A diverse group of writers has released the first version of the
“Definition of Free Cultural Works.” The authors have identified a minimum set of freedoms which they believe should be granted to all users of copyrighted materials. Created on a wiki with the feedback of Wikipedia users, open source hackers, artists, scientists, and lawyers.

The definition lists the following core freedoms:

* The freedom to use and perform the work

* The freedom to study the work and apply the information

* The freedom to redistribute copies

* The freedom to distribute derivative works.

Inspired by the Free Software Definition and the ideals of the free software and open source movements, these conditions are meant to apply to any conceivable work. In reality, these freedoms must be granted explicitly by authors, through the use of licenses which confer them.

On the website of the definition, , a list of these licenses can be found. Furthermore, authors are encouraged to identify their works as Free Cultural Works using a set of logos and buttons.

The definition was initiated by Benjamin Mako Hill, a Debian GNU/Linux developer, and Erik Miِller, an author and long-time Wikipedia user. Wikipedia already follows similar principles to those established by the definition. Angela Beesley, Wikimedia Advisory Board Chair and co-founder of Wikia.com; Mia Garlick, general counsel of Creative Commons; and Elizabeth Stark of the Free Culture Student Movement acted as moderators, while Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation and Lawrence Lessig of Creative Commons provided helpful feedback.

As more and more people recognize that there are alternatives to traditional copyright, phrases like “open source,” “open access,” “open content,” “free content,” and “commons” are increasingly used. But many of these phrases are ambiguous when it comes to distinguishing works and licenses which grant all the above freedoms, and those which only confer limited rights.

For example, a popular license restricts the commercial use of works, whereas the authors believe that such use must be permitted for a work to be considered Free. Instead of limiting commercial use, they recommend using a clever legal trick called “copyleft:” requiring all users of the work to make their combined and derivative works freely available.

Miِller and Hill encourage authors to rethink copyright law and use one of the Free Culture Licenses to help build a genuine free and open culture.

Links

* freedomdefined.org/ – Official homepage of the definition

* freedomdefined.org/Licenses – Information about specific licenses

* freedomdefined.org/Logos_and_buttons – Logos and buttons for identifying free cultural works

Contact

* Erik Mِiller – eloquence (at) gmail (dot) com – +49-30-45491008

* Benjamin Mako Hill – mako (at) atdot (dot) cc

Here is a great summation of P2P technologies as opposed to P2P cultural phenomena which is what we mainly write about here. Most people know the word P2P from its technical definition.

(reblogged from read – write web)

“Written by Can Erten and edited by Richard MacManus. This is the first in a 2-part series on Read/WriteWeb, exploring the world of P2P on the Web. Part 1 (this post) is a general introduction to P2P, along with some real-world applications of P2P. Part 2 will discuss future applications.

As the connection speed of the internet has increased, the demand for web related services has also increased. After the Web revolution, peer-to-peer networks evolved and currently have a number of different usages – instant messaging, file sharing, etc. Some other revolutionary ideas are still in research. People want to use peer-to-peer in many different applications including e-commerce, education, collaborative work, search, file storage, high performance computing. In this series of posts, we will look at different peer-to-peer ideas and applications.
Introduction

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks have been receiving increasing demand from users and are now accepted as a standard way of distributing information, because its architecture enables scalability, efficiency and performance as key concepts. A peer-to-peer network is decentralized, self-organized, and dynamic in its pure sense, and offers an alternative to the traditional client-server model of computing. Client-server architecture enables individuals to connect to a server – but although servers are scalable, there is a limit to what they can do. P2P networks are almost unlimited in their scalability.

In “pure” P2P systems, every node acts as a server and client – and they share resources without any centralized control. However most P2P applications have some degree of centralization. These are called “hybrid” P2P networks and they centralize at least the list of users. This is how instant messengers or file sharing programs work – the system keeps a list of users with their IP addresses.

Different applications of P2P networks enable users to share the computation power (distributed systems), data (file-sharing), and bandwidth (using many nodes for transferring data). P2P uses an individual’s computer power and resources, instead of powerful centralized servers. The shared resources guarantee high availability among peers. P2P is a really important area to research, because it has a huge potential in distributed computing. It is also important for the industry as well, as new business models are being created around P2P.
P2P Standards

The key thing for the architecture of P2P networks is to achieve reliability, efficiency, scalability and portability.

For the moment there are no standards for P2P application development, but standards are needed to enable interoperability. Sun has tried to implement a framework basis called JXTA, which is a network programming and computing platform for distributed computing. Sun was the first company to try and develop standards for P2P, but surely other companies will also try to implement their own standards. Microsoft, Intel and IBM are investing and working in their research laboratories on P2P supported application frameworks or systems. It is an open area where no standards are accepted yet.
Gnutella

Gnutella has been used in many applications to allow connecting to the same network and searching files in a centralized manner. It’s an open, decentralized search protocol for finding files through the peers. Gnutella is a pure P2P network, without any centralized servers.

Using the same search protocol, such as Gnutella, forms a compatible network for different applications. Anybody who implements the Gnutella protocol is able to search and locate files on that network. Here’s how it works. At start up, Gnutella will try to find at least one node to connect to. After the connection, the client requests a list of working addresses and proceeds to connect to other nodes until it reaches a quota. When the client searches for files, it sends the request to each node it is connected to, which then forwards the request to the other nodes it is connected, until a number of “hops” occurs from the sender.

According to Wikipedia, as of December 2005 Gnutella is the third-most-popular file sharing network on the Internet – following eDonkey 2000 and FastTrack. Gnutella is thought to host on an average of approximately 2.2 million users, although around 750,000-1,000,000 are online at any given moment.

The industry use P2P networks in many different ways, each with different business model and different infrastructure. So now let’s look at some real world applications for P2P…
Instant Messaging

The first adopted usage of P2P applications was instant messengers. Back in the early days of the internet, people used gopher and IRC servers for communication. These technologies could only handle a certain number of users online at the same time, so there were delays for communicating whenever the server was approaching its limits. However the use of P2P changed the whole idea of IM. The bandwidth was shared between users, enabling faster and more scalable communication.
File Sharing

The peer-to-peer file sharing era started with Napster and continued with much more powerful applications such as Kazaa, Gnutella. These programs brought P2P into the mainstream. Although some P2P file-sharing applications have stopped because of legal issues, there is still a high demand in the industry. Now Napster has gone ‘legit’ and there are new media P2P apps like Joost (P2P TV) arriving on the scene. We will discuss this more in the next post.
Collaborative Community

Document sharing and collaboration is really important for a company. This issue has tried to be solved by internal portals and collaboration servers. However the information has to be up to date and with portals this wasn’t always possible. Collaboration with P2P broke that barrier, by using peoples computer resources instead of a centralized server.

Groove is a software with P2P capabilities which was acquired by Microsoft in April 2005. Groove is now offering Microsoft Office based solutions, mainly using P2P for document collaboration. It also allows the usage of instant messaging and integration with some video conferencing solutions. It provides user and role based security, which is one of the most important aspects of P2P for an organization. Groove is also a “relay server” to enable offline usage.
IP Telephony

Another major usage of P2P is IP telephony. IP telephony revolutionaries the way we use the internet, enabling us to call anywhere in the world for free using our computers.

Skype is a good example of P2P usage in VoIP. It was acquired by eBay in 2005. Skype was built on top of the infrastructure of P2P file-sharing system, Kazaa. The bandwidth is shared and the sound or video in real-time are shared as resources. The main server exists only for the presence information and billing users of the system whenever they make a call that has charges (e.g. SkypeOut).
High Performance Computing – Grid Computing

High performance computing is important for scientific research or for large companies. P2P plays a role in enabling high performance computing. Sharing of resources like computation power, network bandwidth, and disk space will benefit from P2P.

Hive computing is similar – it is where millions of computers connecting to the internet can form a super computer, if it is successfully managed. One of the popular projects is SETI@HOME (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), which enables users to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It is a voluntary project with more than 3.3 million users in 226 countries – it has used 796,000 years of CPU time and analyzed 45 terabytes of data in just two and a half years of operation.

Some industrial projects also exist in this area. Datasynapse is charging users for the CPU cycles they use. Open Source projects also exist, like Globus and Globus Grid Forum.
Coming soon…

In Part 2, we will explore future applications of P2P. In the meantime, let us know which real world applications you use right now and what you think of the P2P industry in general.”

(Via ReadWriteWeb)

image courtesy of rocketracoon

We’re pleased to present the third and final excerpt from Momentum today, following Ms. Fine’s introduction on Monday, the first excerpt on Tuesday, and the second excerpt yesterday.  Today, the author demonstrates the power of the synergy of Online & On-Land, of Meeting Up and Moving On, of taking it from cyberspace to the streets.

Online and On-Land Go Hand in Hand
As Craigslist demonstrates, localness matters: relationships can be started online, but they are strengthened and deepened by in-person activities. Research indicates that online and on-land communities reinforce and strengthen one another. Virtual communities are strongest when they are attached to geographically based communities. One group of researchers reports, “Heavy internet use is associated with increased participation in voluntary organizations and politics. Further support for this effect is the positive association between offline and online participation in voluntary organizations and politics.”²

            Since 2001, Meetup.com has been the engine for an amazing amount of connectedness; working at the intersection of online and on-land activity, it has been responsible for the creation of over 100,000 clubs involving over two million people. The concept of Meetup is so simple that it is brilliant. Scott Heiferman, one of the co-founders of MeetUp, describes the genesis of the site this way, “How do you start an association today? Do you need a building in Washington? No, you go online.”³Â Â  We are self-organizers, and MeetUp created a simple mechanism for people with similar interests to form their own local group. It highlights the best of online and on-land worlds: the efficiency of online organizing with the intensity of on-land relationships.

            Meetup was quietly plugging along helping people to self-organize, meet locally and have a drink, trade stories and make new friends when the 2004 presidential campaign began in earnest. The Dean for President campaign was not a virtual campaign—it didn’t happen just in cyberspace—it exploded in hundreds of communities around the country when it began to organize local gatherings through MeetUp. In his book, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi describes the frustrating, head-banging first discussions he had with his campaign colleagues when he advocated the need to use “meetups” as part of a strategy to gain grass-roots support for the candidate. Taking their cues from their technophobic candidate, the members of the campaign staff, except for the one webmaster, just didn’t get it. The resistance to using the Internet for a grass-roots campaign, Trippi writes, was similar to the resistance of companies and corporations to using the Internet for advertising. “Forty years of reliance on television advertising has atrophied creativity, forcing everyone to approach every problem the same way.” The answer, for Trippi, was using the networking power of the Internet to empower campaign participants to create their own campaigns as a part of, but not dictated by, the national effort.⁴

            When the Dean Meetups were finally posted, the number of people participating in local gatherings went from 432 to a high of 190,000 within a year’s time. This explosion of activity helped to turn meetup into a noun, just as Google has become a verb. Dean enthusiasts transitioned from e-mailing one another to talking face-to-face in a local pub or Starbucks. Meetups also helped to create friendships among like-minded individuals that have lasted beyond this one campaign and this one candidate.

            MoveOn.org provides another example of the importance of on-land connections to supplement online efforts. MoveOn is the online advocacy group founded by Wes Boyd and Joan Blades in 1998 with the goal of getting Congress to stop the Clinton impeachment activities and “move on” to more pressing issues. MoveOn exploded in size and influence largely due to the founders willingness to let their members take the lead on determining their strategy.  In the years since its inception it has created a membership base of more than three million people through viral marketing, which takes place when individuals pass on e-mails to friends and family, who in turn spread the word to an ever-widening circle of contacts. That’s certainly an enormous achievement. The 2004 presidential campaign mobilized millions of people, but, ultimately, MoveOn was criticized for concentrating too much on fundraising at the end of the campaign and not being effective at mobilizing voters. In fairness to MoveOn, voter mobilization was never a core competency of the organization. The complaints, I believe, speak more to the incompetence of the Democratic Party than to MoveOn’s capability.

            To its credit, MoveOn has recognized its limitations, one of which was the lack of local connectedness. In March 2005, Micah Sifry, the executive editor of the Personal Democracy Forum reported that “MoveOn.org has quietly decided to experiment with a new form of off-line organizing[,] . . . to support the formation of ongoing local MoveOn Teams, focused on the group’s issue campaigns.” In the past MoveOn had organized sporadic house parties and local calling parties as components of larger campaigns and not as part of its own movement building.   MoveOn’s Washington, D.C., staff person, Tom Matzzie, reported to Sifry that the organization recognized that it had to become more than an online community if it was going to enact significant political change.⁵ MoveOn’s desire to evolve into a permanent, sustainable force for social change speaks to the important, symbiotic relationship between cyberspace and local space.

Networks and Organizations
When I was in graduate school, we had an assigned text titled Organizations in Action, by James D. Thompson.⁶ I liked it, particularly because it was short. One of the key concepts of the book was that of organizational boundary spanners. Thompson described them as people who interact with the outside world, such as customers and constituents, on a regular basis. They receive useful information and also push information out. Social workers, community organizers, and receptionists are typical boundary spanners in activist organizations. In the Connected Age, everyone in your organization is a boundary spanner.

            Imagine how different your work would be if instead of thinking about functions and departments, you thought about networks and connections. In the Connected Age, networks trump hierarchy. Sustainable social change is going to come from those organizations that can engage, facilitate, and strengthen their networks rather than organizations that push out strategies and messages to a passive audience through large advertising budgets.

            [...] There is significant tension between how we are taught to view organizational life and how organizations really work.

We’re pleased to present the second excerpt from Momentum today, following Ms. Fine’s introduction on Monday and the first excerpt on Tuesday.  Today, the author gives us a real-world example of how a small network came together to ignite social change.

Free Schuylkill River Park!
 
The Free Schuylkill River Coalition used e-mail advocacy, blogs, and constituent mail to:

·        Increase its list of supporters more than tenfold
·        Line up elected-official support at the local, state, and national levels
·        Increase participation at local rallies
·        Force a major railroad company to negotiate

In 2001 the good news was that a $14 million pedestrian pathway along Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River was finally close to completion. The bad news was that the CSX Railroad, one of the largest rail networks in the United States, was threatening to close existing track crossings that allowed users of Schuylkill River Park to reach the new path.

To the surprise of many, the powerful railroad company was forced to rethink its plans because a small band of residents used the Internet to organize dispersed constituents and elected officials into a dynamic force called the Free Schuylkill River Coalition.

Free E-Mail Advocacy Tools
For their first action, the residents launched an e-mail advocacy campaign to get people to e-mail the governor about their objects to the grade closings. To launch the e-mail advocacy campaign, they used a free e-mail advocacy service for grass-roots organizations called CitizenSpeak (www.citizenspeak.org). They created a CitizenSpeak account and filled out a form that asked for the text of the e-mail letter and the e-mail address of the governor. CitizenSpeak automatically generated a unique web address specific to their campaign. The coalition members e-mailed this link to the fifty members of the local neighborhood association that the association had e-mail addresses for.

The results were overwhelming. Over 150 people participated in the first week, thanks to a CitizenSpeak “Tell-a-Friend” feature, which allows participants to easily forward messages to their contacts. Using CitizenSpeak’s reporting functions, the coalition was able to download the 150 participants’ contact information. An overwhelming percentage of participants provided in their e-mails personal statements that helped refine the group’s issues. The additional demands were included in a second e-mail campaign, which netted a 30 percent increase in the group’s list of supporters, once again at zero cost.

The Blog
In the text of their e-mail advocacy letter, the coalition invited readers to link to their newly created blog (www.freetheriverpark.org.). The blog provided additional information about the campaign, including pictures of grade crossings in other cities that refuted CSX’s liability concerns.

To create its blog, the coalition used TypePad (www.typepad.com), a low-cost and easy-to-use hosted weblogging service that gives users a rich set of features for immediately sharing and publishing information. Users of TypePad can create photo albums, add text, invite and manage comments, add track backs, and monitor weblog statistics. No HTML skills are required.

Constituent Mail
To keep in regular contact with its growing constituency and to maintain high levels of interest and readiness to participate in actions, the Free Schuylkill River Coalition signed up for Constituent Mail (www.constituentmail.com)—an affordable and easy-to-use online e-mail management service that lets organizations maintain and segment a database of users for personalized, HTML e-mail communications with click-through and open-tracking capabilities.

The coalition used Constituent Mail to e-mail its list of supporters and invite them to attend the First Free Schuylkill River Park Presidents’ Day Rally. The e-mail directed visitors to the blog, where they could download flyers to promote the rally and learn more about the cause. Despite freezing temperatures, more than one hundred people turned out for the rally. Reporters were on hand from a radio station, three TV stations, and the Philadelphia Inquirer to help spread the word.

Campaign Outcomes
As a result of integrating various Internet tools with traditional organizing strategies, the Free Schuylkill River Coalition multiplied its list of supporters tenfold, averaged over forty hits on its website a day, totaled over four thousand hits on the blog’s photo album, and, most important, won a major concession from CSX. Despite the railroad company’s previous refusal to meet with the group or city officials, CSX agreed to negotiate with the city and to address the coalition’s concerns.

Interview with Otto von Busch by Regine Debatty on his social art project, Roomservices.

[This is a collaboration ]with Evren Uzer, an Istanbul-based urban planner and a PhD candidate, on roomservices, a series of practical research projects that explore urban and rural issues and transgress the borders between urbanity, social reorganization, design co-location, applied socio-geography and social art work. With the roomservices projects they experiment with ‘tools’ for providing a different viewpoint or just celebrating the differences in everyday life by revealing their varied shades under new light.

Regine: “I’d like you to tell me more about the “roomservices” urban interventions. The booklet Adventures in Local Knowledge Production (download it as PDF) presents the “low-level networks of pro-ams, prosumers, producers and other co-creators.” Could you explain us briefly who are these people? How important is their contribution of Pro-Ams to cultural, economic and social life or even to research?”

Otto: “Roomservices is run by my partner Evren Uzer and me and in the Adventures in Local Knowledge Production we mapped the low level knowledge production in Innsbruck, Austria. We focused on all small actors not appearing in the yellow pages or entrepreneurial maps, but instead engage in very lose and informal networks. People and places of huge creative potential but that do not appear in our current organization of society. These are serious hobbyists and professional amateurs. We created a simple classifying system for understanding how they operate in the city, connect to each other and to other systems, focusing on three aspects of actors in the low-level networks; archetypes, hubs and channels. Traditionally these are poets, discussion circles, small bands, hobby modders, rehearsal studios, squats, pirate radios etc.

There has lately been a lot of talk about “creative industries” but it will be a serious mistake to consider these activities as industries or even production facilities. We instead tried to see them as co-creators as at this level much is very collaborative and society still struggles to get a grip on what this really is. This level of society is not fitting to our entrepreneurial models but we need to rethink our economic operating system in many ways if we want this low-level to blossom and be the ground for a “new economy”. The copyright and music sharing debates we see now is only the tip of the iceberg of this change we think.”

It is also important to state that it is not a question of including all spare time activities into economic systems or transactions. Hobbies and recreation must still be a free zone for play, relaxation and leisure too. The question is if we can find ways to survive of our pro-am interests and not see all work as necessarily alienating.”

Regine: “Which conditions ensure that a lively network of pro-ams can thrive?”

Otto: “Our purpose was not so much to look at the fertilizers of pro-ams or “creative industries and creative class” as in the works of Richard Florida for example. Evren and I tried to find way to map the so far unexplored correlations between these networks and actors. But the sharing and spreading of new ideas is central, not only through the Internet, but socially. Various platforms, amplifiers and scenes are central for the sharing of knowledge at this level and this is actually something that can be supported beyond the “recreation” or “hobby” level it is perceived as today.

But understanding this level of society is only in its cradle. We have spent centuries optimizing industrialism and institutional capitalism and we still lack models and maps for the low-level knowledge production.”

Regine: “How can an expertise raised on non-profit and democratic principles meet with capitalistic modes of production?”

Otto: “Well this is something that we need time to understand and experiment with and social entrepreneurship, activist business, and anti-preneurship are just a first wave of experiments. Perhaps we need to once again look seriously at local currencies and other means for exchange that can operate on levels where global capitalism does not fit. We need more tools to see how this works, it is apparent that there is no longer ONE public and ONE market but multitudes of publics, markets, levels and networks in society, and most probably we need several models to see them all. Not one theory will explain it. Not one ring will rule them all.”

(via we make money not art)

Most companies today are aware that a substantial share of their profits and market value will ultimately depend on the affective relations that they are able to construct among their stakeholders and the public at large. This is true also for non-profit organizations who will find that their ability to attract funding to a large extent depends on their capacity to accumulate such goodwill. Their common problem is to find a viable method of measuring this social impact.

At the same time consumers and other members of the public often perceive that they have few ways of channelling their objections to the bad behaviour of companies and other actors beyond the level of individual frustration and malcontent. What is needed is some form of aggregator that can translate such individual frustrations into a social value that can potentially have an economic relevance for the companies concerned.

The actics system is an attempt in this direction. (See the plug –in here on the right). Instead of trying to measure the ethical performance of companies according to certain pre-established standards, actics aggregates the judgements of individual users into a common index. It is an attempt to develop a folksonomy of ethics, where the values of the social impact of a company or organization results from aggregating the opinions of the net-worked multitude of users. Is this a viable way of giving a new, tangible value to ethics?

more on actics:

www.actics.com

blog.actics.com

I stumbled upon a blogpost that just should be mentioned. Source: www.shadydentist.com/wordpress/archives/2007/03/26/changing-openids-metaphor-to-p2pid/ 

OpenID support announcements are everywhere. The Wikipedia is in, Microsoft is in, AOL is in, Digg is in, WordPress is in. OpenID is the best idea in ages but it has a problem. Nobody wants to trust somebody like Microsoft, AOL, Digg or even beloved WordPress to provide their identity. I think that’s why the only people you see promoting their OpenID much are hosting identity providers.

I think it boils down to metaphor. When I first wrote about OpenID I was thinking about identities hosted by a few trusted providers. OpenID grew from a desire to cut down on the number of accounts we each have to remember and that would seem to solve the problem. I mentioned some kind of ICANN like agency to maintain the whole thing and then trailed off. When you think in these terms, that’s the problem with OpenID, who to trust to control it? I haven’t found an acceptable answer.

Now I think the answer is this: Control should be distributed. Identity should be a swarm. Trust should not be a hierarchy. OpenID needs a way to link many identities together in a secure flexible way. The metaphor needs to change to peer to peer. Philosophers figured this out ages ago but lacked the tools to make it happen, however maybe things have changed.

Hierarchy Metaphor (not so good)   A is an identity provider, it alone contains an identity. B and C authenticate off A. A has all the power. No potential for equal power.

 

vs.

Peer to Peer Metaphor (good)   A, B and C are all identity providers. Any provider can authenticate as much as allowed off any other. Potential for equal power.

In the hierarchy model, ‘A’ has all the power/control and there is no way to change the situation. This power is embedded into the system and once established cannot be changed without rebuilding the system. There just isn’t any mechanism to link ‘B’ and ‘C’ without ‘A’.

In the peer to peer model, ‘A’ might have more power/credibility (for example, if it’s a major university) but the situation is flexible. The power comes from trust not the system itself. If ‘A’ is seen to wither while ‘B’ and ‘C’ grow strong, the system can be adjusted by users to recognize this.

If I want some anonymity I can always create a new identity someplace and link it to nothing. The question then is who will trust such an identity?

These identities could be at a university, or an employer, news organization, political party; coffee shop, night club, etc. The metaphor creates so many identities I don’t even bother to know about most of them. That is after all how the humanity works anyway. I have countless identities for famous people that the people themselves know nothing of. The same with dead people.

The folks at XFN seem to have had this idea for awhile now. Their system works by embedding simple meta data about relationships into HTML to enable links between friends and identity consolation. They have better diagrams than me too.

XFN seems to be struggling for an implementation in the same way OpenID is struggling to get out from under hierarchy. OpenID is being implemented by big kids who smell power but XFN gets rid of that stench. I think it’s time for the two to dance.

Following Allison Fine’s introduction to her book yesterday, we’re pleased to present the first excerpt from the book here, in which she describes the power of networks today.

Social Networks
Networks are an ingrained part of our lives—so much so that we’ve almost stopped noticing how prevalent they are. Physical networks like electricity grids, facilitative networks like the Internet, and social networks like the PTA and religious congregations surround us.

            Two key characteristics of social networks are critical to their success. First, successful networks have hubs of information and leaders who drive the work. Second, information in social networks flows in a “friction-free” way to enable and empower people to work quickly at the outer fringes of the network.

            Social networks are the perfect renewable energy source. A power grid loses overall potency the farther it spreads. The more connections and the broader the network, the more energy it takes to fuel the overall grid. A social network is just the opposite: the more widely flung it is, the more powerful and resilient it becomes. If we could bottle social networks, we would have the perfect fuel because as they grow they get stronger not weaker—and at no extra cost.

            Social-change movements are often catalyzed and led by people who can crystallize a problem and spur their social networks into action. Martin Luther King Jr. worked through the African American churches; Mothers Against Drunk Driving through PTAs; and MoveOn.org through friend-to-friend e-mails. For people and entities dedicated to social change, social networks present the greatest opportunity to build strong constituencies.

            Think about your social networks; your nuclear family or members of your church, sorority, neighborhood association, softball team. In an increasingly noisy world, you may get a lot of information from TV or online, but you get your trusted news—the news you are most inclined to believe—the same way that your parents and grandparents did, from your social networks. These people help you to norm, to figure out what you believe in relation to what others believe about an issue, whether it’s raising school taxes or Aunt Sophie’s new hairstyle. These are your trusted sources for finding a dentist and picking a summer camp for your children. Because of the power of social networks TV news usually needs to quiet down a bit, marinate for a while, before it settles into conventional wisdom. Who won a political debate? Wait a week or so. Only after people talked and wrote did we collectively decide that Al Gore’s heavy sighing and Gerald Ford’s belief that Poland was free of the Soviet Union were serious gaffes.

Facilitative Networks
The Internet is an ever-growing network of networks. That’s why surfing the ’net is so much fun. A recipe for strawberry-rhubarb pie links to a website about the history of Southern food, which leads to a site discussing William Faulkner novels, and so on. Each one of those sites has its devotees, who are connected to all the devotees of the other sites, and this interlocking system creates connections that continue to grow and expand.

            The World Wide Web enables nontechnical users to “see” everything that is going on in cyberspace and to add to it. It is all there: billions of bits and bytes of information, gossip, and articles. Star Trek fans chat about whether the Borg can ever be beaten; single people find dates and spouses; bereaved parents comfort one another; cancer patients exchange information about new treatments. The Web spread faster and wider than any previous technological development because we could readily see that accessing this giant box full of information would be fun.

            What we weren’t prepared for was how using the Web would strengthen existing relationships at the same time that it created new ones. We all bring our own social connections wherever we go, and so, in retrospect, it makes sense that we simply brought them online with us as well. We have the ability to talk or write often and inexpensively to people who are special to us. They may be down the hall or across the country or even overseas, geographically dispersed as never before. We can share newsworthy information—and annoying jokes—with our whole network of friends and family, instantly.

            Remember how hard it used to be to organize a family cookout, when you had to call everyone to check dates first, hand out potluck assignments, and then send out invitations? Now one group e-mail does the trick. How about the difficulty of staying in touch with your college roommate when she moved from Chicago to Seattle? Now you can instant-message her every week to keep up on events and swap digital photos of your kids.

            Advertising professionals use the term stickiness to describe ads that have longevity because people cannot get them out of their heads. The Internet is “sticky” in that social bonds between people who may have only one small common interest become increasingly stronger, broader, and more intertwined.  My husband bought a digital picture frame for his grandmother in Florida. The frame automatically downloads pictures of her great-grandchildren from a web server every day. Our Bubbles doesn’t have to know anything about computers. She just plugs her frame into a wall socket and plugs the phone line into a phone jack, and magically new photos appear as fast as we can take them. In this way, under the radar screen, social ties have grown in the Connected Age. The rise of MySpace.com and other networking sites demonstrates the interest that people have in becoming connected to others across geographical, economic, racial, and social divides, even without a specific purpose.

            Craig Newmark took the concept of cyberspace as a community a quantum leap forward with Craigslist. The site was started in 1995 as a free space for sharing information about social events in San Francisco. It has since become an international marvel that serves 190 cities in the United States and around the world. Over ten million people a month use Craigslist. The site now charges for classified ads in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles only to support itself, but it is far more than classified ads online. Craigslist is a dating service, a hub for bartering goods and services locally, and a forum for discussions. Although Craigslist has spread around the world, the focus of the site has always been to strengthen ties among people in local communities; connections newspaper classified ads can never create. Craigslist enables millions of strangers to build relationships that result in someone buying furniture, a lawyer bartering services with a plumber, and people finding dates in Boise, Boston, and even Rome.

Allison Fine afine@afine.us

The dynamics between experts and amateurs is one of the big governance issues in peer production. If not done right, giving power to the experts can crowd out the amateurs, and kill the dynamic of the project.

Adam Glenn, in a description of the Christmas Bird Count, shows how some citizen science projects have evolved solutions for quality control. He wants to apply these lessons to the field of citizen journalism, where accuracy is equally important.

Excerpt:

By Adam Glenn at www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=31&aid=116168

See our entry on Citizen Journalism for extra context:

“I think such citizen science projects offer valuable models that can be applied to citizen media projects:

1. Rigorous data collection. The Bird Count uses carefully developed methodologies to avoid spoiling data with inaccurate or duplicate information. Likewise, citizen journalists can establish and disseminate guides for reporting and photography standards — especially regarding verifiable info such as names, quotes, attribution, numbers and the like.

2. Pooling and verifying cumulative results. The sheer volume of overall data collected in the Bird Count ensures that, if any contaminated info does sneak in, it won’t unacceptably distort the final result. That’s an important lesson for citizen journalism sites, harking back to the journalistic principle of verifying information with multiple sources. Ideally, citJ projects should seek multiple iterations of information — for example, requiring that assertions by one contributor be verified by others.

3. Vetting amateurs. Even small hurdles like registration forms and minimal fees can weed out the unworthy, while extensive mandatory training can seriously raise the level of contributions (as well as the cost, unfortunately). It’s worth considering whether citJ sites might benefit from mandatory online tutorials, accuracy checklists or story forms to make sure vital info isn’t left out of submissions.

4. Expert-amateur interaction. Most citizen science projects aim to pair the novice with either experienced amateurs or experts themselves, fostering mentoring relationships that ultimately improve the data. Why shouldn’t experienced citizen journalists (or professional journalists associated with new media or even mainstream media) provide the same mentoring? This could be done via workshops, in-the-field training, online editing, or other means. If the gains in media democratization aren’t enough for you, how about the ways in which the resulting bond with the community and its most active news consuming members could pay off in loyalty to the news product?”

The following introduction to this work is from The Drum Beat, a weekly electronic publication exploring initiatives, ideas and trends in communication for development.

In this piece, Allison Fine, author of “Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age” and Senior Fellow at Demos: A Network of Ideas and Action, considers the use of new technologies for social activism. She poses two key questions, reflecting on whether increased technological connectedness will lead to increased involvement in social change efforts.

Connected Activism: Revised Social Action or New Paradigm?

In May 2005, the women of Kuwait used their Blackberries and other handheld devices to conduct a stealth campaign to advocate for full women’s political suffrage. The Kuwaiti legislature overwhelmingly passed a new law allowing women to vote and run for office and the male legislators of Kuwait found out the hard way that emails don’t wear skirts or burkas.

So begins “Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age”, my new book published last fall by Wiley & Sons. Momentum is filled with big ideas and stories about 21st century social change fueled by social networks and social media tools like blogs and instant messaging. I call this new way of working connected activism. Connected activism is happening all around the world, catalysing social change efforts and making them more accessible, more participatory and effective than ever before.

However, as I wrote Momentum two questions lingered related to this current “Connected Age”. The answers to these questions will make the difference between connected activism spreading like wildfire – or not. The first is related to the overwhelming number of existing nonprofit organisations that aren’t connected activists. Can people and organisations change how they think and work in order to move away from being closed and proprietary to becoming open and connected? The second question is: Do the new technologies actually involve more new people in social change efforts or are the same people who would have been protesting, writing letters, attending meetings still doing so now, just online?

But, first, a little more on connected activism.

In the click of a mouse we have traveled from an old century to a new one, from the Information Age to the Connected Age.

Our passion for participation and social change is colliding with the reality that we are increasingly connected to one another. The digital tools that promote interactivity and connectedness, including e-mail and the World Wide Web, as well as cell phones, handheld computers (or personal digital assistants), and even iPods that play music and videos, are called “social” media. Social media combine the intimacy of the telephone with the reach of broadcast. These tools are important not for their wizardry but because they are inexpensive and accessible and can make interactions, and potentially social change, massively scalable.

The fact that new tools network us to one another faster and easier than ever before does not change how social change happens. We have a yearning for connectedness and civic life; they just look and feel different using the new technologies. Connected activism is changing the way people create and strengthen communities; these new ways in turn can become significant forces for social change. In the twentieth century new types of transportation vehicles were manufactured in massive numbers to physically connect people to one another. In the twenty-first century, online networks connect people to family, friends, common-interest groups, peers, colleagues, and fellow hobbyists across not only geographic, but also economic, racial, and ethnic boundaries.

Connectedness is not a device or machine but a new way of thinking and acting that affects everything that we do. Starting a blog or a chat room does not make an organisation connected. The only way to increase connectedness is to listen to people and encourage them to participate in meaningful ways. Activists need to reorient themselves and their organisations. We still need to determine how we fit into the larger network of people and organisations, to intentionally develop and implement strategies, to spur social change in order for our efforts, services, and programmes to be relevant and successful.

Being successful in the Connected Age means using technology to achieve an end. All people, in every aspect of their work, will have to know how and when to use various tools to inform and unite people and to fuel collective action. In order to succeed in this new world, we will have to leave behind our old, commodified, proprietary ways. Yet even though the Connected Age is right here in front of us, people (and organisations) are hesitant to move from the old ways of managing information to the new, connected way of life.

Being successful in the Connected Age is about more than knowing which button to push; I feel it is about becoming more open and connected to people and ideas. And here’s where the struggle to answer my two initial questions begins. In the United States alone, there are nearly one million nonprofit organisations. These are people and groups that for the most part came of age within the systems, norms, expectations and education of the old Information Age – a system that no longer applies to the world writ large and in particular the world of social change. When I was doing research for Momentum I tried to find organisations that had reinvented themselves from old, closed proprietary, to new, open and connected. I couldn’t find any. The organisations that I highlighted in Momentum, like Moveon.org, practice connected activism because it is in their DNA, a core part of who they were from the beginning. So the question remains, can organisations change their fundamental culture?

Some of my colleagues who are immersed in using social media for social change are convinced that these more traditional organisations don’t, won’t, can’t get connected activism. I am not prepared to believe that, but becoming connected activists will require these organisations to change the way they think and act – and I know that this kind of change is difficult.

Much has been made of the fact that younger people are “native” to social media while older people are just “tourists” in it. Still, adults thrown into a foreign culture have been known to go native. People can change; I certainly have. I started and ran a nonprofit organisation for twelve years. During that time, our operating culture focused on branding our products and services, beating the competition to funding, and talking at rather than with our community. We did good, important work in all the wrong ways. I feel I have learned how to be more open and connected, how to work side-to-side not up-and-down and to view my work as part of an ecosystem of other people and organisations doing good work. There is evidence of mature organisations starting to experiment in using social media to engage their constituents in meaningful ways (e.g. the ACLU’s online action network). Though this evidence doesn’t yet indicate a wholesale shift in the way that organisations relate to their volunteers and other constituents, it is promising of the change needed for organisations to engage in connected activism. However, a sample of change in one person (me) and some organisations like the ACLU is not enough to prove that the entire nonprofit sector could fundamentally shift how it works and what it values. More and more organisations are implementing blogs, beginning to use videos as a way to communicate and advocate for their issues, but, again, whether these new tools are indicators of a willingness by organisations to push power out to the edges is still to be determined.

My second question focuses on who is involved in connected activism efforts. Is it the same people who have always been involved in social change efforts, or are the barriers to participation sufficiently lowered so that many new people have become involved?

“The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell describes the phenomenon of ideas and products that reach critical mass, or “tip”, because of a groundswell of interest by large numbers of people. Gladwell describes a group of people who are connectors; they have a natural ability to create and maintain a wide-flung network of friends and acquaintances. They can go through a phone book and find a much higher percentage of people that they know than most of the population can. Extending Gladwell’s framework, in the Connected Age, everyone can potentially become a connector. I may never know thousands of people on a first-name basis, but by using social media I can reach out to more people in more meaningful ways than I currently do. But are people actually using and experiencing social media this way – do normally reticent and retiring people become more active and connected online?

I experienced Gladwell’s concept in action at a staff retreat a few years back. The facilitator posted descriptions of various committees around the room. She then asked people to survey the groups and put a post-it note on themselves if they would be interested in participating in that activity with a group of people. The room of twenty people turned into a post-it continuum of introverts wearing one or two post-its to the mega-connectors who were eclipsed in post-it notes. The natural tendency of people to join or not to join activities is a core part of them and has great implications for who is involved and how they are involved in social change efforts.

A group of psychologists at Western Australia University have been studying the interactions of shy people online and on land. Their findings show that “the absence of visual and auditory cues online reduces shy individuals’ experience of detecting negative or inhibitory feedback cues from others.” But will these new interactions extend to social change efforts that require not only online interactions but also on-the-ground mobilising and organising? Can people, shy or not, learn to become more like Gladwell’s connectors?

For both questions there is an overarching issue: can we teach connectedness to create a broader circle of activists? We know several things for sure already: 1) young people are learning how to be connected from the get-go; and 2) introverts are able to participate in group dialogues much more easily than before. But is this enough to ignite and sustain large-scale social change efforts?

I don’t have empirical answers to these questions. According to the Pew Center for American Life and the Internet, more people are reading more about social change efforts on mainstream media news sites and on blogs, they are clicking for causes like mad, donating online, self-organising meetings about issues and candidates. These trends are mirrored in other countries, although perhaps not at the same level of widespread engagement yet, around the world, enabling people to become and stay involved in a richer variety of ways in social change efforts. Ultimately, though, for organisations and efforts that are rich in intentions and effort and poor in resources, we need to know how or whether these new tools, gadgets, and widgets are enhancing our natural tendencies or creating entirely new ones. It is worth trying to unravel these questions and provide guidance and assistance to organisations working so hard to create positive social change, with few resources.

Allison Fine afine@afine.us