David Karpf [twitter], an assistant prof in comms at Rutgers U., is giving a Berkman Tuesday talk on “The MoveOn Effect: The Internet’s Impact on Political Activism.”

David begins by noting that in 1999 he was the exec dir of the student arm of the Sierra Club. He ran into a guy early on who was doing e-petitions, which seemed ludicrously doomed. The guy turned out to be one of the founders of MoveOn.org.

David points to the recent Malcolm Gladwell article as an example of the pushback against the idea that the Net can change politics. But, David says, we’re looking at the wrong thing. We’ve been looking at e-petitions and weak ties. As Gladwell says, change takes more than that. David points to other recent nay-sayers, who say that we new elites the same as the old elites. “Clicktivism” doesn’t really change anything, says Micah White. But we’ve been ignoring the substantial organizational change that’s been going on.

David points to a set of organizations, including Progressive Change Campaign Committee (found Aaron Swartz is in the room), 1 Sky, Act Blue, Fix Congress First, Organizing for America, Campaign for America’s Future. and Daily Kos. The big changes are coming at this organizational level.

MoveOn is his main example. Found in 1998, founded by the couple that created the flying toasters screensaver. They emerged in 2002-3 as a vocal force in the anti-Iraq-War movement. They have 5M members — a member is someone who receives their emails. “MoveOn has changed the meaning of membership.” They raised $90M in the 2008 election. 933,800 volunteers volunteered 20M hours in the ’08 elections. They have 200+ local councils, 32 staffpeople, and zero offices.

They are not just doing emails. They do offline events, including house parties to deliberate about what their national agenda should be. They sponsor get-out-the-vote calls.

He also points to PCCC. It was started in Jan 2009, so you can’t explain it as first mover advantage. 450K members. $1.3M raised in 2009. Fourteen staff. No office space.It was built initially around the Norm Coleman-Al Franken contest. Instead of setting up an e-petition (as the DSCC wanted), the PCCC set up a donation system that had people donating to the Democratic Party every day that Coleman didn’t concede the election that he had lost. Since they have continued to take bold progressive stances.

Theda Skocpol in her 2003 book Diminished Democracies said that we need to look at the displacement of cross-class membership federations by professionally-managed advocacy. We’ve moved from membership to management. That changes how we Americans participate. Bruce Bimber found that this was a technologically-mediate transition. Membership in the 60s and 70s moved from going to meetings to writing checks (“armchair activism”) because managing massive mailing lists became affordable by non-profits.

David identifies three ideal types of organization. 1. MoveOn is hub-and-spoke. A core staff sends out emails. 2. DFA (from the old Dean campaign) is neo-federated. A national org has affiliates. DailyKos is an online community of interest that also holds annual f2f meetings.

David sees three broad shifts over time. Up through the 1960s, we had cross-class membership federations. 1970-2000s we had single-issue professional advocacy orgs. Now we have Internet-mediated issue generalists. The most important change to explain this has been in funding, from membership dues, to patrons, to online + patrons. A group like MoveOn is sustainable because it has (1) zero-cost scaling (costs about the same to send 5M emails as 5 emails), (2) A/B testing (tuning by seeing the effects of variations in the email), and (3) headline chasing (targeted, timely appeals).

Meanwhile, the old revenue streams are collapsing. “Prospect direct mail” is in freefall because people aren’t opening their snail mail if they don’t have to. Most people under 65 are paying their bills online. Also, targeted fundraising appeals yield money that cannot be used to organizational overhead. Existing advocacy orgs have high overhead costs.

To research this, David created a dummy gmail account and signed up for 70 progressive advocacy groups. In 6 months, he got 2,162 email alerts. About 250 were fund-raisers. Msgs from newer orgs asked far more often for money for specific campaigns, as opposed to asking for general support. The old orgs are applying their old techniques to the Net. The new groups are relying on small donations from many people. There were 202 requestes for e-petition signatures and 85 calls for direct action. MoveOn in the past 6 months sent out as many requests for local action as e-petition. After that it was to call Congress or donate to campaigns.

Overall, the Net’s effect on activism is not clicktivism. It’s not just asking for weak-tie petition clicking. They call to action. This is a new form of organizing. We’re seeing a generation shift here: the old orgs’ sunk infrastructure costs can’t transition to becoming a network org. This is disruption theory a la Clay Christensen. The revenue streams of the old orgs are beginning to collapse. This new type of advocacy groups, with their new types of membership and ways of interacting with their members, is undermining the old orgs. The Internet skeptics generally are missing this.

Q: How does this reconcile with what the Tea Partiers are doing? And how about the Republicans?
A: I did this research before the Tea Party. So, why aren’t there the same sorts of groups for conservatives? They’ve tried to create their own DailyKos, MoveOn, etc. Why is Red State no where near the scale of DailyKos? It’s due to out-party incentives. A Republican organizer said that it’s because it’s more fun storming the castle. The out-party is more likely to adopt the new technology. At the party network level, the new technologies that enter political campaigns are brought in by new political consultants. (See Amy Sullivan: Fire the consultants.) The Dems got new consultants after losing to Bush, and they brought in new tech. While the Reps were winning, they were continuing to use the old consultants. One the Dems gain control, the Tea Party starts. We need to figure out how big the Tea Party is new social movement activism, as opposed to TP as meme.

Q: What other structural differences have you seen how progressive organizations behave and conservative ones?
A: Think of DailyKos vs. Red State. The puzzle is: What do we do with our crazies? Their are extremists on both side. On the left, we identify crazies as 9-11 truthers. DK bans 9-11 truthers because Markos Moulitsas “didn’t want his site to appeal to the nut jobs.” The right has been more tolerant of its crazies, e.g., the birthers. Few of the big conservative blog sites are open to bloggers. And, usually, you need to register to be able to comment. One site only allows one hour of open registration every few months because they’re worried about comedy sites like Wonkette coming in and trolling.

Q: Fox tried to come up with a half hour show like The Daily Show but it was horrible. Why is the Left funnier?
A: Colbert: it’s because the left has reality as a straight man.
Q: Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are purposefully funny/humorous.
Q: Beck and Rush call themselves rodeo clowns to deflect criticism from the Left.

Q: Deval Patrick’s first campaign was beautiful: Green roots, net roots, etc. But he hasn’t governed the way that he ran.
A: [missed the answer. sorry.]

Q: Do you see one of your three ideal types becoming the paradigmatic one?
A: As Clay Shirky says in his Thinking the Unthinkable: Nothing will work but everything might. We will see the collapse of a major non-profit within the next two years, and then this will get the same attention that the newspapers are getting now. For now, multiple models. Which wins depends on how the tech develops, but if I had to bet, I’d say the neo-federated is promising because of the rise of mobile phones.

Q: [me] Why believe these new orgs have any effect except raising money? Has an epetition ever changed anything?
A: The aim of an epetition is to take a first action, which engages people. But compare the effect of MoveOn etc. to organizing ten or twenty years ago. Everything pales against the Civil Rights Movement, but that may be the wrong comparison, because it’s the one time that everything came together and mass action worked. A million-signature petition can make a diff, even though that’s 0.03% of the population. E.g., DailyKos leads to the YearlyKos event that helps build a movement. The Drinking Liberal local events have led to people running for local offices. This is an improvement over how it was ten years ago. It enables the small percentage of people who want to be engaged to be engaged more successfully.

Q: What’s the role of professional management? And how about bringing in new, young activists.
A: Political scientists talk about the interest group explosion in the 1970s. Skocpol’s point is that these new groups were of a different kind: from membership to professional-managed advocacy. When we think of online activists, we tend to think of young people, but the rooms are actually filled with people in their 40s-50s. There’s a generational lifecycle thing going on: there’s a spike of activism when people are students, and rise in 40-50s and on. Zack Exley talks about the tyranny of the annoying: in the old movements, the people who take over are the ones who want to pound the table and be a committee of one. Thanks to the Net making it easier to engage locally, it makes it easier to avoid the tyranny of the annoying.

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Michael Slaby was Chief Technology Officer for Obama for America. His team was responsible for the technology behind the online campaign. He’s giving a Berkman lunchtime talk. NOTE 1: I’m liveblogging, aqnd thus getting things wrong, paraphrasing, missing points, etc. Do not trust these notes. NOTE 2: Ethan Zuckerman’s far superior livebloggage is here.

He begins by modestly disclaiming credit. His group didn’t build the 13M-person mailing list. He at first didn’t want to do Twitter. President Obama was a spectacular campaigner. Everyone was clear about what needed to be done. He says he was part of an incredible team that executed well, including, Chris Hughes and Joe Rospars [and one more person whose name I did not get - dw].

Lessons from the campaign: The importance of being genuine. You can’t fake who you are. He points to the fact that old people who try to sound cool always sound ridiculous. “If you fail the genuineness test, you will lose the ability to make a connection with your supporters.” A motto from the campaign: “Respect. Empower. Include.” When they went into Iowa (where they had an astonishing 33 offices), they understood they were visitors. [Unlike the Dean campaign four years earlier? -dw] Also: Be generous with ownership. Empower your supporters to be your best advocate. “People trust other people about you more than they trust you about you.” “Giving away control means you have to teach your values.” That way, instead of telling them what to do, you can give them tools to act and they will do the right things. They’re going to say some things you don’t want them to, but they will pass the “genuity” test more than you will.

This campaign was won in the field, not online. The impressive thing about having 2M Facebook supporters was that half of them went out and did something for the campaign. When you start a campaign, you’re in a relationship with people. When the campaign started, FB didn’t have fan pages, so you’re just another profile, so you have to act like one, respond to people, etc.

Tell good stories, he says. Lots of people can write a good email, but few can structure an email program that will last for two years.

“The Obama campaign was a good object lesson for technology serving purpose.” Tech is merely a means. “We didn’t use stuff in the campaign that didn’t help us win. That was my mantra: ‘How does this help us win?’”

He says that it was amazing that Secretary Clinton gave an Internet Freedom speech, but that much was absent from it. Our goal is promote democracy, but democracy depends on lots of other things in the culture. It’s myopic to think that democracy is banging on the door of totalitarian states. It can be difficult to go from an authoritarian regime to elections; elections may not be the first thing to do. If we want Net Freedom, we should make it more partisan. We are fine with censorship of some things, e.g., child pornography. So, we should be more explicit about what we value, rather than pretending to support Net Freedom overall. We need to articulate what the purpose of Net Freedom is.

Q: What do you mean by stories?
A: The story on the Obama campaign was born out of Pres. Obama’s personal story as a community organizer, who wanted to empower others to enable change. [I'm paraphrasing poorly.] When you run an email campaign, you have a specific goal, but if it’s not part of the wider message you get a clanging cymbal [symbol?] problem. So, if you send an email asking for a large donation, it clangs against the story that this is about empowering a wide range of people, so we wouldn’t send that email. Joe Rospars came up with the idea of flying 4 low-dollar donors to “dinner with Barack”; usually, you have to donate $100K’s to get dinner with the candidate. Pres. Obama loved these opportunities. “In the summer of ’07 when we were this crazy longshot, we were telling Pres. Obama’s personal story.” Even back then Pres. Obama talked about this being “your campaign.” “If that’s going to be who you are, that’s how you have to stay who you are.” E.g., you have to remember what you’ve told your supporters.

Q: How do you get all these people on the same page? And what mistakes did you make that we can learn from?
A: Joe Rospars, the dir of new media, was a peer with the dir of communications. Joe reported to David Plouffe. It was important for us to be able to say no credibly. There was little drama. The top has to lead with values. Not everyone is comfortable talking about values because they think it’s too soft. “It’s hard to distill your passion into something that is easily articulated and easily understood.” “The humility of knowing who you are is really important.” It’s missing from our Net Freedom policy.
In terms of mistakes, it was great to have the freedom to try things and fail. We thought an honest way to do fund-raising: we’d let people buy the things we need by posting a list. You’d rent us a van and then we’d send you a photo of the van. Sounds great, but it didn’t work at all. Too complicated. We tested an email campaign this way, where you could buy a line item or you could get a t-shirt for contributing, and the t-shirt won. (It’s important to understand when you’re in a tech echo chamber, he says.)

Q: [ethan] At a talk one of Howard Dean’s organizers in response to a question said online campaigning means getting a lot of email addresses and raising money from from. You’ve addeed: Make sure your supporters understand your values and let them speak on your behalf. Great for politics and non-profits. But there’s a gap between that and the larger movement-building that some of us hope will come out of the Net. [That Dean person's characterization is quite unfair to the Dean campaign, which built open source social networking tools, and went out of its way to make sure supporters felt empowered to talk for the campaign. See Joe Trippi's book. - dw]
A: Emails are great for raising money. But, converting online interest to offline action is the most important metric. Everything we did was based on mobilizing people, including building tools to allow people to volunteer easily online. E.g., signing up for a shift is a gigantic pain; we did it fairly effectively with a lot of different tools. We had MyBarackObama that let people find each other locally and go out into the community. Those are the tools that are most interesting for general advocacy. Cf. Chris Hughes’ Jumo that will create a community and then bring organizations to the table. Chris is a genius, says Michael. For engagement online, you have to go where people are; most advocacy campaigns don’t have the advantage of being on TV every day for two years the way we did.

Q: [wendy] What’s your favorite tool for listening to people, and how many do you listen to as opposed to making people feel like they’re being heard?
A: We handled this by having lots of staff. Don’t go into a social medium that you’re not prepared to support with staff. By the end, we had almost 100 paid staff in HQ on new media, plus people in every state, plus a lot of interns, many of whom were helping us respond to people individually. We did a lot to make people feel heard; we’d ask people for their stories and feature some of them. “The only way to make people feel heard is to hear them. You need a person answering a question.”

Q: [me] The Dean campaign went with the idea of horizontal links rather than staffing up to get people to feel connected. Also, they thought those bonds would later form a movement for governing. Did you think about how the tools you were building to win the election might be used to govern?
A: We knew the campaign was temporary. OfA has continued. But when you only have horizontal connectiions, they’re only teaching each other, and there’s less room for you. That may be one reason they were so powerful after the Dean campaign – they weren’t that connected to the campaign. The whole goal of our campaign was to take on K Street, to change the way influence works.
Q: [me] Do you share the criticism that OfA wasn’t carried forward enough? David Plouffe was brought in to reinvigorate it recently?
A: Everything could be done better, but it’s really hard to carry this forward. It’s far more boring than campaigning. Macon Philips is doing a great job with the new media team in the White house, but it’s hard, in part because of legal issues. And David Plouffe was brought back maybe also because it’s getting to be time for midterm elections.

Q: Involving communities?
A: It’s still a goal. Unrealized goal. Doing local stuff seems easier when you’re campaigning and have lots of local resources. It’s important not to over-promise and under-perform. If you don’t have the people to support local people in a few places, not supporting local people everywhere is bad. It looks like you don’t care. But, all of those goals are still goals.

Q: What else did you do culturally or managerially to keep people focused on the campaign’s values?
A: There was a focus on “What are you doing for Iowa?” Iowa was so key to the campaign. I love Iowans now. Iowa was a big part of who we were for the first year. It’s very hard to be a good boss in a campaign: everything is an emergency, you never have enough resources, no one sleeps. The values stuff is central or else you’ll burn out. People aren’t paid well, overworked, under-resourced, which is a recipe for making people undervalued. You have to find other ways to make people feel taken care of and heard. There was a lot of bottom up, but there’s also top down; you have to cut off conversation and just go. Campaigners are very difficult, so you need to take care of your people.

Q: Your tools matched your values. Do you have problems with people using it for other values?
A: Our tools were election tools. There’s a tension between a national and a local goal. But, you’re right that form follows function. When goals change, sometimes tools adapt, but not always. You need more than one tool, and if your problems change, your tools have to change; it’s hard for big orgs to be that nimble. That’s one reason why open source tools are often useful.

Q: [donnie dong] The Net is so interactive that if someone doesn’t like your values that s/he shuts you out, and s/he takes others with her/him
A: Absolutely. This is how the Net works. You get negative comments. It’s not a problem with the tool; with interactive tools, you now know the symptoms that were there but you didn’t know about.

Q: Criticisms make the praise more meaningful.
A: I totally agree.

[herkko] What legal problems? Any copyright problems?
A: We made sure to educate the people we were empowering. If people were going to fundraise for us, we explained the rules to them. Of course there were problems, but nothing too severe. “There was no point in the campaign when I was worried about what we were doing.” We set a high bar for being a supporter. Hanging out on the email list was not enough. If you’re going to do more, you have to take responsibility for your actions. We tried to educate people properly and give them the right tools.

[donnie] Difference between the content you created and the user-generated stuff in terms of quantity?
A: No idea. Most of the content was coming from the campaign. Personal content tends to be more personal. That’s the reason why it’s good. A person telling a story about their own life is more engaging than me telling a story about that person. Ideally the user-generated content and campaign content works together. UGC is worth the danger.

Q: What did you do in social media that resulted in the most offline activity?
A: Measuring social media is difficult. FB’s calendaring structure is good at supporting events. Text messaging was good for getting volunteers to go to a particular place to do some work. We never got to the Holy Grail of knowing who is where and can do what. The data integration posed by campaigns is overwhelming. You have disparate data sets of disparate quality, and you’re not going to be able to match them all up. Even though it’s hard, you need to try to measure. How do you decide what gets credit for why someone went out to vote — TV ad, FB message, etc.?

[the talk ends, but no one leaves]

Q: Where are you addressing your concerns about Sect’y Clinton’s talk?

A: Privately so far. This is the first I’ve talked about it in public…

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Jose Antonio Vargas summarizes and analyzes a three-hour conversation with Al Gore about the Net and politics. Fascinating.

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Plenty is being written already trying to parse, understand, and come to terms with Larry Lessig’s article “Against Transparency” in the New Republic. Ethan Zuckerman does his usual outstanding job in clarifying ideas sympathetically. Transparency advocate Carl Malamud responds to Lessig. I presented my own “walkthrough” of the article. The New Republic has run Tim Wu‘s response, which agrees with Lessig in important ways. The New Republic has also run four other responses, including an excellent response from Ellen Miller and Michael Klein, founders of the Sunlight Foundation, the leading advocate for transparency. (My response is included in that set of four.) Aaron Swartz prefigured Larry’s argument in a piece he posted in April: “Transparency is bunk.” Plenty to chew on.

I want to briefly expand on the article’s import.

At the end, Larry expands his own argument to cover “Internet triumphalism.” Over the past couple of years, we’ve been seeing Net triumphalism waning, at least in the circles I travel in. Triumphalism is the notion that the war has been won. It’s over. Net triumphalism thinks that the new tech is in place, cannot be removed, and will change everything. It thus includes Net techno-determinism, i.e., the idea that the mere presence of the Net has predictable, determinate, and inevitable effects. Triumphalism adds: Yay!

Net triumphalism seemed more plausible back in the days when the demographics of the participants were pretty homogeneous, masking the role culture played in the homogeneous effects the Net was having. As regimes have censored the Net in ways the Net has not routed around, as Albert-Laszlo Barabasi and then Clay Shirky showed us that the Net tends towards the old patterns of unequal influence, as the mere networked presence of Howard Dean supporters failed to end GW Bush’s reign of error, naive Internet Triumphalism has become unsupportable. As Joe Trippi said, we need mouse pads and shoe leather. As Aaron Swartz says, we need narrative journalism as well as the Web. As Larry Lessig says, we need political reform as well as the Web. Indeed, as Aaron and Larry point out, the sunlight of transparency casts shadows as well.

I think “Against Transparency” misidentifies the source of the threat and undervalues the benefits of transparency-as-the-default, even as I agree with Larry’s cautions and his policy agenda. I nevertheless think it is one more marker in incremental extirpation of Internet triumphalism. Some of the pain reading his article causes old-time Net enthusiasts like me comes from that. It’s the right pain to feel, even if we disagree with the particularities of Larry’s article.

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Pew Internet & Life has a new study on the Internet and civic engagement. Here are the four key findings, as put by Lee Rainie, the head of the project:

First, those engaged with civic life online are very similar to those who participate offline from a socio-economic perspective. It turns out that overall the internet is not dramatically diversifying the class of folks who are civically engaged. The well-to-do and well-educated still predominate online, despite some of the early hope and predictions of activists.

Second, generational change in civic engagement is taking place online. Young adults, traditionally a politically inactive group, show less of a deficit in online than in offline political participation.

Third, new kinds of civic engagement are being created in the social mediasphere – on blogs, social network sites, Twitter and the like. Young internet users dominate their elders in those areas and there is tantalizing evidence that socio-economic stratification is not as pronounced among the social media participants who are civically engaged.

Fourth, we find that online tools like email, websites, and instant messaging are now embedded in civic activity as groups of all kinds use them to further civic and political goals.

[Tags: egovernment e-politics e-gov egov ]

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According to a Boston Globe poll, the popularity of Mass. Gov Deval Patrick has plummeted.

Too bad. I think he’s been doing a good job in an economic and political environment within which success can only be measured by degrees of failure. (Those who worry about one-party control turning into a tyranny have never met Massachusetts Democrats.)

But, I was disappointed to receive an email this morning from Doug Rubin, of the Deval Patrick Committee, containing “talking points” for his supporters, with a form that lets us forward it to ten people. The msg begins:

Friends,

In light of today’s Globe Poll, we know that many of you will be receiving many questions about the Governor and the Commonwealth. Below are some talking points to help with those conversations. We ask that you use these in conversation and distribute them to your friends and family. I’m proud of what we have accomplished, feel confident talking about our work, and I hope you are as well.

Sincerely,
Doug Rubin

Jeez, I really don’t want to be recruited as a spin agent.

Governor Patrick, I know this has to be a sucky day for you. There are lots of us in the Commonwealth who think you’re the right person for the job and that you’re an exceptional person in near impossible circumstances. We want to help. Don’t spin us. Fall back on us. We’ll rise to catch you. Trust us.

One more thing: The email msg and the DevalPatrick.com site it comes from do not explain who Doug Rubin is (Google reports he’s the Governor’s Chief of Staff [NOTE later that day: Doug Rubin says in the comments that he was Patrick's Chief of Staff but is now part of the Governor's campaign team] or Deval Patrick’s relationship to the site, other than noting that it is not an official government site. How about a little more transparency than that?

[Tags: deval_patrick pr spin politics e-politics e-gov ]

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Obama has posted his tech policy.

It’s like someone who understands and values technology and the Internet was elected president.

By the way, the Change.gov site welcomes our comments.

[Tags: obama net_neutrality e-politics democracy technology ]

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I’m listening to Bob Kuttner on Fresh Air talk about the topic of his book, Obama’s Challenge. He’s saying that FDR led in part by seizing opportunities to teach us, including his very first fireside chat.

Interesting. We are certainly in a “teachable moment,” as they say. And we have a president-elect who is a learner and has actually been a teacher. I’m so ready to be taught. (Of course, I’m so ready for our new president to do everything that our current president can’t manage to do, including learn and lead.)

Here’s Peter Leyden’s talk in Copenhagen last month about how the Obama campaign used the Internet.

[Tags: obama leadership peter_leyden e-politics ]

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Click on an issue listed at Ask Obama Now and you’ll see a video clip of Obama addressing it, along with a build of bullet points on the side – useful if you’re not sure where he stands on the issues that matter to you.

[Tags: politics e-politics obama ]

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YouTube and PBS are asking us to video and post our voting experience. The videos will be collected here.

I was already planning on Flickring my absentee vote for Obama, just for the joy of it. [Tags: politics e-politics media youtube ]

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