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February 22, 2007
Posted by Andrew Hoppin
Back in August, when I started investigating it for the first time, I
wrote about Second Life, the (for now) runaway winner in an emerging niche of online 3-D virtual worlds that are not (according to their publishers) games. It's high time for an update on what I've discovered in the six months since.
Second Life's greatest utility, to me, is that it better mimics the experience of being offline in the same room together than any other online medium... The experience of interacting there is vastly more social and immersive than, say, an online blogging community. High trust relationships are built quickly.... Therefore, I think it is destined to become an important new platform for online organizing / community building / social networking.
Think Meetup, except that you don't need 40 people to be in the same place on the planet to have an effective Meetup. Therefore a niche group-- let's say "Doctors for Tax Justice" can achieve critical mass to "meet" and form an action-oriented community for readily than if they needed 40 Doctors For Tax Justice in San Francisco. In this vein, we run RootsCamp in Second Life every week.
Think of a conference like YearlyKos in Chicago this summer, in which ~1000 people will attend in person, but which we expect to sell out early... People who can't afford the time or the money to attend in Chicago, or who miss getting registered before we hit capacity, will be able to attend a concurrent "mixed-reality" YearlyKos conference that we will be running in Second Life, complete with Second-Life-only panels that we have insufficient space for in Chicago, streaming of the Chicago panels and keynotes, etc.
Think of a political campaign with staff around the country who need to trust each other and work closely together every day-- Cisco, IBM and many other Fortune 500 companies have already found that Second Life meeting environments can help their distributed teams work together-- and in some cases work directly with their clients-- more effectively than a combination of email, telephone, video conferencing, and airplanes for face to face meetings. That's why these companies are investing millions of dollars in researching and testing virtual worlds. We recently brought NASA into Second Life for the same reason.
Second Life is also a rich medium for content creation that can be "surfaced" to the Web for broader exposure... ~200 people participated in an anti-war "virtual march on virtual capital hill" that we organized between CodePink and RootsCamp in Second Life recently, and one of our volunteers made a video of the event that went mildly viral with over 50,000 views... The cost of creating it was $0.
Clearly Second Life is not a panacea for online organizing, and there is a great deal of hype... User base growth statistics of 30% per month and >$1 Million transacted between Second Life users every day are somewhat misleading, though the growth rate is torrid nonetheless. To hear Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus and the Chairman of Linden Lab (the company behind Second Life) tell it, Second Life "promises to be disruptive… comparable to both the PC and the internet itself, which started as something “quirky” for geeks, and then entered and transformed mainstream society. Ultimately, Second Life will displace both desktop computing and other two-dimensional user interfaces. As a hothouse of innovation and experiment, Second Life may even accelerate the social evolution of humanity.”
Hype or not (and I'm actually not at all certain that it is- Mitch is smarter than I am), I do think we're seeing the early stages of a massive trend towards extensive use of immersive 3-D online environments as a primary medium for online social and professional online interaction with each other and with data that can be represented visually. There is already great utility for me and communities I am helping to build in the context of RootsCamp, NASA, and YearlyKos in Second Life, and I think it likely that the utility I experience today will prove to be just the tip of the iceberg, as Second Life's technology improves and as its user base grows.
Comments (3)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Online community | Tools | connections | e-Government | e-Politics | e-activism | e-campaigning
January 12, 2007
Posted by Rolf Kleef
The folks behind MoveOn and GetUp have been working for a while on a global equivalent for "rapid response" citizen mobilisation, and Bush's move to deploy more troops in Iraq spurred them to launch a few weeks earlier than planned. So now we have Avaaz.org, "the world in action", and the chance to sign a petition that will run as an ad in US papers asking the US Congress to block further escalation in Iraq.
I'm sure we'll see a quick expansion of Avaaz into more languages and countries, with hopefully soon a new way for millions of people to express their concerns and put pressure on decision makers at key moments. Avaaz will become a new voice on global issues such as climate change and peace and conflict in the Middle East.
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: e-activism
November 27, 2006
Posted by Rob Cottingham
When I worked in a Member of Parliament's office back in the early 1990s, our office – like those of our colleagues – was inundated with an unending stream of petitions, pre-printed form letters, faxes and actual mail. Sifting through it all took up a huge amount of time (and incurred more than a little staff resentment).
These communications varied wildly in impact. We often took the effort required by a particular medium as a rough proxy for the level of sender's depth of feeling and commitment. A personally written letter, for instance, carried a lot more weight than a lowly mass-printed postcard, which was maybe a little more significant than a petition.
And if a tangible, paper-based petition is unlikely to soften the flinty hearts in the corridors of power, you can how much hope their electronic kin have. Point-and-click protest is so easy to do – and for that reason, just as easy to ignore in the face of so many competing demands for attention.
So my heart usually sinks whenever I receive yet another appeal to go sign yet another e-petition. With a very few exceptions (such as the petition to change Canadian Alliance Leader Stockwell Day's first name to "Doris" in 2000), and despite the hopes of their sponsors, they almost always wrap up without making a dent in public policy.
But now British Prime Minister Tony Blair seems interested in rescuing the lowly e-petition from irrelevance. Earlier this month, his office launched a remarkable experiment with online petitions.
There isn't really any technical innovation here, but the idea of housing a petition-hosting service within the walls of government is intriguing. It lends respectability to what has usually been an outsider's tool, and there are great touches – like the neat little link to see which petitions have been rejected and why, a small but useful way of helping people do their lobbying more effectively. (The site's staff take that a step further, offering suggestions for ways of making a petition more acceptable.)
With public feelings of efficacy and levels of political engagement so low, it could well be that part of the answer is to lure people back to the civic arena with the easiest possible means of speaking out. And petitions have such a long and honorable history that is would be nice to see some new life for them. Whether the government is trying to co-opt e-petitions or make them more meaningful, responsiveness will probably be the key to whether this initiative succeeds or fails (even if those responses are often a considered, respectful and well-explained "no").
Still, I can't help but wish there was more. It's easy to dismiss even large petitions if you can convince yourself that the signatories wouldn't be voting for you anyway.
So suppose, for example, you could tag your signature with your party affiliation, your broad political philosophy, your stands on other key issues or your occupation. (Listing your occupation as "One of your cabinet ministers" would be a pretty clear warning flag, for instance.) Petition organizers would be highly motivated to start building broader coalitions, starting conversations across traditional political, cultural and social divisions. You could even start generating a little social capital.
Petitions would still be the easiest (some would say laziest) way of speaking out. But breadth of support could lend them some serious clout, as legislators and party strategists discover that the supporters they're counting on in the next election want them to change course now. And if that leads citizens to take on heftier forms of political action, they'll be even harder to ignore.
Even for jaded, overworked political staffers.
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: e-Government | e-activism | e-campaigning
November 19, 2006
Posted by Rolf Kleef
No more debates about the best online tools for letter-writing campaigns, please, cut out the man in the middle, and stop worrying about how to deal with thousands of supporters hammering your site to participate. Head over to WorldCoolers.org to see how it can be done. Better.
...continue reading.
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: e-activism
June 24, 2006
Posted by Rolf Kleef
Res Publica wants to start a "global MoveOn" (the shortest way of describing it to those "in the know"), trying to create a transnational movement around global issues: Global public opinion has been called the world’s “Second Superpower”, but a yawning gap persists between the views and values of the world’s peoples and the policies that govern them. .
They're recruiting for an ambitious team of 20 full-time staff in 6 countries. Their business plan speaks of possible campaigns like "peace talks in Iraq", the upcoming charter review for the BBC, and getting a "people's Secretary General" to support a candidate for UN top post after Kofi Annan leaves. They hope to get around 10% of an estimated 50 million available e-activists in the next 5 years.
I am curious to see how this will work, especially with the focus on short-lived issues. The global civil society organisations usually focus on longer-term strategic goals, and have learned a lot on how to do this in a multitude of cultures, languages, and contexts. How can Amnesty, Greenpeace, or Oxfam benefit from the more nimble and short-term success focus of a global MoveOn?
The model of Nabuur (see my earlier post here) tries to connect immediate availability of people as "change agent" in the context of local needs. How would the "global MoveOn" connect a similar immediate availability and desire for success in the context of strategic campaigning goals of issue-based organisations?
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: e-activism | e-campaigning
May 23, 2006
Posted by Rolf Kleef
Yesterday, I attended the "Web 2.0 for Good" conference, organised by Policy Unplugged, in the RSA in London. A broad mixture of around 100 participants, mainly from charities and non-profits, with a few consultants, discussing many aspects of online technology in an Open Space setting: I think 22 conversations in total, ranging from sessions on "Everything you always wanted to know about Web 2.0, but were afraid to ask" and "Building communities" to "Bio-teams and what can we learn from teamwork in nature" and "What will be the 'google' of Web 2.0?".
The conversation led by Dan McQuillan from Amnesty International touched on the negative effects of all our freedom-to-share, such as a delegation of Vietnamese bloggers who managed to smuggle themselves out of the country to a blogger conference where several people happily blogged about "the Vietnamese are here!". (Dan will be presenting at NetSquared next week as well.) The effects of trusting a couple of companies to have all our content, and letting it flow freely, are still to be determined.
In the meantime, Alaa, prominent Egyptian blogger and a friend from the APC network (with a strong focus on internet rights and security), is being detained for another 15 days by Egyptian state security, after his arrest on May 7th in a peaceful protest in support of the judges who refused to certify the flawed elections. You can get a banner to show your support.
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: e-activism
May 10, 2006
Posted by Alexandra Samuel
Everybody's favorite government supplier got a new look this week with the launch of the Halliburton Contracts web site. (Thanks to Peter Shane for tipping me off.)The site features Halliburton's new solution to global warming, the SurvivaBall:
The devices - looking like huge inflatable orbs - will include sophisticated communications systems, nutrient gathering capacities, onboard medical facilities, and a daunting defense infrastructure to ensure that the corporate mission will not go unfulfilled even when most human life is rendered impossible by catastrophes or the consequent epidemics and armed conflicts.
If this sounds implausible -- even by Halliburton standards -- then you won't be too surprised that the folks behind this site are the ever-lively Yes Men. I got a chance to dig into some of their work -- most notably, their WTO parody site -- when I wrote my dissertation on hacktivism.
Until now, I'd shared the full results of my research only with the folks I interviewed. But the Yes Men's latest foray into hacktivist territory has been a good reminder that hacktivism is still alive, well, and important for citizens, businesses, governments & NGOs to understand.
That's why I'm making my complete dissertation, Hacktivism and the Future of Political Participation, available for download as of today. Depending on your interests, you might want to download the whole enchilada, or to look at selected chapters:
- Chapter 1: Introduction provides an overview of the dissertation & methodology; it's useful for folks who want a quick overview
- Chapter 2: A taxonomy of hacktivism is a beast (65 pages) but provides a very comprehensive picture of the three main types of hacktivism: political cracking (like site defacements), performative hacktivism (like the Yes Men's work), and political coding (like folks trying to circumvent Chinese firewalls)
- Chapter 3: Collective action among virtual selves looks at hacktivism in the context of political science research on political participation; this is the research that most directly shaped my thinking about how to encourage citizen participation in online communities
- Chapter 4: Hacktivism and state autonomy looks at how hacktivists get around policy and legal decisions with the real effects of code; it's useful for organizations trying to understand how the Internet changes the bounds of their effective authority
- Chapter 5: Hacktivism and the future of democratic discourse looks at how hacktivism illuminates hopes for an online "public sphere"; it's useful for folks thinking about issues like free speech and anonymity online
- Chapter 6: Conclusion pulls it all back together and reflects on how hacktivism has been wrongly conflated with cyberterrorism as part of of the post 9/11 age of anxiety; it may interest folks who want to understand the impact of security anxieties on the space for online expression
I hope these files will be useful to a wide range of people who are trying to understand the more colorful and innovative elements of online participation -- including its latest incarnation at Halliburton Contracts.
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+ TrackBacks (1) | Category: Hacktivism | Internet research | e-activism
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