Tag Archives: activism

Today in the Globe: Facebook's Political Reach

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I have the following piece published in the Globe and Mail today. It isn’t going to further endear me to Michael Valpy (who is already not impressed with me)… but felt another perspective on the issue was needed. He, like many traditional columnists, is not a fan of social – or digital – media. Indeed, he has argued it is destroying our country’s social cohesion and democracy. Those familiar with me know I feel differently . By allowing us to self-organize, connect to one another and to our politicians, social media is enabling a different and very powerful type kind of social cohesion and democratic expression.

I respect Valpy a lot and hope we get a chance to sit down and talk social media at some point. Given our collective interest in journalism and statements like this, it feels like it would be fruitful for both of us. Hopefully it will happen.

Facebook’s Political Reach

Yesterday, Michael Valpy posted an interesting piece about a Nanos poll showing Canadians – including younger Canadians – question how much influence political Facebook groups should have on any government.

The problem with the piece lies in the headline: “Facebook forums shouldn’t sway government, young Canadians say.” It suggests that online activism – or social media in general – isn’t credible with the public. This, however, isn’t what the poll showed. Indeed, the poll says little about the credibility of Facebook, particularly compared to other forms of political activity. It does, however, say a lot about social media’s dramatic growth in influence over the past five years.

Critically, the poll didn’t compare forms of political activity. If one had done a similar poll asking whether Canadians believe a demonstration should sway the government, or if direct action – such as when Greenpeace hung a banner from Parliament – should alter government policy, would the numbers have been dramatically different? I suspect not. Governments have electoral mandates – something Canadians broadly agree with. Most political activity, both on and offline, is designed to shape public opinion and ultimately, people’s decisions at the ballot box. That is a threat influences government.

Consequently, it may not be the medium that matters as much as the number of people involved. Do people believe the government should pay attention to a 1,000 person rally? Likely not. Should they pay attention to a 10,000 person Facebook group? Likely not as well. But at a certain point, with large enough numbers, almost any medium matters. Would people think that the government should reconsider a policy in the face of 10-million-person petition? Or a five-million-person Facebook group? Possibly. What about a 500,000-person march? Even this might prompt respondents to reconsider their response.

Ultimately, the Globe article jumps to a negative interpretation of Facebook too quickly. This is understandable in that traditional news organizations are still coming to grips with social – and digital – media. But by allowing us to self-organize, connect to one another and to our politicians, social media is enabling a different and very powerful type kind of social cohesion and democratic expression.

More interesting is how split Canadians appear to be over political groups using Facebook “to share ideas, information and to help mobilize their activities” (30 per cent have a positive view, 30 per cent have a negative view and an enormous 40 per cent are undecided). Here is a technology few Canadians knew existed five years ago, and it is already viewed favourably by a third of Canadians as a way to engage with political groups. As people become more familiar with these online activities I suspect comfort levels will rise, since many people often don’t initially understand or like new technologies. This survey shows us online political organizing is moving into the mainstream – perhaps even more mainstream than a protest or a petition.

So should Facebook influence the government? The prorogation debate shows it already can. But do people believe Facebook should be less influential than other (more traditional) forms of political activity? In this, the survey reveals very little. Indeed as Nik Nanos, the pollster who conducted the survey, adds at the end of the piece (and in contrast to the title): “we still haven’t come to grips with what [Facebook groups] really mean.”

The challenge of mozilla’s magnetism

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Mozilla is unique. The project gets more media, more publicity and more buzz than virtually any other open source project. It is, in much of the public’s mind, the poster child for open source and the open internet. More critically, this isn’t some interesting observation, why this is the case, and what it means, is profound implications for the success of Mozilla, the open web and the future of the internet.

I would argue that Mozilla’s uniqueness is not a result of being the most successful open source project. (I’m sure there is much heated debate over which is the most successful, largest, most complex, most important, etc… open source community/project). The fact is, it’s irrelevant.

moz-head-bigMozilla matters because Firefox is a consumer product. And not just any consumer product, it is THE consumer product that allows people to interact with the world wide web, the most consumer oriented part of the internet. Thus, while Apache, Linux, Sendmail and the million of other open source projects matter (a great deal!) the simple fact is, Mozilla is the brand that represents both the potential of open source and the importance of an open internet. This matters because it means a) Firefox and Mozilla are the catalysts in creating social awareness among millions of consumers about the importance of the open internet and b) as a result, Mozilla will likely be the first port of call of these newly awakened activists who wish to find ways to contribute.

This, of course, is both a blessing and a curse.

One the one hand it often seems that everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, has an opinion about Mozilla (and boy am I guilty of this). I’m not inside Mozilla but I can imagine the constant barrage of “helpful” ideas or suggestions or worse, outright complaints or threats, must feel exhausting. The banging on the gates never ends and engaging in it could distract the community from its important work.

On the other hand… how great that an increasing number of people have this energy and passion for Mozilla and, by extension, the open internet. Many of those banging at the gate – and a good many more who are simply too intimidated or too unsure to even do that – are primed and ready to be among the next million mozillians. The banging (or loitering) is a symptom of a desire to contribute – indeed it may be the only outlet they know of or have.

The real question is – how do we engage these people?

Should Mozilla do more to shape and lead the social movement around the open web? As David Ascher also notes, the opportunity of broadening Mozilla’s tent by absorbing these newly minted activists into streams of activities and helping channel their energy and enthusiasm is an exciting prospect. But I’m not sure the answer is a definite yes. As Mitchell Baker – in part – points out, the risk of diluting Mozilla’s mission or its culture is a serious one.

However, the social movement around the open web is going to keep attracting supporters. Again, because Mozilla is one of the leading catalyst in creating this social awareness these supporters are going to show up at it’s doorstep first. Regardless of the choice (absorb or not absorb) to successfully support the movement I’d argue that at the very minimum Mozilla needs a plan to a) greet these newcomers and make them feel welcome; and b) some capacity to point them in the direction of a variety of institutions, organizations, projects and activities, where they can channel their energy. The more people the movement can engage – or to reframe – the more communities of action with can create within our broader community of interest, the more likely we will be successful in acheiving an open internet.

Hackers are Social Activists mashup – Eric Raymond vs. Bill Moyes

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Bullhorn5If the Open Web is a social movement then are Hackers Social Activists?

From the reaction of a number of people to that post the answer at first seems unclear. Some of those who responded shared their discomfort with the idea of being labeled a social activist. Notions of people chaining themselves to something, yelling into loudspeakers or even adopting the approach of archetype hacker activist Richard Stallman’s makes many open source supporters uneasy.

I agree – but being an activist doesn’t necessarily mean these things.

I’ve been struggling to explain why when, while re-reading the Cathedral and the Bazaar essay “Revenge of the Hackers” I was stuck by how Raymond’s description of the rise of Open Source parallels the stages of activism outlined in the “Movement Action Plan” – a strategic model for social movements developed by Bill Moyer, a US social change activist (basic outline at bottom of this post).

The parallels are not perfect, nor are they absolutely linear (but then Moyer concedes that they never are). Moreover, the language used by Bill Moyer would probably make any coder (or even non-coders like me) feel out of place or downright uncomfortable (does anyone in an open-source community talk powerholders?).  But mapping Eric Raymond against Bill Moyes is instructive. It highlights quite effectively that hackers are a movement, they are social activists (even when thy don’t consider themselves to be), and that when mobilized they can achieve big hairy audacious goals more effectively than many other groups.

I share this not because I want hackers to change who they are or what they do, but, like Eric Raymond, to help them gain a better awareness of who they are and what they are doing (accomplishing!). There are others who want to join this movement – and so understanding that there is a movement, and your role and place in it, is the first step in figuring out how to help others join in. If we want to invite, enable and foster the next million mozillians, we need to at least understand our place within the ecosystem of the open web social movement.

Title and Quotes from the 8 stage Movement Action Plan (see below) by Bill Moyers

Quotes from Eric S. Raymond’s “Revenge of the Hackers”
Stage 1: Business as UsualIn this first stage there are many conditions that grossly violate widely held, cherished human values such as freedom, democracy, security, and justice, and the best interests of society as a whole.

The opposition feels hopeless because it seems that the situation will continue indefinitely, and they feel powerless to change it.

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 Stage 1: A hackers life was not an easy one…I had been in the hacker culture, living through its various phases, for twenty years. Twenty years of repeatedly watching brilliant ideas, promising starts, and superior technologies crushed by slick marketing. Twenty years of watching hackers dream and sweat and build, too often only to watch the likes of the bad old IBM or the bad new Microsoft walk away with the real-world prizes. Twenty years of living in a ghetto — a fairly comfortable ghetto full of interesting friends, but still one walled in by a vast and intangible barrier of mainstream prejudice inscribed “ONLY FLAKES LIVE HERE”.
Stage 2: Normal Channels FailProve that the official doctrine and policies of powerholders and institutions violate society’s values and the public trust.

Positive results are not expected now

Except for the rare media coverage of opponents’ activities, the problem is still neither in the public spotlight nor on society’s agenda of contested issues.

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 Stage 2: Market fails to sustain open standardsNetscape had been targeted for destruction. Microsoft rightly feared that the open Web standards embodied by Netscape’s browser might lead to an erosion of its lucrative PC desktop monopoly. The weight of Microsoft’s billions, and shady tactics that would later trigger an antitrust lawsuit, were deployed to crush Netscape.For Netscape, the issue was less browser-related income (never more than a small fraction of their revenues) than maintaining a safe space for their much more valuable server business. If Internet Explorer achieved market dominance, Microsoft would be able to bend the Web’s protocols away from open standards and into proprietary channels that only Microsoft’s servers would be able to service.
Stage 3: Conditions RipenThe “take-off” of a new social movement requires preconditions that build up over many years. These conditions include broad historic developments, a growing discontented population of victims and allies, and a budding autonomous grassroots opposition, all of which encourage discontent with the present conditions, raise expectations that they can change, and provide the means to do it.The growing numbers of discontented local people across the country quietly start new autonomous local groups, which as a whole form a “new wave” of grassroots opposition, which is independent from the established Professional Opposition Organizations.

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 Stage 3: Condition Ripen
On new Groups and approaches:My first encounter with Linux came in late 1993. I had already been involved in the hacker culture for fifteen years and I thought I understood the hacker culture — and its limitations — pretty well.Encountering Linux came as a shock. I still carried in my head the unexamined assumption that hacker amateurs, gifted though they might be, could not possibly muster the resources or skill necessary to produce a usable multitasking operating system. The HURD developers, after all, had been evidently failing at this for a decade.

But where they had failed, Linus Torvalds and his community had succeeded. And they did not merely fulfill the minimum requirements of stability and functioning Unix interfaces. No. They blew right past that criterion with exuberance and flair, providing hundreds of megabytes of programs, documents, and other resources. Full suites of Internet tools, desktop-publishing software, graphics support, editors, games…you name it. The hacker tradition I had been observing for two decades seemed suddenly alive in a vibrant new way.

On a sense of awareness and identity:

…Around me was a community which had evolved the most effective software-development method ever and didn’t know it!. That is, an effective practice had evolved as a set of customs, transmitted by imitation and example, without the theory or language to explain why the practice worked.

Lacking that theory and that language hampered us in two ways. First: we couldn’t think systematically about how to improve our own methods. Second: we couldn’t explain or sell the method to anyone else… The Cathedral and the Bazaar was less a revelation of novelty than an opportunity to celebrate the new language and the consciousness that went with it. That standing ovations were not so much for my work as for the hacker culture itself — and rightly so.
Stage 4: Take Off!New social movements surprise and shock everyone when they burst into the public spotlight on the evening TV news and in newspaper headlines. Overnight, a previously unrecognized social problem becomes a social issue that everyone is talking about. It starts with a highly publicized, shocking incident, a “trigger event”…

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 Stage 4: Take Off!On netscape going Open-Source:

On January 22nd 1998 Netscape announced it would release the sources of the Netscape client line to the Internet… This was the event that commentators in the computer trade press would later call “the shot heard ’round the world’… For the first time in the history of the hacker culture, a Fortune 500 and darling of Wall Street had bet its future on the belief that our way was right.
Stage 5: Activist FailureThe general populace experiences dissonance, not knowing who or what to believe. While many agree with the movement’s challenges, they also fear siding with dissidents and losing the security of the powerholders and status quo. The alternatives are unclear to them. The general citizenry is about evenly divided, 50 percent to 50 percent, between the powerholders and the movement. Movement violence, rebelliousness, and seeming anti-Americanism turn people off and tend to frighten them into supporting the powerholders’ policies, police actions, and status quo.

Powerholders continue a hardline strategy, including escalating their policies to prove that they are in charge and that both the movement and public have no effect.

The overall goal is to help activists become empowered and move on to Stage Six by becoming strategists by using a framework such as MAP, forming political and personal support groups

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 Stage 5: Crossing the ChasmOn developing a grand strategy:

At the Mozilla launch I met with several key people in the Silicon Valley and national Linux community. While helping Netscape was clearly a short-term priority, everybody I spoke with already understood the need for a longer-term strategy.

On abandoning failed activist approaches:

It seemed clear that the term `free software’ had done our movement tremendous damage over the years. Part of this stemmed from the fact that the word `free’ has two different meanings in the English language, one suggesting a price of zero and one related to the idea of liberty. Richard Stallman, whose Free Software Foundation (FSF) has long championed the term, says “Think free speech, not free beer” but the ambiguity of the term nevertheless created serious problems — especially since most “free software” is also distributed free of charge.

Most of the damage, though, came from something worse — the strong association of the term `free software’ with hostility to intellectual property rights, communism, and other ideas hardly likely to endear it to an MIS manager.

Under the pressure of the Netscape release the FSF’s actual position didn’t matter. What mattered was that its evangelism (associating `free software’ with these negative stereotypes in the minds of the trade press and the corporate world) had backfired.
Stage 6: Win Majority of Public The majority stage is a long process of eroding the social, political, and economic supports that enable the powerholders to continue their policies. It is a slow process of social transformation that create a new social and political consensus, reversing those of normal times.

The movement’s chief goal, therefore, is to nurture, support, and empower grassroots activists and groups. Finally, activists also need to have a grand strategy for waging Stage Six majority movements to win positive social changes against the strong opposition of the powerholders.

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 Stage 6: Win Majority of Decision MakersThe following six months were a study in increasingly surreal contrasts. On the one hand, I was giving talks on open source to Fortune 100 corporate strategists and technology investors; for the first time in my life, I got to fly first class and saw the inside of a stretch limousine. On the other hand, I was doing guerrilla street theater with grass-roots hackers — as in the riotously funny Windows Refund Day demonstration of March 15 1999, when a band of Bay-area Linux users actually marched on the Microsoft offices in the glare of full media coverage, demanding refunds under the terms of the Microsoft End-User License for the unused Windows software that had been bundled with their machines.
Stage 7: SuccessStage Seven begins when the long process of building opposition reaches a new plateau in which the new social consensus turns the tide of power against the powerholders and begins an endgame process leading to the movement’s success. The Stage Seven process can take three forms: dramatic showdown, quiet showdown, or attrition.

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 Stage 7: Marketplace Supports Open Standards
In the early part of 1999 big independent software vendors began porting their business applications to Linux, following the lead set earlier by the major database vendors. In late July, the biggest of them all, Computer Associates, announced that it would be supporting Linux. And preliminary results from an August 1999 survey of 2000 IT managers revealed that 49% consider Linux an “important or essential” element of their enterprise computing strategies. Another survey by IDC described what it called “an amazing level of growth’’ since 1998, when the market research couldn’t find statistically significant use of Linux; 13% of the respondents now employ it in business operations.1999 also saw a wave of wildly successful Linux IPOs by Red Hat Linux, VA Linux Systems, and other Linux companies.
Stage 8: Moving On Stage 8: Moving On

On a separate note, I think it is fascinating the overlap between Bill Moyes Movement Action Plan – which is about activism – and Moore’s “Crossing the Chasm” – which is about technology in the market place. The two things are describing the same event (the adoption of something new) in different spaces (community/society vs. marketplace) and each highlights a point on the exact same place of an S-curve where the threat failure is greatest: the Chasm for Moore, and Activisim Failure for Moyers. Happily, I think Open-Source has crossed the threshold, but other significant challenges, challenges both Moore and Moyer have insights into, await.

Bill Moyes Movement Action Plan:

Movement Action Plan