Pic (cc) Alyssa A Miller

Saul Alinsky’s list of ideal attributes of the organiser/activist

• Curiosity
• Irreverence
• Imagination
• A sense of humour

Earlier this month I started working with 38 Degrees, the member driven campaign organisation. Friday was my first day in the field. I travelled to Sheffield to meet some of our members themselves on their way to meet their MP, Nick Clegg. I was blown away. Whatever preconception I brought into job about who a typical 38 Degrees activist was firmly put in its place. I met 30 very different people with bound by a single goal, saving our NHS.  Hopefully I can bring something to the table, the people I met last week certainly did.

That was fun. A few months of hard work, lots of new friends made all over the world and a tonne of cash raised for non-profits doing some good work. Thanks Twestival Local. But before consigning the project to the filing cabinet, let me quickly consider some of Twestival’s more interesting attributes.

Twestival may be many things, but primarily Twestival is a network, a Latourian actor network even. It is made up of people and concepts and held together astonishingly by a large number of narrow but elastic paths/relationships on Twitter. Maybe on some other lesser social networks too. Twestival displays the classic characteristics of a network; it’s distributed (simultaneously globally, locally), it is robust (knock out one city, the rest continue unaware) and it is scalable (expansion and contraction do require relatively little resource overhead).

Look, I knew all of this before working on Twestival but actually experiencing it work was pretty special. I can’t overstate the value those Twitter paths played in management and information dissemination. Of course email and Google Docs and Skype were part of the toolkit, but day-to-day when something had to be done fast, and when exciting a volunteer as well as spreading a message was crucial, then Twitter was the medium of choice. Twestival didn’t happen without it.

Where does Twestival go next? I don’t know, ask @amanda. That’s not so important as where some of these network management techniques go. I’m going to let Manuel Castells bring the party:

Networks are complex structures of communication constructed around a set of goals that simultaneously ensure unity of purpose and flexibility of execution by their adaptability to the operating environment.

Sounds just like Twestival and indeed lots of other campaigns. Maybe it’s time we conceived some of our campaigns using a paradigm of networks rather than in the classic Euclidian manner encompassing, as it does, a start point (campaign launch) and end point (win/loss), typically in two dimensions with one axis denoting the all too quick passing of time.

What do we gain from a network approach? I’ll give one benefit right now; people. For many campaigns, finding, organising and activating volunteers is a tough job. We have to spend valuable time seeking out those who are engaged, receptive to action, capable of action, willing to spread our message and so much more. Aspects of network theory as proscribed by Castells and Yochai Benkler, may help us out here. Certainly Castells would have it that in the networks, where innovation is a valuable commodity, the innovators become apparent quickly. That for me was the beauty of Twestival. Innovators coming to the fore, engaging, taking the project framework and iterating.

So two jobs now for campaign (network) organisers. 1) Be aware, you are creating networks, not a-to-b routes. 2) Figure out how to find the innovators. Both of these warrant follow up posts.

Photo (cc) James Bridle.

Many organisations measure engagement by their target audience in two dimensions, up and down a ladder. Example:

1. Subscribing to a newsletter
2. Opening a newsletter
3. Clicking a link
4. etc.

But here’s the thing, clicking a link is super-easy, so easy in fact, modern campaigns have bred a new breed of “slacktivists”, finger always by the mousebutton. Or so the argument runs.

Amy Sample Ward tells us we should stop beating ourselves up about this; a) slacktivism has been around a lot longer than the internet and b) it’s actually a sign we’re doing a lot of things right. We want people to click the Facebook Like button, the problem is, we’re neither ambitious or smart enough to ask them to do more than that in an effective manner.

Here’s the interesting part, until we start comprehending the landscape of engagement better, we have little chance of creating better real world interventions. So ditch the ladder and go get yourself a map:

First, the ladder of engagement (refer to the slides if you want to have a visual on the steps here). Let’s take for example the fact that the American Red Cross raised $34 million dollars from the text to donate campaign after the earthquakes last year in Haiti. I want to point out two aspects of the way the engagement ladder doesn’t necessarily work as one step to the next:

• On one side, that’s a lot of people that went from bystanders to donors. But how many of them are being encouraged to continue moving up and how many of them were even bystanders of ARC vs the news of the earthquake?
• On the other, how many people in this room are aware of ARC? You don’t have to respond but consider how many of you may have donated. It isn’t about whether you gave money or not, because I imagine you may have instead retweeted or shared a link or post on facebook.

I think that the engagement ladder needs to change to not show a raising level of engagement but instead operate more as a map, showing where someone may have entered from and where they can go next. They might start out as a creator but still have low engagement (not something that really matches our traditional engagement ladder view) and never get to the donation stage, for example.

We know we have the tools to do this, the question is, do campaigns have the smarts and the willingness to invest in management overhead to step back and spend time on the analysis to go with them. If not there’s very little point in stepping down off that ladder.

Between email lists, several columns in Tweetdeck and a constantly moving Facebook news feed I probably have anywhere between 25 and 50 campaigns fly by me on a given day. Keeping up to speed is as good it gets, it’s next to impossible to engage in any meaningful way. Here’s one of those occasions where it’s worth taking a timeout and wading in; the continued investment by the World Bank in large scale fossil energy projects.

There is great background on the South African Eskom deal here, exhibit A when it comes to investigating the misdemeanours of the World Bank. The bottom line:

• Promotion of fossil fuels: Despite its pro-poor, pro-climate rhetoric, the World Bank’s fossil fuel lending has increased 400% since 20060% of these projects were funded specifically to provide energy access to the poor.
• The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that continuing to pursue centralised coal powered electricity will only lower the un-electrified population from 1.4 billion today to 1.2 billion in 2030.
• The IEA’s 2010 World Energy Outlook states that in order to achieve universal energy access 70% of today’s un-electrified population will rely on decentralized renewable energy systems.

It’s time for the World Bank to update it’s energy policies. To incorporate strategies that will have much greater impact in fighting poverty, reducing global warming, and environmental impacts.

The public campaign calling for that update starts today. The Sierra Club (remember them) and World Development Movement lead the charge. Bring it on.

This really is an incredibly impressive essay from Cory Doctorow. The best defence of online activism I think I’ve read. I’ve pasted the four closing paragraphs below. They are worth considering for a couple of reasons. First off, Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion may be wide of the mark overall, but it is still worth pausing and reflecting that even in 2011, a tweet is unlikely to change the world, by itself. Though as I mentioned previously, tweets can of course lead to amazing things.

Second factor, if activists want to preserve open systems and net neutrality, we’re going to have to go out and fight for it. Doctorow points to mobile gateways which rather than opening the walled gardens of early century providers, seem to be stacking the razor-wire higher. The Mac App store will be followed quickly by content lock-ins if the newspaper industry can get their act together. And there lies the path of danger.

The world needs more people seriously engaged with improving the lot of activists who make use of the net (that is, all activists). We need to have a serious debate about tactics such as the Distributed Denial of Service – flooding computers with bogus requests so that they can’t be reached – which some have compared to sit-in demonstrations. As someone who’s been arrested at sit-ins, I think this is just wrong. A sit-in derives its efficacy not from merely blocking the door to some objectionable place, but from the public willingness to stand before your neighbours and risk arrest and bodily harm in service of a moral cause, which is itself a force for moral suasion. As a tactic, DDoS has more in common with filling a business’s locks with super glue, or cutting its phone lines – risky, to be sure, but closer to vandalism and thus less apt to convince your neighbours to look sympathetically on your cause.

We need to fix the mobile internet, which – thanks to closed networks and devices – is more amenable to surveillance and control than the fixed-line variety. We need to fight the move – driven by entertainment companies and IT giants such as Apple and Microsoft – to design devices to work covertly and without the consent of their owners in the name of protecting copyright.

We need to pay heed to Jonathan Zittrain (another scholar whom Morozov both dismisses and then later inadvertently agrees vigorously with), whose The Future of the Internet warns that the increase in crime, sleaze and fraud on the net will cause user fatigue and make people more willing to accept locked-down devices and networks that can be used to control, as well as protect them.

We need all of this, and a serious critique and roadmap for the future of net activism, because the world’s oppressive regimes (including supposedly free governments in the west) are availing themselves of new technology at speed, and the only way for activism to be effective in that environment is to use the same tools.