So let’s build on that success with a road trip, and bring the same kind of social networky goodness to Diaspora *!

If you’re thinking that you don’t have time for yet another social network, I feel your pain; the plan I’m suggesting only requires an hour of your time. Before we get there, though, I want to talk a bit about why I think it’s worth doing.

Why Diaspora *?

Diaspora shot to prominence last May, as four NYU undergrads raised money on Kickstarter for a distributed open-source privacy-friendly social network project just as a Facebook privacy storm kicked off. Good timing!

Eighteen months and $200,000 later, Sarah Mei and Yosem Companys have joined the core team, and there are dozens of public installations with tens of thousands of Diasporans. Liz Gannes’ Diaspora Prepares to Launch Open Source network on All Things D and Not vaporware, not a Nigerian prince on the team’s blog give an idea of the current status: an engineering team focused on getting to beta, a growing community, another round of fundraising in progress. Hanging out on Diaspora a lot for the last month, I’ve had interesting discussions with interesting people from across the world.

And one thing everybody that I’ve run into so far has in common:

They care about their privacy.

Sounds like a huge opportunity to me. Just by getting involved with Diaspora, we’ll be helping a privacy-friendly open-source social network project during a challenging time. And at the same time:

• non-profits and activists can engage with the grassroots — and find people to relay action alerts as well as potential new supporters
• privacy-focused startups can meet people who value privacy … aka potential beta testers, customers, and advocates
• corporate privacy professionals can get experience with a cutting-edge technology and dazzle your colleagues at IAPP (and the techies at your company!) with your insights into how the webfinger protocol enables decentralized name lookup

Talk about a win/win situation!

It’s not all sweetness and unicorns of course. The software is nowhere near as polished as Facebook and Google. And there are lots of challenges from a privacy perspective: there’s no way to keep things on your profile private from your connections, the code hasn’t been through a security audit (so data is probably vulnerable to hackers), some pods have very weak privacy policies, and I’m not sure if it works with Tor.

Which leads to another potential benefit for a road trip. Feedback from the #privchat community about what it will take for them to be successful as a privacy-friendly social network is extremely valuable to the Diaspora team and pod operators — as well as to all the people working on other open source distributed social networks like Buddy Press, Friendika, Appleseed, status.net, and Buddy Cloud.

So let’s get started!

You can get a quick taste of Diaspora in just a few minutes. Over the next couple of weeks I’ll try to develop a good one-page overview (analogous to Getting Started on Twitter), but for now here’s a rough outline

1. Set up an account on one of the open “pods”. I’m on diasp.org; podupti.me and Pod Up have directories of other pods.
2. Use #privchat as one of the hashtags in your profile to make it easy for us to find each other.
3. Share an interesting link and include the #privchat hashtag
4. Follow the #privchat hashtag, and reshare the interesting stories and join in the comments
5. Add other privchatters to your aspects.
6. Take notes while you’re doing these things, and let the Diaspora team know about any problems you run into — as well as any pleasant surprises, of course!

Once a bunch of us have accounts over there, a good next step would be to have the privacy chat on Diaspora instead of Twitter one of these weeks. It’d be a very different dynamic: different threads for the different questions, a chance to use more than 140 characters, and a chance to interact with new people. And who knows, if it goes well enough there might be enough critical mass for a regular Diaspora privacy chat some other day of the week.

Something that comes up again and again on #privchat is that many people want an alternative to the corporate social networks of the world where we’re the product. Here’s a chance to experiment with a different environment. Please check it out!

jon

Also posted on Diaspora and Dreamwidth

“We’re dealing with the most difficult-to-motivate generation ever. People today feel so powerless, like they can’t have an impact on anything that matters. But you can! So one of the things I’m trying to share with the community is that when you come together, we can make a difference. ”

– Save the Rave organizer Liam Shy

Save the Rave had been in the planning stages for a while, an advocacy organization for Bay Area electronic dance music community to push back against the “war on fun“.  It kicked into overdrive in December, when Assemblywoman Fiona Ma’s proposed Anti-Raves act of 2011 (also know as AB 74).  Matt Haze began organizing a protest; Liam saw the announcement on Facebook and connected with him; and it’s snowballed from there.

To their credit, Fiona and her staff quickly realized that the proposed bill was badly written, withdrew the bill (at least temporarily) and reached out to the community. So the protest got put on hold. Instead, the Save the Ravers met with with Fiona, and convinced the SF Entertainment Commission and the SF Youth Commission to have a joint hearing on the issue. Pretty remarkable progress for a nascent activism campaign!

Of course, Save the Rave starts with some pretty big advantages.  The electronic dance music and rave communities are used to having to fight for our right to party — several of the people involved have worked together on similar issues as part of the SF Late Night Coalition and the California Music and Arts Coalitions. And Liam’s a former SF Youth Commissioner himself, well known both in the community and the political world.

And as if that’s not enough, they’ve got Facebook.

“Facebook and social media let us communicate like we couldn’t before,” Liam told me. “It used to be that we’d print out flyers at Kinko’s and hand them out at events. But that only gets the word out to a few people at a time.”

I found out about Save the Rave from seeing an update from Liam in my newsfeed, and I follow what’s going on via the Save the Rave group. Facebook reworked their group’s functionality in October, and this is the first time I’ve seen an activism campaign really take advantage of it. The discussions in the group are great. We’re starting to see people posting from around the state, and I’m sure it’s just a matter of time until Central Valley, LA, San Diego, and Mendocino start having their own meetings — and their own Facebook groups too.

“The group’s great for engaging people: discussions, shared links and documents, videos,” Liam says. “It goes way beyond the feed and mailing lists.”  With over 5,000 people, it’s the biggest “new group” I’ve been in, and it’s been impressive how well it’s working.

Make no mistake, Facebook and other social networks like change.org (where over 8000 people have signed Jesse Alonzo’s petition) aren’t a substitute for other kinds of organizing. Liam credits phone calls and letters from group members to Assemblywoman Ma for helping show how much people care about the issue.  And the San Francisco group is holding community meetings as well; there’s no substitute for getting together in person.

This issue’s come up again and again over the years, both in San Francisco and nationally with the RAVE act.  Everybody wants to solve the underlying problem.  It’s not a good thing when people are are getting arrested or dying at raves.  And I think all the stakeholders want California to be the kind of place where it’s cool for people to get together and dance to the music they love.  So it’s a great chance to turn things in a positive way and come up with some sensible solutions that focus on harm reduction.

Save the Rave’s next community meeting is Wednesday, February 16. At the state level, Fiona’s convening a stakeholder group with representatives of the nightlife entertainment industry, youth, law enforcement, local government, and emergency medical responders — the kind of people you’d want involved.  And the San Francisco hearings are also an important next step.

If a revised version of the bill is introduced, then we’ll be need to prepare for legislative and legal battles which may well go on through the 2012 elections. So now’s a good time to be organizing.  It’ll be tricky for groups in different areas to get together in person, but hey, there’s always Facebook.   At some point, it may make sense to pull together a statewide meeting in Sacramento. Can’t wait to see the set list!

Stay tuned!

No, I didn’t click on the link. I do my best to keep up with security patches, but why take the chance of visiting a site that’s likely to be filled with malware?

Tales from the Net: Friendship, Identity, Privacy and the Future of Social Networks is reporting from the front lines of the battle for the future of the internet — and a call to action for the readers of the book to join us in the fight.

More here.

Back in April, four NYU students decided to raise money to spend the summer hacking on their project: a privacy-friendly open source social network. They put up a page on Kickstarter, a crowdsourced funding site. Talk about being in the right place at the right time: after a great article Four nerds and a cry to arms against Facebook came out in the New York Times, in a few weeks Diaspora* had raised $200,000.

At which point they moved to San Francisco, got free office space, spent the summer hacking, went to Burning Man … and on September 15, released their software to the community. Basic functionality is in place: status updates, photos, “aspects” to control who sees what. Kudos to them.

Alas, from a security perspective, the code was swiss cheese: filled with holes. Taking off my security hat for a moment: this was probably the right tradeoff for them to make at first. If the guys had spent all their time becoming security experts, they couldn’t have gotten as far as they have. There’s a huge amount of value in giving people something to play with even if it’s insecure.

Still, the major reason people are excited about Diaspora is because of privacy — and you can’t have privacy without security.  So if they want people to trust them, they’re going to have to raise their game. And security is notoriously difficult and expensive to add after the fact. What to do?

Here’s a presentation I’m giving at the Microsoft Blue Hat security conference looking at how Diaspora, or the other emerging Facebook alternatives like Appleseed and OneSocialWeb, might approach it. The full text is available on Liminal States. Enjoy!

Thanks to Adam, Jason, Alem, Sarah, tptacek, Locke1689, mahmud, Wayne, PeterH, Ed, Steve, SonyaLynn, Steve, Michael, Damon, Dan, Michael, Sarah, and Window for comments on previous iterations

My annoyance with Twitter has slowly been building since one of their last updates. I don’t like how Re-Tweets (RT) are handled in the latest updates so I put off updating the software. Twitter’s new authentication process recently went live (a good thing), and it forced me update TweetDeck, the client I use to follow Twitter. And this update included the change that I had been avoiding for months and months: the new RTs.

If I didn’t update, I wouldn’t be able to log into Twitter. So I updated, and the RTs are just as annoying as I thought they would be.

With the new style RTs, strange people show up daily in my Twitter stream; it’s disconcerting because I have no idea who they are. And in what I have to assume is an unintended consequence, it makes it very difficult to acknowledge people who I follow, kind of leaving them out in the cold.

When I RT someone, I try very hard to include everyone who is part of that chain so as to give everyone credit. With the new style RTs, I can’t do that. I can only RT the person who shows up in my stream – which isn’t always the person I’m following. Of course I want to acknowledge the person I don’t know, but I also want to acknowledge the person I *do* know. In order to RT the way I want, I have to manually type in people’s names.

To make matters worse, with a new-style RT the avatar of the person I am following is practically microscopic in size and has no name attached in TweetDeck, so I have to hunt to find the avatar’s name, memorize all of the avatars (not going to happen), RT the way Twitter forces me to, or not RT at all. Twitter gives me no way to easily RT the way I want to RT, or to view my own Twitter stream in a manner I prefer.

I suppose the Twitter folks think new style RTs make following new people more likely becasue you actually see their avatars in your tweet stream, and so your own social network will grow because of this. Maybe Twitter doesn’t care about this, or maybe they have some paternalistic view that they know better than I do how I want to use the system.

Whatever their reason, it leaves me dissatisfied. I want to be able to control my own experience as much as possible, and this rollout takes away options from users instead of making the system more flexible.

IfWeRanTheWorld CEO Cindy Gallop describes it as “a radically simple web platform designed to turn good intentions into action, one microaction at a time”.  Giovanna’s intention here is straightforward: write a short story. As anybody who’s ever tried to write can tell you, though, that’s easier said than done. Using IWRTW, Giovanna’s defined an ‘action platform’ with the steps to accomplish her goal.

Right now Giovanna’s got 10 microactions ‘in play’ and 36 done. “If We Ran The World allows me to express my intentions in a meaningful and quantifiable way”, Giovanna told me. “I love this platform.”

IWRTW is very social in terms of being designed for people working together (you can target microactions as invitations to act and pick up somebody else’s microactions) so Giovanna’s action platform also invites others to help her if they’re interested. The site’s business model is to work with businesses that want to put together an action platform designed to do good and make money simultaneously, and is still in beta. So far the reviews are positive. Bruce Mau Design’s blog summed it up: “Beautiful design + social engagement + fun to use = awesome!”

Giovanna and I met in a very social network-y way. Tara Hunt (aka @missrogue) tweeted a link to my blog post Guys talking to guys who talk about guys. Cindy saw it, left a comment, and we connected via Twitter and Facebook and Skype. I was immediately struck by IWRTW’s colors and inviting user experience, so different from everything I see out there.

Cindy calls it “emotional software” and the first thing I thought of was work that Karen Fries and Tim Skelly did in the 1990s on Seductive interfaces.  When I asked how people were using the site she knew just who I should talk to.

“Giovanna instinctively got the whole concept of Action Branding that we’ve built into IfWeRanTheWorld — you self-identify and self-express as ‘You are what you do’,” Cindy told me. “She’s brought her entire network and family on board, including her grandmother!” So it’s no surprise Giovanna’s at the top of the list of the site’s ‘superheroes’, a classic example of a power user: somebody who knows how to use the site maybe even better than the people who wrote it.

Her short story about Cygnus X-1 is one example. “My story attempts to fuse philosophy and physics in a fun and accessible way.  The action platform provides a roadmap as to how the story was conceived, including my research and literary inspirations.  IRWTW lets me plan it out and track my progress.”

She uses IWRTW for a lot of other things too. Here’s her activity stream, with purple for microactions in play, yellow for action platforms, and orange for microactions that are all about execution.

“As soon as Cindy described the idea for IWRTW to me, I saw its potential as a political organizing tool – I couldn’t wait to bring it to the Canadian political landscape. Now I use IWRTW for so many other things as well. Some of my actions platforms are just for me, like my New Workout Plan. But most of my projects are meant to be shared with other people. Like ensure 30 per cent of Canada’s Members of Parliament are women, which aims to provide microactions that will support more women to get elected.”

Giovanna works with Equal Voice in Ottawa, a multi-partisan organization dedicated to electing more women in Canada. It is the only organization of its kind in the country that is supported by all five of Canada’s national parties. [Cool!  Do we have anything like that in the US?] And that was actually the reason why she came to IWRTW.

“It can transform politics,” she says.

Maybe so. In Ottawa, Oni Joseph (aka the Haitian Sensation) is the first to give it a try.

To be continued …

* Rachel Botsman’s excellent interview in Shareable,  Robert Rosenthal’s Q&A with Cindy on Bookmarks, and Eliot Van Buskiri’s Yes, We Plan in Wired have a lot more about If We Ran the World.

Thanks to Greg, Giovanna, and Cindy for feedback on the earlier draft, and to Oonie for the help with the graphics!

Last week we discussed the lack of diversity in The Economist‘s debate on online privacy.  After reflecting on it over the weekend, it still bugs me, so I decided to write a letter to the editor:

Sir,

Women, people of color, students, and migrants all have important perspectives on privacy, and I was disappointed that you didn’t include any in your recent online debate.  Please consider repeating it with a more diverse range of perspectives.

They probably get a heck of a lot of letters.  So as well as emailing it to them, I’m going to use act.ly to call it to their attention via Twitter.

act.ly is an easy-to-use Twitter petition site created by Jim Gilliam.  In Can Petition Tweets Change the World?, Nancy Scola looks at some of act.ly’s successes and suggests that “adoption and adaptation has proven most successful where the target of the petition is an organization, a company, or any other party that is worried about its reputation and is responsive to a wide swath of the population”.   I’m not sure how responsive The Economist is but hey, it’s worth a try!

The act.ly petition is at http://act.ly/2d8.  One of the clever things about act.ly is that all you need to do to sign a petition is to tweet a link to it.  So if you’re on Twitter, just tweet

@TheEconomist Please repeat your online #privacy debate with more diverse voices http://act.ly/2d8 (please RT)

or modify the text however you prefer.

So please join in!

jon

PS: If you’re not on Twitter, you can leave a comment here or email them at letters@economist.com.

This blog is meant to address the censorship on The Huffington Post. I’ve been a Huffpo user since the site launched… Since then Huffpo has been my main site for news.

– Red Dog in Welcome to Banned from HuffPo, April 14

Pssst…hey kid! Wanna a few words that will get you past the censors over on Huff-Po? Pay attention; you gotta use the weasel words and technique that make you appear normal; you know, conversational stuff or you get banned by JuLiA, HP’s newest software.

– Terry, in the comment thread

Censorship’s one of the topics we’re planning to discuss in Tales from the Net, so we were delighted when Expose the Truth left a comment on our Relaunching… post with a link to Red Dog’s blog and James Ballard’s petition to talk show host Thomas Hartmann.*

The blog’s got great information, too.   Red Dog’s intro post looks at the different aspects of censorship.  Automated filters (aka “bot censorship”) screen comments for potentially-inflammatory words and frequently get it wrong; authors frequently delete critical comments; and criticisms of Huffington Post or any meta-discussions of censorship are routinely deleted.  Comments and other stories on the blog have some great examples and discussions, including perspectives from an anonymous HuffPo blogger, snapshots of censorship in action, and the fascinating results of IzzyIdol’s Consumer Censorship/Community Moderation Test.

Red Dog, aka Michael, made an important point when we talked on the phone earlier today:

I’m not against censorship.  You need to moderate things.  I’m against arbitrary and pointless censorship.  The filtering just doesn’t work.  and they’re censoring out comments because they don’t like what they say.

Indeed.  Of course it’s not just HuffPo — I’ve had my own run-ins with automated filters and been banned from sites after critical comments — but that doesn’t make it any less irritating.

As well as the blog and a Facebook group, there’s also a mailing list for people discussing this.  Alas, HuffPo hasn’t seem particularly interested in engaging so far.  “If somebody says they’ve been censored and I try to reply with information about the blog and my email it’s instantly censored,” says Michael.  But there are ways to get around this:

So instead we leave subtle hints: “oh some interesting stuff here, check this URL”.   And I’m pretty sure they block links to my blog, so I have some other sites which point you to the blog.

You’d think that a story about everybody’s favorite example of an online newspaper (and one of the most powerful progressive news sites) censoring unpopular views would get a lot of media attention.   It hasn’t yet, but people are working to change that — and get the word out through other channels.  There’s a petition on change.org, and discussion in the blogosphere.

Will it all add up to enough to get HuffPo’s attention? Stay tuned!

jon

* For any of you doing online activism, Expose the Truth’s comment is a great template: it succinctly conveys the issue, where to go to find out more, and how people can take action.  It piqued my interest!

To be continued …

To find out more about …

• censorship and free speech on social network sites: So Huffington Post Censored Jesse Ventura? (Democratic Underground); How to response when Facebook censors your political speech; Rebecca Mackinnon’s More trouble in Facebookistan (rmack)
• other Huffington Post controversies: Jessica Wakeman’s The Case Of Huffington Post Sexism (The Frisky), PZ Myers’ “What do Fox News and the Huffington Post have in common?” (Phyrangula on Scienceblogs)

The Economist’s latest online debate is on whether governments should do far more to protect privacy.  In early returns 72% of the voters agreed with Marc Rotenberg of EPIC that governments should do far more to protect privacy, but after the rebuttals it stands at 63%-37%.  Props to Jim Harper of the libertarian Cato Institute, who’s taking the “no” side.

The debate continues until September 2, and there are also insights from experts  Joseph Turow of the Annenberg School, Jules Polonetsky of The Future of Privacy Forum, and Simon Davies of Privacy International …

Hey wait a second, I’m noticing a pattern here.

Yeah really.  And it’s not just women who are being ignored. There aren’t any students or seniors, they’re all from DC, Philadelphia, or London, and it seems like a pretty white bunch to me.

Don’t get me wrong. Deborah and I have worked with Marc, Jim, Jules, and Simon on activism campaigns and organizing the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference, and have a lot of respect for all of them. Even when we disagree, they articulate their positions very well.  They’re all extremely qualified to speak on this issue.

But there are a lot of ways in which they are very similar, and so there are a lot of perspectives that are not being represented.

Gender, age, race, and power in online discusions, chapter n, from January 2008, calls out The Economist for a similar pattern in their first online debate.* This was one of the first stories we covered here on Tales from the Net, and despite the bias to straight white guys, it was a great experience and vibrant debate.   The “pro” side wroting their opening argument in Twitter (how cool is that?) and different perspectives in the blogosphere complemented the ones on The Economist‘s site.  And in his closing statement, the moderator said:

I also admired the interventions from JON PINCUS, who pointed out that supporters of the motion underestimated “the risks that the new technologies will in practice reinforce (rather than counter) existing negative biases and trends in the system”.

Indeed.  Fortunately new technologies can counter existing biases as well as reinforce them.

So let’s get involved in the discussion on The Economist‘s site, and try to bring other perspectives forward during the debate.  Here’s an excerpt from my first intervention:

The discussion would benefit from insights from government regulators; why not include people like Jennifer Stoddart, Ann Cavoukian, and Ilse Agnier?  Similarly I would like to hear the private sector speak for itself; David Drummond of Google, Fran Maier of TRUSTe, or many others would have interesting things to say.   And given the well-known generational differences in views of privacy, input from youth-orited researchers like danah boyd (who coincidentally enough has just blogged about the subject) would be helpful as well.

More generally, women, students, people of color, and seniors have views on this issue.  You would do a great service to your readers by featuring them as well as , as well as middle-aged white men.

Your thoughts?

jon

* Alas the site’s no longer available, but our summary and link post here has excerpts from Ewan McIntosh (pro), Michael Bugeja (con), Parry Aftab (guest), and danah boyd (whose posts shaped the debate even though she wasn’t an official participant), as well as links to posts including Vicki Davis on Cool Cat Teacher (which includes a lot of detail on the ways she uses Ning), Ira Socol on SpeEdChange, danah’s classic Let’s define our terms, and many others. Michael, Vicki, and Ira also join in the comments on the passionate plea for the educational possibilities of social networking Why I’m voting “pro”.