bottom up change

Monday, June 15, Iranian supporters of Moussavi protest the election results (Photo: AFP/Getty)

You may have missed what happened this weekend.  I know I almost did.  No, I’m not talking about the dramatic protests in Iran against the declared election results claiming that President Ahmadinejad defeated Mir Hussein Moussavi by a large margin.  Instead, I’m referring to the use of social media in Iran and in the United States to have an impact on the protests and on the coverage of them in major American media outlets.   Andrew Sullivan has done an incredible job covering the protests and the use of Twitter in particular over the weekend.  For a summary of his work over the past few days, see this post.

So how did Twitter have a significant impact on the events in Iran and on US media coverage this weekend?  First, check out this post by Sullivan called “The Revolution Will be Twittered“, which by the way is a huge rip-off of my post a few months ago, “The Revolution Will Be Tweeted.”  Plus, it’s “tweeted” not “twittered”, Andrew.  But I digress.  Sullivan reports that Iranian authorities had silenced cell phone communications and taken down Moussavi’s website.  Text messaging had been used in the weeks leading up to the election by supporters of Moussavi to organize, so the government wanted to make sure that they did not use this method.  However, they did not disable Twitter, allowing Moussavi and his supporters to send a tweet calling for people to go to the rooftops and yell “ALAHO AKBAR” to protest the election results.  Thousands did so.  In fact, this was apparently the first time that people had spontaneously organized on rooftops since the Iranian revolution in 1979.  (And just as I am writing this post, this news breaks: Moussavi just sent out another tweet telling his supporters that every night in Tehran from 9pm-11pm they should go to the rooftops and shout “ALAHO AKBAR”.)

Twitter also enabled protesters to tweet updates about the violence that the government was unleashing against them so that the world would know what was happening.  They used the hashtag #IranElection to aggregate their tweets, and the stream of tweets was enormous: it has become one of the highest trending hashtags on Twitter over the past few days.  #IranElection is immensely popular internationally on Twitter, with users from around the world sending messages of encouragement and solidarity to the Iranians who are protesting.  Green avatars or avatars with the message “Stand with Free Iran” spread quickly with users who wanted to show solidarity.  In this way, the protesters are getting their message out and breaking news to an international audience, and the audience is able to talk back to the protesters and let them know they have the world’s support.  It’s a nice feedback loop, and one that might help sustain this rebellion or perhaps even help produce a new democratic revolution in Iran.  I am pretty skeptical about the latter, but that’s what many are hoping for.

Many traditional news organizations and reporters have picked up on the story of the role of social media in helping bring about and sustain the incredible events we are witnessing in Iran.  See this report by CBS for another account of Iranians’ use of social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook to organize their protests and let the world know about the crackdown against protesters.  Thomas Friedman also wrote over the weekend about the ways that Iranians, much like the Lebanese in their recent push-back against Hezbollah in a major election, were using technology to increase democratic activism.  Even Fox News jumped on the story.

But the traditional news entities almost missed the significance of this story entirely.  The major media outlets did a miserable job over the weekend reporting on what was undeniably one of the biggest stories of the year so far–a potential coup in Iran and a rebellion against the government by a pro-democracy movement in that country.  CNN and many other news outlets were missing in action over the weekend during some of the most tense moments in Iran shortly after the election results were announced.  Users of Twitter who had been following the story closely noticed this silence in the media, and particularly on CNN, and began a campaign to protest the lack of broadcast news coverage of the rebellion.  They started a hashtag, #CNNfail, which quickly became one of the most popular tags on Twitter along with #IranElection.  CNN noticed the organized outrage on Twitter and by Sunday their coverage of the protests increased.  CNN had to defend itself publicly from the criticism on Twitter.  The Wall Street Journal did a story covering the effects of the Twitter #CNNfail movement here.  A website has even sprung up, CNNfail.com, which includes all the tweeets under the hashtag #CNNfail and #Iranelection.

A lot of people may still roll their eyes and shrug, wondering what the big deal with Twitter is.  But they are missing out on engaging in a new form of communication that is much more than mere entertainment.  Quite simply, Twitter is leading the way in transforming the Internet into a powerful tool for organizing, rebellion, and yes, revolution.

This topic deserves a lot more space, but I’m going to try to give the short version of it here.  Since December of 2008, I’ve been exploring the world of social media.  I don’t know what the technical definition of social media is, and it is probably not as new as we like to think.  Suffice it to say that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and blogs are exemplars of social media.  You get the idea.

My interest in social media/Web 2.0/new media/whatever has taken me from casually using Facebook to starting a blog, to joining Twitter, to attending “Tweetups”, to organizing my own Tweetup, to starting a social media and politics organization.  And now on June 29-30 I will be attending We.Gov, which is the Personal Democracy Forum’s annual conference on politics and technology in New York City.   I am very excited to see the speakers at this event and to meet people who are trying to improve our government and politics by using the Internet and other technologies.  (Ok, really, I am just going to see Ana Marie Cox.)

Some people fret about social media because they think it is making us more self-absorbed, more narcissistic, more isolated.  It’s understandable to worry about some of this since there are countless examples of the hyper-individualism that the Internet has spawned.  There is something to the criticism of social media as amplifying some of the more self-regarding aspects of human nature.  The whole “personal branding” movement, which is very popular in the social media world, is one example of the way that self-publishing content is leading people to start thinking they are not human beings, but businesses that should be marketed like Coke or McDonald’s.  (In the words of Jay-Z, “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man.”)  This all seems slightly ridiculous to me.

But I also believe that the Internet is spawning a new communitarianism, a new form of civic life that, despite our ever-increasing mobility, makes it possible to meet each other in public spaces, to form new groups and associations.   Meetup.com is just one example of how successful the Internet has been at making it possible for people to connect with others with similar interests through the Internet.  And, of course, the Obama campaign’s use of MyBO made it possible for his supporters to mobilize in certain states without any campaign staff present.

Now, after the Obama campaign’s success, it’s amusing to think about how much ridicule Time magazine received when it declared that the Person of the Year in 2006 was You.  As the media began to recognize the power of social media, critics reacted as though the only purpose of this technology was for people to constantly update their Facebook status with the most mundane details of their lives.  Twitter has recently been ridiculed the same way as only being for narcissists wanting to tell the world what they’re having for breakfast.  But people who say this about Twitter probably haven’t heard about Twestival or Tweetsgiving.

So there’s We.gov and Me.com.  Let’s not neglect to notice the We of social media.

I apologize to readers who have wondered where I’ve been over the past week.  Actually, the past two weeks have been very slow here at Bottom Up Change.  If it wasn’t for Nathan Pyles’ excellent contributions (for which I’m extremely grateful), there would have been little new content.  But I do have a good excuse!  First it was the OFA-MA Organizing Forum, which I posted about last week.  Since then, I have been busy starting up a new grassroots organization in Boston, which I want to write a little bit about here.

The past two weeks have been very exciting for me because I’ve begun to implement some ideas that I’ve been mulling over for several months.  Actually, these ideas date back to the beginning of this blog, when I began thinking about the possibilities of using blogs and other social media to connect with progressive organizers around the country.  But it was only over the past few weeks that my thinking about this topic began to crystallize into something more specific.  It’s been an inspiring few weeks and I’ve been able to confirm some of my suspicions about the power of social media as a tool for organizing.

In early May, I attended a meeting of the Young Democrats of Massachusetts (YDM), where I met with the chair of the Boston chapter, Kevin.  I had originally met Kevin at a “tweetup” (a meetup for users of Twitter) and we later connected on Twitter, where he told me about the YDM meetings.  I then met another YDM member, Ash, a few days later on Twitter.  It was refreshing to finally meet some active progressives in the Boston area who used Twitter as much as I did.  I had been to a half dozen tweetups this year, and while I always enjoyed meeting new people at these events, the attendees were usually in marketing and public relations.

When I met with Kevin and Ash in person at the YDM meeting, I laid out some ideas of holding a tweetup for politicos on Twitter.  They both were very interested in the idea and I began planning it.  My main reason for organizing a political tweetup was to see how much interest there would be in another idea I’d been toying with.  I wanted to organize a forum for the candidates in Boston’s mayoral race since it is the most competitive race for mayor that Boston has seen in over 10 years.  My idea was to make it a “social media” forum, where I would promote the event on Twitter and people could “tweet” their questions for the candidates to a hashtag (such as #Mayor).  I also thought it would be an interesting experiment to make a candidates forum as interactive as possible by making social media a major part of the forum.  The name for this forum would be Tweet the Candidates (of course).  I had been trying for several weeks to get in touch with the campaigns of Mayor Menino and City Councilor Sam Yoon, but not with much success.  It seemed that the campaigns weren’t too interested in attending a forum of uncertain turnout organized by an unknown person–me.  So after I talked with Kevin and Ash about the tweetup and the possibility of a social media candidates forum, I decided that I may have a better chance of persuading the candidates to attend the forum if there was an organization sponsoring it–one with a track record of achieving a solid turnout at events.  This led me to the idea of creating a social media organization in the Boston area that focused on politics and government.  When I began to promote the tweetup, I used the name “Social Media Progressives” for the group.

I wanted this organization to be identified as an association because at this stage, its primary aim is to connect people interested in progressive politics and social media.  I defined the organization as bringing together the tech community and the political community in the Boston area so people could start sharing ideas and collaborating about how social media and other technology can improve our politics.  Or, to use the more formal language I’ve written for the group, “Social Media Progressives is a new association of progressives interested in the ways that technology is changing politics, government, and journalism, particularly through the rise of social media.  One goal of this association is to increase collaboration between the online and offline worlds of politics and technology.”  As you can see, I wanted this group to serve as an umbrella organization for tech and politics broadly conceived, and I wanted the focus to be taking the online conversations offline so that progressives could meet, form relationships, and work together on real projects.  You can read more about our tweetup at the invitation page that we used.  I also created a Facebook fan page (please become a fan) and a Twitter account for our group.  

A few days before the tweetup, I met with Kevin, Ash, and another person I had met on Twitter, Yasmin, whose main interest was in the “Government 2.0″ movement.  Thankfully, they bought into the concept of Social Media Progressives and became founding members.  We didn’t have money and we didn’t have any other members, but our organization was up and running.

As you can see from the pictures on our Facebook page, the tweetup was a success.  We had over 40 people sign up, and over twenty people showed, which was a good turnout for our first event.  People from many different backgrounds attended.  We had the Chief Technology Strategist for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, members of the YDM,  almost the entire staff of Generation Progress, and several prominent members of the social media community in Boston.    We held a raffle for Clay Shirky’s book on technology and social change, “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations”.  When the night was over, people were enthusiastic about the potential of this organization to grow over the summer.  The plan is to have one Social Media Progressives tweetup a month.  In the future, we hope to attract prominent speakers in the world of politics, technology, and social media.  We are still planning a “Tweet the Candidates” forum sometime over the next few months.

Social Media Progressives could be a model for other online organizing efforts around the country, particularly those using Twitter.  In fact, I have talked with several people who are interested in creating SMP chapters in several cities.  Of course, this effort isn’t entirely unique.  I know that others in the progressive “Twittersphere” have been trying to organize progressives.  Most visibly, Jon Pincus has been successful in providing progressives on Twitter with a common space to share information under the #p2 hashtag.  There may be other efforts to organize progressives on Twitter that I am not aware of.  But what I would like to see with SMP is a way to take the online conversations and connections offline so that we start building relationships in local areas among people who use social media and consider themselves progressive.  These offline gatherings can also serve the purpose of educating progressives on new technology and create opportunities for collaboration with the tech community.  By focusing on offline gatherings and emphasizing the importance of local activism, I think that SMP can develop strategies for taking online organizing to a new level.  But this is just the start.  There’s a lot to learn and a lot to do yet.

In a later post, I’m going to go into more detail about how Twitter can be used for online organizing, and how SMP will be employing these techniques.  There is a lot of potential in combining social media with progressive organizing.  I’m excited about where this will lead.

Blogging lately has been slow because I’ve been sidetracked by some side projects.  One is the Grassroots Organizing Forum that I am helping plan.  I didn’t realize this before, but this event is the first statewide Organizing for America (OFA) event in the nation.  OFA-Massachusetts is a genuinely inspiring group of very hard-working volunteers (I don’t think anyone is staff here) and I’ve enjoyed working with them.  Our event is Saturday, and I think it’s going to be a big success.  So far, over 600 people have signed up.  I will write a follow-up post about it for sure.

In any case, I’ve been experimenting a bit with Twitter by creating an account for OFA-MA and then using it to promote our event and raise money for it.  My experiment has been to test the capacity of Twitter as not only a marketing and communications tool, but as an organizing tool.  I’ve tried to experiment with Twitter in this way in the past when I organized my Ice Cream Tweetup and Pledge Project Canvass.  That worked fairly well, and I was pleased that a very effective organizer in my neighborhood, Joseph Porcelli, heard about the event through Twitter, showed up, and helped get the word out on his website, Neighbors for Neighbors.

So I’m still in the early stages of my experimentation with Twitter as an organizing tool, but so far I have learned a few things.  First, it is very difficult to find people on Twitter who would be interested in a specific cause and who are living in a specific area.  As a result, it is tough to find the right people on Twitter to contact about an event or action.  The fact that Joseph learned of my event through Twitter was just good luck.  The problem is that Twitter does not have a search function that allows one to search by location and keywords in the user’s bio, so finding the right kinds of people to follow is cumbersome.  There may be apps that allow for this kind of search, but I do not know of them.  Second, because tweets get lost in one’s ever-changing stream, it is very difficult to communicate one’s message and get relevant updates out to people in an effective way.  (I’m sorry if this point is lost entirely on people who don’t use Twitter.  Solution: sign up and start using it!  It’s free, after all!)  Third, despite these setbacks (which I hope to solve soon) Twitter is an extremely effective tool for getting one’s message out to a different audience and as a supplement to more traditional forms of outreach.  I am finding new Obama supporters through Twitter that I didn’t know about before.  I followed them, they followed back, and we started a conversation that revealed their support.

At the Organizing Forum I hope to have a hashtag (#OFAMA) for any Twitterers in the audience to discuss the event for people who are not able to attend.  My hope is that this will allow me to identify more Obama supporters in Massachusetts who use Twitter.  I am also planning a more ambitious Twitter-and-organizing event in June, focusing on local politics.  Stay tuned!

The White House's Twitter Page

The White House new media team has much more important tweeters to follow than you or I, including @DHSJournal, @hhs_gov, @CDCflu, and @dipnote (the State Department), among many other federal agencies and departments.  We’re not going to be on the Following list any time soon.  But actually, now that the White House has joined Twitter, it may well be that the White House will be following some of our tweets.

First, let me make a brief digression.  As Twitter users know, one of the most powerful tools on Twitter is search.twitter.com.  This search engine allows people to search for every possible term that users type when they post their 140-characters-or-less “tweets”.  This opens up Twitter to many different purposes than mere responses to the question, “what are you doing?”  For instance, if you’re a beer enthusiast and want to know what people are saying about beer on Twitter, just type “beer” in the search engine, and you will see every tweet that includes the word “beer”.  You can then start a conversation with people who are tweeting about beer.  But what if you are a beer company?  Say you are Sam Adams (I chose a local Boston brand for the sake of convenience–it’s also a decent beer).  That’s where things get very interesting.  Believe me, this will connect to the Obama administration’s use of Twitter.

Since I joined Twitter in December of 2008, I have went to many meetups of Twitter users, called “tweetups”.  Most of these events are full of marketing professionals who are using Twitter to help companies promote their products or services.  One of the strongest reasons that companies want to use social media, and especially Twitter, is to find out what customers are thinking about their product or service in real time.  They can gain immediate feedback from customers who may be trying a new product line, for instance.  (This post describes the differences between marketing with social media and traditional marketing).  So, going back to the beer example, if I search for Sam Adams, I find this tweet by @steventurous: “I don’t care if it’s kind of weird and polarizing: I love Sam Adams Cherry Wheat”.  If the Sam Adams marketers are curious about consumers’ feelings about the Cherry Wheat, they can refine their search to Sam Adams Cherry Wheat.  It seems like this beer is a hit with people–in my cursory search, I tried to find a negative review but couldn’t.  So we now have immediate qualitative data about consumer preferences in addition to the quantitative data that companies receive from their sales numbers and other numerical indicators.  (Continued below.)

Mmmm...beer!

So by now it may be a little clearer how all of this connects to the White House’s use of Twitter.  Obviously, the White House wants to use Twitter to get its message out.  But my question is whether the political department of the White House will want to look at voters’ reactions to the President and his policies in real time using Twitter search.  For example, maybe the White House wants to find out what people are saying about Obama’s response to the swine flu outbreak.  Well, they just type in “Obama swine flu” and find their tweets, like this one: @scotia626 “swine flu over-reaction is a failure of obama’s leadership team”.  It seems that many of the criticisms of Obama’s handling of the outbreak on Twitter is that Obama is overreacting, not that he hasn’t taken stronger measures, such as closing the border.  The administration can get more specific, and find out citizens’ reaction to the administration’s view that, if schools close, they should close for 14 days.  Here is one unhappy reaction and a misunderstanding (profanity edited): “This is soooo [messed] up, Obama wants schools to close up to 14 days for swine flu — this is graduation and prom time.”  This kind of reaction may send a red flag to the White House that they need to clarify their message: they are not asking all schools to shut down, but only those with cases of swine flu.

Using Twitter Search obviously doesn’t provide the White House with a large sample of Americans’ reaction, and I don’t want to overstate my point here.  Reading tweets on search is often like reading the comments of a blog post, and there is the usual mix of insight and madness in both.  My point is simply that Twitter Search provides a very fast and efficient way for the White House to gauge Americans’ reaction to the President’s decisions.  Polls provide quantitative data, but Twitter provides immediate qualitative data about Americans’ political views.  Knowing that the President has a team of talented and tech savvy new media people working for him, I wouldn’t be surprised if they are using this powerful tool as well. The White House may be following our tweets after all.

There was a good post at Wired’s Epicenter blog about some of the ways that the White House might improve Open for Questions.  The highest ranked question from the event, of course, was whether or not Obama supported the legalization of marijuana as a way to improve the economy.  At first, I thought the marijuana question was kind of ridiculous, and clearly the result of advocates for marijuana legalization gaming the system.  Now I’ve come to believe that this kind of “fringe” question is exactly the kind of organic interaction that you would want the government to engage in when it uses social media.  The traditional media is not going to ask certain kinds of questions.  And as the Wired post notes, the marijuana question seems to have sparked a constructive debate that is relevant to our economy and the current drug-related violence in Mexico.

There is still a lot of improvement needed if the White House is going to use a platform like Open for Questions to its full capacity.  But the new media team appears to be listening to the feedback.  If you haven’t seen it, their latest installment of Open for Questions is worth watching.  The question relates to health insurance for people with disabilities:

The Special Assistant to the President for Disability Policy answered the question here.

I’ve taken about a week-long break from Twitter.  It’s a fun and useful social media tool, but it’s also addictive and it can be a huge time waster.  As with anything, it’s best used in moderation.  Instead of tweeting, I’ve been thinking about how social media can be used more effectively in politics.  This is a big issue, and I’ve already tried to take a stab at it in one post about using Twitter to increase bipartisan discussions and debate.

One use of Twitter that I think might be very powerful one day is to create links of contact between public officials and their constituents.  Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) @clairecmc is one of the public officials who uses Twitter better than most.  What is most common to see among Senators or Representatives is staffers basically tweeting the official’s agenda for the day.  But Sen. McCaskill tweets herself and often relays useful information to the public.  Here are a few of her recent tweets:

clairecmc: Just off phone with Gen Shinseki. Most don’t realize that large part of increase in discretionary spending in Pres budget is for veterans.11:28 AM Mar 27th from web

clairecmc: Once again, a large part of the INCREASE in DISCRETIONARY spending in the President’s budget is finally about keeping our word to veterans.12:44 PM Mar 27th from web

clairecmc: And keep in mind that in FY06 a Republican President signed off on 27 Billion in earmarks from the Republican Congress.

I didn’t know these facts.  So if Sen. McCaskill has constituents in Missouri who follow her on Twitter but disagree the level of spending in the budget, they will at least be able to hear her side of the story very easily.  Sen. McCaskill also claims to read all the replies to her tweets, which provides her with useful feedback from her constituents.  Right now she has nearly 19,000 followers, which may be one of the highest numbers of any public official besides @BarackObama.

An online grassroots effort called Tweet Congress is trying to collect signatures to encourage more Senators and Representatives to join Twitter.  You can go to this site, look up your local Rep or Senator, and petition him or her to join Twitter and start communicating with the public using this platform.  Of course, it all depends on how they use Twitter.  Just signing up is not progress in itself.  But overall, this looks like a good project to increase the social media savvy of our government.

WhiteHouse.gov has finally launched the Open for Questions feature that was so popular during the transition days of Change.gov.  However, there is a difference this time: President Obama will respond to some of these questions himself Thursday morning.  You can submit your question about the economy to the President and vote on the quality of other questions.  The White House will choose some of the most popular questions for Obama to respond to.  This is a very positive development for those of us who are eager for the government to embrace social media tools to provide new ways for the public to gain information from their leaders and provide them with feedback.  I think that if President Obama answers questions in this way on a frequent basis, it could mark a historic shift in the way that presidents communicate with the American people.

My question to the President: what is your plan to prevent banks from becoming too big to fail after this crisis is over?

Saturday was Pledge Project Canvass day, and we had our own event in our neighborhood of Boston.  It was small, but the people who showed up made it worth the anxiety that I was feeling about this first OFA action.  Would anyone show up?  Would people have a good experience?  Would this achieve anything?  And most troubling: was I becoming a card-carrying member of the Obama-bot cult???  Note to Michelle Malkin: it sure beats the cult-of-Santelli.

I’m sure we could have had a larger showing if I’d had more than three days to organize this event and if I was a better organizer.  But, considering the time constraints, overall I am satisfied with the result.  I do have a few complaints, though, which I’ll get to shortly.  But first, I’ll discuss what worked.

This event was different from a lot of the canvasses around the country, I think, because I framed it as a combination of a social media gathering (in this case, a “Tweetup”) combined with activism.  We met at a local ice cream/coffee shop called JP Licks, had some ice cream, and spent the first hour discussing how new technologies such as Facebook, Twitter, Ning, etc., can be used for political organizing.  Although the turnout was small, the people who showed up came from a variety of backgrounds and were eager to get involved.  A candidate for the Boston City Council named Tomas Gonzalez joined us along with his daughter and one of his campaign volunteers.  A veteran of the Obama campaign’s primary/caucus in Texas who had recently moved to the neighborhood was there.  Joseph Porcelli, a local organizer and founder of Neighbors for Neighbors, was also there to cover the event for his organization and offer his social media expertise.  (Shout out to Joseph for the video above.)  We decided that it would be a good idea to have a larger politics-meets-Twitter event in April or May in which we might invite local candidates and create a network of Boston politicos on Twitter.

After the Tweetup, several more volunteers joined us and we went out into the main commercial drag of my neighborhood to gather pledges (minus Joseph, who couldn’t join us).  Our main goal was to talk with people about the budget, let them know what Organizing for America was doing, and obtain pledges.  There were five of us in total.  A few volunteers were extremely successful in gathering pledges, but for most of us, it was tough going.  We devised a concise pitch to try to get the attention of passers-by so they would stop and chat with us.  But even in a liberal’s paradise like Jamaica Plain, few people wanted to talk to us.  In my experience, a lot of people who supported Obama didn’t want to stop for just two minutes to fill out a form.  One man passed me by and said, “Obama will pass the budget without me.  Good luck!”  Another woman who I tried to talk with walked by and I noticed a “Health Care, Not War” pin on her jacket.  When I asked her if she would support the President’s budget, she looked at me coldly and let me know that Obama was disappointing her with his appointments and by not supporting a single-payer system.  Well, that’s the way it goes, I thought.  Most volunteers had to leave early, so we only canvassed for about an hour and ended up collecting 54 pledges.

So, that’s not a bad day.  If it’s true that there were over 1,000 canvasses held around the country, it’s possible that there were around 50,000 pledges collected this weekend.  Considering that a lot of the OFA state organizers are not in place yet (not here in MA it seems), that would be an impressive achievement considering this was OFA’s first action.  Also, I had several conversations that made me think that just being out there talking with people about the budget was having a positive effect.  At least three people thanked me and one person told me to “keep it up.”  The best encounters I had were with people between the ages of 18-25.  They were most willing to sign the pledge.  One younger guy I met talked with me at length about his disappointment with Notre Dame for rescinding their invitation to Obama over his stem cell decision.

Despite the generally positive experience I had with this canvass, there were some problems.  First, the volunteers who hosted this event weren’t given much time to plan, advertise, and recruit other volunteers.  We were given a little over a week’s notice about this canvass, but the mass e-mail that OFA sent to its 12 million person list did not go out until last Monday.  Second, although the budget is a very important part of the President’s agenda, it is very hard to get volunteers motivated about it.  The one consistent criticism I heard from my volunteers was that it just wasn’t that engaging to ask people to support a federal budget proposal  [Insert expression of shock here].  Third, the goal of the plege project was never entirely clear.  I’m still not exactly sure what OFA is going to do with these pledges.  Sure, the media will talk about the numbers, which should give the President a small boost with the public.  And, of course, OFA is collecting information about people who support the budget and who may be interested in volunteering in the future.  But there needs to be a much more concrete focus for this kind of action.  It is hard–really hard–to take several hours from one’s weekend and talk to strangers about a budget.  I am extremely impressed by the volunteers who showed up at my event, but I know it wasn’t easy for them.  This kind of civic engagement and desire to enact change is encouraging.  Still, unless the projects that OFA offers people are made more engaging, it may be difficult to sustain interest among a large portion of the grassroots.

Finally, one of the volunteers told me that she felt a bit uncomfortable with the entire idea of a grassroots organization in support of the President.  It might be better, she said, to stick to volunteering for organizations that are working with the poor or with people who need direct assistance.  People need to be able to oppose the President as well, she noted.  This is actually a very serious objection to the idea of OFA and it needs to be addressed more fully.  I don’t think it’s right, in the end, because there’s no difference in principle between volunteering for a cause or to directly help people in need versus volunteering for a public official who is committed to the same goals.  The fact that Barack Obama is the President shouldn’t make a difference.  If the goal is universal health care, a greener energy policy, more jobs, better jobs, and increased opportunity for all American children, then any kind of activism that helps achieve these goals is worthwhile.  That also doesn’t mean his supporters should not oppose him when he does the wrong thing.  Otherwise, we’d truly become cultish Obama-bots.  Fortunately, there has always been much more inra-party dissent among progressives than those of Malkin’s ilk, so we need not worry much about sheep-like followers here.  The woman I spoke to with the pin is a good example.

The Pledge Project Canvass was a decent start, but it revealed some major problems that need to be examined.  The lasting impression for me is just how novel this kind of organizing is.  It wasn’t intentional, but it was appropriate to have an event on new media when we were getting ready to participate in a kind of politics that hasn’t existed in America before.  Whether this new politics is sustainable will depend on whether OFA can make it exciting, interesting, and connect it to real outcomes.  The battle for health care reform may be just the right fit for the new politics.

UPDATE: Major media outlets, including the Washington Post and CNN, are reporting the results of the Pledge Project Canvass today (Sunday).  It turns out there were over 1,000 canvasses Saturday: more than 1,200 canvasses, actually.

Continuing the theme of transparency from my last post, there’s an interesting piece in the Washington Post today about the use of crowdsourcing to monitor the spending of stimulus money.  Crowdsourcing is a notion that was developed by an article in Wired a few years ago and it seems to be spreading in popularity.  The basic idea is that, using the internet, we can outsource work on a task or project to a large group of unknown people.

While “crowdsourcing” is one of those trendy buzzwords that is being thrown around a lot on the internet,  Stimulus Watch is an example of how the interactive nature of the web can increase transparency.  Stimulus Watch is not tracking the specific projects of the stimulus–at least, not yet.  Instead, it is seeking input from citizens around the country about the list of “shovel ready” projects that were proposed recently at the US Conference of Mayors.  The website asks its users to identify local projects and then allows them to comment on them and rate the projects in terms of their perceived importance.  The hope is that, as a result of this kind of citizen feedback, when Mayors do receive the stimulus money it will be spent on those projects that are viewed as being most critical by the public.  Here is how the site’s co-founder, Jerry Brito, describes the significance of crowdsourcing as a means for allowing citizens to keep on eye on government spending:

“You don’t have to hire an army of auditors, because it’s impossible for them to follow every single dollar and every single transaction,” Brito said in an interview. “However you can augment their work with citizens, who can keep tabs on things that go on in their neighborhood.”

There are many useful features at Stimulus Watch.  First, projects are divided into categories such as “Most Expensive”, “Most Critical,” and “Least Critical”.  There is also a search function so that users can easily find proposed shovel-ready projects in their area.  Finally, using a Wiki, the site provides users with a description of each project and a chance to offer more qualitative feedback in the form of comments and a discussion thread.

One question that I have with a site like this is how it prevents users from gaming the rating system.  I can imagine a city administrator seeking federal funding for a project sending an e-mail to employees asking them to rate the project favorably when, in fact, most citizens in the community would oppose the project.  It is unclear how a website like this can prevent bias and manipulation from distorting the results.  But that seems to be one problem with the idea of crowdsourcing in general.