Mobilizing communities and sharing information
Suggestions and tools for connecting people.
By Gillian Kerr, RealWorld Systems
The information in this article is current as of April 8, 2005.
Last week, at the Ideas That Matter conference on Building
Strong Communities, Phillip Smith and I presented a workshop on how to
use technology to strengthen communities. Phillip leads Community
Bandwidth, a consulting company that "explores the thoughtful use of technology
toward creating a more just and sustainable society." Phillip has helped many
nonprofits set up web sites that mobilize their communities around social
issues, and has kept up with the latest online tools and web strategies.
Here are a few of the tools he shared with me as we prepared for the conference.
Creating and strengthening social networks
There are dozens of free or inexpensive online tools that organizations can implement almost instantly, and that can extend their reach to communities.
Meet-up tools like www.meetup.com
or www.upcoming.org allow people with
common interests or concerns to connect quickly, whether its 'Friends of
Elvis' or a public demonstration.
Social network sites like Friendster
and Orkut share information about users'
social networks so that they can meet new people. This could be a good way
to identify people with common values, but it is also a good way to reveal
more than you want to potential employers or colleagues. (Do you really
want to link to photos of all of your girlfriends and boyfriends for everyone
to see?) It also opens the possibilities of abuse by governments that want
to identify and harass people in political networks. It will be interesting
to see how these sites evolve. They present all kinds of potential and problems
around privacy and etiquette.
One general comment about social networks is that they have significant
costs in terms of time and energy to maintain. You have to respond to people
and occasionally interact with them in order to stay involved in a network.
It is not feasible to maintain active memberships in an infinite number
of networks, and social network programs don't seem to recognize the costs.
For example, I use Skype, and every time I add someone to my contact list
in order to have a conversation with them, I see exactly when they sign
on and off their computer and vice versa - forever. Skype assumes that I
want to be permanently engaged with all of my contacts. One of the big challenges
of social network programs is to figure out how people can maintain their
privacy and control over when they are available.
Blogs are a great way to connect communities and build relationships in
a more formal way. Some blogging programs, like www.blogware.com
or www.sixapart.com/movabletype,
are sophisticated content management programs that provide everything most
agencies would want in a web site. In addition, they enable individual staff
or volunteers to engage in informal conversations with their communities.
When you look at blogs, you will notice that many have 'blogrolls' on the
side of the page, where the writer lists all the blogs that influence him/her.
Many blogs invite comments from users, so they can become a mini-discussion
group around specific topics.
Another way to tap into the power of social networks is through del.icio.us,
a free 'social bookmarks manager' that allows users to add web pages to
their own bookmarks, give them categories, and share them with others. To
see how it works, click on a 'tag' that you find interesting from the list
on the right hand column, such as 'search'.
You will see a list of web sites under the topic 'search', along with the
names of people who have marked it. They are listed in chronological order,
newest first. The top link today is "Google + Craig's List", which has been
bookmarked by 123 people. Click on the 'people', and you are given the names
of all the people who have saved that bookmark. Then you can select any
of the people to see what other bookmarks they have collected. It seems
elaborate, but it's a fast way to share interesting web sites, and could
be used by agencies to keep users up to date on web resources. It takes
seconds to register as a user, and then all of your bookmarks are available
through the URL http://del.icio.us/your_name.
Full featured community mobilizing web sites like CivicSpace
and Democracy in Action
offer a broad range of tools for advocacy, fundraising, communication, and
grassroots organizing. CivicSpace, which is based on Drupal,
is open source and needs a programmer to customize if you are hosting it
yourself, but you can get a hosted service from Bryght.
The Republican counter-convention
is a good place to see several tools in action, many of them free. For example,
check out text-mobs, which enable users
to communicate to any number of people instantly on their mobile phone text
messages. This allows rapid mobilization of groups, and has been used to
organize public demonstrations.
Another tool that was used by the Republican counter-convention was an open
source phone system called Asterix. Asterix was used in their 'get out the
vote' initiative, providing a central phone hub and messaging centre for
volunteers.
There are so many options, and so many ways to customize them, that agencies probably
need advice to figure out how to use online tools most effectively. Even free
tools cost a great deal of time to find, test, and implement. Recruiting knowledgeable
technology people onto your boards or committees, or even as ongoing advisors,
is a good way to keep in touch with these resources.
However, many technology experts like building their own solutions rather than creatively using existing tools. Avoid this if at all possible. Managing software development projects is expensive and rife with problems, and given the many wonderful options for customizing off-the-shelf tools, it's often unnecessary.
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Gillian Kerr, Ph.D., C.Psych.
President, RealWorld Systems
gkerr at realworldsystems.net
Read my weblog at http://blog.realworldsystems.net
