From my blog on Corante:

Anti-war e-activists have embraced one of the old standbys of pre-digital politics: snail mail. Bring Them Home Now is selling postage stamps with the “bring them home” symbol: a yellow ribbon super-imposed on a peace sign. BTHN is encouraging people to buy the stamps and use them to mail in their tax returns on April 15th.

Read the whole story on Civic Minded, Corante’s new e-democracy blog.

Flying Meat is the software company behind VooDooPad, my latest favorite application ever. VooDooPad is one of those transformational technologies that do one small but crucial thing so incredibly way that they change the whole way you work.

In this case, what VooDooPad does is to give you one place to put all your notes — all those random files that are currently scatterred across your computer as Word files, stickies, Outlook/Entourage notes, text files, draft emails, draft blog posts, etc. That’s if you’re like me — the old me, I mean, pre-VDP.

Now all my notes are in one place: a single VooDooPad document that lets me create a new page for every random thought, to-do list, set of questions, document in progress, telephone call, chunk of code I need to hold onto, idea for an article, etc etc. I have categories for all my projects so I can assign each page to the right category or categories, and find it again easily. Wiki-style hyperlinks mean my pages can link to related pages, and that I can find those related pages using the “backlinks” feature. Awesome search means anything that doesn’t jump out at me from backlinks or categories is still easy to find.

But as much as I love VooDooPad, I think I may love Flying Meat even more. As far as I can tell, Flying Meat consists of August “Gus” Mueller, a software developer who could teach public participation types a thing or two about community engagement. Here’s what I’ve learned from Gus:

Ask for input. VooDooPad has a “report a bug/feature request” option built into its help menu, and on its website. That means that whenever you think to look for more information, you’ll be prompted to give feedback at the same time.

Let the public set the agenda. VooDooPad’s bug reporting interface doesn’t force you into a box that corresponds to their work process instead of yours. It’s just a message box that lets you type in an email, and (optionally) note whether it’s a bug or suggestion.

Responsiveness encourages communication. When I filed my first feature request, I got an e-mail from Gus just a few hours later. That personal and informative response made me feel like my input was heard and valued, and has encouraged t has encouraged me to provide further input, and created what I hope is a virtuous circle (or from Gus’s perspective, spam.)

Information fuels commitment. When Gus responded to my e-mail, he didn’t just thank me for my ideas — he actually provided some more information about the software to help it work better for me. By providing me with some value (in the form of a use tip) in return for my input, Gus has motivated me to continue participating in his user community by providing further feedback.

Transparency counts. As incisive and useful as my input may be, Gus hasn’t just taken it all with a thank you and you’ll see it in the next upgrade. By sharing his reservations about some of my suggestions he’s increased his credibility, and my interest in further communication.

Names count. Would I have sent an e-mail to PersonalNoteWiki or McWiki or YourNotesInc? Who knows. But there’s something about a company called “Flying Meat” that screams open doors and open minds. And of course, flying meat.

Boyd Neil of Hill & Knowlton has written a very kind and thought-provoking post in response to the launch of Social Signal. Boyd’s observation is that corporate communicators have a lot to learn from social movements and community activists about how to use the Internet as a tool for bottom-up community engagement and marketing campaigns.

It’s an interesting twist because I’m used to coporate communications being held up as a model and example for nonprofit people — particularly online, since corporate web sites often seem to be a few steps ahead of their nonprofit counterparts (at least aesthetically). While I’ve grown increasingly convinced of the potential of decentralized online collaboration as an engine of social change, it hadn’t occurred to me that part of its impact lies in shifting the balance of power between the private and nonprofit worlds.

For all sorts of historical, cultural, and perhaps even structural reasons, civil society organizations may be just that much ahead of private (and I suspect also government) organizations in their ability to adopt, adapt and exploit participatory, collaborative models. If that’s the model that is most effective — and most available — in the era of online communications, then the shift towards online community may actually put community organizations in a newly powerful position.

Of course the other possible — and equally hopeful — scenario is that private sector organizations will learn to adopt and adapt participatory models for their own benefit. I say, bring it on! All my experience and observation of community collaboration suggests that the structures and processes of collaborative work and decision-making have a transformative impact on organizational culture and mission. Democratizing corporations — by giving employees, customers and the broader community a greater role and stake in their decisions — could have an even larger social impact than democratizing government and civil society groups.

And there are more opportunities than ever for corporations to immerse themselves in the experiences and innovations of web-savvy, collaboration-driven community organizations. Dare I suggest that participating in Net² could be a great place to start?

I’m delighted to announce the launch of Social Signal. Social Signal’s goal is to support online communities and distributed collaboration networks — networks of communities that share content and relationships by using the latest generation of web tools. This practice builds on my consulting, research and writing in the fields of online community, public participation, and social software, but extends its value and capacity with the strengths of a new partner: Rob Cottingham, a communications consultant with long experience in online advocacy and web development.

Appropriately enough, the Social Signal web site launched on the same day as our latest project, TechSoup’s Net². Net² is an online community and conference that will celebate the achievements of the nonprofit web, while asking the ever-fascinating “what’s next?”

What’s next is a crop of technologies that work the way healthy communities work: decentralized, bottom-up, and participatory. Tech memes like blogging, tagging and RSS — sometimes described as “Web 2.0″ technologies — allow individual non-profits, community organizations and campaigns to work together effectively, while still maintaining their individual identities. Each organization has its own web site and/or blog, but shares content with other like-minded organizations by using RSS to move news, stories and information from one site to the other; tagging provides a way of structuring this information into particular topics.

This kind of decentralized collaboration parallels the best practices that have emerged out of research and experience in the fields of social capital, public engagement, planning, public consultation, and public participation. For the past twenty or thirty years — and gaining ground dramatically in the past decade — public servants and community service organizations have been exploring ways of bringing the public into organizational decision-making. They’ve discovered that decisions that have been meaningfully shaped by public input not only enjoy broader public support, but are more effective and more sustainable. It turns out that the most successful public decision-making processes are — you guessed it! — decentralized, bottom-up, and participatory.

Social movements and community activists have found a similar path. You can’t get people to support a cause by offering a laundry list of ideological justifications. You get people to participate in a political movement by listening to them, letting them set the agenda, and providing ways for them to participate wherever, whenever and however it works for them. It turns out that the most successful social movements and political campaigns are decentralized, bottom-up, and participatory.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that the Web is finally offering tools that match the best practices in public decision-making and community organizing. The Internet grew from the same cultural wellspring that inspired many civic engagement practitioners and many social movement organizers. The 1960s counterculture has been cited as a parent of hacker culture, which gave birth to the open source movement. Open source software development takes a participatory approach to the creation of computer code, allowing many people to collaboratively contribute to one or more related programs. It turns out that the fastest and most secure way of writing code is decentralized, bottom-up, and participatory.

Software developers, public planners, collaboration consultants, community organizers — they’ve all ended up on the same page, working from something like the same play book. They all see the power and joy of a decentralized, bottom-up, participatory model of collaboration. And they’re all trying to build the structures — technological, organizational, and social — that will make this form of collaboration the new standard for how to do business, make policy, create art, or communicate.

What’s exciting about Web 2.0 — yes, we really need another name for it! — is that it offers the technological infrastructure for decentralized, bottom-up, participatory collaboration. Instead of creating another community group to compete for foundation funding, like-minded members of existing community organizations can use a wiki to develop a joint proposal. Instead of distributing government surveys, public servants can access spontaneous, focused feedback by aggregating blog-based policy discussions. Instead of focusing on fundraising in order to pay campaign staff, activist groups can create far-reaching information campaigns that are powered by their members’ RSS feeds.

We’re still in the early days of discovering how the collaborative toolkit of blogging, tagging and RSS — not to mention other tools that are just emerging — can transform our organizational, social and economic structures. Net² is part of this process of discovery. So are the other “Web 2.0″ projects I’m working on, like telecentre.org.

Community-based projects like these — projects that engage with the decentralized, bottom-up, and participatory potential of Web 2.0 tools — are crucial to unleashing the transformative power of the next-generation Internet. We hope Social Signal will help to enable that transformation.

Non-governmental organizations seeking to strengthen relationships with members. Governments trying to reach out to citizens. Businesses hoping to engage and win the loyalty of customers. These are the kinds of challenges that bring people to the field of online dialogue and community-building — and that should encourage them to adopt RSS.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, a format for storing online content so that people — or web sites — can subscribe to and receive content as it’s updated. (For a more detailed explanation see my RSS mini-site.) RSS lets individual users “subscribe” to online content (”RSS feeds”) by using newsreaders (”feed readers”) that round up all the news from different sites and put it in one place. But RSS can also serve as the circulatory system for online communities by making it easy for web sites to share content with one another.

Marnie Webb’s great post on the ten reasons that non-profits should use RSS is a great crash course in the value of RSS. But it’s become clear that RSS has particular value in creating online communities — and not just non-profit communities, but potentially for-profit communities, too. So with a big nod to Marnie, let me suggest….

10 ways RSS can help build online communities

1. Start in the middle. The biggest hurdle to creating an online community is the challenge of starting up a site without any content to draw people in. With RSS, you can create a site and immediately populate it with content that will interest the kind of people you’re hoping to engage.
2. Safety in (small) numbers. Small communities are easier to create and sustain — but small online communities can have a hard time generating enough content to sustain their members’ interest. RSS makes it easy and efficient for people to set up sustainable micro-communities by aggregating (subscribing to) content on a given set of topics, rather than creating it from scratch. Fo example, the left-handed trombone players of Wyoming can have a thriving online community populated by RSS feeds about left-handedness, trombones, and Wyoming. (Sign me up!)
3. Go to where the people are. Offline communities have long known that when you’re trying to recruit or build your community’s membership, you can’t wait for potential members to come to you; you have to go to them. RSS lets you apply that insight in the virtual world: instead of waiting for new community members to return to your site, your content can reach them — when and where it’s convenient for your readers.
4. Put your members to work for you. Communities thrive when members participate actively. If your site makes effective use of RSS, your members can contribute content by streaming comments directly from their blogs to your site.
5. Online community in 5 minutes a day. One obstacle to participating in online communities is the amount of time it can take to track a range of conversations across the many discussion boards and threads that can emerge within a single online community. RSS makes it easy to offer members a customizable dashboard where they see all the content and conversations that interest them as soon as they get to your site.
6. Safety and diversity. It’s easy for online communities to become “echo chambers” in which people hear only the views of people who think the same way they do — in fact, one valuable kind of online community is just a safe space where people can talk with others who share their core values. RSS lets homogenous communities bring in content from people who think differently, and then review and discuss it within their safe space.
7. Foster discussion, not chatter. For the same reason that online communities often become echo chambers, they can also become pretty lightweight. RSS feeds can inject substantive content into your community, encouraging your members to engage in meaningful dialogue instead of idle chit-chat.
8. Look around you. Your community isn’t just the people who have registered on your site — it’s the broader community of people whose interests intersect with the interests or values of your members. RSS makes it easy to exchange content (like blog posts) with these related sites, so that your members can find one another.
9. Plan for your demise. Many communities have a limited life span. Conference sites inspire great discussions that peter-out; contests or promotions produce a spike of interest that ultimately dissipates. By creating RSS-based relationships with other related sites, you hook your site into a larger community that can offer your members other possible homes if and when your site reaches the end of its useful life.
10. Plan for your rebirth. Those other sites I was talking about? They don’t have to belong to other organizations. RSS makes it so easy to move content across micro-sites, it’s suddenly efficient for you to run multiple online communities that target different groups, interests or efforts. By the time one community winds down you’ll have another site and community well underway.

One of my favourite organizations working on dialogue and deliberation challenges is the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD). They’ve done a great job of building community among people doing civic engagement, dialogue and deliberation work, and are the inspriation for the upcoming Canadian C2D2 conference.

Now NCDD is expanding its extensive web site and is looking for someone to do some PHP and MySQL Web development work. More details for you to peruse and forward to your favourite coders:

The specific project is called the “Learning Exchange.” This is essentially a redesign and expansion of a significant portion of the content available through our main website (www.thataway.org, see the resources section).

The specific goals of the project are:

1. To provide a vast amount of information in an organized manner
2. To make specific information easier for users to find, both through browsing and through basic searches
3. To add a sophisticated ”needs-based” searching interface
4. To create an administrative interface that enables quick and easy management of the site’s content

Please look over our RFP at http://www.thataway.org/misc/ncdd_rfp.pdf to learn more.

This fall I’m teaching two e-engagement programs through Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. One of the programs is a TeleForum (a series of conference calls) so it’s accessible to participants anywhere in the world.

Please let your colleagues and friends know about this chance to learn about online engagement and dialogue:

Do you need to build relationships with new stakeholder groups? Are you managing complex issues and relationships with limited resources? Is information management and information sharing crucial to your stakeholder engagement work?

Online tools can help you manage all of these stakeholder engagement challenges. Engagement leaders have recognized that tools like online discussions, resource libraries and surveys can increase the reach and effectiveness of almost any stakeholder engagement program.

Beginning in September 2005, the Collaborative Learning & Innovation program at Simon Fraser University is offering two opportunities to learn more about the values, tools and approaches that drive successful online stakeholder engagement.

The Online Stakeholder Engagement Teleforum (http://www.sfu.ca/cscd/cli/online_engagement_teleforum.htm) is a series of six monthly conference calls for engagement practitioners. These monthly discussions will focus on collaborative knowledge-building among participants in order to create a learning community that is useful to the work of its members. Participants will develop the field knowledge and analytic framework to assess e-engagement options and to plan for effective online engagement with key stakeholders. The first session will be held on September 14; calls will be held from 10 am – noon PST, and international participation is welcomed.

The Online Stakeholder Engagement Workshop (http://www.sfu.ca/cscd/cli/online_workshop.htm) will be held on October 17 in Vancouver, Canada. This one-day workshop will provide an intensive introduction to online engagement work, emphasizing online engagement as a catalyst for increasing the depth and value of public involvement work. Participants will get hands-on experience with a range of online engagement tools, and will develop their own perspective on the opportunities for online participation through discussion and group exercises.

Both the Teleforum and the in-person workshop will be co-taught be Alexandra Samuel and Ann Svendsen. For further information please visit the CLI web site at http://www.sfu.ca/cscd/cli/executive_programs.htm, or e-mail Alexandra (alex_at_alexandrasamuel_dot_com) or Ann (svendsen_at_sfu_dot_ca).

The UN is sponsoring the International Conference on Engaging Communities in Brisbane, Australia, from August 14-17. Speakers include Stephen Coleman and Robert Putnam.

On my way back from this weekend’s meeting of the Online Deliberative Democracy consortium I had a chance to enjoy the ever-increasing vigilance of US airport security. At the end of my last US visit I ended up at the airport with a colleague who relayed the observation that while the elaborate rituals of airport scanning — unpack your computer, take off your belt, empty the change from your pockets — do little to increase security, they do an excellent job of turning thoughtful citizens into obedient sheep.

Through the lens of this observation I found myself irritated with the screening process, whereas I’d previously accepted it on the grounds that a minor hassle is a small price to pay for any possible increase in security. I fell back on my favourite mechanism for coping with life’s minor (and major) irritations: mentally composing the blog post that tackles the politics of US airport security.

I had barely packed away my laptop on before I started second-guessing the wisdom of such a post. My dissertation research on hacktivism included an investigation of hacktivist protests (PDF) against Echelon, the early name for the rumored electronic surveillance of electronic communications. That has left me with a not-atypical case of progressive paranoia about who might be reading my blog posts, e-mail, or web site.

Then I second-guessed again: after all, in the two days I’d just spent with my fellow e-democrats, we’d done a lot of hand-wringing about the current disconnect between the blogosphere and the political sphere. For all the energy and hype around blogging as a form of personal publishing and political discourse, there’s little evidence that policy-makers keep an eye on the blogosphere as a source of grassroots citizen input. Sure, they may read a few blogs from the Technorati Top 100, but that’s more in the spirit of anticipating the next media crisis than as a way of hearing from the proverbial little guy.

While the participants in the ODDC meeting all acknowledged that bloggers are hardly a representative population, many were also (like me) very interested in the possibilities for capturing the energy and spontaneity of blog-based political discussion — and finding ways to make that discussion more constructive. One of the most exciting upshots of the conference is a plan to experiment with blog-based deliberation — something that could provide a model for policy-makers seeking to incorporate the spontaneous political utterances of bloggers into the structured processes of policy-making.

The juxtaposition of my mental blogging on airport security and our excited planning for blog-based deliberation led me to a couple of possible axioms:

1. I should be able to be as reasonably hopeful that the government is scanning my blog for political and policy inspiration as I am anxious that it’s taking my blog posts as security threats, OR
2. I should be able to be as reasonably hopeful that the government is not taking my blog as a security threat as I am skeptical that it is drawing policy or political inspiration from my blog posts.

At the moment, I confess that I’m confident in neither option. I do feel nervous about posting this — yeah, I’m paranoid, but I also have to cross the border a fair bit — and I would feel astonished to learn that US policy-makers were considering my blog posts the way they might consider an e-mail or letter I sent to a congressional representative. But I’m looking forward to further discussion (and action!) on how to make blogging a policy input, and I can’t imagine living as an American who was too scared to blog.

A lot of my recent reading and thinking has focused on how social software — community-building online tools like blogging, wikis and social networking — effect small-p political change by allowing groups to self-organize more easily and powerfully. Today, Wired has a story about how a wiki is being used to do big-P Politics:

A group of volunteers has begun using collaborative wiki software to expedite the process of perusing thousands of pages of complex documents related to detainees held by the U.S. government at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

The group, which has coalesced through the influential liberal blog, Daily Kos, has taken it upon itself to vet documents about Gitmo detainees the American Civil Liberties Union received as a result of a 2003 Freedom of Information Act request. The organization has been slow to review the documents itself due to a lack of manpower.

Given that the ACLU has recently hired Jed Miller — one of the pioneers of online civic engagement — as its Director of Internet Programs, it will be interesting to see whether the ACLU finds a way to harness this grassroots venture.

The European Social Capital, Quality of Life & Information Society Technologies project (SOCQUIT) is holding a 2-day conference in Paris (!) this September. The conference will reviw the results of SOQUIT’s research into the impact of IT on social capital, which focuses particularly on work and employment, aging population, local initiatives and migrants. For details see the conference web page.

The European Social Capital, Quality of Life & Information Society Technologies project (SOCQUIT) is holding a 2-day conference in Paris (!) this September. The conference will reviw the results of SOQUIT’s research into the impact of IT on social capital, which focuses particularly on work and employment, aging population, local initiatives and migrants. For details see the conference web page.