OFA: Harnessing Obama’s grassroots network in Massachusetts

A couple of weeks ago (on May 16), Organizing for America [OFA], the grassroots network that was called Obama for America, had an organizing meeting in Massachusetts that drew over 400 attendees.  [I've written earlier about the challenge and promise of OFA, the 13 million person network from the campaign, that is unprecedented and the question of whether they will be field troops for the Obama agenda or enabled to have their own input into policy.]

Marshall Ganz provided a historical context for OFA.  He noted that social change in our history is not a constant, it is episodic: “”Change is slow except when it’s fast. We’re in a fast movement now so let’s not lose it.”  This is the first time, Ganz noted, that a social movement gave birth during a political campaign.  Successful social movements have to act national but be locally rooted, and to translate national action into local change. Ganz believes that more civic capital has been created through this campaign than ever created through our nation’s history; we have to be creative about using this civic capital.  We need to make sure that it is not a one-way arrangement.

The theme of OFA members wanting input on policy came up at the OFA-MA event, both in questioning of Mitch Stewart (national director of OFA) and in informal discussions throughout the day. Mitch Stewart noted that OFA’s prime agenda was “to support the President’s agenda.”  During Q&A a woman  shouted out “We want input in that agenda!” to large applause.  Stewart tried to siphon the OFA interest in policy by encouraging people to express their input on  whitehouse.gov or by communicating with their members of Congress.  He noted that he was not a policy expert and OFA was not a policy organization.  But it is clear that the audience wasn’t comfortable with that resolution.

A number of speakers highlighted a theme that I have discussed earlier about the importance of marrying technology with “social capital” to have optimal effect. Ethan Winn (software developer) summarized it as  “organizing practices apply online” and commented that once you build the trust through F2F encounters, you can give people responsibilities.)  Marshall Ganz, Harvard lecturer, former community organizer and train-the-trainer for the Obama grassroots effort, in response to a question about how to reach low-income people through technology, replied: “It’s important to distinguish between carpenters and tools. The best tools in the world don’t build a house. The campaign made the tools and equipped people to use the tools. The Dean campaign was successful in using technology to fund raise but the Meetups were not successful — no one knew what to do. The Obama campaign did that part well. People were hungry for tools to work with one another successfully. The technology AND the leadership together were what made the campaign successful. Also, the use of YouTube to enable people to tell their stories was extraordinary. That tool has just begun to realize its potential.”  And Sarah Compton (field organizer in MA for Obama) observed:  “I hope that technology never replaces face-to-face contact. When canvassing to NH, we tried to have a carpool in every town. Those carpools were also meetings and got people engaged. A proof that that was more successful in some ways than technology, the national campaign sent out a blast email about Drive for Change, but we got thousands more people to canvass through word of mouth.”

Here is a thoughtful post on the OFA-MA meeting by “Bottom Up Change”.

Here is video of “Grassroots Organizing: Harnessing the Obama Movement” [panel featuring Sarah Compton, Marshall Ganz, Juan Leyton (director of Neighbor to Neighbor), Ethan Winn and Alan Khazei (BeTheChangeInc.org and co-founder of City Year)

OFA-MA has many other resources from the recent meeting including a live-blogging account of the day.

Conflicting data on Facebook: good for university attachment, bad for Cause-related fundraising

(Facebook Wheel of Friendship - photo by jurvetson)

Despite the online fundraising success of the Obama campaign, the Washington Post reports that Facebook Causes, “hugely popular among nonprofit organizations seeking to raise money online, has been largely ineffective in its first two years, trailing direct mail, fundraising events and other more traditional methods of soliciting contributions.” Only the Nature Conservancy and Students for a Free Tibet have raised more than $100,000 on Facebook Causes, and most of the 179,000 non-profits listed on Facebook don’t even make $1,000 from the site.  This is more depressing when you realize that Facebook usage has swelled to over 200 million.  Twenty five million Facebook users show their affinity through Facebook Causes and their belief in the environment or women’s rights or freedom of choice, but fewer than 1% of such users actually donate.

Other experiments have shown that 1-3% of a nonprofit group’s e-mail list donate money when solicited, at an average of about $80 per person. That is more than 44 times the rate at which such users are donating online through Facebook Causes.

Note: one reader, Will Coley, brought to my attention two blog postings contesting the Washington Post report.  See Fine Blog and  Beth’s Blog.  I don’t find these refutations all that persuasive; sure there are lot of Facebook Causes that are not NPOs (so the donation/cause is not the right statistic) and Facebook has a lot of young users (who are not big donors), but the original motivation of Facebook Causes was to help harness social networks to raise a lot for non-profits, and this has largely been a failure, although maybe it helps Facebook users to identify themselves with other users that share their values.

The more hopeful finding about Facebook comes from a recent paper “Social Capital, Self Esteem and the Use of Online Social Networks”.  [This is a longitudinal follow-up paper to an earlier paper by Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe in 2007 called “The Benefits of Facebook Friends: Social Capital and College Students’ Use of Online Social Network Sites.“] Ellison et al. found in panel survey data they gathered at Michigan State University (MSU) stronger evidence that Facebook usage predicted later increased levels of “bridging social capital” than that “bridging social capital” caused increased Facebook use.  [Note: see below on their strange measure of bridging social capital.]

It’s an intriguing finding, although one should note that the size of the panel is quite small (92 students completed the earlier and later survey) and there was attrition both in whom they originally asked to do the survey (where only 277 out of 800 students contacted responded) and then secondary attrition when only a third of those 277 students then filled out the follow-up survey. [Ellison et al. note that the 92 seemed demographically representative of the 277 students, but one can never know about hidden attributes that might have explained why people would stick with the survey and also explained why these same people would have made more friends.]

Moreover, one would suppose that the power of Facebook to build social capital and bridging social capital is probably higher at a university setting where most of the e-friendships are in the same town, and one is thus more likely to encounter budding Facebook friends in real life.  (Almost all research shows that it is easier to build trust and stronger ties face-to-face, so having a strong geographic concentration of Facebook friends and ‘near friends’,  in an environment where new students are establish friends,  should provide Facebook with the strongest dynamic for friend-building.)

The paper, as I noted in a blog post on the earlier study, uses weird measures of bridging social capital.  Bridging social capital is supposed to measure the degree to which one has social friendships to people of a different religion, or social class, or race or ethnicity.  Their “bridging” measures are more about attachment to MSU as a community and include: “I feel I am part of the MSU community”, “I am interested in what goes on at MSU”, “MSU is a good place to be”, “I would be willing to contribute money to MSU after graduation”, “Interacting with people at MSU makes me want to try new things”, etc.    I definitely had loyalty to my college when I was there, but I don’t know that this necessarily says a whit about how diverse my friendships were there.

With this unusual measure of “bridging social capital”, the researchers found that both higher-esteem and lower-esteem students were likely to benefit by increased “bridging social capital” (i.e., have a stronger attachment to MSU) from Facebook use, although this effect was highest for students with low self-esteem at the beginning of the study.  And they found that Facebook produced greater attachment to MSU even after controlling for general Internet use and measures of psychological well-being.

While their survey doesn’t directly get at this question, it seems somewhat different than the common findings with technology that the socially-rich get richer, and, rather than leveling the playing field, it may fuerther tilt it.  Ellison et al. don’t directly measure level of social capital at the outset, but in their finding that those low in self-esteem may benefit the most (at least in attachment to MSU), it suggests that at least in this domain the socially unattached may benefit more.

For more information, see :

Charles Steinfield, Nicole B. Ellison, Cliff Lampe. Social capital, self-esteem, and use of online social network sites: A longitudinal analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology 29 (2008) 434–445

To Nonprofits Seeking Cash, Facebook App Isn’t So Green: Though Popular, ‘Causes’ Ineffective for Fundraising by Kim Hart and Megan Greenwell (Wash Post, 4/22/09)

OFA activated to stump for Stimulus Bill

I previously posted about the Obama’s efforts to turn their amazing 13 million person grassroots network into an organizing force on behalf of the Obama legislative agenda (or “your agenda” in their language).

OFA (technically “Organizing for America” or sometimes called OFA 2.0) was activated through this video where President Obama notes the importance of crowd-sourcing (how the people will collectively produce a better product), although he doesn’t use that term.

Apparently 3,300 house parties on the stimulus were organized, to mixed press reviews — the OFA is tapped out or a success – some were canceled, some had low turnout, but others seemed an excellent example of democratic participation, like the account that538 had of one grassroots account of a Maryland house party among OFA Obama activists discussing the stimulus bill. After reminiscing about the 2008 campaign and why they wanted to stay involved, participants broke into subgroups like Energy; Science & Technology; Transportation; Education; Health Care; Jobs (retraining); and Public Sector Jobs (teachers, firefighters, etc.) to discuss what was or wasn’t in the Stimulus and what should be.  Their goal was to share the group’s thinking with Senator Barbara Mikulski.

Not sure whether these efforts actually changed the stimulus bill, which disappointingly was hammered out between House and Senate leaders (with Administration representatives) in closed-door, old-fashioned, smoke-filled rooms. But is clear that some combination of Obama stumping for the bill plus the activation of the OFA network may help explain why popular support for the stimulus bill increased in recent days.

As I wrote earlier, I think the challenge of keeping OFA vibrant is making participants more than foot soldiers in the Obama “our” agenda.

Is “Organizing for America” really “Organizing for Obama”?

We’ve posted earlier about the $64,000 question: what will happen to the throngs of political supporters brought into the process by the Obama Campaign?

This has been partially answered.  Obama for America 2.0 [OBA 2.0] as it was loosely called will be called Organizing for America.

The language sounds empowering of his supporters (“you’ve built the largest grassroots movement in history”, “our journey to change America”, “we cannot do it without you”, I wouldn’t have been sworn in without you,  etc.), but a separate press release by Tim Kaine, governor of Virginia and head of the Democratic National Committee, indicates that Organizing for America will work within the DNC.  This organizational structure suggests that it will be more of a force to enact the Obama Administration agenda: in other words a one-way rather than a  two-way street.

He doesn’t answer how it will be staffed and funded, whether it will be a federated, with a chance for participants to rise to state or national leadership positions in OFA through voting, and most importantly doesn’t address whether it will enable individuals to contact each other: criticizing Obama if they feel he is not living out the ideals of the campaign, or organizing around issues different than the Obama Administration is focusing on.

I’ve indicated earlier that I think this extraordinary 13 million person network will have less staying power if the individuals feel they are merely foot soldiers without an ability to change or shape the political priorities.  (And the one other effort to help glean citizens’ priorities for the Obama Administration (Change.org),  seemed to fall victim to the “vote early, vote often” phenomenon, propelling the legalization of marijuana to #1, probably because Ron Paul supporters rallied their troops repeatedly).

The Obama folks also introduce by video Mitch Stewart as the Executive Director of Organizing for America, caucus director of Iowa and the person and the person who ran Virginia for Obama during the general election.

Stay tuned.

Watering the Obama grassroots post-election

(photo by MacaStat)

The 2008 election really succeeded in engaging new voices into the political process.  Especially Obama (see below), but also Palin’s appeal to white men (some based more on Palin’s looks than her policies), has drew new voices in American politics.

Obama, who has a background in community organizing,  hired some of the best community organizers in the country to build an unparalleled grassroots organization in his presidential quest.    He gave campaign volunteers responsibility and access to crown jewels (like voting lists) when candidates traditionally centralize power much more.  And Obama combined high-tech and high-touch.

As Newsweek’s Howard Fineman reports: “The resulting bottom line is astounding: 3.1 million contributors, 5 million volunteers, 2.2 million supporters on his main Facebook page, 800,000 on his MySpace page and perhaps a million more names on Obama’s own campaign Web site. Even discounting for likely duplicates, Plouffe says he could end up “knowing” almost 7 million voters by Election Day—roughly one in 10 of Obama’s likely total. “These are people who are responsive,” he says. “They want to be respected and to continue to be involved in what we do.”

Now that Obama is elected, how will the Obama administration rate in the care and feeding of this tremendous network?  At our Saguaro conversations back in the late 1990s (in which Barack participated), it became clear that politicians have much more of a natural interest in stoking grassroots networks before elections and tend to neglect them after election victories, when it is often less clear both how to use these networks and “what’s in it for them–the politicians?”

The Deval Patrick Administration shows the potential dangers here.  Patrick, a very bright, young African-American Harvard Law graduate was elected Governor of Massachusetts in 2006, also thanks to the brilliant campaigning of David Axelrod (the campaign strategist for Obama) in a campaign that had stronger grassroots civic engagement than any election Massachusetts had seen for decades. While Patrick announced that civic engagement was going to be one of the three pillars of his administration, his rhetoric has been stronger than his strategy in this regard.  While it is not clear that his grassroots supporters have turned on him, they certainly are far less moored to his Administration than pre-election.

As Fineman notes: “…[I]f you live by viral marketing, you can die by it, too. ‘His supporters have sky-high expectations and expect to be involved,’ says Will Marshall, who studied the Obama organization for the Democratic Leadership Council. ‘They are loyal but not easy to control.’ “  Fineman observes that this grassroots network could turn against Obama if he puts far more troops in Afghanistan.

But if Obama’s strategists adequately focus on how to best engage these volunteers, and one would hope and trust that his experience in the Saguaro Seminar helped deepen his commitment and his knowledge about civic engagement, this enormous grassroots base could be a galvanizing force against so many of the woes that face us (our economy, our high school dropout epidemic, our need to take action against global warming, our need to mentor those falling through the cracks, etc.).  Especially at a time of great economic need, when government’s purse strings may be limited by the economic bailout, unleashing a civic army of volunteers against our woes could be a doubly willing strategy.

As Marshall notes”If [Obama] wins, he’s going to have a personal following he can use to press his agenda,” says Marshall. “He can use these millions to reach over the heads of the Washington insiders, the Democrats on the Hill. It could be powerful.”

See “What Have We Created: Obama’s supporters have high expectations, and they may expect to have a voice in governing?”

See also A Civic Inflection Point in the U.S.?

A civic inflection point for the U.S.?

Sorry for the length, but this is an important post discussing evidence that we may be turning a corner civicly and starting to get re-engaged.

My colleague Robert Putnam has written about the devastating declines our nation witnessed in social capital in his landmark book Bowling Alone. As Putnam demonstrated and continued research proves, this social capital is vitally important to things like how well our schools and government works, how fast our economies grow, how happy and healthy we are, how safe our communities are. [For more on this read Bowling Alone, section III.]

It is interesting to note, given that backdrop, that we may well prove to be at an inflection point in our nation’s civic connectedness due largely to generational forces and the election of Obama. Obviously predictions are perilous, so it’s far too soon to announce “Mission Accomplished” on civic re-engagement, but here are some reasons to be hopeful.

Forces at work:

My colleague Bob Putnam uses the metaphor of a bathtub. Imagine that our national stock of social capital represents a bathtub. Each year 18 year olds are coming into this adult civic bathtub with their civic habits largely formed and each year we are losing (a mainly elderly) slice of America to the Grim Reaper. The relative difference between the civicness of the new 18 year olds and the folks dying each year represents an automatic civic change, even if no one changes their own civic behaviors.

For a long time, we’ve been losing each year one of the most civic slices of America (what Brokaw calls the Greatest Generation – folks born prior to 1931 – who have been throughout their whole lives way more civic). They gave more, joined more, gave blood more, voted more, trusted more, volunteered more, than the generations that came before and after them. And until the last 10 years, the folks coming into the bathtub were not very civic (they didn’t vote much, they didn’t trust much, they didn’t volunteer that much). Thus there was a cruel generational calculus going on that was persistently making America on average less civic and less connected, even barring any individual-level change with very hot civic water leaving the bathtub each year and being replaced by more lukewarm water.

There are now two important changes transpiring from a generational perspective. First, the Greatest Generation no longer exists in large numbers (percentage-wise). Thus we are entering into the period where a higher percentage of the folks we lose each year to death are the early Boomers, not the Greatest Generation. It is obviously a major loss that we don’t have the Greatest Generation around in the same numbers as a decade ago, but from the perspective of the civic bathtub, the average temperature of the civic water we’re losing each year has gone down.

And at the incoming end, the water entering the bathtub is heating up as well. The good news is that over the past 10 or so years, volunteering among young people has been going up. Some of this (maybe 1/3) is “mandatory” service (required to graduate from middle school or high school) or service to burnish resumes for college. But the motivations don’t matter all that much. Researchers have found that those who volunteer at a young age are likely to do so throughout their whole lives, regardless of why they initially volunteered.

Since Sept. 11, we’ve witnessed an increase in political interest and voting among American youth who were at or near college at the time of 9-11. We’ve written about these changes in “Sept. 11 as Civics Lesson” describing a new “9-11 Generation” forming. Since we don’t know about voting behavior until youth reach age 18, it’s impossible to know whether 9-11 shaped the political behavior of children who were as young as ages 8 or 10 when the Twin Towers fell, but so far the trends are encouraging. For example, interest in politics among college freshmen was down almost monotonically for 35 years from the early 1960s to 2000 and has turned up almost every year since 2001 (in the UCLA American College Freshman Survey)

2. Barack

Enter Barack Obama (force #2). Some in the press have indicated that Obama created this political upsurge. We don’t think the data support this view. Barack Obama is a remarkably impressive man who we had the pleasure of working with on Saguaro, and he is highly charismatic. But Bob Putnam has noted that although Obama was a match in igniting young people, there was an underlying stock of dry kindling among youth (their pent up interest in politics) waiting to be lit.

The Obama Campaign was a masterful strategy of engaging Americans. I mentioned in an earlier post how it was a great combination of high touch and high-tech and Obama’s intention in the campaign was to take community organizing to national level. He trained thousands of local organizers, engaged millions of new Americans in politics, as volunteers, as donors.

Not all of these were young Americans, but a disproportionate number were. For example:

• The biggest increases in primaries and general election appear to be among 18-29 year olds; and
• Moreover, these volunteers and supporters have the high of a success, for many coming on their first engagement experience.

We think the Obama campaign and administration will influence our civic trajectory in at least four ways:

a) The Obama campaign has built up a network of 13million e-mails of supporters. This is a tremendous potential asset in our nation’s civic re-engagement if it gets effectively used in the future, but it is a $64,000 question about how this should and can be done. Should it be done top down or bottom up? Should it become a new non-profit? Should it be part of the Democratic Party? Will it be a one-way street (for the Obama Administration to mobilize foot soldiers) or a two-way street? Will it be independent enough to criticize the Obama Administration? Some are not waiting for the Obama leaders to define its post-election character and taking action into their own hands (such as, MoveOn “Real Voices for Change” post-election house parties, Nashville Community Organizers Meetup group, Nations for Change, GroundUp (CT for Obama), Wisconsin Field Hands). We saw this earlier in the campaign when the network started to mobilize when Obama switched positions to support FISA, which  has led to Get FISA Right.  It is a hopeful sign that Obama has permitted dissension on his Change.gov site about Obama’s choice of evangelical preacher Rick Warren to give the inauguration convocation.

There is a very good summary at TechPresident by Micah Sifrey about the current state of play on this network of activists, or what is called “OFA2” (Obama for America 2). Some sites are even using “crowd sourcing” to try to set agendas for the Barack Administration (set up by the campaign) or this alternative agenda crowdsourcing site.

One trivial example of how this network might be used came recently when Obama’s campaign manager suggested to the e-mail list that if they are concerned about Barack’s girls’ choice of a White House “first dog”, they should get involved with animal shelters. (The e-mail read: “Excited about the much anticipated first dog? Support your local animal shelter to give animals in your area a chance.”) Some criticized this approach as too small-bore, but the general approach might have great merit. Think of something like Net Day applied to multiple issues over the course of a year.

b) Bully pulpit: Barack will have many opportunities as President in ways big and small to show the importance of service and caring for others and this will have an impact. Whether it is signaling that his girls will have to make their beds in the White House, or telling Detroit’s 3 CEOs that they should forego salary, or giving blood, or working on a volunteer project, or telling us how we need to sacrifice to cut back on global warming.

[Postscript: as one trivial example of this, Obama's use of USAService.org and self-example of painting a homeless shelter doubled the number of Americans in service on MLK Day from 500,000 to over a million.]

c) Given Barack’s own background, one can assume that his policies will be more social capital friendly. The government spends well over $2.5 trillion every year, dwarfing the expenditures of non-profits. How those dollars are shaped could have enormous difference in our civic patterns. The potential examples are almost limitless; imagine if more national spending went to:

• Integrating immigrants through social organizations, learning English in groups with immigrants or non-immigrants;
• Anti-crime efforts that focused more on neighborhood networks;
• Public health efforts that focused on getting individuals into social networks and groups;
• Putting more of the educational dollars into promoting civic values in schools, teaching civic skills and knowledge and ensuring that all students engage in service learning in groups with meaningful reflection;
• Increasing opportunities for intensive national service after high school, with a GI-like Bill component that in turn opened up educational opportunities for those who served;
• Using neighborhood networks and knowledge for homeland security; or
• Ensuring that more of the funding for the arts went to foster community engagement or the bridging of disparate social groups.

d) Transparency and civic engagement in the process. The Obama Transition Team has a working group looking at Technology, Innovation and Government Reform. It’s too soon to know what they will suggest and whether they can get Congress to go along. Although he has said he will not sign any bill until Americans have had a chance to comment on it, I’m not sure that is practical or meaningful. And certainly the risk is that unless the public can see a dispassionate distillation of these comments, Obama Administration officials may pick and choose the friendly comments. But for sure, many think that we have inherited a citizen-participation scheme of government that is badly broken (few if any come to government hearings) and it certainly doesn’t use the best of open source technology or the Internet. Imagine if there were lots of channels for citizens to participate, and citizens could choose the paths that represented their best expertise and highest interest. One such example is Peer-to-Patent where citizens can provide their expertise to review whether inventions are patentable based on “prior art”. Citizens could be used to provide greater expertise in local budgeting (as done in Ipatinga, Brazil) or in holding government accountable or in figuring out policy answers to tough questions (as was done in British Columbia in evaluating the right parliamentary voting process through the use of a citizen jury). But in this process of getting citizen participation we must be able to separate, as Clay Shirkey has noted, the franchise from passion or interest. In our voting system, one gets one vote no matter how passionately one cares about an issue. If commenting and voting systems don’t identify or track participants they risk being gamed: in the way that Ataturk became TIME’s leading vote getter for Man of the Century or that  “legalization of marijuana” rose to the top of the list of issues the new Obama Administration should address at Change.Gov. The issue, as Clay points out, is whether a well organized minority can out-maneuver and less well organizers majority.

3. Technology

I don’t think we’ve figured out how best to use technology to foster social capital and civic engagement, although the Obama campaign as I indicated was a masterful combination of high touch and high-tech (using technology to enable people to figure out whom among their friends lived in battleground states and hence whom they should call, using texting to link people to campaign events). For sure, technology will need to play in a key role in the fourth path above: liberating citizens to play a more active role in governance and accountability.

We’re too early on in the life of the Internet in to know what the technology answers to our patterns of civic disconnection will look like or even if they will emerge (although there are some encouraging signs like Meetup or Craigslist or potentially some of the merging of cellphones with locational awareness to activate and strengthen weaker social ties, like with Helio Beacon Buddy or Loopt). For sure lots more tweaking, innovation and experimentation is necessary.

But technology is a useful ace in the hole, even if it doesn’t start driving solutions yet.

Generational forces are tough when you are working against them and a boon when they are working with you: imagine running into a headwind vs. running with the wind at your back.

If the generational changes (referred to earlier) start to stabilize our stock of social capital and even begin moving us in a positive direction, and the Obama administration, both in their spending and in their moral signaling, raise the profile and importance of social connectedness and sacrifice, technology could be the after burner that gives additional thrust to a period of civic re-engagement, both through participation in governance and outside of government.

This won’t happen on its own, but it is a distinct reality with your concerted attention and the attention of thousands others like you.

For an in-depth look at some of civic engagement of the Obama volunteers and how they consciously deepened volunteers engagement, see the National Journal piece “Community Organizer In Chief: The success of the Obama campaign is a sign that civic participation is on the rise again after decades of decline”. [This also describes some of the history of civic organizations over the last 100 years.] Also see Zack Exley, key online organizer of the Howard Dean campaign and a former union organizer, who had this interesting post “The New Organizers: What’s Really Behind Obama’s Ground Game” in the Huffington Post (October 8, 2008)

Dentyne hopes social capital message sticks

Dentyne’s latest commercial “Make Face Time” strives to associate gum chewing with connections with friends.  While it’s hard to see the connection (other than the appeal of fresh-smelling breath), their commercial is a nice wry twist on the limits of online connections and the strength of face-to-face connections.  They refer to a friend whispering to another in a pool as “voicemail” and a couple kissing as a real “instant message!.”  [It also has nice background music of Coconut Records, the moonlighting project of actor Jason Schwartzman, singing "Summer Day".]

Dentyne’s web campaign also gives you 3:00 on their website and then tells you to go out and do something.  And on the website you can say goodbye to emoticons (in the Smiley Chamber of Doom), go to the Face Time Finder (to find good local places to connect with others), and make a “Face Time Request” to someone you want to see in person.  While we applaud Dentyne’s connection sentiment, is the Internet really required for this?  How about a phone call? And do we really want to give Dentyne access to some information about our personal networks?

Facebook changing the political dynamic?

Facebook won its first election last month?

Vanessa Sievers, a 20-year old Dartmouth undergraduate from Montana, claims that $50 and all her Facebook connections catapulted her to victory in the race for Treasurer in mostly rural Grafton County, NH. Some call it less of a fight in the jungle than an ambush in the forest. The incumbent Treasurer misjudged how Facebook, in the wake of low voter turnout for such a race, could upend the result.

Sievers used her $51 to purchase a Facebook ad to mobilize students at Plymouth State College and Dartmouth University, narrowly upsetting an incumbent Treasurer (Carol Elliott) with decades of political experience. Sievers bested Elliott by 586 votes across the county, and in Hanover Sievers won by 2,438 votes (almost exactly the number of Dartmouth students who voted there).

Ironically, the fix to this problem is more people caring and voting.  In communities where voting in local races has dropped precipitously, it leaves candidates far more exposes to a smaller number of votes influencing the election.  College student votes normally could not have turned this election unless lots of adults didn’t vote.  But in an era where in many communities the League of Woman Voters is not as active as it once was, it may be that Facebook candidacies have an easier way of reaching potential voters than ones using older technologies (coffees at neighbors’ houses or standing on street corners).

“The talk around here [Grafton County] is how the young woman — a ‘teenybopper,’ in the words of Ms. Elliott, who was not amused at her fate or at the furies unleashed on Facebook — hijacked a centuries-old process to inherit a part-time job that pays only $6,408 annually but has serious, adult responsibilities, like investing around $17 million when property-tax revenues pour in and sometimes borrowing millions during the course of a year.

Vanessa Sievers, Grafton County Treasurer-elect

Indeed, Dartmouth College folklore, a rich vein even in non-election years, includes lurid and almost surely apocryphal tales of students storming into local politics, taking over the process and producing such landmark legislation as the mandate to pave a road from Hanover directly to South Hadley and Northampton, Mass., the homes, respectively, of Mount Holyoke and Smith colleges. These were tales of Dartmouth boys being boys and of (cooped-up) boys chasing girls.

…[Sievers'] resume includes being the co- chair of the college’s Bait and Bullet Club and…[her] political profile includes ardent support for hunting…. A member of the Democratic National Committee Youth Council, she is a symbol — and so is the reaction of some of her opponents to her election. Ms. Elliott…told John P. Gregg of the Valley News newspaper that the college students who voted for her opponent were ‘brainwashed.’

“She [Sievers] used technology that caught older people by surprise,” said Michael Hais, a retired vice president of the Frank N. Magid Associates communications research firm and the co-author, with Morley Winograd, of Millennial Makeover, a book outlining the political potential of Ms. Sievers and her Millennial generation. “This symbolizes a generational conflict that may not be as shrill as the one in the 1960s but may be just as important….”

Some of the first stirrings of this [the new dynamics of an Internet-based campaign[ became apparent two years ago when Andrew Edwards and Jeffrey Fontas, both 19 at the time, mounted campaigns for the New Hampshire Legislature from Nashua, in the southern part of the state. This year more advanced versions of the strategy were unveiled in the national presidential campaign, here in Grafton County in the county treasurer race and now in Israel, where the campaign of Benjamin Netanyahu for prime minister has virtually replicated the look of Mr. Obama’s Web site and is seeking to harness the power of social-network communications.

Eliot has fired back; she now asserts that students who live in another state shouldn’t be able to vote in county contests, since they don’t have enough connection with ensuring that local government works. The political-comedy Internet site 24/6, noted: “At a time when the country is in crisis and the world is mere weeks away from a sweeping revolution in American politics, the last thing we need is young people ‘getting involved’ and bringing ‘fresh ideas’ to the table.”

See “The Facebook revolution: Online social networking didn’t just bring young people into politics, it brought them into power“(Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 11/30/08), from whom these quotes are taken.  NYT article on Sievers’ election here.

Honest signals: our hidden, influential patterns of communication

(photo by shadowplay)

Interesting lunchtime talk by Alex (Sandy) Pentland about honest signals sponsored by the Program on Networked Governance program at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

Sandy’s theory is that 50,000-100,000 years ago, humans lacked language, yet still managed to communicate with each other through “honest signals” (ancient primate signaling efforts which developed biologically to communicate our intentions, our trustworthiness, our suitability as a collaborator, whether we were bluffing, etc.). When language was introduced, it didn’t over-write or eliminate these honest signals but evolved to be synergistic with these signals. While we focus much more on language, these signals are measurable (Sandy’s group developed machines to read these signals) and often equally or more effective at predicting various behaviors than language. Sandy’s research aims to shine a light on this powerful channel that we know less about.

Sandy notes that such data from electronic ID badges (sociometers) and specially-programmed smart phones, can give us a “god’s eye” view of how the people in organizations interact, and observe the “rhythms of interaction for everyone in a city”.

What are such behaviors?

Sandy’s group at the MIT Media lab focuses on 4 of them, although there are probably others (laughter, yawning, etc.).

1. INTEREST, shown by activity. An autonomic response. For example in children, this is evinced by jumping up and down or in dog’s by barking or wagging tail.
2. ATTENTION, by looking at influence. Evidence of thalmic attention. Sandy observes that people actively following in conversations break in faster than they could with normal attention spans. Shows that they are processing the conversation and discussion as it goes along and predicting the right time to break in.
3. EMPATHY, as shown by mimicry. This is evinced by mirror neurons, which are observable in infants as young as 3 hours old that can imitate a mother sticking her tongue out. People who evince higher levels of mimicry are seen as more empathic and more trustworthy. For example, they had computerized agents trying to sell an unpopular policy to students; in the cases where the computerized agent mimicked the body movements of the experimental subject with a 4 second delay, the computerized agent was 20% more successful in selling the policy to the experimental subject and the subject was unaware that he/she was being mimicked.
4. EXPERTISE, as shown by consistency. This a function of the cerebellar motor. We assume that people who can do things more smoothly are more expert because of the number of actions that need to be simultaneously coordinated.

What do these honest signals predict?
These are only some of the examples:
-Computers attentive to these honest signals (and ignoring the content) were as successful in predicting from pitches by entrepreneurs which business plans would be judged by business school students as successful.
- Effective sales pitches: listening to the first few seconds of a telephone sales pitch (without listening to the language) but listening to tone, timing, etc., the computer could predict with 80% accuracy which would be successful calls.:
-Success in speed dating: monitoring the female’s signals predicted 35% of the variation in which couples exchanged their phone numbers, and this was significantly higher than any other factor researchers could find. Interestingly, the men’s signals were not predictive, but somehow men must have been able to subconsciously pick up on the women’s signals, because in almost all cases the men didn’t ask for phone numbers where it wasn’t reciprocated by women.
- They also found that honest signals predicted depression, predicted who was likely to be successful in negotiating for a pay raise, job interviews, who was bluffing at poker, etc.
Successful individual-level traits: they found that the most successful folks with these “honest signals” were ones who were high in activity, high in influence (others were more likely to mirror their communication styles then they were likely to mirror others’) high in “variable prosody” (their pitch varied and they sounded open to ideas), and high in body language dominance (i.e., they were more likely to directly face another person and others were more likely to not face them square on).  They were often far more successful in these “honest signals” than they were aware of.

Organizational effectiveness

Sandy notes that unlike an MRI, one can hook up an entire organization to these sociometers and absorb micro-second by micro-second, and the results are highly predictive. But the challenge is that while the people who exhibit these highly successful individual traits are useful to organizations, they are usually in “connector” roles for organizations, with star-shaped patterns of communication, where ideas flow through these individuals. While this speeds up the decision-making process, it actually impairs the brainstorming process. Sandy’s group is experimenting with devices to see if making participants aware of the dynamics of a team can influence their behavior in a positive manner.  They have shown with some experiments (Japanese-American teams designing Rube-Goldberg-type projects, and distance teams) that it can change people’s behaviors in a positive manner. The challenge will be to see if the group’s behavior can be more connected at the brainstorming phase and more “star-shaped” at the decision-making stage.

Sandy noted that they have been able to extract many properties of the social networks using smart phones: from a combination of where people are (GPS), when, and communication flows (who they talk to and when). He noted some interesting experiments to observe the flow of nurses in a nursing ward, or the flow of taxis in San Francisco, or communication (e-mail and face-to-face) between departments in a German bank. They are now at the stage of trying to get whole dormitories or parts of the city of Boston using these smart phones to try to track social networks and patterns in these data. (I’ve written about digital traces before.)

How could these flows of people be used:

-Traffic: one could monitor, for example, delivery vans coursing through the road networks and by observing flows slower than typical, spot emerging traffic problems.

-Urban tribes: Sandy noted that by monitoring flows of taxis, you can distill separate patterns of interconnected places. In other words people who live in this neighborhood, work in this area, go to these restaurants, go to these nightclubs. (You are not actually monitoring individual people but patterns of association.  This is equivalent to Netflix telling you that people who like “The Firm” also like “Michael Clayton”.) Or one can even find sub-patterns in a neighborhood:e.g., locations from which people regularly are returning from nightclubs at 3 or 4 AM.

-You can then use these patterns to “find people like me”: based on your own patterns (where you work, where you live, etc.), the system could tell you where many people in your neighborhood shop, go to dinner, or hear music.

- Lending: one major bank told Sandy that credit scores are not very good (except at the high end) in predicting repayment rates on loans. Banks would love to use behavioral information (who is at nightclubs late at night, who goes to work early) to predict repayment rates.

- Health insurance: similarly one could imagine rates tied to activity levels (who was jogging or getting enough sleep or…)

- Germs: they want to use these devices to watch the spread of germs through social networks.

Privacy issues

The above examples of health insurance and lending make one understand why there are clear privacy implications. Do we want banks or health insurers knowing what we are doing (going to nightclubs) to set our rates? Will this be used to impose behavioral bases for “red lining”, where people in certain areas (like the old red lined areas) don’t get loans because of some behavior of theirs that is correlated with low repayment rates? Does it make any difference if these people can supposedly change their behavior?
-Sandy thinks we should move from company owning the personal data and sharing with no one or only sharing if an individual didn’t say it was confidential to the person owning the data and being able to decide how it gets used and whether the owner gets compensated for such use.
-There are clearly issues here about how the decision is framed? Does the individual truly understand why certain marginal information is so useful to a bank or insurer? And there may be negative externalities for all, even if you don’t choose to share your information with these companies?

Sandy’s research also raises questions about what happens when you start incentivizing people in companies based on these behaviors, or you start teaching people about these hidden “honest signals”. Do people start learning how to display these honest signals and dupe people who are not as aware of this (e.g., mimicking others to increase sales or do better in negotiations). If so, do people start focusing on these behaviors (like mimicry) and consciously teach themselves not to be swayed by this? Do companies find that people who pretend to be connectors (to get a pay raise) are actually less valuable to companies than the people who do it naturally (and are unaware they are doing this)?

See previews of Sandy’s book Honest Signals here.

Buy Alex (Sandy) Pentland’s Honest Signals here.

See interesting related story in NYT, “You’re Leaving a Digital Trail. Should You Care?” (John Markoff, 11/30/08), mentioning Alex Pentland’s work among others and discussing the SF taxi example.

UPDATED: Crowdsourcing to replace social networks?

Mark Pesce writes in “This That and the Other Thing” the following:

“The easy answer is the obvious one: crowdsourcing (see also description later in post). The action of a few million hyperconnected individuals resulted in a massive and massively influential work: Wikipedia. But the examples only begin there. They range much further afield.

“Uni [University] students have been sharing their unvarnished assessments of their instructors and lecturers. Ratemyprofessors.com has become the bête noire of the academy, because researchers who can’t teach find they have no one signing up for their courses, while the best lecturers, with the highest ratings, suddenly find themselves swarmed with offers for better teaching positions at more prestigious universities. A simply and easily implemented system of crowdsourced reviews has carefully undone all of the work of the tenure boards of the academy.

“It won’t be long until everything else follows. Restaurant reviews – that’s done. What about reviews of doctors? Lawyers? Indian chiefs? Politicans? ISPs? (Oh, wait, we have that with Whirlpool.) Anything you can think of. Anything you might need. All of it will have been so extensively reviewed by such a large mob that you will know nearly everything that can be known before you sign on that dotted line.

“All of this means that every time we gather together in our hyperconnected mobs to crowdsource some particular task, we become better informed, we become more powerful. Which means it becomes more likely that the hyperconnected mob will come together again around some other task suited to crowdsourcing, and will become even more powerful. That system of positive feedbacks – which we are already quite in the midst of – is fashioning a new polity, a rewritten social contract, which is making the institutions of the 19th and 20th centuries – that is, the industrial era – seem as antiquated and quaint as the feudal systems which they replaced.”

He suggests that these e-connections and contributions can in effect tell us which restaurant can be trusted to eat at, which professor we can entrust to teach us a class.  In principle, one could use this to also pass on social reputation with pictures and names for community residents who had behaved in an untrustworthy manner so others could avoid them.  On its face it sounds like a persuasive argument and part of a strand that suggests that the new technology can always out-do what we used to do.  Assuming the software is effective at eliminating shills (as eBay or Amazon had to contend with — writers or sellers getting fake users or affiliated users from giving them great reviews), these kind of crowdsourcing techniques can be helpful.  Yelp’s recommendations about restaurants are often good; and Amazon’s recommendations are instructive.

What can’t these invisible, helping e-networks do?  1) get at the truth with contested theories of what happened; 2) tell you whether you should value A’s comments more than B’s (although in principle the software could rate the comments by friends in common or their reputation); 3) actually be useful for things beyond spreading information (trust, reciprocity, social support, etc.).

Pesce goes on to point out that the technology does have limits.  Technology brings us together in anarcho-syndicalism and offers the potential for community.  But what limits its effectiveness is that we have a collision between the e-crowd and community and community requires us to work together.  We want to copy and mimic what others have done, but that requires each of us to act for the good of others.

“But [our] laziness, it’s built into our culture. Socially, we have two states of being: community and crowd. A community can collaborate to bring a new mobile carrier into being. A crowd can only gripe about their carrier. And now, as the strict lines between community and crowd get increasingly confused because of the upswing in hyperconnectivity, we behave like crowds when we really ought to be organizing like a community.

And this…is..the message I really want to leave you with. You … are the masters of the world. Not your bosses, not your shareholders, not your users. You. You folks, right here and right now. The keys to the kingdom of hyperconnectivity have been given to you. You can contour, shape and control that chaotic meeting point between community and crowd. That is what you do every time you craft an interface, or write a script. Your work helps people self-organize. Your work can engage us at our laziest, and turn us into happy worker bees. It can be done. Wikipedia has shown the way.

And now, as everything hierarchical and well-ordered dissolves into the grey goo which is the other thing, you have to ask yourself, “Who does this serve?”…I want you to remember that each of you holds the keys to the kingdom. Our community is yours to shape as you will. Everything that you do is translated into how we operate as a culture, as a society, as a civilization. It can be a coming together, or it can be a breaking apart. And it’s up to you.”

What Pesce doesn’t discuss is “social capital.”  This seems to be missing from his remarks.  Some of us may serve others in real space or electronically through the goodnesss of our hearts.  We’re do-gooders or e-do.gooders.  But others of us need to understand that these social ties hold us accountable to the group.  They make us more likely to do things for others because we are hardwired to provide more for people inside our circles than outside our circles.  That’s why we give more to our family than to strangers and help friends more than we do a tribe half-way around the world.  Social ties redefine our sense of ‘we’.

It’s hard to believe that exhortations to do good on the Internet, as important as they are, will achieve the optimal amount of communal action.  That is, after all, why commons are overgrazed and oceans are overfished.  Because too many in society realize that there is more to be had from overgrazing and overfishing now rather than letting someone else do it.

Social capital can also help police social norms (of working for others, of contributing, of not taking more than one’s share).  Experimental evidence shows that fairness also seems hardwired into our brains.  We are willing to punish others in experimental Ultimatum or Dictator Games from behaving in a selfish manner, even when it means that we the punisher gets less.

For more on Crowdsourcing, Jeff Howe (from Wired) has an interesting new book, Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business (2008).

Definition: A company outsourcing a job traditionally served by employees and fills it through an open call to large undefined group of people, generally using on the internet.  People best qualified to do the job are not always the person that one would first think of to assign a job in a corporation.

CrowdSourcing builds upon The Wisdom of Crowds; in it, Howe identifies 4 ways in which groups can produce better results than individuals: collective intelligence, crowd creation, crowd voting, and crowd funding.

From BusinessWeek’s review of the book: “In the first [category], collective intelligence, companies including Dell and gold-mining group Goldcorp ask people inside and outside the company to help solve problems and suggest new products, such as Dell’s Linux-based computers. The second model, crowd creation, is used by businesses such as Current TV and Frito-Lay to create news segments and video ads. People vote for their favorite T-shirt design at apparel maker Threadless’ Web site, thereby illustrating crowd voting. Startups SellaBand and Kiva use the last model, crowdfunding, to underwrite new music labels and fund microloans to individuals.

“Howe’s best example is iStockphoto, a startup that is undermining the established stock-photo business. The community began in 2000 as a vehicle for hobbyists who wanted to trade their pics. Two years later, iStock began selling photos for 25 cents each to cover bandwidth costs. Clients flocked in, and in 2006, Getty Images bought the enterprise. Now, with 60,000 part-time photographers and illustrators on board, 3.5 million images in the bank, and 2 million customers, iStock is the world’s third-largest dealer of images.

“Howe sweeps away certain misapprehensions about such activity. While it’s true that most people who are involved don’t get paid, they still need incentives. At iStockphoto, that comes in the form of workshops in which people meet and share expertise. And Howe warns that not all crowds are created equal. For example, he suggests that sports teams would do better to use fantasy-league enthusiasts rather than scientists to handicap up-and-coming athletes. Perhaps the hardest lesson for businesses is the importance of including people with whom you don’t ordinarily work. Organizations reinforce similar approaches and inside-the-box thinking. When you’re looking for something truly different, the crowd can lead you down a less traveled path.”

While Howe praises this rise of the ‘virtual crowd’ — you used to have to actually assemble a crowd to benefit and now gee-whiz you can do it on the internet — I wonder whether despite benefits to corporations or individuals (like cheaper pictures on iStockPhoto or better predictions of what ads will work), we’ve lost the social capital inherent in actual crowds or the social capital built from these old-line processes.

If we are migrating to more CrowdSourcing we ought at least pursue what we do (at a minimum via the Internet) to actually bring this virtual crowd together (making creating e-events, maybe creating communities of interest as was the genesis of iStockPhoto, maybe if the virtual crowd is large enough, breaking it down by zip code and encouraging and facilitating pieces of the crowd getting together in real space).  What’s good for the goose is not always so for the gander, and CrowdSourcing is likely to lead to cheaper outcomes (for example photos) and often better, more democratic decisions, it portends to exacerbate the real losses we’ve seen in our true communities over the last generation.

10/7/09 update: Facebook, through Facebook Connect, now uses crowd-sourcing for foreign language translation, getting users to vote on which user-supplied translations are best for various phrases.  More here: