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Digital Activism: An Interview with Mary Joyce

Digital activism is defined by the newly launched Meta-Activism Project as "the practice of using digital technology for political and social change." One of the leaders in the field of digital activism is Mary Joyce, the founder and executive director of the Meta-Activism Project. Joyce is among the most knowledgeable and experienced digital activists in the world. She also founded DigiActive.org in 2007, a volunteer organization for grassroots activists. In 2008, she was New Media Operations Manager for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

As a lead-up to the upcoming event in New York City with Chinese digital activist Ai Weiwei, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and yours truly, I interviewed Mary Joyce about the strategies and success stories of digital activism.

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RWW: You recently moved on from DigiActive in order to create a new organization for digital activism. Can you tell us more about what that will be?

MJ: The new organization is called the Meta-Activism Project (MAP) and its goal is to build the field of digital activism by catalyzing a body of strategic knowledge unique to the field.  Today’s digital activist is in an untenable position: caught between the 100-ton rock of pre-digital strategy and the thousand slippery pebbles of highly-contextual tactical knowledge that focuses on a seemingly endless stream of new social media applications.  We want to build a new body of activism strategy that recognizes the radically different communications infrastructure of the digitally networked world.

I am really excited to announce the official launch of the Meta-Activism Project on ReadWriteWeb! The site – http://meta-activism.org – went live at the end of last week and, though it is pretty bare now, we’d like it to be a central location for people interested in building a body of knowledge about the fundamental mechanics of digital activism.

RWW: We’ve heard a lot about Twitter being used in Iran last year, and the subsequent blocking of social media services like Twitter and Facebook in China. What other countries have social media tools had a big impact in, for digital activism?

MJ: Judging impact is quite tricky in the field of digital activism, as few cases of digital activism are actual successes.  Usually we judge the success of an activism campaign by whether the activists achieved their campaign goal.  However, in almost all of the famous cases of digital activism "success" – the post-election mobilizations in Iran and Moldova in 2009 or the 2008 general strike in Egypt – while activists did successfully mobilize using social media, they did not achieve their campaign goal, be it to overturn an allegedly fraudulent election result or the wide range of social and political reforms demanded by the strike organizers. 

Mary doing digital activism training at Video Camp Goa

The measuring of impact thus becomes extremely subjective.  Digital activism proponents want to count mobilization as success even when the goal is not achieved, while skeptics and pessimists point out that, by traditional measures, most digital activism campaigns are failures.  Though I am certainly a proponent of digital activism, I would actually side with the skeptics here.  In order to really push the field forward, we need to set high standards for digital activism success and not be satisfied with half-measures. 

RWW: Facebook and Twitter are the two most high profile social media tools being used for digital activism. Are there any other Internet tools that have had success, that perhaps people aren’t as aware of?

MJ: I could tell you, but that tool would probably become outdated in a few months, or would prove useless out of its original context.  That’s the problem with tactical knowledge: tools change, contexts change, and activists are forever playing catch-up. 

Probably the greatest factor which determines the utility of an application to activists is scale and "use neutrality."  Scale means that the tool needs to reach a certain critical mass of users before you will have the network effects that will either make it likely that activists will become aware of it (in the case of something like Tor or proxy servers) or, in the case of social platforms, that enough people will be on the platform to constitute a meaningful audience for an activist message. "Use neutrality" means that it can be easily co opted, that its architecture can facilitate a wide variety of interactions and does not dictate the content of hosted files.  YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Blogger are use neutral, LastFM and Bloglines are not. 

Mary at the Women’s Leadership and Technology Conference, Sharjah, UAE

RWW: Over the past year or so, can you describe a couple of success stories for digital activism using web tools.

MJ: Ha! More about measuring success. With the lack of true success, it is no wonder that people are so eager for these stories.  I think the traditionally-defined successes in this field (i.e. when the campaign goal is achieved) are much smaller and less dramatic – NGO meets fundraising goal through online donations (multiple cases), bloggers get a corporation to withdraw an offensive advertisement (e.g. Motrin), a social network lifts a questionable national block (e.g. LinkedIn in Syria). 

In the high-stakes activism campaigns that intend to make dramatic changes at the national and international level, I would say that we have cases of successful mobilization – Iran, Moldova, Egypt – without successful campaigns.

RWW: In terms of China, a lot has been written about the censorship there – both the Great Firewall that blocks certain sites and domains, and the self-censorship that many companies have to do in order to survive. Currently Google is trying to challenge censorship, but we’re not sure how successful even a hugely influential company like Google will be. So what, if anything, can ordinary people do in terms of digital activism to support the freeing up of the Chinese Internet? 

MJ: I am not an expert on China, but it seems like the best strategy for defeating the Great Firewall is to make it obsolete: create so many ways of getting around it that it no longer successfully censors Chinese Internet users.  This means both creating new circumvention tools – more Psiphons, proxies, Tors, FreeGates – and finding new and innovative ways to get those tools to Chinese users.

RWW: Thanks Mary for this illuminating interview. We at ReadWriteWeb wish you the best with the newly launched Meta-Activism Project!

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Google Declares "Living Stories" Experiment Success, Offers as Open Source

It’s been just over two months since Google, the New York Times and the Washington Post joined together to experiment with a new way to provide news with Google’s Living Stories. Today, Google has declared the experiment a success and has said that it will offer the project’s functionality to the general public.

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According to Google, 75% of people who sent feedback regarding the Living Stories project have said that they preferred the format to traditional online news. But maybe that’s the thing – “traditional” online news is just the knee jerk reaction of a previously print-based industry trying to jump on the bandwagon. Trying to keep up with the health care debate by typing those words into Google or even Google News or any number of other search engines is often more a waste of time than anything else.

Google’s Living Stories allows media to provide news in a way that lets readers fully explore a story from a central location. They don’t have to scroll down through a page of search results or unrelated articles. Instead, a single page break a story down into four main components: a general summary at the top, a list of filters along the left side, a time-line of important events along the right side and a stream of updates and articles in the center. Living Stories is like a personalized RSS feed reader, but customized to pay attention to just that one story. The story is customized to the user, keeping track of what they have already seen so that it can alert them when new content is available.

When we first saw the news delivery system two months ago, we said that we could “imagine other publications employing this kind of system of organization” and now we’re glad to see that this will become a reality. Something to note, however, is that this is not an algorithm-based service provided by Google – the content of a Living Story is completely determined by an editorial team. In a way, it’s just another content management system, but one that is tailored to telling a single story and, from what we’ve seen, telling it well and from a number of angles.

Disclosure: ReadWriteWeb is a syndication parter of the NYTimes.

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MoveIdiot: Use the Web to Manage Your Move, Track Your Stuff

The Internet is becoming more and more a part of the world around us: our homes, our neighborhoods, our communities.

Services such as BuildingBulletin and Neighborgoods allow us to be efficient and productive neighbors and homeowners. A new service we just found takes that one step further, allowing users to put their entire moving process online. Using online tools to streamline real-world processes is nothing new, but we think MoveIdiot is a particularly useful application.

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The app is a free web-based service set to launch this month. It allows users to manage their moving experience from a central location online. Users can track boxes, manage budgets, keep track of their belongings and manage to-do lists.

With its pre-made moving checklists, MoveIdiot reminds users of every imaginable circumstance, need or errand, such as notifying one’s doctor or bank of a move, changing one’s address with the DMV or even planning a farewell party.

MoveIdiot further allows users to track their moving budget, with fields for each expenditure and category, such as travel, hotels and rentals.

Finally, one of the most interesting aspects of MoveIdiot (and one that, if enhanced, we’d actually pay for) is the ability to track one’s belongings. The site lets users upload and organize data on all their possessions, so users know exactly where each item is packed. MoveIdiot has pre-fabricated lists of common household goods, and users can also input items themselves. The app allows users to print the packing details as well as box labels.

Then, MoveIdiot’s box tracking feature lets users upload or e-mail tracking information from multiple shipping companies and then view real-time updates on an interactive map. If this feature also included RFID tags from MoveIdiot itself, that would provide an interesting value add for users making cross-town moves, as well, or using moving companies that don’t have thorough tracking systems.

According to MoveIdiot, tens of millions of people move each year. The MoveIdiot application provides these folks with a central and intuitive application for managing this process. It speaks to the growing trend of using online and mobile tools to manage, simplify and expedite one’s day-to-day life.

And with the right mix of features, such as the aforementioned RFID tags and a good mobile suite, we can see a freemium model going over very well. We also wonder if MoveIdiot has considered enterprise applications for corporate moves or the same kind of labeling and tracking for items in storage.

What do you think, friends? Would you use a free web app to help manage your next move? And what features do you think would be worth paying for for such an application? Let us know what you think in the comments.

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Factual wants to be the center of the web’s open data

The team behind Factual, a website that’s launching its beta test today, has an ambitious goal — to become the central location where people share, find, and mash-up data.

Founder Gil Elbaz points to sites like the Open Directory Project and MusicBrainz, as promising examples of how to share and collaborate on data about the web and music, respectively, and there are other examples, particularly around government data. But Elbaz says he wants Factual to be more comprehensive, in the way that way Sourceforge has become the primary repository for open source programming code. Elbaz wants his Los Angeles startup to be the repository for pretty much every data set you can think of, whether it’s about endocrinologists, video games, or California restaurants.

The data sets are stored as tables which can be viewed and edited on Factual, and also embedded on other websites. The site has hundreds of thousands of tables right now, Elbaz says. For example, I’ve embedded the table of popular books for the last 20 years below. If you see something wrong in the table, go ahead and edit it. You don’t even have to go back to the Factual site, as changes here will update the original data set. (Which doesn’t mean you can completely change the table at whim. When people dispute facts, Factual has an algorithm for weighing the different citations and reaching a “consensus,” and facts that seem more disputed have question marks next to them.)

The tables, however, can be a bit clunky when they have a lot of information, and are therefore not always easy to browse. Elbaz also hopes to see developers using Factual’s application programming interfaces (APIs) to build tools that bring useful information out of the data. As a sample application, Factual built Eatery Search, a way to search, filter, and map its restaurant data. Both embedding the tables and using the APIs is free, and Elbaz says he plans to keep it that way, while adding pay services eventually.

Freebase is a project with similar goals. Users can view and edit data on the site, and the data is also usable in other web services and applications. But Elbaz says Factual has a very different approach to open, structured data, and a visit to the two sites seems to bear this out — for starters, Freebase doesn’t offer Factual’s massive, embeddable tables.

Elbaz, who co-founded Applied Semantics and sold it to Google, has self-funded the company. Well-known technology commentator and investor Esther Dyson recently joined Factual’s advisory board.

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