In Case You Missed It...

Kevin Thurman looks at the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee’s DLCCWeb program, which equipped down-ballot candidates with entirely affordable online tools. By learning how not to reinvent the wheel, Democrats-not-named-Obama were able to save big and campaign big, he writes. "[O]ver 300 websites...were launched through the program in the 2008 cycle," says Kevin. "These sites generated 13.9 Million views, generated 2,798,496 emails to supporters and voters, and raised $444,098.99 in donations" -- all for just forty bucks a month.

Nancy Scola questions Democratic Strategist's Ed Kilgore's thinking that the rightroots' attempt at rebuilding the GOP is weakened by a lack of "a preparatory period of ideological ferment."

Mike Turk says that the woeful Federal Voting Assistance program -- the Pentagon effort to help both military members and Americans abroad cast ballots -- reminds him that government IT programs often fall short "either on the development side...or on the marketing side." Hey, Mike, it could be worse. In '04, troubles with DOD's basic server configurations meant that you couldn't pull up the FVAP site from many places overseas.

Law enforcement in Mumbai, the Indian city that has been the scene of devastating terrorist attacks this week, invoked section 19 of the Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act of 1995 in an attempt to clamp down upon TV networks' live reporting coming out of the city. "Coverage of the actions taken by the police against the terrorists in South Mumbai," reported India's Business Standard, "is causing impediment in the police action."

A news black out might stop TV crews from broadcasting. But it hasn't done much to stem the stream of live news about the coordinated attacks pouring out of Mumbai via all forms of social media, from Twitter to Flickr to Wikipedia. CNN's Stephanie Busari has a look at Twitter:

With more than 6 million members worldwide, an estimated 80 messages, or "tweets," were being sent to Twitter.com via SMS every five seconds, providing eyewitness accounts and updates.

Many Twitter users also sent pleas for blood donors to make their way to specific hospitals in Mumbai where doctors were faced with low stocks and rising casualties.

Others sent information about helplines and contact numbers for those who had friends and relatives caught up in the attacks. Tweeters were also mobilized to help with transcribing a list of the dead and injured from hospitals, which were quickly posted online.

As Twitter user "naomieve" wrote: "Mumbai is not a city under attack as much as it is a social media experiment in action."

Since the attacks, hundreds of compelling live-from-the-scene photos from the city's Colaba district have been uploaded to Flickr -- some appearing almost immediately after the attacks began. One showing fire trucks dousing the landmark Taj Hotel, uploaded by Soumik Karon on Thursday, sparked a compassionate croos-border comment by Paidipati, based in Sengkang, Singapore: "This is very unfortunate...the commoner has no security anymore. My prayers to all those affected."

(A note: It's unfortunate that many of the Mumbai attack photos are, like Karon's powerful photo of the Taj, shared under strict copyright. Those terms make sharing them online difficult.)

A Twittering Flickr user by the handle @Vinu has made an instant name for himself by being one of the earliest to share photos of the attack. Wired.com's Sarah Lai Stirland has a brief interview with @Vina, a.k.a Vinu Ranganathan, who reported that his tweeting about his photos got his Flickr account usefully boosted. "A Flickr staff who got my twitter," said Ranganathan, "decided to give me a 3 month gift of Pro."

One factor in the stream of social media coming from Mumbai may be that mobile technologies like Twitter and cell-phone photos are particularly useful in places like India where there's an extraordinarily high comfort level with mobile phones, as the Wall Street Journal's Mei Fong and Loretta Chao suggest:

Compared with the U.S., "the cellphone system and SMS culture is stronger in Asia," said Sree Sreenivasan, a new-media professor at Columbia University.

Ranganathan was by no means alone in turning to Twitter to cover and discuss the attacks. Tweets marked with #mumbai have poured in since Wednesday -- prompting, of course, a great hashing over of how reliable such social media reports can be. The London's Times Online breathlessly reported that Tweeters were asked by authorities to stop sharing information on Twitter.

ABC News, though, has noted that the source of those reports was tracked down to a 16 year-old Boston high-school student named Mark Bao, recently profiled in a Boston Globe story on young tech entrepreneurs. Here's the twist. Bao has taken to defending his sources -- on his Twitter account, of course, saying "please don't blog and assume before emailing me at mumbaiupdates@gmail.com."

Finally, there's Wikipedia. The social encyclopedia's entry on the attacks was started by "Kensplanet," a.k.a. John Kenny. Kenny is himself a Mumbaikar and avid Wikipedian, having made more than 7600 edits. The entry on the attacks began with just 23 words: "The 26 November 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks were a series of attacks by terrorists in Mumbai, India. 25 are injured and 2 killed." It's since grown into a robust news resource, complete with casualty counts by nationality, a timeline of the chaotic events -- and a section on how social media has responded.

(Photo credit under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license by Stuti)

In Case You Missed It...

With an eye on the non-profit world, Sarah Granger considers election '08 as "a sweeping mandate to expand our technological infrastructure for the public good."

W. David Stephenson says the sort of liberation of government data that fueled the District of Columbia's recent Apps for Democracy contest "may in fact revolutionize the relationship between government and citizens." And Matthew Burton has this to say about the contest: "The Washington, DC government just procured 47 Web-based tools in 30 days" and at low cost. "This is good news in any year," writes Matthew. "But this year, it is a blessing."

In Case You Missed It...

Gene Koo has part two in his great series called "From Campaigning to Governance." The focus of this installment is transparency, which, writes Gene, can help balance the problem of "asymmetric attention." That's where ordinary concerned citizens struggle when pitted against those with tremendous veted interests (read: lobbyists).

Allison Fine pushes back against the idea that what America needs right at the moment is more and better volunteerism, saying that our energies should be directed toward making government work.

Nancy Scola has a look at Barack Obama's second weekly YouTube address, saying that the series finds the President-elect navigating the tricky path of having enormous perceived power without the hard power of the presidency.

In "Change We Can Perceive In," Tom Watson says that when we consider how "believers" and "cynical pragmatists" seem to be differently judging the presidential transition, it might be the latter who "end up happier with President Obama."

Finally, from our Department of Horn Tooting, Craig Newmark of Craigslist has a nice mention of techPresident in which he says of the site, "you can get an idea of how the future is being invented there." Has a nice ring to it, no?

Luckily, I remembered something that might just be perfect. During the campaign, Barack Obama had promised to inaugurate just such a part-time volunteerism system, an idea the campaign catchily called "a Craigslist for service."

The mention comes in their Plan for Universal Voluntary Citizen Service (pdf). In it, the Obama-Biden campaign tipped their hat to existing volunteer matching services, from USAFreedomCorps.gov -- a little-known and clunky portal launched by President George W. Bush in 2002 -- to VolunteerMatch.org, founded Silicon Valley entreprenuers that connects the willing with existing opportunities with more than 50,000 non-profits. But they went further, saying:

Obama and Biden will build on that foundation and leverage technology to increase awareness of and participation in service opportunities. There will be a comprehensive, easily searchable web presence with information about service opportunities, and a full strategy to ensure that people interested in opportunities can find them.

The enormous, pressing question that remains is this: is their vision limited to more efficiently slotting people into existing service opportunities? Let's hope not. There's an opportunity to sprinkle some of the magic dust of the Obama campaign to make a Craigslist for service far more citizen-driven, and, in turn, far more revolutionary. Such a thing is still just pie in the sky during these early days of the pre-administration. But if it works, hey, it might be a perfect fit for my aunt and uncle.

Now, techPresident contributing writer Gene Koo of Harvard's Berkman Center has called the idea "rather dull and uninteresting." But, frankly, the same could be said of the actual, enormously successful Craigslist. It's wildly speculative to wonder if a true peer-to-peer Craigslist for service -- one that connected people together, creating new social opportunities, not just plugging people into existing ones -- could work, but that's the fun part.

Without carrying the metaphor too far, let's consider how a service model inspired by Craigslist could succeed, and why it might not:

Getting Started Would Be Trivial. In the pre-Craigslist age, if you wanted to, say, get the word out about a garage sale you're having, you'd call up your local newspaper and place an ad to run in the next few weeks. No longer. With Craigslist, just create a posting and poof! the world knows about your yard sale. In some communities, that's enough to draw a big enough crowd. Applying that to service, if you've got a plan to, say, raise the cash to bring in a speaker on social justice to your local library, a service system truly on the model of Craigslist wouldn't erect any roadblocks along the way.

The downside: Such loosey-goosey organizing is great for simple tasks, like putting together a "Hey, Let's Clean Up Lincoln Park this Sunday!" action. But sometimes accomplishing great things takes real planning and consensus, which is harder to achieve in a flat-organizing model. That said, with the infighting that can drag down community activism, maybe encouraging lone rangers to go it solo isn't such a bad thing.

Citizens Who Share Interests Could Finally Find One Another. During his 2005 bid to become New York City's public advocate, techPresident founder Andrew Rasiej asked why there was no city office responsible for connecting the many New Yorkers who are ready, willing, and able to make the city a better place. Why not help bring together the concerned citizens who each, invididually, want to open up the neglected South Bronx waterfront for public use? An office like that, though, could be entirely virtual.

The downside: Helping citizens self-organize is great when they're on your side. Not so great when they have other ideas, and figure out how to lobby City Hall. While remaining fuzzy on just how interactive a model they have in mind, the campaign did pledge that it would have Web 2.0 bells and whistles, like letting citizens rate volunteer opportunities. That said, if we're just feeding volunteers into existing jobs -- doing a shift at the local Red Cross, helping kids to read after school, or a candy-striping at a local hospital (something, actually, the real Cragslist already does, in its signature messy way) -- is that really all that much progress?

Overhead is Minimal. One of the more appealing aspects of Craigslist is surely the cost: in most cases, nada. Of course, the dark hearts of newspaper men and women burn with a hatred for Craigslist for, supposedly, smothering the classifieds business in its sleep, killing the news subsidization model for local newspapers especially. But it has made customers very happy. A Craigslist for service model could significantly reduce overhead for volunteerism, which is a considerable burden to charity work.

The downside: Some charity work takes real money to set up and run. Are we setting up the expectation that suddenly that money isn't needed anymore?

Things Can Happen Quickly. Craigslist is great for quickies. When you need a new dresser, last-minute tickets to the Coldplay concert at the Meadowlands, or a ride to the beach this weekend, it's perfect. But how do we support sustained action online that takes months or years to accomplish?

The downside: Of course, many point to MyBarackObama.com as a model for sustained action that worked, and beautifully. But there we had a charismatic candidate and an exceedingly clear goal: get Barack Obama elected come November 4th, 2008. That unity will be a lot tougher to achieve when the end zone is far fuzzier and farther off.

Giving Stuff Away Makes You Feel Good: When, years ago, I found myself with an extra couch that I needed gone by the weekend, I listed it for free on Craigslist. Some recent college graduates came to pick it up. They were falling all over themselves in gratitude, which made me feel nice -- until one of them, some six years younger than me, called me "ma'am." There has been a reemergence of a hunger to contribute to the common good. Once it's rewarded, it makes you want to do it again and again.

The downside: Those boys should get a job and buy their own damn couch. The worry is that we're putting to much emphasis on volunteerism, just when voted in a president who embraces the liberal belief that sometimes government's exactly who should be tackling poverty, hunger, hopelessness.

It's Craig's World. We Just Live in It. When everyone in your city uses Craigslist to give away furniture or list killer apartments, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to look elsewhere.

The downside: In this case, what's at the top of the ticket isn't a smiling bald utopian-minded programmer from San Francisco. It's the leviathan United States government. Do we really want to entrust so much or do-gooderism to Uncle Sam?

That's enough from me. Let's hear from an expert: Craiglist founder Craig Newmark. I asked him for his take:

Many people in the US want to do more to help other people, not just the new "civic generation" but people across all ages and background. I feel we need both top-down and bottom-up means of getting people together to do so. The bottom-up version would involve online tools which would get people together to spontaneously connect, possibly via existing social networking tools. We're all busy, but now and then we have free time, and a good grassroots, local tool would be great.

Great indeed.

A huge thanks to Micah Sifry for chewing over the ideas in this piece.