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December 10, 2004
As you type, the Google Suggests beta suggests completions based on how many hits there are for each possible fulfillment.
At PA it suggests “Paris Hilton” and at PAM it suggests “Pamela Anderson,” so clearly the technology works.
Here’s the script that makes it work. I think.
MeetUp’s have doubled in the past three months. They’ve built MeetUp 2.0, allowing MeetUps to have official moderators.
Scott founded MeetUp after reading “Joining one group cuts your odds of dying over the next year in half” in Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone.
The Net is enabling a new type of associations, different from unions, parties., etc. The new ones are local, persistent, with card-carrying members and advocates.
The Internet isn’t about changing the world. It’s about saving the world.
[As Susan Crawford says on the IRC: Yay optimism.]
Robert Putnam, author of Bowling alone, replies. We have “privatized leisure time.” Now we’ve been having the debate on the Net’s effect on communities for 15-20 years. It’s more interesting to ask how the Net can be used not to create some fictional [“fictional”???] commnity online but real face-to-face communities.
By far the evangelical Protestant movement is the best organized in the country. It’s the biggest counter-trend to the isolation I described in Bowlling Alone. MeetUp groups don’t have the intensity or commitment and social support of the “cellular church” model.
Tod Cohen, eBay
[eBay is the main sponsor of this event.] eBay tries to live by simple values: Most people are good, etc.
In the 3rd quarter, there were 348M listings. The total goods and services traded in the 3rd Q was $3.8B. The largest category by values is automobiles, $10.7B. 54% of the business is in the US. 12M registered users in Germany. There are 56M PayPal members. 2.4B feedback comments.
The question for the panel: What can politics learn from business with regard to the Net?
Esther Dyson
[She’s on the MeetUp board and was chair of ICANN.] “You learn from mistakes, and I learned a huge amount at ICANN.”
A lot of the utopian stuff you hear on line — “We’re going to create a global village” — is implausible, to put it politely.
In business, you can get rid of the customers you don’t like. You don’t need to follow due process beyond staying within the law. Government can’t do that. That’s why government is so ponderous and slow. The Dean and Kerry campaigns failed to enlarge the market; they were talking to themselves and they weren’t listening. In politics, you want someone with convictions and courage, but who listens so s/he can explain her/his views more effectively. the Net needs to be used more as a listening tool.
Debora Spar, Harvard Business School
The bubble taught us that the Net didn’t suspend the law of gravity. You need to have a business plan that involves selling stuff. “And I suspect the same is true in politics: Yes, there are many things we can do differently, but we haven’t suspended the basic laws of human interaction.”
Conclusions for politics: Don’t forget the basics. And what are the ways of putting together communities of interest? And business and politics are different: Business is about controlling info and politics is about disseminating info.
Esther: eBay is political. It changes how people view themselves in relationship to institutions. When you see yourself empowered in one sphere, you see it in other spheres.
[The fact that we can use the same “models” to discuss politics and business should, IMO, be taken as a sign of despair and deep cynicism.]
Jonathan Zuck, Association for Competitive Technology
“I don’t care about politics.” Politics is a little bit ridiculous if it’s taken as an end unto itself. He’s a sw developer. In politics you have a three-legged stool: voters, money, and substance. In that order.
Businesses can take on a life of their own. Look at Craigslist.org. And now it’s happening in politics. But, if people see the promise not coming to fruition, they may recede back into their Barcaloungers.
Craig Newmark, Craigslist.org
[He’s introduced as “customer service representative and founder.”]
I grew up with a pocket protector. I’m going to ignore the topic of a business plan or model because we have neither. Experience and instinct are more reliable. Craig supports “nerd values.”
“What’s working for us is that we seem to be run by a moral compass. We’re trying to do what’s right for people based initially on our own values, but the community pretty much drives us. For example, when we were thinking about charging, we asked the community what we should charge for, and they said charge people who otherwise would be paying for the service. We’re not pious about this.”
This is one of the most uncomfortable things I’ve ever said but the Golden Rule is really what people want from businesses and politics. Nothing fancy, just being fair, trying to level the playing field, and treating every one with respect. I’ve never said this before but we try to be righteous.
I spend most of my time doing customer service. Maybe that’s the equivalent of government service. This is dull as dirt. How does this apply to politics? There’s a lot of talk about moral values. There’s something real there. People want to be treated fairly. Work hard, play fair and you’ll get ahead. But in politics, people can be scammed by the talk. A lesson we learn from customer service is to genuinely engage with people all the time.
[I’m a huge fan of Craig and what he’s built, or, more exactly, what he’s enabled to arise.]
Q: Is the Net culture value free?
Esther: It fosters openness. Reputation systems find the bad apples and lead the rest to behave better.
Craig: People are eager to behave well.
Jonathan: People are basically passive. They’ll go online and just read. [Jarvis is shaking his head a few rows ahead of me.]
Esther: Governments should generally keep their hands off. Peer-to-peer governance is better.
Q: (Ina Steiner, AuctionBytes): What can governments learn from companies like eBay?
Jonathan: The entrenched middleman is the main barrier to ecommerce. I’m not that interested in having politics learn from business, but maybe the lesson is: You entrenched middlemen? Your jobs are at risk, too. Let’s hope they get displaced from politics.
Esther: A lot of governance mechanisms will come from outside the government, so we have to build an ecosystem of things that work together. And don’t rely on the authorities for everything.
The Berkman Center’s conference on the internet and democracy begins with a panel on “Citizenship.”
Tom Sander, Kennedy School of Gov’t
Tom is studying MeetUp.com. They sat in on 40 MeetUps in 8 communities and interviewed people. They found that MeetUp is not a young person’s phenomenon. Attendees tended to have more education than normal. There’s a high turnover rate, which is not a good way to build trust. Nevertheless, about 30% of attendees meet up with other attendees outside of MeetUp.
Kerry MeetUps attracted 10-15x the number of people who came to Bush MeetUps. [And then the Kerry campaign stopped supporting MeetUp.] The political MeetUps tended to be larger and to have a clear leader. And they spent a loss less time socializing than at other MeetUps. The Kerry campaign at its peak hade 2/3s the attendees that Dean did at his. Maybe this is because MeetUp is more useful in the early stages of a campaign. Also, the Dean campaign was better at letting ideas and blogs from the grassroots filter up into public view.
Pippa Norris, Kennedy School
She has researched the effect of e-voting from the home or office in the UK. In Britain, they’ve experimented with doing this through phone, Palms, Interent, teletext TV, etc. This should be compared with Oregon where everything was done through the mail. The British method is more convenient, can overcome social exclusion (“My kid was sick that day,” “Too hard to get my wheelchair down the stairs”), and streamline the administration of elections.
In May 03, the UK tried 59 pilot studies involving 6M people casting real ballots. The results showed that voting by mail incrased voter turnout while e-voting was at best mixed. Young people didn’t vote whether it was postal, email or mixed. The older population really liked the postal voting. Gender, age and class were significant variables.
Conclusion: All-postal ballots are afar more effective than e-voting at boosting turnout. The Internet has more effect on other aspects of the election process.
[Pretty damn interesting. Jarvis says her pdf is here.]
Hossein Derkkhshan (Hoder)
70% of Iran is under 30 years old. 5-7M Iranian citizens are on the Net. There are about 75,000 active weblogs in Persian. The result is the Internet is the most trusted medium among Iranians.
He gives metaphors for understanding what’s hapenning. First, blogs are windows. You can see into Iran and see how deeply the Iranian people have changed, how open and more tolerant they are. Second, blogs are bridges. It can even bridge parents and children. Even the VP of Iran blogs, a nd promotes blogging as the best tool for understandiing what’s going on. Women bloggers have been invited to official ceremonies as representatives of their generation. The hardliners have blogs, also. And blogs are cafes, places where discussions happen that otherwise wouldn’t be allowed to happen.
The Internet has made the hardliners in charge so angry that they’re cracking down on political websites. They’re filtering them out. They’ve developed conspiracy theories to support their agendas, e.g., the bloggers are funded and managed by the CIA.
[Hoder is explaining exactly why for so many of us, the Internet is the medium of hope.]
QA
Lolita Jackson, pres of a NY Republican activist group: Do political meetups do better in areas where the people feel a bit under siege?
Tom: I haven’t researched it.
Jarvis: What can we do to help, Hoder?
Hoder: The world could help us a lot. Localized, free technology. Education. We need to increase access. E.g., millions in Iran have access to satellite TV. It would be revolutionary if the same tech could be used to provide Net access.
Jordan Pollack (Brandeis): WRT e-voting, people have to trust that the medium has not been undermined. [A totally off-topic editorial interjection: Jordan has created a micro version of backgammon, called Nannon.]
Pippa: There are a number of factors, including trust. We need to do more research.
Zack Exley (Kerry campaign, ex-MoveOn.org): We took the links to MeetUp off the Kerry site because we were switching to our own version. When we did it corresponds with when Tom saw the dropoff. Why do you, Tom, consider MeetUp’s stickiness to be low? Compared to what?
Q: Is the Net narrowing us or broadening us?
Hoder: Few people are able to consistently read opinions that are opposed to theirs.
Dan Gillmor blogs that he’s leaving the san Jose Mercury News in order to start a citizen-journalism project.
This is a big deal. Dan is one of the most respected journalists around, a man of perfect integrity and great vision. And guts. Something exciting is in the wind.
Joi, who’s in the room, has set up a chat channel for the Berkman conference: harvardbits at irc.freenode.net. See you there.
I’m at the Berkman Center’s conference on the internet and democracy, and will be “covering” it. Except that I feel no obligation to report on everything that goes on. I write about what’s interesting to me and what I think might be interesting to you.
When I’m live-blogging, I attempt to give the gist of what’s being said, keeping as true to the particular words as is useful. If I’m quoting exactly, I put quotes around it. Otherwise, I’m gisting. Remarks in brackets are editorial comments.
The conference is being webcast here. Because you need a Harvard account to use the wifi, I don’t know if there will be a backchannel.
This morning, MovableType’s internal ui is all squished to the left. This happened when I was installing the upgrade to 3.1, and it was because I had put styles.css into the wrong directory. Once I [put it into the right place, it worked fine. I didn’t move anything since then, and the styles.css is right where it’s supposed to be, but MT seems not to care.
Any suggestions?
Reduced Version of last night:
Michael Turk: The Internet is great for getting your message out.
Joe Trippi: The Internet is great for enabling people to connect with one another.
Reduced Reduced Version
Turk: Messages.
Trippi: Conversations.
Reduced Reduced Reduced Version
Tu: !
Tr: ?
December 9, 2004
At the John f. Kennedy Forum at the John f. Kennedy School of Government, the Berkman Center is kicking off it’s conference on the Internet and politics. A couple of dramatic statements came out at this first event…
The moderator, journalist Kathleen Matthews, begins by saying that some think the Internet is a useful tool and others think it will change everything. She introduces Joe Trippi (head Deaniac) and Michael Turk, e-campaign director for Bush/Cheney who “marshalled 7.5m e-activists”. She says they should talk in sound bites, which she unfortunately twice refers to as “blogspeak.” [Jeff Jarvis, behind me, whispers, “She obviously doesn’t read Rosen.” And I want to tell her, “Don’t confuse being interesting with speaking in sound bites.]
Q: Trippi, you say the revolution won’t be televised. What do you mean by that?
Trippi: TV is a passive medium. In 2003, the question was whether people would get past sending email to one another and go out an organize in the community. That was a huge sea-change. What this was about is Americans learning to trust strangers again. A community of trust gets built on the Net. No one would put their name address on a telephone pole saying come talk with me about politics, but that’s just what people were doing on the Internet.
Q: For a hundred years, your party would sponsor your little league team, and on election day you’d be given a little money and you’d walk around and get out the vote. Then it became big media buys on TV. In the 2004 campaign, what was new?
Turk: Viral marketing. People at house parties pass along the messages of the campaign. That’s one reason there was more interest in the campaign.
Q: And it was easier for people to contribute.
Turk: Yes, but we were more interested in getting the volunteer base communicating and spreading the message. [Politics as “message passing.” I hate it. Democracy is not marketing.]
Trippi: The Net is making a lot of the standard powers of politics more irrelevant. People weren’t taking their cues from the party leaders. The Net let the message be spread, but it was people talking with their friends and neighbors and co-workers that enabled us to grow. Meetup.com was important.
Q: You also gave people marching orders on the Dean web site…
Trippi: We asked people to talk about Dean with a friend and get them to sign up. But people responded with their own ideas and creativity. People knew they owned a portion of the campaign, if not all of it.
Q: Wasn’t the Dean campaign almost anarchy with no hierarchy?
Trippi: We started with 432 people. All insurgent campaigns have that lack of command and control.
Turk: Because we were a presidential campaign, we couldn’t do some things that a challenger could do … some of the cartoons going around on the Net wouldn’t make it onto our site. We used the Internet to organize and coordinate, e.g., download the maps of where people should go canvass.
Trippi: We put up lists of undecideds for Dean supporters to write letters to. 135,000 letters were written to them, but we only wrote 95,000, so we know that the Kerry or Clark campaigns were coming onto our site and downloading names.
Q: What happened to Dean in Iowa?
Trippi: We were well organized. But the Iowa tape in which Dean denigrated the caucuses dropped us ten points overnight in our own polling. When Dean told an Iowan to sit down so Dean could speak, we lost another 5 points. (Trippi recounts his blunder on Crossfire in which he intimated that Carter was going to endorse Dean.) The campaign made a bunch of errors that devoured our support.
Q: In this campaign $1.5B was spent on advertising. What will happen when everyone can block out ads? And will the Internet be where this advertising happens?
Turk: There will lots of advertising on the Internet. There’s something very compelling about video.
Q: How are you going to communicate with voters in 2008?
Trippi: In 2000, you couldn’t have predicted 2004. Same thing with 2008. My guess? The Dean campaign was running video on our site, 24 hours a day. At first we wondered how we’d ever feed it. It was a headache at first. But then all over the country, people started creating their own video, running a camera in a coffee shop where Howard was eating. My favorite was a student right before an event telling Dean that he was skipping exams for this. Howard turned from presidential candidate to father…We decided which ones to post, but there was an explosion of creativity.
Q: Will we just have aggregated party channels covering the conventions?
Turk: You look at RSS feeds, and news aggregators … you create your own channel.
Trippi: I think email will be supplanted by RSS feeds as the way the average citizen gets informatoin about the campaign. I think the blogosphere is here to stay. The press keeps looking at these blogs that are getting the huge traffic, but that’s not where the story is. It’s in the long tail. Think about 4.5M blogs averaging 10 readers. That’s 45M readers. There’s no way to stop that or control that.
Q: How do you see the credibility of the blogs expanding?
Turk: You’ll see more stories like Rathergate. The depths of experience represented by those blogs is just amazing. The blogger who uncovered the forgeries was more of an expert than the expert CBS had hired.
Q: What about the problem of blogs spreading misinformation and not having a self-correcting mechanism for days?
Trippi: With blogs??? The interesting thing about the blogosphere is that the average blogger gets called on it immediately. The blogosphere and the Internet are incredibly self-policing. In one sense, the Internet is only surfacing the rumors that have always spread; we just didn’t know they were spreading. The mainstream media have the responsibility of looking into these rumors, e.g., that Bush stole the Ohio election. It’s a healthy thing that the Web bubbles those sorts of rumors up.
Audience participation:
Jeff Jarvis: This national campaign stuff is really cute, but isn’t it really going to matter at the local level?
Trippi: It’s already having a huge impact at the local level. And lots of people have learned that they can use this tool to get involved in their democracy. I’m really excited about what’s going to happen.
Bill Bates: Is the Internet bringing us a deeper understading of the issues, or shallower?
Turk: It depends on the next four years. How much of 2004 was the pop cutural coverage as opposed to community involvement.
Allison: [I couldn’t fully hear her question about the media.]
Kathleen (Moderator): In newsooms, they’re checking the blogs, just as print reporters watch cable news. News is more of a conversation. News consumers are also producers.
Trippi: When reporters were embedded in Iraq so that we only got one flavor of coverage, there was only one place to go: the blogosphere.
Kathleen: It’s a shift in the power structure of the media. And politics.
Q: How do you balance the need to focus on a controlled message and the emphasis on grassroots opinions?
Trippi: If you have the answer, we want you as chair of the Democratic Party. We need to let the people’s voices speak and let the message emerge.
Q: Digital divide? Is using the Internet for politics just white guys talking to white guys?
Turk: It also brings in the activists.
Trippi: Don’t think about the Internet as the age of information but as the age of empowerment.
Jay Rosen: This year, a more interesting narrative was that some people in politics still practice control and some who believe in de-control. This was a war in the Democratic party. It was probably there in the Republican party as well. That’s one way of rewriting the story of the campaign. Looking forward, you have all these people in politics whose career is tied up in control of story, money, news, etc. If the Net is really going to de-control all that, then what happens to this class?
Turk: Every article we saw about the e-campaign was “The Bush campaign is all about control.” But there was no feeling of that internally. There are lots of people who don’t mind bowling alone, who don’t want to be part of a communal structure. [Stowe Boyd, sitting next to me, mutters, “That’s preposterous.”] We never told a volunteer that they had to make ten calls. We gave them tools so that they could spread the message of the campaign. [NO MORE MESSAGES! Please.]
Trippi: Up until this election, there was no where for the urge to reform to go. Both parties continue to slap down reform and not get that this is about recognizing that there is an urge to participate and urge to reform. One party — probably the Democrats — will go to the way of the Whigs. [Whoa, Nelly! Don’t go telling the truth!]
Q: Will the Internet strengthen the two party system?
Trippi: The parties are already becoming irrelevant. The Democratic Party beats the Republicans only in contributions above $1M. You can’t have that and withstand the pressure from below for reform. Someone is going to run an independent campaign and wreak havoc on the parties.
[Turk talks about marketing and passing messages. Trippi talks about people talking and conversing. OTOH, Bush won and Dean lost.]
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