Alex 2.0: Now with extra civic-mindedness
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March 8th, 2006 by Alex
Yippee! Today Corante launched its new Civic Minded blog on Internet politics, e-democracy and online engagement. This is a little project I cooked up with co-conspirators Steve Clift, Marnie Webb and Stephen Coleman.
I’m thrilled to be working with such a great team, and really looking forward to what we cook up. Come on over and join the conversation!
10 ways to keep online dialogue on topic
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November 18th, 2005 by Alex
I’ve spent the past two days at a Ohio State for a conference on Building Democracy Through Online Citizen Deliberation, which has been a terrifically productive gathering. One session consisted of an interesting conversation about how to structure online deliberation in a way that promotes civil dialogue. We agreed that one key challenge was simply keeping online conversation on topic, and got most of the way towards a list of 10 ways to keep online dialogue on topic.
I thought others might find this list useful, so I’ve written it up and finished it off.
- Keep your goal visible. Write a clear statement of the goal of your discussion, and place it on your discussion board or chat window so that it will remain visible to all participants for the duration of your dialogue.
- Keep your rules visible. Write a succinct list of rules (”no flaming”, “maximum 2 mins per comment”, etc.) and keep them visible on your discussion board or chat window.
- Use moderation effectively — and sparingly. An effective moderator can help keep conversation on track by limiting off-topic conversation, but will be most effective if she is sparing in her interventions.
- Open a parking lot. Face-to-face facilitators sometimes create a “parking lot” — a space to write down comments or ideas that are off-topic, but still need to be acknowledged or documented. A virtual parking lot (perhaps a separate web page or discussion thread) can play an analogous role in housing comments that don’t quite fit the main disscussion.
- Create an alternative channel for free-form input. If your discussion is the only opportunity for participants to have their say, they will be highly motivated to bring a wide range of ideas, interests and views to the table — even if some of these comments are outside the scope of your discussion. By providing an alternative channel (like a suggestion box or feedback form) for input, you give participants a way of voicing comments that don’t fit into your dialogue process, and increase the odds that your discussion will stay on track.
- Offer outside spaces for outside discussion. Your participants are likely to want an opportunity to discuss the issues that they are dropping into your suggestion box or parking lot. Creating an “off topic” forum or e-mail list — a place to discuss all the odds and ends that don’t fit into your main discussion — can help keep your dialogue focussed.
- Try and try again. An iterative approach to dialogue — that is, multiple phases of conversation, each with a clear goal, start, and and end point — is more likely to maintain focus. Each phase of the dialogue can have its own distinct focus, and you can either narrow or broaden the scope of each phase in response to what you learned in the previous phase. So while the discussion will narrow or widen over time, each phase of the conversation will have clear goals and a clear and sustainable focus.
- Be a role model. If you’re moderating a discussion, you have to be more restrained about injecting off-topic comments or anecdotes than any of the other participants. That doesn’t mean suppressing your personality — the occasional joke can be a great ice-breaker — but pick your digressions wisely, and keep them short. The more focused you can be, the more focused your discussion will be.
- Reframe off-topic comments. Rather than pointing your finger and dismissing a comment as off-topic, try to reframe it so that it leads the group back into your main discussion. Even if you have to get creative: “Well it’s interesting you mention Madonna’s new single, because of course THE Madonna is a huge figure in the Catholic church, and the Catholic church has been a big influence on anti-poverty policy. Does anyone else have thoughts about how community groups can help address poverty?”
- Redefine “on topic”. The most innovative solutions to a policy problem or dialogue dilemma often fall outside the pre-defined alternatives on the table, or the pre-defined scope of the conversation itself. When keeping conversation “on topic” it’s helpful to take the broadest possible perspective on what your topic really is, so you don’t lose any of these “outside the box” gems. And don’t discount the value of the occasional joke or personal anecdote, either — by building social relationships and trust among participants, these off-topic conversations can make your on-topic conversation that much more effective.
Community goes corporate
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October 7th, 2005 by Alex
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?
Introducing Social Signal: collaboration for communities
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October 6th, 2005 by Alex
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.
National Conversation now online
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September 14th, 2005 by Alex
Politics Online has launched theNational Conversation project, which aims at engaging Americans in dialogue about major national issues (in the first instance, 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina). I like the effort to encourage multimedia contributions, and to allow people to simply “agree or disagree” with key statements. But this seems like a project that would be ripe for a distributed strategy — i.e. allowing people to contribute comments by blogging them and aggregating those blog posts in via tagging and RSS. Perhaps that’s how the “share” feature will work once it’s up and running? The site is still beta so I’ll be curious to see how its functionality evolves.
From AdvocacyDev
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July 13th, 2005 by Alex
Today is the last day of AdvocacyDev II, a gathering of people using technology to support nonprofit and social change work. As promised by Mark Surman, it’s been a truly mind-blowing experience.
A big part of what’s amazing is the event organizing and facilitation methodology used by Katrin and Gunner of Aspiration, who organized the conference. Their approach is to bring a whole bunch of interesting people together and let them drive and structure discussions. No talking head panels here: session topics have emerged out of the interests and needs of the people in the room, and each discussion has been a mix of brainstorming, case sharing, strategy sharing, putting questions out for feedback, and coming up with really concrete ideas for projects and next steps.
The wiki helps set things on fire becuase it creates a concrete collective output from each discussion. While a room full of geeks are particularly well-positioned to make good use of the wiki dimension (if only because everyone here has a laptop), the wiki is easy enough to use for non-geek events. And while the wiki is great and useful I don’t think it’s essential to the chemistry of the event (though I’d be curious to hear what Gunner and Katrin think).
Anyone who is involved in planning or organizing a conference or event would learn a lot from participating in an Aspiration event. And if you organize events for people in the tech or nonprofit worlds, it’s a must: make sure to put one of Aspiration’s upcoming events on your calendar.
e-Democracy skills training
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June 25th, 2005 by Alex
I was part of a break-out group discussion today on making online deliberation tools accessible. We discussed three facets of this challenge: tool design, user training, and motivating participation.
Our conversation began and ended with user training issues, becuase that’s what we came back to throughout our conversation. The question of motivating participation was simply too broad for our group to meaningfully address: ultimately it came down to the same kinds of motivational challenges that affect every form of on- and offline participation, not only in politics but in work, society and personal life. Tool design, on the other hand, seemed to be too specific a challenge for us to meaningfully address: ultimately the design and usability issues have to be addressed tool-by-tool, project-by-project, and developer-by-developer.
Training was the middle ground: an issue with broad applicability to many different kinds of online engagement projects, but an issue where we could perhaps take some concrete and constructive steps. The three possible ideas that emerged for ODDC work were:
- Training guidelines for e-democracy: Some sort of written guidelines that might guide training efforts by community networks and other social or nonprofit technology trainers, that would encourage a focus on tools and skills that increase capacity for online civic participation.
- Training initiative: Seek a grant or organization to fund a centralized effort at developing training and trainers who could foster online skills for increasing civic capacity.
- Grassroots training: Create some tools, like how-to guides or screencasts, to faciliate self-organization by volunteers with some technical skills (like bloggers) who might organize their own community tech training sessions if it was easy and obvious how to do it.
In our plenary discussion we heard that our ideas about training guidelines and materials have been partly fulfilled by the Bristol e-democracy project, which produced some e-democracy training materials.
In the plenary we also talked about what had been done in terms of usability analysis of e-democracy projects. One suggestion was to come up with usability “juries” to get input on usability of different e-democracy projects. Another was to see if we could get a usability lab or studen to do some evaluations. Todd Davies described a recent usability workshop for six teams of open source developers.
Online tools for ODDC: URLs
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June 25th, 2005 by Alex
I’m in Minneapolis for the Deepening Online Deliberation workshop hosted by the Online Deliberative Democracy Consortium.
We had a terrific conversation today about some of the tools available for online deliberation and for collaboration among deliberation researchers and practitioners. Some of the URLs mentioned include:
Conversate– a new tool for spontaneous conversation. I set up this link for us to try out Conversate as a space for ongoing ODDC conversation.
Jerry Michalski’s “boot camp for the new millenium”
Alex’s introduction to tagging and social bookmarking (Tagging 101)
You’re It — a blog about tagging (Tagging 201)
Alex’s 10 steps to RSS (RSS 101)
The Online Deliberation 2005 Conference blog
Gataga - a search engine for finding tagged content.
43 Things is a tool for creating lists of personal goals and networking with people who share goals.
del.icio.us is a social bookmarking system that lets people share web resources, for example on deliberation
For an interesting political application of wikis, see the dKospedia project to review files on Guantanamo Bay detainees. Volunteers are helping to review thousands of documents on the detainees, and are keeping notes on a wiki so that multiple readers can cross-check and edit each write-up, as seen here
Italy gets 57 new e-democracy projects
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April 4th, 2005 by Alex
Information Policy reports that the Italian government is boosting its support for e-democracy:
The government will contribute a total of EUR 9.5 million to selected e-democracy initiatives at regional and local levels.
E-democracy and egovernment tags - DoWire.Org
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March 29th, 2005 by Alex
Steve Clift has set up a wiki page for e-democracy and e-government tags, following up on my call for a common tag taxonomy.
If you work in the e-democracy or e-government field, please visit this page to add any tags or keywords that you use for tracking bookmarks or blog posts in this area.
Tagging e-democracy
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March 28th, 2005 by Alex
This week’s challenge: coming up with a common set of e-democracy tags for all of the e-democracy bloggers and bookmark collectors out there.
For those new to the tagging concept, here’s a brief intro: In the process of setting up Diablogue, I’ve been exploring the world of social bookmarking and tagging. Social bookmarking systems (like del.icio.us, furl, and my favourite, spurl) allow people to create online bookmark collections (or even complete web page archives) which they can share with other like-minded folks.
The key to sharing is the use of common “tags” — essentially keywords that indicate the subject of any given web page. The tagging concept has also moved into the blogging world, where Technorati (a fantastic tool for tracking what is going on in the “blogosphere”) uses tags to categorize different blog posts. Many blogging software systems (like WordPress and Movable Type) automatically tag blog posts by converting post categories to tags.
To see what tags can do for you, check out the Technorati page for the “e-democracy” tag which shows recent blog posts that have an e-democracy tag, as well as e-democracy bookmarks from del.icio.us and furl.
Tagging is a very powerful tool for collaboration, especially among groups of colleagues who share specific interests — like all of us e-democracy, dialogue, and Internet research types.
But because tagging is currently a “folksonomy” — a grassroots generated set of keywords — there is no consistency to how blog posts and bookmarks are tagged. That limits the possibilities for collaboration and knowledge-sharing. Want a sense of the problem? Check out the OTHER technorati edemocracy tag page.
Now back to our challenge…
It would seem that the time has come for us to pursue some sort of common tagging system.
John Gotze has made a great start at establishing a potential set of tags for e-democracy (and beyond). And Steve Clift has set up a set of keywords with links to shared bookmark collections (see also http://www.dowire.org/wiki/Shared_Bookmarks).
But even John and Steve aren’t in synch yet, and their keyword systems still leave lots of gaps to plug.
Any other tagging schemes or proposals out there? Any thoughts on how we can all get on the same page?
Pew Report on 2004 Campaign
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March 7th, 2005 by Alex
Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user Alexandra Samuel on 2005-03-08
- Pew Report on the Internet and Campaign 2004:
The Pew Internet & American Life project released its report on the 2004 election campaign this week. Michael Cornfield’s pithy summary reports helps explain how this year’s buzzwords — like blogging and meetup — became the hallmark innovations of the 2004 election cycle.