A few thoughts on social change movement HR strategy

Posted on 7/19/2011 by Jon Stahl

Social change work is hard, long term work.

Like most hard work, it takes a lot of practice to get really good at it. Malcolm Gladwell in “Outliers” claims that it takes about 10,000 hours (10 years) of practice to really master something. I don’t see why social change organizing/campaigning should really be any different.

People who have the skills to be outstanding social change activists have lots of choices and opportunities in their professional life–they have the leadership, analysis and “getting things done” skills to be valuable in many fields.

So, given these realities, are social change movements structuring themselves to attract highly skilled potential superstars and to retain them for the 10 years it takes to attain mastery… and beyond, into the most highly productive years that follow?

In my anecdotal experience, not so much. To me, the sector looks like its strategy is more “burn and churn.” Get ‘em in while they’re young, pay ‘em as little as possible, and work ‘em hard for 3-5 years until they burn out. Minimal investment in tactical skills, strategic thinking or leadership skills. The survivors become the next generation of leaders.

In a world where it’s organized people vs. organized money, why aren’t we doing a better job of investing in our people?

Update: Some great discussion on this post over at Google+.

What is effective environmental organizing?

Posted on 4/29/2011 by Jon Stahl

We’ve been talking a bit internally at Groundwire here about how to define effective social change organizing. Here’s what we have so far:

Effective social change organizing creates relationships in order to build measurable power and wields that power to achieve specific, significant behavioral, policy or political outcomes.

How does that work for you?

We like that it is succinct and clearly connects relationships, power and tangible outcomes. But it also raises questions of what we might mean by “measurable power” and “specific, significant outcomes.”

Any organizing campaign or organizer will need to figure out what measures of power are most meaningful for their context, but in general, we think that power is most often measurable in terms of “I can motivate X people to take action Y, which results in Z.”

“Specific and significant” outcomes will also vary greatly across campaigns, but again, we want to emphasize how important it is to be able to articulate these outcomes in specific and measurable terms. Some examples could include:

Winning an election
Passing legislation or administrative policies
Measure shifts in public opinion or behavior

If your “big hairy audacious” goal will take years to achieve, that’s OK, but you need to be able to define some specific shorter-term outcomes to let you know whether you’re on track.

Paul Loeb on Greg Mortensen and the fetishization of “innovation”

Posted on 4/27/2011 by Jon Stahl

Paul Loeb has just published a nice, thoughtful piece about the Greg Mortensen affair. I particularly liked the following couple of ‘grafs, because they remind us that our fascination with Mortensen is part of a larger, unhealthy dynamic in which we fetishize “innovation” and “heroes” while ignoring systems approaches and long-term experience.

The arc of Mortenson’s fame also reminds me how much our culture enshrines lone entrepreneurs as the ultimate change agents, while displaying a commensurate disdain for those who’ve long worked in the trenches. We see this in international development, where businesspeople or celebrities receive massive publicity for their glamorous new projects, while groups like Oxfam or CARE that work year after year in local communities are left invisible in the shadows, or presented as dull, bureaucratic, and retrograde in comparison. We see the same thing with America’s educational debates, where those who talk glibly of solving poverty and inequality with the instant solutions of high stakes testing, charter schools, or eliminating the long-held rights of teachers receive massive attention, while the experiences of those who’ve actually spent 20 or 30 years in the classrooms are disdained and ignored.

Sometimes fresh approaches can shake things up, and Mortenson’s focus on getting Pakistani and Afghan girls enrolled in school may well be one of those transformative ideas. But his books still feed the narrative that the best way to make change is to ignore pretty much anything that anyone else has been doing all along, and to charge ahead with your own Lone Ranger initiatives.

On Buildings, Balance and Advocacy Campaigns

Posted on 10/4/2010 by Jon Stahl

My wife Molly works for a big-time international multidisciplinary buildings engineering firm. Over the dinner table, I’ve learned a bit about how big buildings get designed and built. Another frequent topic of dinner conversation in my house is the myriad challenges of designing and running truly effective environmental advocacy campaigns. The other day, I had one of those “aha!” moments.

Buildings are really complicated. They can’t be designed and built by just one person, or by a team of people with only one set of skills. For example, on Molly’s current project, there’s a mechanical engineering team (they figure out the heating and air conditioning), an electrical engineering team (the do the lighting and electricity), and a structural engineering team (they make sure the building doesn’t fall down). And that’s just the engineers! There are also multiple teams on the construction side, the data center designers, and more. Playing the role of designer & project manager are of course the architects.

Each of these disciplines sees the world very differently. Each of them have different expertise, and each brings important knowledge and skills to the project. Failure to incorporate any of these disciplines’ perspective would almost certainly lead to a failed project — a building that is too hot or too cold, doesn’t have reliable power, falls down, is ugly, doesn’t have the functions the owner needs, or goes wildly over cost.

As you might expect, these different teams often have wants and needs that conflict with the other teams. The most beautiful building design might be impossible to cost-effectively heat or cool. Electrical and mechanical teams can tussle over limited space in the service spaces. Structural wants bigger, heavier beams while the project owner wants to keep cost down.

All of these differences of opinion have to be worked out, typically through ongoing “coordination” meetings. In the best cases, potential conflicts are identified early in the process, before too much time and energy has been spent. But since building design is always an iterative process, coordination is a continuous process, and as the building design evolves, it can become more and more stressful and high-stakes.

Let’s talk about advocacy campaigns. As you may be starting to suspect, I think there are some parallels. Advocacy campaigns are often big, complex, multi-year endeavors. They have a clear goal, but the process can be very messy and filled with unexpected twists and turns. Successful advocacy campaigns will involve people with many different forms of expertise: strategists, lobbyists, field organizers, communications, technology, policy experts, attorneys, fundraisers. Each of these disciplines sees the world very differently, and advocates for different values.

So far, lots of parallels to that big building project, right? But when I look around at the leadership circle of most of the advocacy campaigns I’ve been familiar with over the years, I don’t see that diversity of disciplines represented. Mainly I tend to see lobbyists and/or policy experts. Strategy, field organizing, communications, technology, or development are rarely represented at the leadership table, and if they are, they’re typically represented by junior staff who are lack status and power with respect to more senior lobbyists/policy experts.

Over time, this results in unbalanced campaigns, where critical expertise from all of the relevant disciplines is dominated by one or two limited perspectives. Such campaigns may experience short-run success, but they quickly run into the limitations of their narrow leadership perspective.

Worse, I see a disturbing pattern wherein certain of these disciplines (e.g. communications, field organizing) are long-term under-resourced, which results in these disciplines never developing senior staff-level expertise, which makes it all the harder for these disciplines to credibly represent themselves and be taken seriously at the leadership table. This further deepens the vicious cycle of unbalancing.

Have you been a part of an “unbalanced” campaign? What was it like? How do we create more balanced campaigns?

9 changes towards transformation

Posted on 1/28/2010 by Jon Stahl

I’ve been thinking a bunch about the challenges of making cultural transformation in the organizations I work with here at Groundwire. It’s a tough challenge. The first step, it seems, is about naming the changes we want to help folks make.

Here are some rough notes that popped out as I was gathering my thoughts for a meeting. I’d love to know what thoughts they provoke for you.

From –> To

Broadcast –> Dialogue
Formal –> Conversational
Organizational voice –> Personal voice
Goals –> Values
Centralized communications –> Distributed through many channels
Intuitive decisions –> Data driven decisions
Master planned –> Continual refinement toward clear big picture goals
Set the agenda –> Respond to what’s hot that fits your goals & values
Always the center of collaborations –> Partner more, and more informally

Alternative Gift Registry

Posted on 1/24/2010 by Jon Stahl

Center for a New American Dream has a nicely done “Alternative Gift Registry” tool (currently the #4 Google result for “gift registry”!) that allows you to create gift registries that de-emphasize consumerism (used goods, donations to charity, experiences rather than stuff, etc.). This is a great example of a nonprofit advocacy group coming up with a valuable public-facing service that is grounded in its mission and expertise to bring people into the circle of engagement.

Transformation, not technology

Posted on 1/12/2010 by Jon Stahl

It occurred to me yesterday that the real challenge we[1] face is not the question of “how do we apply technology tools to organizations?” but more “how do we help organizations & people transform themselves so that they are more able to harness the power of technology?”

[1] “we” = those of us standing astride the worlds of technology and social change.

Stories of Now

Posted on 9/30/2009 by Jon Stahl

From Marshall Ganz’s lectures on organizing:

Stories of “now” articulate a challenge we face now, the choice we are called upon to make, and the meaning of “making the right choice”, in particular the hope that may be there. Stories of “now” are really stories set in the past, present and future. The challenge is now; we are called upon to act now because of who we have become, a legacy of the past; and the action that we take can shape a desired future. These are stories in which we are the protagonists. We face a crisis, a challenge. It’s our choice to make. And, if it is a story of hope, there’s hope if we make the right choice. It’s not a sure thing, but there’s hope… and it’s the right thing to do. The story teller among us whom we have authorized to “narrativize” this moment finds a way to articulate the crisis as a choice, reminds us of our moral resources (our stories, stories of our family, our community, our culture, our faith), and offers a hopeful vision we can share as we take our first steps on the journey.

We report, you decide

Posted on 7/11/2009 by Jon Stahl

Brilliant manifesto, or reheated marketing pap? (David Eaves says the former, I’m less sure.)

What’s your take?

Obama starts a grassroots lobbying group via DNC

Posted on 1/18/2009 by Jon Stahl

It will be very, very interesting to see how Obama’s new “Organizing For America” effort, run through the DNC, plays out.

The new group, called Organizing for America, will be a “special project” of the Democratic National Committee, according to Obama transition spokesman Ben LaBolt, and it appears to be the primary vehicle for issue advocacy for Obama’s agenda. It will also be the keeper of Obama’s e-mail list, which has 13 million addresses.

The DNC has not exactly been a hotbed of authentic grassroots organizing, but perhaps Obama can transform it.

In addition, I wonder whether this new effort will push independent progressive groups like MoveOn to the sidelines or starve them for resources/attention.

“Chaotic, cacophonous, well meaning efforts that will inevitably add up to nothing”

Posted on 11/27/2008 by Jon Stahl

Allison Fine throws some common sense on the fire in assessing post-election “crowdsourcing change” efforts. I’m going to shamelessly quote it at length because the message is worth amplifying and repeating.

Oh, the sacrilege of criticizing well meaning crowd sourcing!! Shouldn’t citizens be allowed, nay encouraged!, to throw do-goody ideas against the wall so that we can then all vote on them and then . . . and then . .. well, somebody should do something, right? These well-meaning, misguided efforts have fallen into two categories: 1. The Confusion of Service Category. The discussion of using a Craigslist approach to scaling up service, as my friend Nancy Scola outlines rightly points out is not very helpful if it’s just more of the same. The notions of increasing voluntary, community service as the solution to government not working right needs to end. I have written about this morphing of public and private service before, most recently here and the basic premise of my argument still holds. Americans have increasingly been volunteering (particularly young people who are required to do so in school and are continuing to do so beyond school), the number of nonprofits has exploded in the past twenty years and yet problems abound. That is because the size of government far overshadows the size of volunteer efforts in terms of resources. Peter Levine compared philanthropic dollars to government dollars for Katrina repair and you will see the difference, $6.5 billion in private philanthropic dollars, nothing to sneeze at, but compared to $120.5 billion in government aid. So, more volunteer databases are not what we need to strengthen the civic infrastructure of the country and overhaul our government. 2. The second category are the idea generating sites that are automatically set up as an “us vs. them” paradigm to help the Obama administration “set priorities”. Ah, yes, we are going to tell you what we think you should do — as if we haven’t just had that conversation over an exhausting marathon of an election — and then we’re going to hold your feet to the fire by stomping our feet and holding our breath until you do. Or just as bad, we, the Obama campaign, are going to “listen” to you as you fill out a survey (oy!) and then we’ll . . . well, we’ll say that we listened to you.

What’s the alternative, then?

This election was about transforming government, not just encouraging people to volunteer more. (Oh, and btw, I don’t buy the idea that because Obama has a large mailing list its the same as a constituency, it’s a mailng list of people who were involved, not a list of people who have signed up for the next phase of the journey – big, big difference that campaigns and nonprofits need to understand much better.) So, here’s my plan of action: 1. The focus has to be on changing government to include citizen participation. [...] The advocacy models of the 1960s were created to protests against government; we need a new model of advocacy that helps us to participate in government. So, the question changes from, “What do we want government to do?” to “How are we going to participate in running our government.” 2. Continue the training. One of the most successful elements of the Obama campaign was training local organizers. Now we need to educate and train people on what government does. [...] We should set a date of say, January 3rd and 4th and use Meetup.com to get everyone go to your local library for a seminar on the fundamentals of government; local, state and federal. How does it work, what does it do, how can we participate? 3. Start local today. One of the dangers of the “throw an idea up against the wall” strategy is that the ideas tend to be too big (“alleviate global poverty”) and too hard for individuals to participate in tackling [...] Let’s make a national to-do list for transforming local government, someplace where we really can make a huge difference right now, today, if we show up and participate. Steve Clift gets us started here. Run for office, go to planning board meetings, ask your town supervisor to start blogging and post the budget online (and keep it updated in real-time!), promote local businesses, revamp the outdated recycling program.

Hat tip to Marnie for flagging this.

Low-transaction-cost organizing

Posted on 6/20/2008 by Jon Stahl

The always-insightful Mark Schmitt has some interesting thoughts on the significance of internet-enabled low-transaction-cost issue organizing:

Low transaction-cost organizing will present many challenges to the way we think about politics and how to regulate it. Much of the regulation of money in politics, for example, is based on limiting organized money (PACs, bundling) because some people can organize and others can’t. Instead, perhaps, it should seek to encourage greater organizing, reduce the transaction costs even further. And, of course, even with low transaction costs, real political equality is impossible — and perhaps we will even come full circle, where everyone can organize and be heard, and then once again the only ones who matter will be the ones who bring the really big cash. But for now, it’s all an improvement, just as it’s an improvement to be able to find infinitely new ways to find status and satisfaction.

Scenius — Environments that nurture collective genius

Posted on 6/19/2008 by Jon Stahl

Kevin Kelley rolls a great little neologism, “Scenius”:

Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes. Brian Eno suggested the word to convey the extreme creativity that groups, places or “scenes” can occasionally generate. His actual definition is: “Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.” Individuals immersed in a productive scenius will blossom and produce their best work. When buoyed by scenius, you act like genius. Your like-minded peers, and the entire environment inspire you. The geography of scenius is nurtured by several factors:

Mutual appreciation — Risky moves are applauded by the group, subtlety is appreciated, and friendly competition goads the shy. Scenius can be thought of as the best of peer pressure.

Rapid exchange of tools and techniques — As soon as something is invented, it is flaunted and then shared. Ideas flow quickly because they are flowing inside a common language and sensibility.

Network effects of success — When a record is broken, a hit happens, or breakthrough erupts, the success is claimed by the entire scene. This empowers the scene to further success.

Local tolerance for the novelties — The local “outside” does not push back too hard against the transgressions of the scene. The renegades and mavericks are protected by this buffer zone.

Scenius can erupt almost anywhere, and at different scales: in a corner of a company, in a neighborhood, or in an entire region.

A nice concept.Â And an elegant way to describe what a healthy organization and/or open-source community should look like.

Update: Alex Steffen weighs in with a great riff connecting the unpredictable nature of scenius with the ongoing stream of failed efforts to catalyze it philanthropically:

Worse yet is the trend towards half-assed citizen media and social networking approaches, projects based on the insane assumption that all that’s needed to court collaborative creativity is a website and a good advertising campaign. This tendency to think that innovative collaboration comes free of cost, bubbling up out the Internet like spring water, betrays a poor understanding of the actual workings of either online collaboration or quality thinking. Most often, when these open/ citizen-media/ online-collaborative approaches work, it’s because a core group in the project provides most of the important input, and usually curates most of the other participants’ input into useful forms. So, frequently, funders’ hopes that they can create transformation on the cheap actually just create a system that appears cheap because it externalizes the cost of expert participation onto the shoulders of others… and when their enthusiasm lags (or they need to get day jobs), the project falters or dies. The examples of failed peer-based social innovation efforts outnumber the successful cases by orders of magnitude.

Happy May Day!

Posted on 5/1/2008 by Jon Stahl

Zephyr Teachout waxes eloquent about May Day:

May Day is not about people in the streets. I like streets as much as the next person, but streets, like the internet, are only tools–in 1890 they were powerful tools, and the right tools to use, but if you confuse the image with the action, you can spend years in the streets (or on the internet) and never get anything done. May Day was an actual expression of power that was being wielded to allow people to control their own lives. And May Day is not about an ideology, unless that ideology is democracy.

Hat tip to Michael Gilbert.

Liveblogging “Political Campaigns and Technology”

Posted on 3/19/2008 by Jon Stahl

[18:00] I’m liveblogging from the event ONE/Northwest is hosting tonight, titled “Political Campaigns and Technology.” We’ve got about 50 people in our office here in Seattle, gathered together for a fast-paced peer-to-peer learning session in which we’re going to explore the various ways that political campaigns are using technology to build and sustain relationships, and what nonprofit activist organizations can learn from the fast-paced world of political campaigns.

Gideon Rosenblatt — ONE/Northwest Executive Director

Gideon is welcoming people, explaining the concept, how it relates to our work. We’ll have three speakers, followed by some group discussion and general socializing.

Karen Uffelman — ONE/Northwest Program Manager

Questions to audience:

In the last 12 months, how many have seen a candidate website? Lots
How many have been contacted by a candidate? Lots
How many have taken action on behalf of a candidate? Lots
How many would have 4 years ago? Lots (!)

[18:05] Karen: dramatic changes in how candidates are using technology. Karen posed several discussion questions for people to consider in small groups, which they are now doing…

[18:10] Report outs:

Group one:

What’s the most innovative use of interactive media you’ve seen this campaign season?

Viral videos used to hold candidates accountable for what they’re saying

Group two:

Have candidates lost control of their message because of new media?

Yes, but some campaigns have done a better job than others at using new media to get their messages out there. The technology itself is beginning to shape how candidates present themselves and their communications style. Think that Obama is less concerned with controlling events, more focused on explaining things as they occur. George Allen’s “macaca” video is an extreme example of loss of control. Control models are going to work less and les in the future.

Group three:

Have candidates lost control of their message because of new media?

You can’t control what people say about you online. The blogosphere has some tendency towards self-correction, though. Retractions and debunkings can happen very quickly.

Most innovative use of interactive media?

Email from Obama campaign: you’ve donated before, would you like to match a first-time donor? Can send personal message to the first-time donor, and they can respond to you. Very gratifying way to make a small personal connection with a fellow supporter.

Group four:

We talked mostly about the “relentlessness” of the Obama campaign’s online organizing work this year. In 2004, seemed more episodic than continuous. Lots more use of video from candidates; e.g. video of Obama on his donation page. Very slick.

Group five:

We talked about some of the tools we’ve seen on Facebook and their longer-term potential. How social networking has been used as a fundraising tool, ability to raise money very quickly. Rapid response of Ron Paul campaign around specific issues. Blast updates vs. segmentation.

Group six:

Increased turnout of youth vote during primary cycle. Challenge ahead is how to translate election excitement downballot and to ongoing long term issues. How can we get people to care about the fights that follow. League of Young Voters Facebook application attempts to find people through the campaign opportunity, get a sense of issue priorities as well.

Group seven:

Unexpectedly viral things. Change in tone of campaign emails from “donate now” to fake(?) insider emails. New phonebanking tools. Washington Trails’ experience creating a small Facebook application.

[18:25] Three Speakers

Brett Horvath – Your Revolution

A new nonpartisan nonprofit.

Show of hands: who has a Facebook account? (Many) Who actively uses it? (Few)

Your Revolution: building a Facebook app focused on voter registration. Hope to scale up voter registration efforts by leveraging the reach of the Facebook platform.

What differentiates Facebook from other social networking platforms: Facebook is a “social utility” that allows people to actively do things. Some stats about rapid growth of Facebook.

Massive protest in Colombia, organized via Facebook. Something different is going on here that’s not going on elsewhere.

Big difference between a website and a web presence. Facebook gives you access to lots of people who are already nearby and comfortable consuming information there.

Obama online: my.barackobama.com — allows users to self-organize, plan events, build groups. Houe parties, fundraisers, phonebanking etc. All outside of the control of the campaign.

Quick rundown of Your Revolution features:

Register to vote from within Facebook
Tell you which of your friends are registered to vote
Send a reminder/invite to your friends to get them to register to vote — peer pressure!
Ask about issue interests during process
Connect you with groups that are working on what you’re interested in.

Your Revolution gives nonprofits some collaboration and project management tools for their constituents.

Working with students to bring online voter registration to states around the nation (!) (Now: WA and AZ are the only two states that allow it, but Rock The Vote has technology for generating paper forms online.)

Questions for Brett:

Q: What kinds of privacy safeguards are there? How exposed is your personal information?

A: You can control how much info people see on Facebook. Your Revolution doesn’t keep or use any data from FB.

Q: Is hard to get off of Facebook?

A: Actually, yes. Hard to fully delete all of your profile information. This is generally pretty true of anything you put on the internet these days.

Q: How do you prevent voter reg. fraud?

A: Require valid drivers license info, which is verified by Secretary of State.

[18:50] George Chung – Win/Win Network

How Democratic Party technology has trickled down to interest groups.

An example: anti-immigrant ballot measures in Washington in recent years. Hard to defeat hot-button ballot initiatives like this. Insight: find all the people who voted against a previous anti-affirmative action initiative. Problem: it was virtually impossible to find, and we had to start from scratch. A “learning moment.” Each campaign should build long-term organizing capacity, win or lose.

Democratic political campaigns have consolidated their voter file databases and interfaces. Catalist, Voter Activation Network are two companies that were started by major Democratic party donors to consolidate disparate voter file, demographic and consumer data and then provide sophisticated applications built on top of that, e.g. phonebanking systems with real-time feedback. Trickling down to state parties and the precinct captain level.

Campaigns don’t end when the election is over. Then we go to elected officials and push for policy change. More thinking about cycles of accountability. Elections are means to policy ends.

Win/Win Network – started by Washington Progress Alliance. Goal is to defragment progressive issue communities at the state level so that we can work more powerfully together. Shared services, e.g. voter mobilization tools from Catalist/VAN.

[19:00]

Q: Doesn’t sharing of names among organizations like this pretty much amount to spamming people without their permission and run the risk of inundating people?

A: Learning from the work the environmental community has done here, how to get the word out without violating permission. We don’t actually share emails among groups.

[19:15] Steve Andersen – ONE/Northwest

I work on CRM systems for environmental groups. Constituent Relationship Management. Technologies and techniques for helping organizations develop relationships with their supporters. Companies use CRM to sell stuff. Nonprofits use it to build power. We use Salesforce.com as our main CRM tool; it’s not nonprofit-specific… it’s used by businesses, political campaigns, and nonprofits.

Four very quick demonstrations of how political campaigns use CRM.

1) Raising money…

… and reporting on that fundraising. A core component of any CRM system, but also one of the least interesting. Moving on…

2) Managing speaking opportunities

Candidates need to keep track of where they and their surrogates are going to appear, from a huge field of opportunities and possibilities. Nonprofit activists have the same problem. We’re currently working with Van Jones of the Ella Baker Center on a system for managing hundreds of speaking requests per month.

3) Influencing key decision makers

e.g. Superdelegates and precinct leaders. (Or, after the election, running issue campaigns for nonprofits). Quick demonstration of a system we built for Futurewise to track their success at influencing regulatory decisions around land-use. The same model can also be used to track efforts to secure endorsements for a candidate. Track decision makers, people & organizations who influence those decision-makers, whether they support or oppose us. Campaigns to our members who relate to that decisionmaker. Share all of this data with the campaign team.

4) Media tracking

How to keep track of all the blogs, viral video and online news coverage that campaigns are getting? Can’t just follow three networks and a few newspapers anymore. Quick demo of a media tracking tool we built for Futurewise. Media clips are connected to decision campaigns (above). Simple bookmarklets make it fast and easy to save items that you find in your web surfing.

“We haven’t had the need to clip YouTube videos for very long.”

Salesforce lets us build little tools like this really quickly. Took us about an hour to be able to clip & watch YouTube inside of YouTube.com.

[19:25] Questions

Q: Can you spit back out stuff that you capture?

A: We can get stuff back out through Salesfore’s APIs and show it via a website to the public, or pull it into an email message.

Q: Can data be linked to projects?Â Groups of people that might take action?

A: In principle, yes.

Q: How do you assess if an organization is ready for powerful new tools like this?

A: It’s hard.Â

[19:30] Gideon Rosenblatt – Thanks, Closing and General Hanging Out Time

These are the facets of a new kind of democratic process emerging.Â It’s all about putting power back into the hands of self-organizing groups of people.

With that, your loyal liveblogger went off to get a well-deserved beer.

Is the Tipping Point Bullshit?

Posted on 1/26/2008 by Jon Stahl

New research suggests the Malcom Gladwell-popularized theory of “Influentials” (or Gatekeepers) doesn’t hold water. Really interesting article in FastCompany about research Duncan Watts:

Watts, for one, didn’t think the gatekeeper model was true. It certainly didn’t match what he’d found studying networks. So he decided to test it in the real world by remounting the Milgram experiment on a massive scale. In 2001, Watts used a Web site to recruit about 61,000 people, then asked them to ferry messages to 18 targets worldwide. Sure enough, he found that Milgram was right: The average length of the chain was roughly six links. But when he examined these pathways, he found that “hubs”–highly connected people–weren’t crucial. Sure, they existed. But only 5% of the email messages passed through one of these superconnectors. The rest of the messages moved through society in much more democratic paths, zipping from one weakly connected individual to another, until they arrived at the target. Why did Milgram get it wrong? Watts thinks it’s simply because his sample was so small–only a few dozen letters reached their mark. The dominance of the three friends could have been a statistical accident. “And since Milgram’s finding sort of made sense, nobody even bothered to redo the experiment,” Watts shrugs. But when you perform the experiment with hundreds of successfully completed letters, a different picture emerges: Influentials don’t govern person-to-person communication. We all do.

There’s a really interesting bit about how they experimented with ForwardTrack, which makes viral forwarding activity transparent to the users. It massively increased pass-along traffic. I really want to start working this into more online activism work.

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