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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
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.
Comments (2)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: e-Government | e-activism | e-campaigning
October 8, 2006
Posted by Rolf Kleef
...continue reading.
Comments (1)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: e-Government
September 25, 2006
Posted by Marnie Webb
The eUser project released a report that details a survey regarding citizen need of eGovernemnt and other online survey. Among the key findings are:
- No perceived tangible benefits when compared to the phone or face-to-face interactions.
- Many can only access services through others because they are not skilled in using the Internet.
Consistent information delivery across departments and good training is key to helping set expectations. Also, everyone -- the government and the citizens -- understanding when to best use online services (making appointments, for example, or finding forms) versus a need for face-to-face interactions can help with both.
(via experientia)
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: e-Government
June 16, 2006
Posted by Alexandra Samuel
This week's trans-Atlantic discovery is a report from the UK government on Inclusion through Innovation: Taclking Social Exclusion Through New Technologies (PDF). I discovered the report through Paul Waller, the former director of e-democracy and e-Europe for the UK Cabinet Office and the new head of a digital inclusion team charged with implementing the recommendations of this report.
The report and project take aim at a broad set of groups who are often ill-served by traditional public service models: groups like disabled people, people with limited literacy, certain ethnic groups, some young adults, and many seniors. The report enumerates a bunch of ways that information and communications technologies (ICT) can help serve the needs of these groups:
...continue reading.
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: e-Government
May 12, 2006
Posted by Alexandra Samuel
The Oxford Internet Institute, one of the leading centers for Internet resesarch, is seeking input for a study on eGovernment that it is producing for the European Commission. They are asking people who work in, study or know about eGovernment to take a short survey.
...continue reading.
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: e-Government
March 31, 2006
Posted by Alexandra Samuel
Tom Adelstein has written a widely-bookemarked piece on LXer, Why I stopped promoting Linux in government. His frustration boils down to skepticism about political decision-makers themselves:
I would characterize the people involved in these type of organizations as nasty bureaucrats. I have never met one of them who cared about the people they serve. The ones I have met only care about their careers. They would cut the heart out of the person in the next office in a minute.
I'm sympathetic to both the importance and challenges of introducing open source software in government. Open source tools are often -- though not necessarily -- an economical choice for government, and even more important, government support for open source software helps to foster affordable alternatives for lower-income computer users and small businesses. That's part of the reason I often work with open source tools, especially when helping government clients.
But chalking up government resistance to open source to bureaucratic selfishness does a tremendous disservice both to government, and to the open source movement. My experience in government (as a former political staffer myself, and as a longtime consultant to public sector clients) suggests that public servants are no more -- and very often much less -- self-serving than your average private sector wage slave (or software engineer). A public sector career isn't a fast-track to wealth; it's a career choice that most frequently appeals to people who at least start out with a strong desire to help their communities or countries. Sustaining that motivation may be difficult (especially in the face of widespread public cynicism about bureaucrats) but that's probably not the explanation for the difficulty in promulgating open source software in government.
What does make it difficult is the relative riskiness of embracing open source tools. I've seen plenty of bureaucracies that are perhaps excessively risk-averse, but the open source movement has done little to address that risk aversion. (Nor is that risk aversion entirely inappropriate: it's easy for failed government expenditures turn into news headlines.)
Rather than complain about the limited scope for innovation in government, open source developers need to recognize not only the opportunities (in terms of scale) but also the challenges (of risk aversion) in the government market. The way to address those challenges is not to pillory public servants, but to develop the kind of professional services, documentation and business cases that proprietary software vendors offer to the public sector market. Bureaucrats need to know that if they go to the wall in battling for an open source option -- and it often is a battle, despite policies that nominally favour open source solutions -- they will have an army of skilled software professionals who can ensure the successful deployment of open source tools. That doesn't just mean ensuring success in the technical sense, but understanding how software tools can be successfully deployed within the organizational and political context within which governments work.
Smearing public servants as "nasty bureaucrats" doesn't paint the open source community as sensitive to the particular needs of the public sector market. Happily there are plenty of open source developers who are working hard to prove otherwise.
Comments (7)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: e-Government
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