Brigade

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Steven Clift
21 hrs
So if you had $10+ million to do this:
"... create a nonpartisan place that people would visit every day - not just during the two weeks before election day. It would be a place where they could discuss the issues of the day, share news stories and organize."
What would you do?
http://www.sfgate.com/politics/joegarofoli/article/Startup-Brigade-will-use-tech-to-boost-civic-5634317.php

Startup Brigade will use tech to boost civic involvement
Sean Parker - the billionaire early Facebook investor - has contributed the bulk of Brigade's $9.3 million in early funding, with venture capitalist Ron Conway and Saleforce.com founder Marc Benioff chipping in...
SFGATE.COM
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Alexander B. Howard Not spend it on that.
21 hrs · Like

Steven Clift I should note that this is exactly what E-Democracy.org has been working on for 20 years since we launched the world's first election info website in 1994. People kept participating after the election by accident and then we took the model hyper local for far greater, then inclusive participation. Our open source, open lesson sharing approach combined with very limited tech capital as a non-profit means we've gone local to discover and share lessons. I do wonder who things would be different if we had gone .com years ago with our real names approach in 1994 a decade before Facebook. 
21 hrs · Like · 2

Alexander B. Howard Steven Clift Of the 85% of American adults who are online, how many visit e-democracy.org on a daily basis? What about a weekly basis? What about residents of U.S. towns or cities, at the local level?
21 hrs · Like

Sarah Schacht The more relevant number would the percentage of the local population E-Democracy is targeted at. And, Steven, I feel you on this. It's not easy to be first in industry.
21 hrs · Like · 1

Sarah Schacht ...Or go the route of nonprofit instead of for-profit.
21 hrs · Like

Steven Clift Great question - essentially as an R+D e-participation project we've experimented by going more and more local. Key is that the more local you go, the higher percentage of "everyday folks" who will participate. So where we are strongest we reach ~30% of households in S. Minneapolis most days/weeks. We did this with "community life" and you've probably noticed neighborhood Facebook Groups growing and NextDoor attracting $100 mil. Key lesson - at the city-level with a politics-first frame our experience is that only about 1-2% of folks will show up ... the political class. In my view if #opengov and civic tech is going to have any chance to reach a broad cross section of the public, they need to view online neighbor connecting as a loss leader if you will. With the .com activity, our lesson building new voices inclusion work has been cut off at the pass as funders figure "the market" is taking care of neighbors online. (And it is with private/gated resident-only community models most attractive to homeowners fearful of crime/"others" (like a barista, or civil servant serving your community but not living there) attracting those most attractive to advertisers.)
21 hrs · Edited · Like · 2

Steven Clift One consistent challenge for political .com start-ups is trying to "do good" in politics from a non-partisan perspective when the real money is in helping groups keep or gain power and influence. I told a Voter.com staffer when he mentioned stock options in 1999 that "I could help you lose less money."
21 hrs · Edited · Like · 1

Bill Bushey Yeah, I'm really curious to hear what their monitization strategy is. I can't tell if this is a focus that the reporter introduced, or if it is a focus of the company, but it's disconcerting to see the article talk about the difficulty campaigns have in reaching young voters, and not the needs of communities to be able to converse and organize.
21 hrs · Like

Micah Sifry It's a fun thought experiment, Steven Clift. I'd actually love to invite the civic tech sector to bid for a piece of that $10M to see what people would propose, but offhand I'd say I'd give chunks to SeeClickFix, PopVox, AskThem.io, Sunlight, Code for America, E-democracy, etc. Or, another way to slice/enlarge the pie--I'd put up $1M as a first-round prize that would give 5-10 projects some running funds to prove increased traction over a 3-6 trial run, and then a big prize for the most effective.
20 hrs · Like · 2

Andrew Noyes Thanks for raising this Steven and thanks for inviting me to join the group. In case anyone is interested in helping us build this thing, Brigade is hiring (http://onbriga.de/brigadecareers). More broadly, I know our whole team is looking forward to working with all of you. As we've said before, we’re excited to talk to and learn from strategists, technologists, advocates, and academics who have worked in this space for quite some time and have important insights.

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18 hrs · Edited · Like · 2

Alexander B. Howard Edging closer and closer to having a robust dialog here tonight...
18 hrs · Like · 1

Sarah Schacht Andrew, glad you joined this thread. Took a peek at your product designer position. It lacked a crucial skill: experience designing for citizen engagement in governance, communities, or politics. Few people who've worked in tech have the perspective, research, or experience with these fields to design for this kind of work. You can't just bring the engagement folks in as advisors--they have to be a part of the design team.
17 hrs · Like · 2

Daniel Bennett This is great news. And W3C is working on social media standards. Eventually we people may even control our own identity and content/comments. Irony, this conversation is taking place in a space where we have little say over identity and control over our content. Hmmm.
17 hrs · Like

Steven Clift Thanks Andrew Noyes, Matt Mahan , and James Windon for joining us from the Brigade.
6 hrs · Edited · Like · 1

Steven Clift I woke up this morning thinking, there are two powerful questions here - what would you do if you had ten million dollars to invest for the greatest impact over three years from a nonprofit perspective OR from a .com return on investment perspective? Perhaps the Brigade will try to cut this down the middle?
7 hrs · Edited · Like

Steven Clift If I were to invest millions to have the greatest and widest impact - I'd work to bring the most compelling online participation options to millions more people by focusing of raising new voices and connecting the people across income, race, generations, immigrant and native born as well as work to bridge the partisan divide. I'd take these Pew numbers to heart - http://bit.ly/pewcivic - and take our "just ask" strategy from our BeNeighbors.org effort national. Over our field's first two decades we've essentially raised the voices of those who already show up (demographically) and we suffer from a terrible loudest voices problem where the most partisan drive 95% folks away from participation online. I'd take lessons from Sunshine Week, Local Democracy Week (UK), and "speak softly and carry a massive email list" moving everyday folks into local and national opportunities to participate online each week. (This of course is a civic tech/opengov "producers coop" Got Milk? campaign that would need public interest funding to go beyond the first three years.)

“Inclusive” Civic Engagement in the Digital Age – Questions to Spark Debate on an Important Pew...
blog.e-democracy.org
Discuss report on Twitter #pewCivic  - Discuss report on Facebook Discuss report...See More
6 hrs · Like

Steven Clift Now from a .com revenue generation perspective while still holding on to an empowering civic mission, I'd do something completely different. I'd take a far wider "community life" approach, embrace geographic relevancy, develop an engine for local civic org and media biz engagement that helps them (and us) revenue wise, mix in some creative "share the wealth" participatory budgeting, leverage Facebook (which now hosts 95% of online public life engagement online in local communities now), and embrace one of E-Democracy's key lessons - elected officials will engage when they know they are mixing it up with their actual voters/constituents. There, I've said everything and nothing at the same time! 
6 hrs · Edited · Like

Miles Fidelman 1. I'd work on getting real politicians involved - be they in office, or campaigning. Most of the civic engagement efforts I've seen are unconnected with any real outcome - so what's the point. And most of the communications I get from politicians are asking for money. Seems like there's a connection waiting to be made.
6 hrs · Like · 1

Miles Fidelman 2. How about using the dollars as prize money? Can you say "X-prize?" Not exactly sure how to frame the challenge - but competition for coin sure does seem to create active engagement.
6 hrs · Like

Micah Sifry Speaking of an X-prize, here's the outline of a "Hacking Democracy Prize" that we at Personal Democracy Media would love to run (just need a wealthy sponsor--this is drawn from a memo we wrote to someone who seemed interested)... The vast majority of Americans never give a campaign contribution. Barely half vote. Only a few have lobbyists. Even in the organizations Americans belong to, we rarely get to participate in the decisions that affect us
We can change that. It's time to democratize democracy. 
Introducing the Hacking Democracy Prize.
The goal is to stimulate a massive flowering of ideas, projects, collaborations and ultimately working sites, platforms and tools that demonstrably increase participation in politics by ordinary people.

Here's how this could work:

Let's say we started with a million-dollar prize pool. The prize would have two phases, a first round set of semi-finalist winners that would each get $50,000 and six months to prove out their idea, and then a grand-prize winner that would get the remaining $500,000. Of course, if we were drawing in more support and interest, the prize pool could be increased or rolled out in more phases.

We'd build an open submission site where people would submit proposals and be able to comment, like and share. We'd also recruit a set of first-round readers to sift the pool and a group of well-respected judges with domain expertise to help pick the semi-finalists. 

The prize would have some explicit goals that applicants have to aim for. These would have to be determined with some further discussion and consultation, obviously. 

But imagine something like this: To win the Hacking Democracy Prize, a semi-finalist project needs to measurably grow public participation along one or more of these hard measures of engagement during the six months of the finalist round:
-number of overall users
-number of high-intensity users
-number of participants in flesh and blood meetings
-number of sub-groups of at least 10 members each formed
-number of people paying dues
-number of people making a financial contribution to a political entity
-number of social media actions taken
-number of hard actions taken

Running the prize would involve some administrative costs for development of a home site, recruitment of judges, and so on.
6 hrs · Edited · Like · 4

Steven Clift Micah Sifry at a small scale, the http://cura-tech.org project has a staged approach with user-centered design training ... but not the insightful metrics stuff you've proposed. On a related note, I've wanted to democratize the "specification" stage for some time - http://pages.e-democracy.org/Next_Generation_Ideas . We started work on it, but our funder wanted us to focus more on our stronger inclusion work in year two. However, I converted the idea prioritization phase into a vote of sorts. Here is what 3,000+ votes said: http://www.allourideas.org/engageonline/results?all=true Vote here: http://www.allourideas.org/engageonline

CURA:TECH
www.cura-tech.org
CURA:Tech supports collaborations among diverse communities in the Twin Cities to design, create and deploy civic technology tools and practices. Cool, right?
5 hrs · Like

Sarah Schacht Micah, I like the idea, but I'd suggest one tweak to it. I'd eliminate the pool of "well respected judges with domain experience." Why? Elites in this field aren't always in touch with the realities on the ground in communities and democratic processes. 

Instead of bringing in the usual suspects to rate and review projects, I'd suggest creating a judging pool made up of a diverse range of community organizers, electeds from local and state levels, associations and advocacy group leaders, a few people from faith organizations, and citizens who've recently become successful advocates or change-makers. Get people who would plausibly use the tools to judge them.
5 hrs · Edited · Like

Jill Miller Zimon As someone who has lived in the civic engagement world and the campaigning world and the elected world, I have to emphatically press what Miles Fidelman wrote in his first point. I love Micah Sifry's Hacking Democracy Prize and the taking action metrics are critical, but I do wonder if there's a way to add some knowledge-related metric. Maybe that's more a longitudinal metric that could be designed or developed. In other words, we want to form habits, like those of us who insist on voting in person. Something nearly inviolable that will keep someone engaged through thick and thin. There's so much here and relevant to some of what I'm starting to work on in NE Ohio and also in continuing to do a kind of anatomical study of my own primary this year that I'll be writing a few blog posts about it, at the very least. But again, echoing Miles - electeds have got to be a part of all this, no matter how few of us there are who believe in it. Please check with National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD) as they definitely have a handle on which electeds in the country are most genuinely interested in pushing this kind of work.
5 hrs · Like

Jill Miller Zimon Also, for additional evidence of the current disconnect between civic engagement, the tools we put out there and suggest are how to engage, and the engagement's effect on policy making, read or listen to this report broadcast yesterday on public comments for net neutrality. If we don't attack this disconnect, you can go make all the money you want from engaging people, but we will have failed in improving democracy. http://www.npr.org/.../one-million-net-neutrality...

1 Million Net Neutrality Comments Filed, But Will They Matter?
www.npr.org
The last time the FCC saw this much public interest was after the Janet Jackson Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction. But research shows comments aren't likely to sway the agency's policy decision.
5 hrs · Edited · Like · 1

Micah Sifry Sarah Schacht That's a friendly amendment, but I would just say that if we are somehow going to get someone to put up a big pile of money for this, "well-respected judges with domain experience" will almost certainly have to be part of the mix.
5 hrs · Like

Mark Dixon Build out my Smarter Local Government and Cognitive Digital Democracy concepts. CDD addresses the civic engagement side.
4 hrs · Like

Steven Clift @jillmillerzimon +1 - I've been engaging emerging "digital native" elected officials and candidates who are essentially "friending for office." (I am working on a top ten tips article.) While E-Democracy's local neighbors forum represent a ready made audience, these candidates like creating their own broadcast/engagement network where they are in the center and have more control. They will still "go to the digital parade" so to speak when it makes political sense, but it is natural for them to want their own space for online office hours where they are the host. The good thing about friending and interactively engaging people as you run for office (via your _personal_ Facebook profile) is that when the election is over you can continue to engage your constituents easily. A lot of sites want to create places where constituents can ask officials/candidates question - but you know what is also working? The opposite - ask Mayor Betsy Hodges about her notes to her "Facebook friends" asking people questions. (See how we leveraged her "bragging week http://bit.ly/1p6q0D8 ) - So if I were to run a Democracy Week, we'd have a Get Friendly Day where we'd encourage a far more diverse range of people to directly friend the (local) elected officials who represent them and not leave this as a community activist/politician hyper connected playground.
What we love about Standish and Ericsson neighborhoods? #lovempls #bragmpls: Minneapolis...
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4 hrs · Like

Sarah Schacht Perhaps they would need to be in the mix, Micah, but they shouldn't be the only judges. There's something to our reliance on elites to pick out "winners" that seems to contribute to tools that don't see broad pick up. I can't tell you the number of times I've heard academics and thought leaders in our space condescend about the capacity of average Americans. Too often, they pick projects based on the the reinforcement of their biases against "average" Americans, opting to build something that only engages people like themselves.
3 hrs · Like

Jill Miller Zimon Sarah Schacht & Micah Sifry perhaps people who've been involved with the The Participatory Budgeting Project efforts would have good insight.
3 hrs · Like · 1

Steven Clift +1 Sarah Schacht - The Forever St. Paul challenge had a single $1 million prize, hundreds of submissions, and judges who first narrowed if down to 30 some semi-finalists and then 3 finalist for a public vote. I'd only use judges to winnow it down to say 50, then use stages of public voting to get to the initial winners. What I like about Micah Sifry's idea is having some agreed metrics (agreeing on those collaboratively and making sure they themselves don't cost more to measure than the project would make for a very interesting process as well), sharing comparable stats on "results" in real-time or near real-time leading to additional resources. One of the design challenges is if you do something nationally and still just interest the most political you have millions in a potential audience while if you go local/state for a broader cross section of population your pool is much small. So per capita measures would be needed if you really want to demonstrate break through uptake with the potential to scale to more areas.
3 hrs · Edited · Like · 1