Archive for March 8th, 2010
Digital Activism: An Interview with Mary Joyce
Digital activism is defined by the newly launched Meta-Activism Project as “the practice of using digital technology for political and social change.” One of the leaders in the field of digital activism is Mary Joyce , the founder and executive director of the Meta-Activism Project. Joyce is among the most knowledgeable and experienced digital activists in the world. She also founded DigiActive.org in 2007, a volunteer organization for grassroots activists. In 2008, she was New Media Operations Manager for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. As a lead-up to the upcoming event in New York City with Chinese digital activist Ai Weiwei , Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and yours truly, I interviewed Mary Joyce about the strategies and success stories of digital activism. Sponsor RWW: You recently moved on from DigiActive in order to create a new organization for digital activism. Can you tell us more about what that will be? MJ: The new organization is called the Meta-Activism Project (MAP) and its goal is to build the field of digital activism by catalyzing a body of strategic knowledge unique to the field. Today’s digital activist is in an untenable position: caught between the 100-ton rock of pre-digital strategy and the thousand slippery pebbles of highly-contextual tactical knowledge that focuses on a seemingly endless stream of new social media applications. We want to build a new body of activism strategy that recognizes the radically different communications infrastructure of the digitally networked world. I am really excited to announce the official launch of the Meta-Activism Project on ReadWriteWeb! The site – http://meta-activism.org – went live at the end of last week and, though it is pretty bare now, we’d like it to be a central location for people interested in building a body of knowledge about the fundamental mechanics of digital activism. RWW: We’ve heard a lot about Twitter being used in Iran last year, and the subsequent blocking of social media services like Twitter and Facebook in China. What other countries have social media tools had a big impact in, for digital activism? MJ: Judging impact is quite tricky in the field of digital activism, as few cases of digital activism are actual successes. Usually we judge the success of an activism campaign by whether the activists achieved their campaign goal. However, in almost all of the famous cases of digital activism “success” – the post-election mobilizations in Iran and Moldova in 2009 or the 2008 general strike in Egypt – while activists did successfully mobilize using social media, they did not achieve their campaign goal, be it to overturn an allegedly fraudulent election result or the wide range of social and political reforms demanded by the strike organizers. Mary doing digital activism training at Video Camp Goa The measuring of impact thus becomes extremely subjective. Digital activism proponents want to count mobilization as success even when the goal is not achieved, while skeptics and pessimists point out that, by traditional measures, most digital activism campaigns are failures. Though I am certainly a proponent of digital activism, I would actually side with the skeptics here. In order to really push the field forward, we need to set high standards for digital activism success and not be satisfied with half-measures. RWW: Facebook and Twitter are the two most high profile social media tools being used for digital activism. Are there any other Internet tools that have had success, that perhaps people aren’t as aware of? MJ: I could tell you, but that tool would probably become outdated in a few months, or would prove useless out of its original context. That’s the problem with tactical knowledge: tools change, contexts change, and activists are forever playing catch-up. Probably the greatest factor which determines the utility of an application to activists is scale and “use neutrality.” Scale means that the tool needs to reach a certain critical mass of users before you will have the network effects that will either make it likely that activists will become aware of it (in the case of something like Tor or proxy servers) or, in the case of social platforms, that enough people will be on the platform to constitute a meaningful audience for an activist message. “Use neutrality” means that it can be easily co opted, that its architecture can facilitate a wide variety of interactions and does not dictate the content of hosted files. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Blogger are use neutral, LastFM and Bloglines are not. Mary at the Women’s Leadership and Technology Conference , Sharjah, UAE RWW: Over the past year or so, can you describe a couple of success stories for digital activism using web tools. MJ: Ha! More about measuring success. With the lack of true success, it is no wonder that people are so eager for these stories. I think the traditionally-defined successes in this field (i.e. when the campaign goal is achieved) are much smaller and less dramatic – NGO meets fundraising goal through online donations (multiple cases), bloggers get a corporation to withdraw an offensive advertisement (e.g. Motrin), a social network lifts a questionable national block (e.g. LinkedIn in Syria). In the high-stakes activism campaigns that intend to make dramatic changes at the national and international level, I would say that we have cases of successful mobilization – Iran, Moldova, Egypt – without successful campaigns. RWW: In terms of China, a lot has been written about the censorship there – both the Great Firewall that blocks certain sites and domains, and the self-censorship that many companies have to do in order to survive. Currently Google is trying to challenge censorship , but we’re not sure how successful even a hugely influential company like Google will be. So what, if anything, can ordinary people do in terms of digital activism to support the freeing up of the Chinese Internet? MJ: I am not an expert on China, but it seems like the best strategy for defeating the Great Firewall is to make it obsolete: create so many ways of getting around it that it no longer successfully censors Chinese Internet users. This means both creating new circumvention tools – more Psiphons, proxies, Tors, FreeGates – and finding new and innovative ways to get those tools to Chinese users. RWW: Thanks Mary for this illuminating interview. We at ReadWriteWeb wish you the best with the newly launched Meta-Activism Project! Discuss
Chris Pirillo Debuts E-Book: 140 Twitter Tips
One of our favorite geeks has just released an e-book on best practices for Twitter use. Chris Pirillo ‘s 140 Twitter Tips, a 14-page PDF, is a concise compendium of useful guidelines and helpful hints for every kind of Twitter user, from doing-it-wrong noobs to social media addicts. From the best time of day to get retweets to how to process public criticism, the e-book also covers a broad range of common issues users experience. Sponsor Some of the tips might seem like common sense – until you realize you might not be adhering very well to them, yourself. Most of us are occasionally guilty of using too much jargon and oversharing (or undersharing, in the case of some more professionally oriented accounts). The e-book costs only $1.40, or you can hold out for the $14 deluxe version, which will contain more than 140 adorable illustrations from Kristin Marshall . Click here to purchase 140 Twitter Tips from GnomeTomes, the new publishing arm of Pirillo’s social media empire/blog network Lockergnome . Other GnomeTomes include guides for YouTube and Windows 7. Discuss
Location Privacy Goes to Washington
Testifying before a congressional hearing in late February, Mike Altschul with the Wireless Association was blunt : Federal mobile phone privacy policy is undefined and the privacy guidelines for location-based services written in 2008 are obsolete. The hearing on consumer privacy was the fifth in a series that seeks to evaluate and eventually legislate location-based privacy issues. It comes none too soon. The recent flood of location based apps and services has significantly shifted liabilities from mobile carriers to app developers and end-users. As Congressman and hearing chair Bobby Rush of Illinois said, Yesterday there was Facebook, and in the not-too-distant future we will be encountering something more akin to a “Placebook.” Sponsor While the Wireless Association works on its 2010 guidelines, and while Congress deliberates, what’s going on with all our geolocation privacy rights? Do we have a right to control what location-based advertisers do with our info once they have it? Do we have a right to ensure that law enforcement and government agencies don’t abuse our easily obtained mobile data streams? Are our children safe? What does social science research say about all these changes? These are the many questions that this congressional hearing sought to address. Here’s a breakdown: What does the privacy research tell us? Lorrie Cranor, direct of CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory at Carnegie Melon University testified about her research into how end user’s react to the implication of privacy loss due to location-based technologies. She also reported on her survey of the most popular applications and systems. “In August 2009 we evaluated 89 location sharing applications and systems to determine the types of privacy protections each offered,” she said. “Overall, we found that most of these applications provided fairly limited privacy controls and about a third of them did not provide readily accessible privacy policies on their websites. We reviewed the websites for these applications again in February 2010 and found similar results for the 84 services still in existence at that time.” Who will have access to our information? Last Tuesday we reported in our Ads with Eyes post about a report by the Center for Democracy and Technology on advertising abuses that mobile end-users may face. The center is also concerned about abuses of law enforcement and government agencies related to their use of location-based information. At last week’s hearing John B. Morris, general counsel for the center presented the case for why the Electronic Communications Privacy Act should be updated to protect location information from inappropriate disclosure to government. He highlighted how recent court proceedings and local government surveillance protocols are creating contradictory rulings, unclear jurisdictions and generally snowballing into a fundamental lack of privacy protection for U.S. citizens. What’s the latest wording of potential new laws and guidelines? The preliminary language of almost all future U.S. laws begin in hearings such as these. In his testimony, Tony Bernard, VP of Useful Networks, sought to outline some of the most essential elements of this new language. “In order to derive an end user’s location from any source, the end user must be presented with notice of how, when and by whom location will be used,” he said. Additionally, said Altschul, senior VP and general counsel for the Wireless Association, “Notice must be provided in plain, easily understood language. It must not be misleading, and if combined with other terms or conditions, the portion pertaining to the location-based service must be conspicuous.” How will kids and young adults be affected? Anne Collier, Co-Director, ConnectSafely.org testified that new technologies are not as much of a threat to children as we may believe, and the real issue is the quality of parenting and supervision that kids are getting. As far as kids’ potential for future use of location based services, she presented startling data. “U.S. teens now send or receive an average of 3,146 text messages a month and 9- to 12-year-olds 1,146, according to the latest figures from Nielsen,” she said. “For them, a text isn’t like a phone call, it’s part of a conversation as well as of the ongoing flow (or seemingly 24/7 drama) of school life. But texting is only one of young people’s social tools. There is as yet no data on teens’ mobile social mapping or LBS use, but we know that more than 65 million, or about a third, of Facebook users of all ages currently access the social site through their mobile devices.” What comes next? At the end of the hearing, Rush said, “In closing, let me state clearly, for the record, and especially for those interested consumer groups, industries, and government regulators who have been monitoring our series of hearings that, with the information we’ll obtain from today’s hearing, we have now learned enough to take the next major step.” What should that next step be? Are you ready for more clearly defined location-based privacy protections? How can companies who are currently building applications and services keep themselves out of the courts? Do we really need more regulation to resolve this? What do you think? Hands photo by Monika Leon . D.C. photo by Barb Ballard . Discuss
First Look at SnapGroups: A Delightful Tool For Lightweight Discussion
Mark Fletcher builds software, that’s just what he does. He may have sold the system that became Yahoo Groups for $400 million, and then made millions selling Bloglines to Ask.com as well, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to stop making software. And it’s not just any software he makes, either. Those two projects changed millions of peoples’ lives. Tomorrow morning Fletcher will unveil his newest creation, a lightweight group communication tool called SnapGroups . We first wrote about it two weeks ago but hadn’t been able to take a look until tonight. We’re happy to report that you’re probably going to like it a lot: it’s easy, it’s clear, it’s got good social design and it’s real time. Check out the screenshots below. Sponsor Update: Just after we posted this, Fletcher says he’s lifted the password from the site and it’s live! SnapGroups makes it really easy to create a group discussion around a particular topic, invite people, set variable privacy controls and then participate in that conversation as part of a whole “newsfeed” style stream of updates from all your various groups in one place. Fresh comments, likes and dislikes get pushed to your browser live using a home-made bit of AJAX and the whole thing couldn’t be much simpler. It’s a lot of fun to use, in fact. Fletcher says this is only the beginning, that all kinds of features are still to come, but he’s focused on the basics for now. He started working on the site in October and says his favorite part of the project was “learning about the new technologies that have sprung up in the past couple years.” “The various databases that have come out recently are great,” he told us. “I’m using Mongo , but there are many interesting projects now.” The core of the site is written in C++. Fletcher says SnapGroups will go live tomorrow morning. You should try it out when it does. Invites to groups will no doubt be flying around Twitter and Facebook. It may very well become something you want to use regularly. Hopefully there will be a way to export your conversations easily. Fletcher is a pretty straightforward guy and will probably implement just about anything that enough people ask for and that isn’t too hard to do. Mark Fletcher has a habit of building relatively simple things, like the first major email list system and the first popular RSS reader, that end up being a defining player in the rise of a new era online. Simple, real-time group communication? Not at all hard to imagine that being a big new thing as well. Discuss
Another Nationwide Outage For The Blackberry
The Blackberry just doesn’t seem to have the luster it once did. Today, it had another nationwide outage. According to Data Outage News: “A number of users are reporting and an escalated RIM tech support call has confirmed data issues affecting WiFi devices NOT connected to a WiFi network. The outage is sporadic and issues are confirmed on at least on Verizon and T-Mobile on both US east and west coasts. Again, if you are connected to WiFi, you likely won’t notice any problems until you are out of WiFi range. This is not affecting ALL WiFi users, the reports are sporadic, but across all carriers, BIS and BES included.” Sponsor What’s going in with the Blackberry? Once the enterprise stalwart, it is now looking like a struggling behemoth. Its interface almost seems antiquated. An analyst group is now saying the iPhone is expected to beat out the Blackberry in 2011 for the number one spot. And now we have another outage. Twitter users are all over today’s outage. Some people are saying their service has been out since the morning. There have been some reports that the outage is international in scope. The last Blackberry outage came in December . Reported outages also came in 2007 and 2008. Blackberry has been facing a lot of of market pressure. The iPhone, the Android and the upcoming Windows Phone 7 Series all present challenges to the Blackberry. A report by Trefis shows the iPhone beating out the Blackberry by 2011. The iPhone’s surge into the business community is a major reason for it overtaking the Blackberry. A Trefi analyst write in Forbes : We expect Apple’s market share to overtake that of RIM by 2011, and for Apple and RIM to have 11% and 8% market share, respectively, by the end of Trefis forecast period. We believe sales of the iPhone will eventually outpace BlackBerry sales for the following reasons: 1. Apple’s ecosystem of consumer products (Macs, iPad, Apple TV) and services (iTunes, iPhone apps) make the iPhone a more attractive phone for many consumers compared to the BlackBerry 2. End of AT&T exclusivity will give Apple’s iPhone wider distribution in the US (comparable to BlackBerry distribution) 3. iPhone is making inroads with business customers that have traditionally preferred the BlackBerry Discuss