Tuesday night showed what community organizing can do. Not only did Obama take the electoral college in a landslide, but the 50-state strategy made red states like North Carolina blue while turning many others purple. He did it with huge turnout, a dominant position among emerging voter blocks like youth and ethnic voters and with techniques learned from the trenches in Chicago.

Only a community organizer could pull this off.

The stories from the field about the Obama vs McCain ground game show the difference. Obama’s field offices were reported full and buzzing with volunteers from all over the country. McCain’s campaign offices were mostly empty and dull, or closed.

Then there’s the Obama campaign’s web strategy, which will go down in history as the first mass scale and most effective use of the social web for political or any other form of organization. But it’s just the beginning, and there is so much yet to be written!

Change.gov shows that Obama fully intends to take his massive email and sms lists, the lessons learned from the campaign and his community organizing instincts together with a new call and program around National Service to really transform the meaning of politics, community and country. The clues are there, and I just can’t help but stare in awe and amazement.

For those of us who dreamed of the potential of marrying bottom-up social movements with a new kind of leadership style, it’s hard to process that our moment may really truly be now. All of a sudden, the work of community organizing just got a new and rather Presidential luster. For those of us who work in the field where social web and real-world issues meet, it’s going to be a very busy time indeed.

read more | digg story

Now this shouldn’t really be a surprise to those who have been paying attention to social network analysis, tipping points and the new behaviours enabled by the social web.

What is a surprise is that the nonprofit/charitable sector has been fairly late to the social web party, while corporate brands trip over themselves to build brand communities, develop social media strategies and deploy viral campaigns as budgets increasingly shift from broadcast to digital.

When it comes to helping to shift societal behaviours to more sustainable and humane patterns, the tools, practices and methodologies of social media and social change were made for each other.

If you (or your clients) are involved in social change and looking for an intensive, practical and productive training into these technologies and practices, Social Tech Training being held June 22-24th in Toronto could be just the thing. I sit on the advisory board for the event.

A co-production of Web of Change and MaRS, this is an amazing opportunity to learn from some of the global leaders in this space. Check out the amazing faculty. The agenda is pretty rich and allows for plenty of opportunities to make the program fit individual needs.

The convergence of these forces in the context of tremendous global economic, environmental and political uncertainty signals an opportunity for renewal by change-makers, social innovators and social entrepreneurs for the benefit of us all. The complexity of the world requires better solutions, and we know from the open innovation literature that the ideas we need today do not live within a single organization.

Is this a truly transformative moment at a critical point in human history? Is a new social, economic, environmental and cultural resilience possible, or will status quo forces reassert themselves?

Full essay after the jump…

The New Great Transformation

Paul Hawken’s book Blessed Unrest and his talks paint a picture of an emergent immune response to global environmental and social injustice in the form of a global and decentralized social movement unlike anything that has come before. When you have some time to reflect, I recommend the video of the full Long Now talk.

Hawken describes an emerging movement of NGOs around the world concerned with values of economic, environmental and social justice – projecting a set of global cultural creative values throughout the world.He describes this as a movement unlike any other in history. It is new, because it is not driven by a single charismatic leader with a unifying ideology. This movement is not devoid of ideology, of course, but it is primarily pragmatic and solutions-oriented about propagating memes, while being driven by a unifying set of values rather than an integrated ideological system.

Up to now every ism became a schism. This movement is born atomized.

This movement is also not trying to aggregate power onto itself, but rather it seeks to disperse pathological concentrations of power that are harmful to the sustainability of human and other life on earth. It is less about gaining power than it is about permeating our institutions with ideas and memes, trying them out to see what works, letting them go if they don’t.

Hawken claims that we are observing the end of isms. Moving from a world of privilege to a world of community. In his view, Neo-conservatism, religious and economic fundamentalism are vestigial reactions to the threat to traditional concentrations of power that is posed by this movement.

The Social Web

The emergence of a self-organizing global civil society movement that Hawken describes is enabled and accelerated by social web tools. Those who are building these tools, learning about how they are eliciting new kinds of human behaviour, and developing practices to connect those tools with the challenges and opportunities of contemporary global life are engaged in building the architecture for Hawken’s Great Transformation.

Whether in social movements, government or corporate life, the technologies and behaviours of the Social Web are already having a huge impact. This is only beginning, and these impacts will become more and more visible in the years to come, as Generation Y grows into itself and assumes its place in our organizations and our politics.

The Obama Moment

We may see a truly transformational leader take the world stage in January 2009.

Barack Obama’s recent speech on race in America, A More Perfect Union, is the closest thing I have witnessed to transformational leadership in action. This is a new style of leadership, one born out of a deep understanding of complexity of the post-modern world, steeped in grassroots community organization, recalling the best oratory from history and realized through the enabling networks, technologies and participatory practices of the Social Web. Just one of the reactions:

What I heard today, though, was not a political speech in the sense we have gotten used to in this country. I heard instead a speech that, as much as it was about Obama and Wright, was also about us. Our politics does not quite know how to handle such a thing; campaigns are meant to tell people what they can expect to receive, not to ask them to understand, forgive, and reach out. [The Plank]

A politician promoting self-help and social change. This is new. It is not the nanny-state, nor is it laissez-faire neo-liberalism. Hillary Clinton says “I will do this for you”, Barack Obama says “we can do this, but only together”. Absolutely progressive, but pragmatist and post-ideological. Somebody who does not shy away from complexity, his 37 minute speech receiving 3 million views on YouTube in a few days thereby bypassing the 15 second sound-bite horror show that is cable news. Obama is a politician who uses the Social Web not only to communicate but, as Sean Howard argues, to gain insight and enable our participation:

Even if Obama fails to achieve his goal of becoming President of the United States, I predict he will have a deeper and more powerful understanding of the American people than anyone in the history of politics. He will have engaged at a level yet to be fully grasped or understood. [CrapHammer]

The importance of Obama isn’t so much his policies, the man himself or even his potential to transform US and international politics. His importance is that he is the FIRST of his kind – a political leader that understands and is able to intelligently tap the forces of Hawken’s “New Great Transformation” using the tools of the Social Web – in order to bring participation back into democracy. This is my great hope: that others will learn and will follow.

My Work – Government 2.0?

These converging forces and my own recent work is giving me greater focus about the direction for my consulting work and greater clarity around my social mission. What is it that I do, and why am I doing it? I am wrestling with some key questions:

1. What is the relationship between the world of control (corporations, government, governance, policy, politics) and this emerging decentralized global social movement?
2. What is the interface between hierarchies and heterarchies? How do we break the boundaries between them and create a fusion of these categories for mutual benefit?
3. What is the relationship between global, networked movements and place? How do we reimagine the local in the face of a profoundly changed global context?

I suppose you could say that I work in the Government 2.0 space. I do spend a lot of time working on projects related to public policy and planning, but I’m reluctant to attach myself to 2.0-anything. The term “Web 2.0″ didn’t help us understand the Social Web with any particular insight, so I’m reluctant to hop on the Gov2.0 bandwagon. But I will try to give some definition to how these emerging trends impact the public sphere.

My reading of whatever “Government 2.0″ is is not about “E-Government”. It is not about info-age efficiency from automating government services using web tools, however useful and beneficial these applications of technology might be. E-Government is not transformational change, it is incremental change.

The E-Government discourse does not allow for insight about what public policy should be and how its goals can be achieved. Nor does it provide guidance about how the private and public spheres collaborate in new ways to produce those public benefits.

My focus on public engagement and open innovation models in Government and governance is in part about enabling a new conversation about how we develop policy and plans, how regular citizens can become part of a solution-making process and how we can reconsider and reconfigure the public sphere in order to get better solutions. It is about open innovation applied to developing public policy solutions – inside or outside government.

And yes, this is an emerging field of practice, with much that is not yet well understood. So I look for collaborators and clients who are interested in doing innovative work in this emerging space; groups of passionate individuals interested in playing midwife to something new that is actually pretty old: nature reasserting itself as a form of social resilience to global change.

What is a Metronaut?

Metronauts.ca is an open community of people from across the sprawling greater Toronto region who care about the future of their cities. Metronauts are explorers of the future form of our cities and the role transportation has in our lives.

This new project would not be possible without the sponsorship and active participation of Metrolinx (the Greater Toronto Transportation Authority) and we are grateful for their support right from the top of the organization on down, for their willingness to innovate new ways of engaging community as part of their public consultation process.

What I am most amazed and pleased by is how this project has brought together some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in open and participatory research, media, policy, innovation, technology and culture into an agile team – all of whom call Toronto home. The Metronauts project is an open innovation platform for refining our thinking as we adapt the tools of co-creation, user-generated content, social media and collaborative innovation into the unlikely world of urban transportation policy and planning.

I am humbled and blessed to be able to work with some of the most talented leaders in their respective domains on this project. These creative individuals understand the tools and methods of participation and understand the value of pooling their expertise into a community framework for the benefit of their communities and for the development of their practice. And we will be sharing our learning with the community, ’cause that’s how we roll.

Meet the Band!

Mark Kuznicki (Steward-in-Chief), Wendy Koslow (Cruise Director), Sean Howard (Participatory Research Strategist), Misha Glouberman (Conversationalist & Facilitator), Sameer Vasta (Storyteller), Jed Kilbourn (Cultural Anthropologist), Qasim Virjee (Online Community Architect), Matt Rintoul and Lee Dale (Community Site Design), Alistair Morton (Visual Identity Designer), Daniel Rose (Collaborative Innovation Facilitator), David Eaves (Public Sector Renewalist), Michele Perras (Innovation Design Strategist), Jay Goldman (Social Technology Advisor), Eli Singer (Social Media Advisor), David Crow (transitcamp.org Domain Steward), Joey deVilla (Accordion Guy), Mark Raheja (Experience Strategist) and Mark Surman (Professor of Open).

Pedro talks about the possibilities of social software tools and online communities and the possibilities of technology enabling social change. We are working on this all the time, and my practice is more and more focused on the use of both online communities and events linked to social innovation goals. I hope that we can get Pedro to come to Toronto for Mesh, I think he’d be a great addition to MeshU and a panel conversation.

read more | digg story

Fascinating stuff – watch the video:

Presentation notes after the jump…

Presentation Notes:

Facts:

• UK survey 2006, nearly half of mobile users actively lie about where they are; Hi honey, “I’m on my way home” – yeah, right!
• 100% of people on online dating sites lie about themselves; men about height, woemen about we
• we are entering an arms race of deception; for every bit of transparency, there is a service to lie about it;
• people lie about where they are in mobile; people lie about height/weight in online dating; entering an era of accelerating deception;

What do anthropology theory and tools reveal about digital deception?

Perspective: technology transforms far more rapidly than social/cultural changes; difficult for us as technologists to understand this limitation, and is rather confounding to Intel (hence they have 30 anthropologists!)

Secrets and Lies; lies – untruths, secrets – knowledge that is withheld;

Cultural Ideals about Secrets & Lies: legal systems and religious doctrine always against lying and deception; there are certain exceptions in certain situations; bringing peace to households, between households and among nations; lies are ok if the end is good;

Cultural Practices about Secrets & Lies: we’re telling lies all the time; we tell 6-200 lies a day – from greasing the social skids to much more complicated and intense; motivations: conceiling misbehaviour, not many about increasing popularity; men tell more lies, women are better at it; secrets are kept and broken irrespective of status at law or socially

Other Perspectives: Social theorists that argue lying is a necessary part of daily life; Steignitz – the lie is not about negating truth, but about negating a particular kind of reality; Sommer – self-deception is part of survival; a core behaviour as part of learning about identity; playful act of working out the rules;

Notion that all info should be avail to everyone is very recent; you see various cultures resist this and place gates around their traditions – Australian aboriginals; the secret and the sacred – not all knowledge should be in the public domain; the public domain is actually coded and you need to have knowledge to understand what you are seeing;

Similar playfulness and practice is happening in the digital sphere; avatars, playfulness, codes can be read in a number of different ways; withholding info is a way keeping it safe; what we withhold and why is about keeping ourselves safe;

New ICTs arrive in the land of secrets and lies; lying about where, who, what you are doing are all dissembled online; some of this is required

Dana Boyd looking at age on MySpace is lied about, stunning number of people over 100, which begs credibility; the price of participation is a lie – your must be over 14 to join because of law;

Online dating sites – unlike lies in physical world that result in guilty or shame, lies online results in something approaching glee; lies are flourishing;

PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard. e.g. “My prom date was gay…I pretended not to know.”

Cell phones have tracking services attending them by the parent of children; surveillance can be culturally reconfigured; children with tracking said their parents love them more; alibi services – creative a backstory to support your lie;

Insights/Conclusions:

Tensions between cultural ideas and cultural practices are important and significant; a lot of what we see going on in tech and behaviour are us sorting these tensions out

Secrets & lies is a useful way of reworking notions around privacy and security; systems and networks infrastructure are concerned about privacy and security; people are concerned about they things they don’t want to have told, their secrets and their strategy for getting around this is telling lies

What are the implications about how we build social networking sites, building web 3.0 on a bedrock of confabulation?

How does it fit into larger conversations about national security, safety and danger?

Pedro Custodio did a great workshop, an “Online Communities Clinic”. Good material, really solid foundation for thinking about and planning user interactions for online communities. Once the slides are on Slideshare I’ll update this post and embed. (If you want to see them when uploaded, leave a comment on this post.)

| View | Upload your own

My rough notes follow after the jump….

Overview

Communities need to bring together a unity of goals and actions; they should display internal policies that guide social behaviour; online communities lay on top of computer systems that support the social interaction

Communities necessarily have boundaries; something ambiguous will not be joined; although it is necessary to have boundaries, those boundaries need to be permeable to encourage adoption and movement/adaptability

Online communities architecture:

virtual space -> user interaction -> virtual community -> information

Users Profiling:

Visitors – start as observers
Consumer – as interest raises, so does the involvment at tthis point users
Member – fully active, producing materials, engaging and helping others

Sort communities by kind of Interaction:

Low social interaction – users only interact with the platform, not with each other: e.g. Digg, Last.fm
Built upon “products” – Flickr, YouTube, Threadless – because of the tool, not the users
Highly collaborative communities – real-world communities, moving online for some reason,

…by level of Commitment:

Communities of interest; very specific; will not be active for your whole life, but will join when you need it
Communities of passion; subtype of interest,
Communities of purpose; common short-term goal; afterwards it will dissolve
Communities of practice;

Better Usability means Better Communities? Not only user-centered interfaces…we need community centered interfaces! Need to plan ahead for the behaviour

Communities are conversations; so look for Conversational Maxims; Apply the same ground rules that run daily interactions in real life:

Quantity – the amount of information that each party should provide; should limit how users interact; length and frequency of posts
Quality – deals with truth and authenticity; credit and reference to expertise
Relation – relevancy of participation
Communicate in a fast and reliable way: post message, was it delivered?
Interface should be as transparent as possible; the tool mediates, but it shouldn’t get into the way
Allow user to cancel

Community Design Pattern Types:

1. Community support – sustains the community itself
2. Group support
3. Communication support
4. Awareness – perception of the others, part of something bigger

Community Support Patterns:

Quick Registration: as quick and lightweight as possible, very important for them to enter quickly to evaluate the community; but still protect the community from strangers; leave profile info as a later process, noncontingent; need to track the process in order to identify dropouts; PROBLEMS – fear of commitment, because trust has not been established; BOTs are problematic – Catchas, email verification;

Login: force users to identify themselves before using/entering the community; easy recovery mechanisms

Welcome Area: list new members of a community and present them to other members, ensuring that new members won’t go unnoticed; e.g. email communities, introduce themselves to each other; USE WHEN: a long-standing community who know each other very well, large collective history, subgroups inside the larger community, resistance to entrance of new members; PROBLEMS: newcomers may not want to attract so much attention at first; veterans have to be made sensitivie;

User Profile: virtual presentation; a personality and skills aggregator; the bridge between the real and the virtual individual representing the user across all interactions with the community; Digital Identity Mapping image – FredCavazza.net;

User Gallery: USE WHEN: hesitation on first contacts, hard to remember who’s a member of a community; you know their names, but want to know more about them; PROBLEMS: must be searchable, carefully balance amount of public information without further involvement or identification (user levels-> information levels)

Buddy Lists: friends list is the new centre of the universe; “through others I define myself”; “Tell me who you go out with, and I’ll tell you who you are!”;

Group Support Patterns:

Groups: need ways to form, short-term and long-term communications; shared repositories; group awareness – feeling of being part of something; E.g. Flickr – friends or family, that’s it; USE WHEN: send out multiple artifacts to same users multiple times; select multiple users before interactions; users don’t clearly know who they interact with; PROBLEMS: by interacting with groups of users, one might not develop group awareness – no awareness outside the ; additional workload for users; group create strong borders within the community; group moderation;

Invitations: allow user to plan interaction with others; PROBLEMS: time to turnaround; rejection fear; need to sort out

Shared Editing: allow users to edit simultaneous user of data/documents; USE WHEN: need for collaborative editing; missing group collaboration in context of isolated user actions; PROBLEMS: single-user applications don’t help collaborative environments; WYSIWIS – what you see is what I see

Reputation and Differentiation: metrics to store reputation, a projection of their status; users with more friends, more photos, more music;

Messaging: provide ability for direct messages within community

Chat: allow users to communicate synchronously; if messages aren’t being responded to quickly;

Comments: on specific artifacts; not a message to you in particular, to the community about an artifact;

Forums/Blogs: provide means for persistent, asynchronous conversations; important role for newcomers, a way to learn about the community; persistent nature of the community;

Patterns for Awareness:

Overview: Give users a sense of the other; understanding or realizing the others’ activities; communities with high awareness are highly collaborative; creates the feeling that there are many others, than they are; you are just a dot, but you’re not alone

Neighbours: proximity pattern; providing information about user’s interactions with the platform; Last.fm – people who played similar music; keyword discovery for people you want to meet; Proximity: six degrees of separation concept;

Interactive user Info: make information about others users clickable and connect it with means of communication; quick action spots

Activity Logs: record information about users activity; most famous – Wikipedia tracked changes; memory; users don’t have a lot of time, can’t be on all the time; need a reminder of what’s been happening; merging past and present activities it’s hard; scale – ensure many users can update simultaneously; ensure users know what activity is tracked

Timeline: e.g. Facebook news feed;

Period Reports: inform users at regular intervals of relevant changes/actions; weekly what happened in the community – brief;

Aliveness Indicator: show an indicator on the virtual environment that reflects user’s activity

Conclusions:

It is about identity; the more I know about the others, the more I feel engaged in/by the community; Features for more advanced users will scare off less advanced users; overlap the experience level profile with the adoption of the features; Foster personalization, production and sharing of content; Plan the social interactions

Scalable Platforms: Can never know when your community will explode; can’t predict; development, support, moderation; Open and well documented APIs; the Social Graph;