Eli talked about the wisdom of the crowds and how large groups can often be smarter, more thoughtful, and more creative than individuals in the decision-making process. For MoveOn, this fact is an essential element of the organizational philosophy, and therefore the strategy. He talked about how MoveOn emphasizes a strategy of using online activity to mobilize offline activity like raising money, voting, or calling members of Congress. Eli said that, although he is passionate about these issues, his job as Executive Director of MoveOn was not to push his own opinions or ideas about strategy, but to listen to MoveOn’s members and take his cues from them about the important issues, and then about creating innovative and effective campaigns.

He also talked about testing strategies to determine empirically which were the most effective. The Obama campaign was also known for this, and it’s a clear area where nonprofits can and should take advantage of relatively inexpensive tools to make a big difference in their outreach. As Eli noted, “expert opinion” is often no more than a hunch. Good data is more useful than hunches.

The power of MoveOn’s approach is obvious: it is one of the most successful advocacy organizations in pushing issues to the center of the political debate. Its power is its members, and with more than five million members, it has done extraordinarily well at harnessing the power of its members and their passion, enthusiasm, and commitment.  Eli made an argument at the study group that this is a template that can work for many different organizations, and I think he’s got a good point. He also noted that there is a significant part of the process of advocacy where MoveOn has not yet figured out how to tap into the wisdom of its members, and that technology offers all sorts of interesting opportunities to do so in new ways.

Eli also made the point that activism is not zero-sum: people don’t have a limit on how engaged they are with the political process (and even if they do, that limit is very far away). I was so glad to hear him say this, because I think it’s easy for us as activists to think that if people put their energy toward climate change issues, they’ll have none left over for health care reform. This ties directly into the point I made about thinking about how to engage people and their creative thinking and passion for their issues.

The Difference Between Urgent and Important
The conversation got me thinking about some of the challenges even for nonprofits that really understand how to integrate members completely into the organization’s work. Eli spoke about the responsibility of advocacy organizations to find or make space in the political atmosphere for their issues. I agree with him, and this is particularly challenging work when dealing with issues that aren’t naturally an attention draw even for committed activists. The international community has recently fully recognized that rape is often used as a weapon of war in violent conflict around the world. This constellation of issues, which includes medical care for survivors, child soldiers, infant mortality, and related problems, is a hard one to make actionable for the American people. International aid in the US is an incredibly complex system.  Funding is often buried in a much larger appropriations bill and split up into multiple streams, and it’s a challenge to show activists that all of those little streams add up to a powerful river that can have a real and positive impact on the lives of people around the world if it is designed well. And then even if the language is good, implementation can be a completely different story.

So even if gender violence is an issue of importance to many activists, nonprofit organizations have struggled to make it concrete in a way that provides opportunities for their members to engage with the issue. This is clearly one of those areas where we don’t have it figured out yet, and it is critical that we start thinking about it. Nonprofit organizations have a responsibility to ensure that urgency isn’t the only criterion for attention.

Marriage Equality and The Limits of Activism
The conversation with Eli also made me think about this past Tuesday’s defeat of marriage equality in Maine. Gay marriage has been defeated every single time it has been sent to the voters; all of the progress made on this issue has been made in legislatures and with judges and governors. Jesse Ventura (of all people) reportedly said “You can’t put a civil rights issue on the ballot and let the people decide. You have to have elected officials to who have courage to make the right decision. If you left it up to the people, we’d have slavery, depending on how you worded it.”

What does this mean for advocacy organizations working to move the majority of the country toward better, smarter, more compassionate government when the majority isn’t there yet? MoveOn often emphasizes elections, but that emphasis doesn’t make sense for issues that we know (at least for now) are box office losers. Do the same strategies for engagement still apply, or do we need to think differently about these kinds of issues?

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

(Because the conversation was formally off the record, Eli Pariser gave his permission to publish this blog post.)

I just made today’s 232,25th health reform call to Congress. Help us get to 200,000: http://bit.ly/1t6LPH #hc09 #CallCongress #OFA

The message gets people personally involved in feeling like they have helped to meet the goal personally and by encouraging friends to take action. It also takes full advantage of hash tags to push the topic into trending topics.

In class this week and next, we’re reading Groundswell, a book about business in an online world of social technologies. The book is a practical approach to taking advantage of the groundswell of people involved in online communities and spaces to shape a brand, improve customer service and public relations, and spread the word about a product or business. The framework has the potential to be immensely useful not just to businesses, but also to NGOs and government agencies.

The groundswell includes five types of people, say the authors: creators, critics, collectors, joiners, and spectators. One of the reasons the Obama campaign and now Organizing for America (OFA) have done so well is that they have targeted many different segments of the online population with appropriate messages for different types of people who are participating in the worldwide online conversation. The #CallCongress message was delivered through email, for the spectators who don’t regularly produce or critique content online but are members of listservs and discussion groups, and Twitter, for the joiners and creators who use it as an online network and platform for self-publishing.

The #CallCongress effort was so successful because it is a trusted, well-regarded brand, at least by the vast majority of those who follow Obama’s Twitter or receive OFA emails, that tapped into the groundswell: the roiling, tumultuous online collection of conversations and communities that was already tweeting, blogging, and reading about health care reform, and gave them a simple, concrete set of actions with which they could have an effect on the effort for health care reform.

The #CallCongress campaign is not the only area in which the executive branch is participating in the online space in completely new and interesting ways. In the State Department, Jared Cohen is the point person for social media and youth issues. He helped convince Twitter to delay maintenance in order to support the democratic process during the Iranian elections. In an interview with NPR, it is clear that Cohen recognizes the groundswell: he says that those who say that not many people around the world have access to these technologies are missing the significant upward trend in access:

So take a country like Pakistan, for instance: In 2001, Pakistan had 750,000 mobile phone subscriptions. By 2008, just seven years later, it had 78 million, which is an astronomical jump. In Afghanistan, today there’s 23 percent of the population with access to mobile phones; they say by 2011 it’s going to be close to 72 percent. So it’s not about how many people have access today, it’s about how many people have access tomorrow and a year from now. And so we have a unique opportunity to engage in that space while access is continuing to spread.

He recognizes that it is important for the State Department, and the US government more broadly, to understand the truth of its brand for people around the world and to engage in conversation and become a trusted voice in the online conversation. He adds:

We can recognize that nobody can control these technologies — bad people will continue to use them, but that’s all the more reason to engage in these spaces. And the other option is to…shy away from it. If you do that, it’s not going to stop them from using it. In fact, all it’s going to do is give them more of an opening without any effort to counter their narratives.

Like the State Department and Organizing for America, NGOs and governments need to start to figure out how to strategically position themselves in the important online communities and to help shape the ongoing conversations about their issues and their brands.

PBS’s Video Your Vote project recruited citizens to take video cameras to their polling places and upload the video of their voting experience to YouTube. PBS asked citizens to report on any problems with voting machines, access to polling places, voter intimidation, and registration, as well as interesting perspectives on the election and the voting process. What does this mean for the future of journalism in the age of digital media?

Obviously, there are a lot of questions on this subject and very few answers as we enter a period of relative anarchy in terms of journalism and media models. In one of our readings this week, Newspapers and Thinking The Unthinkable, Clay Shirky talks about the history of newspapers and printed media, and how the current model was not intentional and deliberate, but rather an experiment that turned out to be fortuitously effective for nigh on 500 years. I went to the Newseum recently, and my favorite exhibit was the one consisting of hundreds of years of newspapers and their predecessors along a long (long) hallway. It’s pretty cool to see the common narrative of society laid out like that, and it is a bit disappointing to think that there likely won’t be a similar sort of central channel of communication for the next 500 years.

On the other hand, the opportunities available to us now, at the cusp of this new media age, are exciting and innumerable. When every citizen is a journalist at some points in her or his life, the coverage of important news events will be more dynamic, compelling, textured, and told from a wider range of perspectives than when woven into one cohesive narrative by one writer or editor. All of the people on Video Your Vote got to tell pieces of their stories, and thereby gave us a story of their community. This part of the promise of the new media age is immensely appealing to me.

When news is curated by the establishment, so to speak, the danger is that it’s easy to represent a paucity of views, a small subset of the millions of perspectives that exist in the population as a whole. With the decentralization of the news, we can find out how all sorts of groups make sense of the world, unmediated by that establishment voice, which may have particular ways of interpreting their contributions that don’t reflect the group’s perspective in an authentic way.

This idea runs somewhat counter to the idea that the new journalism will require careful cultivation by a cadre of passionate news professionals. I get that editing, culling, and training is necessary to routinely generate high-quality journalism from amateurs, but I also think that an important aspect of the web is that there is no formal barrier to entry as in printed newspapers. Anyone can comment on On Faith on washingtonpost.com, even though very few letters to the editor will be printed in the non-digital paper in any given week. And the moments of web greatness are when comments or blog posts or YouTube videos go viral because they represent something important in the cultural zeitgeist, even if that contribution wasn’t recognized by a traditional professional editor or journalist.

I make no predictions about the specific future of journalism online, because many people (one of whom is my professor, Nicco Mele- whose website is definitely not dangerous, so ignore the year-old warning you may see) have written and spoken more and more intelligently on the subject than I, but I am intrigued and will watch with interest as it unfolds.

The first part is why blogging matters for us as individuals. Rosenberg argues that the web, and specifically blogging, is a tool for personal satisfaction on the individual level. My previous  blog about my experience studying abroad in Bolivia was definitely an instance of personal satisfaction from blogging, but it’s not just the satisfaction of putting thoughts to keyboard: it’s connecting with people.

My point here is to debunk the idea that communication online is not legitimate, “real” communication. Rosenberg’s thesis in the early part of the book is that the point of the web, and particularly the culture of the web that later developed into blogging, is about “opening a channel between yourself and the world,” as he quotes Jesse James Garrett as saying. Basically, blogging matters because it gives us another way to communicate with the other people on the web, who are, after all, real human beings too.

Lots of people like to talk about how the web shuts down “real” communication by pushing all human interaction online, but there’s nothing fake about finding someone who shares a passion or a problem and starting a conversation with them. As creators of niche blogs have often found, you can sometimes find a more genuine, passionate, informed, and supportive community on the web than you might be able to find in “real life” because of its constraints of time and space.

So the reason blogs offer an opportunity for personal satisfaction is that they enable communities and conversations. I am particularly interested right now in the role of nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations in these communities and conversations, and the role of the conversations in achieving the ongoing goals of the organizations. Part II is more on that.

Gross’s core insight, the one that now drives the entire search economy, is that the search term, as typed into a search box by an internet user, is inherently valuable – it can be priced.

This was a revolutionary idea, and it’s related to Chris Anderson’s core idea in Free, that of attention as a scarce commodity in the internet age. Gross figured out that you can make millions (or billions) of dollars with thousands or millions of transactions that net you a few cents each. The other important piece of Gross’s work with GoTo was a new business model where advertisers only paid when someone clicked through to their site, instead of paying for the basic advertising space, like you do in a newspaper or on TV. Gross realized that this model is significantly more accountable, and the accountability enables companies that might otherwise feel uncomfortable venturing into web advertising to do so, because if no one clicks, they haven’t lost anything.

So GoTo.com (which eventually became Overture) had a viable business model before Google ever did, partly because Larry Page and Sergey Brin were originally loath to mix organic search results and paid advertising.

Google eventually warmed to the idea, though, and created AdWords, which is at the core of its business model to this day. After that, AOL decided to use Google instead of Overture for its paid search results, which meant Overture lost a $50 million deal. That was the beginning of the end for Overture, which was sold to Yahoo soon thereafter. Today, Google pretty much gets the credit for pioneering the new business model. But Bill Gross is still inventing away, and after reading this chapter, I wouldn’t be surprised if another one of his creations changes the way we think about the internet yet again.

Anyway, the point of the Database of Intentions (Battelle points out, and I should too, that this isn’t a real thing- just a concept he named) is that the subset of the entire world’s population that’s on the internet is making the decisions for you. This was the revolution of Google: from search engines that made decisions about information to engines that used the decisions that people made to provide search results. Given this history, Bing seems to me like a step back at a time when the rest of the internet is hurtling forward.

(p.s. Thank you, WordPress, for saving this post automatically so that I didn’t lose anything when the computer I was working on suddenly shut down several minutes ago.)

Google logo, by Mark Knol

So: in DPI-659 this week and next, we’re reading John Battelle’s The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. We’re reading and thinking about the way search is designed, the way Google has designed its business, and – eventually – the impacts of all this on media, communication, networking, and politics.  Notice too, though, that we’re not just talking about Google: this is also about all those other companies that have completely reshaped how we think about making money and interacting with people in the internet age.

Battelle coined the term “Database of Intentions” to talk about the basic revolution in search: from a simple algorithm based on indexing of the text of websites to the massively complicated endeavor it is today. We  contribute to the Database of Intentions every single time we use a service like Google. It can follow our clicks and see how we think about how we communicate. The classic example is “white house,” and Google has found that when most people type “white house” into a search engine, they’re looking for the executive branch of the US federal government. The aggregate of all of these searches and click patterns, Battelle explains, is this thing called the Database of Intentions that says a whole lot about who we are and what we look for when we use the internet- and especially search. It’s the sum of information that resides in a bunch of different places- Battelle highlights AOL, Google, MSN, and Yahoo as partial holders of all this data. It’s a thing that’s rife for abuse, but also for appropriate use to connect people with the information, services, and products they want, and that’s what Google has done.

It took a long time for anybody to stumble upon search as any kind of business model, much less a standalone workable one, and if you want to understand the journey from the early days of the internet to the revolutions of PageRank and AdWords (one of my cousins is an AdWords person at Google) and the dominance of Google in search, I recommend reading chapters 1-6 of The Search or coming to the Kennedy School to sit in on “Media, Politics, and Power in the Digital Age.”

As I was reading, I kept returning to the ideas Chris Anderson presents in Free (free Free audiobook here) and The Long Tail, about the scarcity of attention in the new online space and the sustainability of small businesses in niche markets targeting customers with significant specificity (explanation and graphic from Anderson here). Battelle talks about Google’s business plan in terms of “making billions a penny at a time,” and this is at the core of the idea of the long tail. There is clearly significant exchange of ideas here: in fact, Battelle co-founded Wired Magazine, where Anderson is the current editor-in-chief, although their tenures were years apart, and Battelle interviewed Anderson a few years ago at something called ecomXpo.

Google has been the beneficiary of the Google halo, which partly arose from its motto, “Don’t be evil” (quietly dropped in April of this year) but as Battelle points out, it’s a lot more difficult to draw the lines of evil when you’re a multibillion dollar international corporation making difficult decisions about working with the Chinese government to provide search to the world’s largest country. And, of course, the security concerns of the US government, codified in the Patriot Act, run right into the implicit trust Battelle correctly notes we place in companies with which we store our data and do our searching. So there are policy issues to be considered from many directions as we think about the future of new media and power in the internet age.

There’s lots more food for thought in the first six chapters of the book, particularly regarding Google’s approach to building its business, which has some interesting correlation to the 7S structure of organizations.