual journalists with stories that are packaged in a way that appeals to them.

Larry, a former AP reporter, mentions how many nonprofits and universities are now funding journalism. He thinks that there’s a lot of distortion in that process; those funders are able to shape what gets covered. Has Human Rights Watch considered directly funding papers; is it financially tenable?

Carroll thinks it’s important to distinguish between journalists funded by Foundations and nonprofits like Human Rights Watch that are moving into the media business. She doesn’t think Human Rights Watch would want to fund outside journalists to do their work. They use journalistic talent to produce good pieces of journalism (though she wonders if you can call it journalism if comes from Human Rights Watch). Susan Meiselas has expressed that she wants HRW to support the profession of photojournalism. Carroll says that beyond hiring photojournalists, there’s not much they can do.

An audience member asks: Why have a research-led projects when you could collect just what your targeted powerful people need to create change? Carroll says that Human Rights Watch is moving increasingly in that direction. In addition to researchers, HRW now has a growing number of advocacy staff who work with governments and other powerful actors in national capitols. The needs of those advocates is increasingly shaping the research agenda.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.