Internet tools to shake up a broken political system

When an issue needs more publicity, has momentum and I feel like it would have untapped support on Twitter, I'll do a petition. 9 times out of 10 I won't do a petition unless I think it'll blow up. Most of the time I'll listen to the show, and if there's a particular issue that Cenk gets really worked up about, I'll weigh all the variables and decide whether or not to do a petition.

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It goes without saying the importance of engaging with your supporters on Facebook is growing every day. One of the "holy grails" for many organizations, including those Jim and I have been a part of, is connecting email lists with Facebook accounts. This hasn't been possible to accomplish on a large scale, until now. Read more

Our free Twitter petition tool act.ly has been raising hell ever since we launched it a little over a year ago. Just last week a petition bringing the issue of women's rights in Afghanistan to the attention of Katie Couric quickly garnered over a thousand tweets and prompted her to respond. The next day, the CEO of Target responded to a petition accusing the company of funding an anti-gay politician.  Read more

Thanks to Reshma Saujani, our first pro.act.ly candidate, we got a lot of buzz this week at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in NYC.  She gave a first glimpse of pro.act.ly on a panel with Chris Hughes (Facebook, Obama, Jumo) and Scott Heiferman (Meetup) about using social networking to create social change.

Social media can help you to "build your own machine" to change the status quo, says Reshma Saujani, a congressional candidate for the 14th District in New York who has been organizing her campaign for the last 18 months, mostly on social networks. "I believe technology can really disrupt the Establishment," she told the panel. "Normally, you need to belong to a political party or club that brings endorsements, contributions and visibility ... and outsiders, therefore, find it hard to run." But social media change that, Saujani said. 

She is testing a new social media organizing platform created by Jim Gilliam (Brave New Films) called pro.act.ly, which Saujani described as being "Obama 3.0." She said "we knew that we would need 30,000 votes to win our campaign on September 14 and we knew we would not get the support of the party or the labor unions, so we had to build our own machine." Pro.act.ly, she said, enables movement organizers to look up any single supporter and learn instantly how many people in their networks are supporting your campaign. "It measures the intensity of their commitment," she said, a kind of digital dashboard for community organizers of all stripes. 

"Jim (Gilliam) wants to give pro.act.ly to a lot of people in 2012 who want to run all across the country and get them to change Congress," she said.

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The internet is democratizing one industry after another, why can't it democratize the greatest democracy of all?

That's why I started 3dna after the 2008 election, and began exploring how I could shake up politics with web tools. I've been experimenting with different ideas and concepts to see what works -- White House 2, NationBuilder, GovLuv, act.ly and Tweet Progress. I've learned so much, and am excited to have Jesse Haff joining up with me to take it to the next level.
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Nearly every progressive I know is freaking out about the Supreme Court ruling removing restrictions on corporations spending money on behalf of political candidates.

There are all kinds of reasons the ruling is bad, but the rules of politics are already ridiculous. Now it's worse, but you've still got to play by exploit the rules, because your opponent certainly will.

TPM points to a coming report from CampaignGrid (an online advertising platform for Republican campaigns) on how outside groups can use unlimited amounts of online advertising to drive signups and donations for a candidate.

Using a combination of display and search advertising, FSC Bank could advertise online and link to Congressman Goodfellow's campaign website to drive traffic and volunteers and donations to the website - however FSC Bank could not report back the results of these efforts to the Goodfellow Campaign.

One of the big problems in building a movement is trying to get people to do "less" of something. If it's morally wrong, you shouldn't just do less of it, you shouldn't do it at all! Without the moral clarity of "murder is wrong," people just keep doing what they're doing.

This is a big problem for issues like climate change, rampant consumerism, pollution, trash, etc. "Pollute less" or "buy less" simply isn't cutting it.

These issues need to be framed into one thing that eventually everyone can agree is bad. Planet abuse.

This has been done before. Child abuse. It wasn't always a bad thing, but today many things, like striking a child in anger are widely regarded as wrong. Very few think kids should be forced to work. However, there is controversy on spanking children, and the age line of what constitutes molesting a child keeps moving. But if you ask someone "is child abuse wrong?" 100% will say yes.

If we started to talk about "planet abuse" we could eventually get a lot of people to agree that it is wrong, and then we can fight to define exactly what planet abuse is. Some things will be clear, and others will be murky and change over time. "You can't do that, it's planet abuse!"

I just googled this phrase, and apparently it's never been used before. Let's change that.

This came out of a discussion with Aaron Swartz.

Tweet Progress is a directory of progressives on Twitter. A couple weeks ago, Twitter rolled out a new "lists" feature that lets people curate their own list of Twitter accounts, then others can follow those lists to see just the tweets from those people. This is great, and obviously I should make lists for all the people in Tweet Progress.

Only it was a little more complicated than that. Twitter limits each list to a maximum of 500 people, and each account to only 20 lists. There are over 4,000 Tweet Progress members so there was no way to create one big list. So I had to figure out some way to split up the list, but not too much or I'd run into the 20 list limit, and I didn't want to just do the top 500 with the most followers, since that doesn't really fit in with the spirit of the project. And I definitely didn't want to make any kind of editorial decision as to who should be included or not. There had to be a computer algorithm sort of way to do this.

Here's what I came up with. There are four lists. Mentors, Newcomers, Influential, and Highly Influential.

Mentors and Newcomers is similar to what you see on the Tweet Progress site, limited to the most recent 100 newcomers, and the 100 most influential mentors. Influential and Highly influential is based on Topsy, a great search engine for links shared on Twitter. Similar to how Google uses a 1-10 PageRank to rank web pages, Topsy uses a 1-10 metric to rank users, based on how frequently they are retweeted, who retweets them, etc. (more details here) They display this on the site with an "influential" and "highly influential" tag. I've incorporated that information into the Tweet Progress database and that's how those lists are determined.

I've just started playing with the results, and I can say that the influential and highly influential lists are exceptionally useful, you should definitely follow them to stay on top of what matters to progressives.

If you want to be included, just join Tweet Progress. The lists are updated automatically every night.

Also, sort of related, you can use GovLuv to create a Twitter list of who represents you in government -- federal, state, local.

With act.ly petitions, I'm finding that a lot of activists just want people to retweet something, and it's not necessarily a petition. People were actually targeting petitions at themselves just so they could use the other act.ly functionality, even though all they really wanted was for people to tweet some specific text in support of a cause. So I made act.ly retweets to better do that. You can use this for pledges, or links you want people to retweet, or your own email petitions you want people to tweet about... anything really.

It's very similar to the petitions, it tracks the people who recruited the most retweeters, it lets you put a lot more information on the act.ly page (including videos and links to donation pages) than just the 140 chars. There is a digg-like embeddable widget you can put on your own site. You get the fun Google Map, and you can have the checkbox to follow you when someone tweets, along with auto-following anyone who does tweet.

Check it out: http://act.ly/retweets and tweet me feedback @jgilliam.

Also, Nancy Scola interviewed me about the first 3 months of act.ly, what's working and what isn't, for TechPresident this week. There's some good info in there on effective ways to use act.ly petitions.

The Washington Post is now forbidding staffers from "writing, tweeting or posting anything – including photographs or video – that could be perceived as reflecting political, racial, sexist, religious or other bias or favoritism that could be used to tarnish our journalistic credibility."

This is a trap that nearly everyone who is supposed to be "unbiased" falls into. They think it's better to hide personal views than be open and transparent about it. I disagree.

I'm progressive, if you look at my tweets or google me, you'll figure this out in about 5 seconds. Yet, I make tools that anyone can use -- act.ly, GovLuv, and White House 2 are completely non-partisan. Part of it is necessity, how can I possibly draw a line on whether something aligns with a certain political view point? And part of it is my desire to change the game. Technology can be used for partisan ends (Tweet Progress is a good example) but it's most effective at changing the rules of the game, and that's what gets me excited.

So I'm in a somewhat similar position to the Washington Post. I don't want conservatives to feel they are locked out of what I'm building, so the natural inclination would be to hide my personal views. But I don't because I think people will trust me more when I'm honest about who I am. Very few people do this, particularly reporters, so people are naturally suspicious. This is part of why bloggers are gaining audience over newspapers and cable news is becoming more personality driven.

The funny thing is, I haven't gotten any pressure from conservatives to stack the deck, and they love using both act.ly and White House 2.

But some progressives (not most, just a few) have actually tried to bully me into favoring them. Either changing something on the site, or even preventing conservatives from using the tool entirely. Not gonna happen.