Part 2 of a series for NWEN’s blog

Obviously this isn’t just a problem for women, nor just in technology… we run across the problem anytime our society has an “in” group that we want to figure out how to equalize (immigrants, race, sex, age, etc.). Since the male/female ratio is likely to stay about even throughout society, it might be an easier(?)/good(?) place to really try to work it out and benefit a whole lot of other “out” groups.

– Beth K, in a comment on an earlier draft

If you missed part 1, after a brief intro discussing the Arrington kerfuffle and started on a list of things we can each do as individuals to help change the ratio: Commit to putting some energy and resources into it, Mentor women, and Get out of your cultural cocoon.

There’s a lot more to be said but first I’d like to highlight something I think is particularly important:  while the current discussion is focusing primarily on women in technology, the underlying challenges are much broader and even more complex.

People of color, LGTBQs, people with disabilities, older people, youth, non-native English speakers … all of them face huge biases and are generally underrepresented in technology. The broad categories disguise significant differences. Black women, Latin@s, Native American women, etc. all have unique experiences at aren’t captured in “people of color”. And the challenges are toughest at the intersections: women with disabilities, older women, rural women … the list goes on.

So while my examples are primarily about women, please keep other dimensions of diversity in mind as you’re reading this — similar approaches are needed there as well. And if you’re a blogger or wiki type who would like to expand the examples and recommendations here in additional dimensions, please do!

Thank you for listening.  We now return to the discussion of  changing the ratio of women in technology.

• Mention women, not just men:* Track the ratio of men to women that you mention in your email, blog posts, tweets, or “top 25″ lists “. Is it lopsided? As K. Tempest Bradford describes on Geek Feminism, it can happen easily enough: “when measuring the nebulous concept of ‘influence’ a lot of gut decisions are made that have more to do with personal perceptions than other factors.” If so, look for ways to bring balance. If you’re giving out awards, look at your committee: if they’re 80% male, then you probably won’t have a lot of women finalists and winners.
• Reach out when you’re hiring. The Geek Feminism Wiki’s resource page is a good starting point for this. At my most recent startup, we made sure to get our job descriptions reviewed by women and diversity experts to make sure they were equally inviting to women, and routinely posted them on Digital Eve Seattle as well as other lists. And if any angels and VCs happen to be reading this, please pay attention: you’re in a uniquely leveraged position to encourage diversity, so please work towards having a diverse team yourselves as well as encouraging diversity in your companies.
• Reach out even when you’re not hiring. Allyson Kapin (aka @WomenWhoTech) and Aliza Sherman both list some of the many organizations working in this space: Anita Borg Institute, She’s Geeky, Women Who Tech, National Women of Color Technology Conference, Women 2.0, Girls in Tech, Astia, Pipeline Women …. In Seattle, there’s TechMavens and the Professional Women of Color Network as well as Digital Eve. Get involved with them. If you’re looking for expert speakers at a conference or event, they’ve got plenty of good resources. And don’t forget Twitter; follow hashtags like #geekfeminism, #womaninnovator, and #fem2 and RT stuff you think people will find interesting.
• Think before you share.  (TODO: expand on Joshua’s comment here.)
• Be a role model.  Women benefit a lot from good role models — and so do guys who are interested in becoming allies.

I’m sure there’s a lot more. As I said last week, suggestions welcome!

These are a lot of work, so I just want to close on an upnote by highlighting why diversity matters so much to NWENs audience of entrepeneurs, investors, and service providers with another qutoe from Cindy Gallop, CEO of IfWeRanTheWorld:

It’s a numbers game. There are far fewer women in tech than men. So anyone genuinely interested in changing the ratio and evening out the balance, has to more than meet women halfway … — Cindy Gallop in on WIMN’s Voices

As Clara Byrne notes on VentureBeat, female employees and co-founders are a competitive advantage; on TechCrunch Europe, Inmaculada Martinez goes into more detail in It’s time to hire more women in startups – your products deserve it. Paying attention to diversity — gender, race, age, and all the other dimensions — opens new opportunities, broadens your hiring pool and investment options, helps you avoid blind spots, and results in products that are more appealing to everybody.

It’s getting harder and harder to deny there’s a problem, and that the advantages moving ahead will go to those who address it most quickly

jon

References: The definitive women in CS/STEM thread on Geek Feminism is a good place to start. Vivek Wadhwa’s Silicon Valley: You and Some of Your VC’s have a Gender Problem, Janine de Nysschen’s Why Men Get VC Money and Women Don’t….and How that is Changing have a lot of recent data. TODO: link to Astia, Anita Borg, Illuminate White Paper, etc.

* For more on this, see Shelley Powers’ Guys don’t link, Susan Herring et al’s Women and children last: the discursive construction of Weblogs. And as always, look for similar patterns — and take similar steps to improve the situation — with other dimensions of diversity like race and age as well.

Jon Pincus is a Seattle-area strategist, writer, and activist, currently volunteering for NWEN and co-chairing the First Look Forum with Rochelle Whelan.

Looking ahead, the Women In Tech teleconference on September 15 includes TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde is on the “Female Ferocity” panel.  There’s the sold-out Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in Atlanta at the end of the month.  And late last week, Arrington tweeted that they were going to add an all-women panel to TechCrunch Disrupt to discuss “women’ issues”.*   So I suspect we’ll be hearing a lot more about this …

Hopefully as we move forward, as well a continued focus on the underlying issues and realities of structural biases against women and minorities, we’ll also see a lot more discussion about what people can do. Mary’s Where to after the required reading? on Geek Feminism asks for suggestions.  I’ve got a draft response in What each of us can do; feedback welcome.

In any case I thought it would be useful to collect the links to what’s been written so far.  It’s really striking how much good stuff there’s been on blogs and Twitter (I collected some of the tweets that caught my eye in various comments in another thread**) so hopefully the list it’ll be valuable to anybody else writing about it.

First though, in a comment that the Arrington’s of the world will no doubt dismiss as pandering, I’d like to take a moment and express my admiration for the women in technology who have been doing such great work to change the ratio.  The women I know who speak out on gender equity aren’t “whiners”, as they’re so often dismissed by people who don’t want to hear what they’re saying.   They’re remarkably successful despite the huge biases against them, and somehow manage to find time for diversity work in addition to having careers, friendships, and often families.

Of course they’re frustrated when privileged guys who clearly haven’t looked at the problem in any detail deny there’s a problem, attack women and allies, and disclaim responsibility — and who can blame them?  Despite that, though, they’re a remarkably positive group … and with good reason: they’ve invested a huge amount of time and effort here over the years and it’s really starting to pay off.

So kudos and respect to you all.  I’m impressed by what you’ve accomplished and proud to know you  And thanks, too: the technology world is a much more pleasant for your efforts!

And you know, stuff like this makes a big difference. There was a very encouraging episode late last week in response to Chiara Atik’s Guest of a Guest article on TechStars New York’s ratio of 46 male mentors and only two women. When Cindy Gallop brought it up on Twitter, David Tisch of TechStars quickly reached out.  Props  all around. More of this please!

Here now the links, in rough chronological order.  There’s also excellent discussion in the comments of many of these; I’ve also included “HN” links for the meta-discussions on Hacker News on some.  I’m sure I missed some — please tweet them to me at @jdp23 or leave ‘em in the comments.  Thanks as always!

jon

• Addressing the Lack of Women Running Tech Startups, Shira Ovide, Wall Street Journal
• Too Few Women In Tech? Stop Blaming The Men.  Or at least stop blaming me, Michael Arrington, TechCrunch. (HN)
• Stop Playing the Blame Game, Allyson Kapin, Fast Company
• “Too Few Women in Tech?”, Eva Smith, Tech.  Food.  Life.
• Nobody’s Blaming Anybody, Cindy Gallop, WIMN’s Voices
• Blame Sexism. Ivan Boothe, Rootwork
• Fretting, Asking, and Begging Isn’t a Plan, Jon Pincus, Liminal States, cross-posted on Feminism 2.0
• Arrington is completely wrong about women in technology, Laurie, Seldo.com (HN)
• My Challenge to Michael Arrington, Michelle Greer, michelle’s blog
• In Response to Michael Arrington’s “Too Few Women in Tech” article, Helena Stone, ChipChick
• The Lack of Tech Industry Diversity: One Year Later, Jeff Nolan, Venture Chronicles
• Women in Tech and Women Entrepeneurs Discussion, Fred Wilson, A VC
• More Women in Tech Discussions, Brad Feld, FeldThoughts
• Arrington: “Women Entrenepeneurs: Stop Blaming Men for Your Problems”, Alyson Shontel, Business Insider
• Women in Tech: What Gives?, Shefaly Yogendra
• How Anonymity Contributes to the Problem, Arvind Narayanan, 33 Bits
• A Realistic Look at the Numbers, Jolie O’Dell
• Getting More Women to Tech, Kay, Feministe
• Musing about Inclusion in Technology, JP Rangaswami, Confused of Calcutta
• TechCrunch Comments Fail: from STFU to “Female Supremecists”, clarley, Mavenity,
• What Do “Where are the Women” Sh*tstorms Achieve? Irin Carmon’s Jezebel.
• 5 Simple Ways to Help Women as Tech Leaders, Ja-Naé Duane’s
• 18 Reasons Your Company Might Be a Sausagefest, Jessica Wakeman
• Try Harder Isn’t an Answer, Jamelle Bouie, TAPPED
• On Influence, Lists, Women and the Confluence Thereof, K. Tempest Bradford, Geek Feminism
• There’s More than You Think, Terri, Geek Feminism
• A few things each of us can do (DRAFT), Jon Pincus, Liminal States
• Is There a Gender Divide in Startups?, Leah Culver, The Daily Beast
• “I  Could Keep Writing About the Lack of Women in Tech, but Starting a New Company Seems Like More Fun”,  Rachel Sklar, Change the Ratio
• My List of 30 Great Women, Don Dodge, The Next Big Thing
• Mindfulness is the Key to Finding Female Speakers, Geoff Livingston
• Douchebag Decree: Michael Arrington, Technological Determinist, Kelsey Wallace, Bitch
• Women in Tech: What to do Now?, Clara Byrne, Venture Beat
• Finding more women to speak at Ohio LinuxFest, Mackenzie, Geek Feminism
• We Aren’t Blaming Men , Aliza Sherman
• Stop Telling People How They Should Feel About It, Sasha Pasulka, Seattle 2.0
• Quick Thoughts, Leslie Poston, Uptown Uncorked
• Blame Men — And Women, Gayle Laakmann, Technology Woman
• Go Aliza.  Women in Tech do Blame Some Men, Eilieen Brown, Eileen’s Technology Blog
• “Ambient Un-belonging” , Audrey Watters, an/archivista (HN)
• Blogging and Mass Psychomanipulation, Michael Arrington, TechCrunch
• Not sure if I agree with this dude’s logic, Rachel Sklar, Change the Ratio
• Women in Tech, Men in Tech, and the Blame Game, Cameron Sorden, Digital Life
• Girls in Tech Debate: A Publicity Hoax?,  Ellie Cachette, Social Times
• An apologetic Mike Arrington, Paramendra Bhagat, Netizen
• What You Can(’t) Tell Just By Looking At Her, Tara Hunt, HorsePigCow
• Ratio: Changing, Rachel Sklar, Change the Ratio
• Why We Don’t Need more Women in Tech … Yet, Jolie O’Dell
• women, entrepeneurs, and tech, Emma Persky

* see @navarrowwright, @nakisnakis, and @randomdeanna for some points on the TC Disrupt panel

** including Arrington snarking at me if you read far enough down

It’s a numbers game. There are far fewer women in tech than men. So anyone genuinely interested in changing the ratio and evening out the balance, has to more than meet women halfway …

– Cindy Gallop in No One’s Blaming Anyone on WIMN’s Voices

Shira Ovide’s Wall Street Journal article Addressing the Lack of Women Running Tech Startups kicked off the latest women-in-technology firestorm, and Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch rant  Too Few Women In Tech? Stop Blaming The Men.  Or at least stop blaming me sent it into overdrive.   The list of 30+ links on Liminal States includes views from the Seattle area community in Sasha Pasulka’s excellent Stop Telling People How They Should Feel About It on Seattle 2.0, Cameron Sorden’s Women in Tech, Men in Tech, and the Blame Game and my own  Fretting, Asking, and Begging Isn’t a Plan.

Good stuff!

One consistent theme in the responses to Arrington’s post is that blame isn’t helpful.  The underlying causes of gender inequity and other diversity problems in the tech industry are complex, including education, cultural norms, the advantages of the “old boys club”, and sexism.*    Most people I talk to, no matter what their gender, agree that it would be a better if the industry and their organization were more balanced.**

So how to make progress?  Here are a few things each of us can do:

• Mentor women (suggested by Ja-Naé Duane in 5 Simple Ways to Help Women as Tech Leaders).  Finding good mentors is a huge challenge for women, and Elizabeth Stark’s The Gender Gap in Tech: Why Mentors Matter describes why it’s so important.
• Reach out when you’re hiring.  The Geek Feminism Wiki’s resource page is a good starting point for this. At my most recent startup, we made sure to get our job descriptions  reviewed by women and diversity experts to make sure they were equally inviting to women, and routinely posted them on Digital Eve Seattle as well as other lists.  And if any angels and VCs happen to be reading this, please pay attention: you’re in a uniquely leveraged position to encourage diversity, so please work towards having a diverse team yourselves as well as encouraging diversity in your companies.
• Reach out even when you’re not hiring.  Allyson Kapin (aka @WomenWhoTech) and Aliza Sherman both list some of the many organizations working in this space: Anita Borg Institute, She’s Geeky, Women Who Tech, National Women of Color Technology Conference, Women 2.0, Girls in Tech, Astia, Pipeline Women ….  In Seattle, there’s TechMavens and the Professional Women of Color Network as well as Digital Eve.  Get involved with them.  If you’re looking for expert speakers at a conference or event, they’ve got plenty of good resources.  And don’t forget Twitter; follow hashtags like  #geekfeminism, #womaninnovator, and #fem2 and RT stuff you think people will find interesting.
• Get out of your cultural cocoon (as suggested by Carol Tran of  Chic Meets Geek in this excellent  video).  Shireen Mitchell points out that using social media to diversify your online network is only the first step; real world connections matter a lot too.  Last month I went to a CRAVE Seattle networking event, and got to experience the role reversal of being one of only two guys in a room and realizing that everybody was looking at me and wondering what I was doing there — and met a bunch of people I never would have otherwise.
• Mention women, not just men:*** track the ratio of men to women that you mention in your email, blog posts, tweets, or “top 25″ lists “.  Is it lopsided?  As K. Tempest Bradford describes on Geek Feminism, it can happen easily enough: “when measuring the nebulous concept of ‘influence’ a lot of gut decisions are made that have more to do with personal perceptions than other factors.”  If so, look for ways to bring balance.  If you’re giving out awards, look at your committee: if they’re 80% male, then you probably won’t have a lot of women finalists and winners.

Of course, these only scratch the tip of the iceberg.  There are plenty more good suggestions in the articles and sites I link to above — and please drop your own in the comments!

jon

* Vivek Wadhwa’s Silicon Valley: You and Some of Your VC’s have a Gender Problem, Janine de Nysschen’s Why Men Get VC Money and Women Don’t….and How that is Changing, and the definitive women in CS/STEM thread on Geek Feminism have a lot of data, and if you’re not familiar with the issue are great starting points.

** Although if you’re an entrepeneur or investor reading this and don’t think diversity matters for you, I’d encourage you to think again.  As Clara Byrne notes on VentureBeat, female employees and co-founders are a competitive advantage; on TechCrunch Europe, Inmaculada Martinez goes into more detail in It’s time to hire more women in startups – your products deserve it. .  Paying attention to diversity — gender, race, age, and all the other dimensions — opens new opportunities, broadens your hiring pool and investment options, helps you avoid blind spots, and results in products that are more appealing to everybody.   It’s getting harder and harder to deny there’s a problem, and that the advantages moving ahead will go to those who address it most quickly.

*** For more on this, see Shelley Powers’ Guys don’t link,  Susan Herring et al’s Women and children last: the discursive construction of Weblogs.  And as always, look for similar patterns — and take similar steps to improve the situation — with other dimensions of diversity like race and age as well.

Jon Pincus is a Seattle-area strategist, writer, and activist, currently volunteering for NWEN and co-chairing the First Look Forum with Rochelle Whelan.

Success in Silicon Valley, most would agree, is more merit driven than almost any other place in the world. It doesn’t matter how old you are, what sex you are, what politics you support or what color you are….  Statistically speaking women have a huge advantage as entrepreneurs.

– Michael Arrington in TechCrunch

Privileged much? *

The lastest firestorm about women and entrepeneurship got kicked off by Shira Ovide’s excellent Wall Street Journal article Addressing the Lack of Women Running Tech Startups.   Shira’s article has some fine quotes from Rachel Sklar, Dina Kaplan, Yuli Ziv, and Fred Wilson, and this from Rachel Sklar of Change the Ratio:

Part of changing the ratio is just changing awareness, so that the next time Techcrunch is planning a Techcrunch Disrupt, they won’t be able to not see the overwhelming maleness of it.

I thought it was a great read.  But not everybody agreed.

Every damn time we have a conference we fret over how we can find women to fill speaking slots. We ask our friends and contacts for suggestions. We beg women to come and speak. Where do we end up? With about 10% of our speakers as women.

Oh please.  Fretting, asking, and begging isn’t a plan.

Yes, it’s hard.  Stop whining.  Take some responsibility.

Allyson Kapin’s Stop Playing the Blame Game, Ja-Naé Duane’s 5 Simple Ways to Help Women as Tech Leaders, and Jessica Wakeman’s 18 Reasons Your Company Might Be a Sausagefest all have some specific suggestions for Michael and TechCrunch — or anybody else who’s working on diversity.  Here’s my perspective.

If you really want to make progress, treat it the way you would any other business problem you take seriously. Set goals, put a plan together, hire good people to help you, and do some real outreach.  Work with organizations like Change The Ratio, Women Who Tech, Anita Borg Institute, GeekFeminism, BlogHer, Fem2pt0, TechMavens, Women 2.0, ASTIA and so on.  Invite them to guest post regularly on TechCrunch.  Go to their events.  Pay a diversity consultant and invest in their recommendations.   Oh and while you’re at it please work on race, age, and other biases in TechCrunch and your other enterprises.

Or not.  It’s up to you, of course.  But if you ignore all this input and keep acting defensive, don’t expect people to see you as taking diversity seriously.

There’s plenty more privilege (along with some sexism and misogyny) in the comment thread.  More positively there’s some good stuff as well, including perspectives from Michelle Lee of Mamabread, Michelle Greer, LToTheWolf, Cindy Gallop of If We Ran the World, and many others.   Women and allies are underrepresented in the thread but more than holding their own   There’s also a brief appearance from Fred Wilson, and a great riposte by self-described angry feminist Millercan, who responds to a clueless comment about meritocracy with:

have been in tech (my guess) since before you were in kindergarten. i’ve been rewarded based on merit. but never as well as men who actually shipped shitty products, or took out 16 million organizations with narcissistic behavior.

There have been some excellent followup posts as well, including from  Cindy Gallop, Michelle Greer,  Jamelle Bouie, K. Tempest Bradford and Terri on Geek Feminism,  Eva Smith, Ivan Boothe, Laurie on Seldo.com, Alyson Shontel, Kay on Feministe, clarely on Mavenity, Helena Stone, Fred Wilson, and Irin Carmon’s What Do “Where are the Women” Sh*tstorms Achieve? in Jezebel.

Update, Sept 3: Two more excellent posts: Aliza Sherman’s We Aren’t Blaming Men and Sasha Pasulka’s Stop Telling People How They Should Feel About It (on Seattle 2.0!  Go Pacific Northwest!)
Sept 6: But wait there’s more!  Gayle Laakmann’s Blame Men — And Women, Audrey Watters “Ambient Un-belonging” Geoff Livingston’s Mindfulness is the Key to Finding Female Speakers and Mackenzie’s Finding more women to speak at Ohio LinuxFest are all well worth reading.

That said, Arrington’s position has gotten some support, too. Here’s what the all-male team at Charles River Ventures has to say on Twitter

I think of articles like this as a fascinating snapshot of how privilege, combined with the “guys talking to guys who talk about guys” cliquing behavior, leads to a remarkably convenient blind spot for Arrington — as well as a lot of his readers, and so many other privileged white guys.

At the same time, though, it’s also a great sign of the momentum that the women-in-technology networks and their allies are making.  The steady coverage in Fast Company, Mercury News, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other high profile sites, along with the overwhelming evidence, increases the pressure on the “objective” defenders of the status quo.  It’s getting harder and harder to deny there’s a problem, and that the advantages moving ahead will go to those who address it most quickly.

So I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot more “anxious masculinity under threat” blog posts.

Something to look forward to!

jon

* In fact, most don’t agree. Michael presumably knows the data that’s been published in TechCrunch and elsewhere about the superior performance of women-run startup. And yet less than 10% of the successes are by women. Unless you’re sexist enough to believe that women don’t want to run companies or are for some reason less qualified, there’s no way to reconcile this a belief that Silicon Valley is a meritocracy — let alone that women have systemic advantages.

In early returns 70% of the audience sides with Marc that governments should do far more to protect privacy but it’s far from over. The debate continues until September 2 with expert insight from Joseph Turow of the Annenberg School and Jules Polonetsky of The Future of Privacy Forum, rebuttals, and final statements.  Good stuff!

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, with a summary and links post and a passionate argument for the educational possibilities of social networking in Why I’m voting “pro”. 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”.

So 31 months later, let’s try this again, shall we?

<potentially quote from my Facebook profile — asking permission>

And it’s not just women who are currently being ignored. There aren’t any students, or seniors, or anybody who lives outside of the DC and Philadelphia area and it seems like a pretty white bunch to me.  Don’t get me wrong, they’re all extremely qualified to talk about this issue. Deborah and I have worked with Marc, Jim, and Jules 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. 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.

Still, it’s not too late.  New technologies can counter existing biases as well as reinforce them.  For example The Economist could easily invite some additional guests, or prominently feature supporting statements ‘pro’ and ‘con’ on their sites. Just off the top of my head I have to believe that people like Canadian Privacy Commissioners Jennifer Stoddart and Ann Cavoukian, German Consumer Protection Minister Ilse Aigner, Fran Maier of TRUSTe, James Rucker of Color of Change, David Drummond of Google, any of the DREAM Activists, and of course danah boyd (who coincidentally enough just blogged about Regulating the Use of Social Media Data) could add a lot to the discussion, and I’m sure there are plenty of others as well. Or maybe they’ll have a followon “no older white guys allowed” debate and see if it comes out differently.

Wouldn’t want to rely on it, though. And in any case, The Economist’s site is still as difficult to use for a conversation as it was 31 months ago. So let’s use some other new technologies to have parallel discussions in a more friendly and diverse environment … like Twitter and Facebook!

Here’s how you can join in:

• on Facebook, you can either answer the Question, or join in on the discussion thread on the Economist’s page.  TODO: ask question, post on Economist’s page

• on Twitter, tweet your comments to what hashtag?

If you’re not on either of those sites, or you’ve got more to say than will fit in 140 characters, drop it in the comments here — or blog about it yourself, leave the link here, and somebody will tweet it.

All of the participants are on Twitter so with any luck they’ll join us as well.  Whether or not you’ve got Facebook or Twitter accounts, you can follow the discussions here and here.

TODO: include screen capture of dotRights tweet here and maybe one or two others

And while you’re at it, get involved in the discussion on The Economist’s site too.  And stay tuned for the rebuttals, closing arguments and final voting.

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 Why I’m voting “pro”

And props to the Innovate 100 team and pii2010 for getting a more diverse group of participants than we often see in events like this.  As well as good racial diversity, two of the speakers were women — quite a contrast to the all-male feel of TechStars, Y Combinator, or last spring’s NWEN First Look Forum.

Shameless plug: speaking of the First Look Forum, we’ve extended the application deadline for the fall event to August 23.  If you’re an early-stage startup, please check it out!  If you’re thinking of applying, there’s some tips here and here.

The pitch slam started with a one-minute “Quick Pitch” competition, with Secret123, Puzzazz, Open Mobile, aNEWSme, wishpot, and InternMatch competing for the last open spot in the finals.  I was impressed by how well most of the presenters conveyed what they were doing in just 60 seconds.  The crowd went wild after InternMatch’s dramatic reveal at the end of their minute: the person giving the presentation was actually an intern!  Gotta love that.   So it wasn’t at all surprising that they moved on to the finals.

And a lot of people I talked to thought InternMatch should have been the overall winners as well.  Nothing against Optify, but I really felt like they shouldn’t have been allowed into the competition: they’ve already raised $2.1 million from Madrona, where their CEO used to be a venture capitalist.*  Ah well.  Such is life.

InternMatch’s business is matching students with internships.  In his five-minute presentation their CEO Andrew Maguire made some great points about the strategic importance of interns and why the area’s so ripe for reinvention.  They’ve got a large pilot in Washington State that’s going well, and the very young founding team clearly gets the challenge from the interns’ perspective.  One big question they’ll face is what prevents Monster.com or another large company from getting into the space.  On the other hand that’s also an opportunity: if they can get out there and establish their brand and technology, they could be a very tempting acquisition target.  During the presentation, Cathy Brooks tweeted that Andrew is somebody to watch, and I certainly agree.

Tweetajob is another company with an impressive CEO facing a similar challenge/opportunity.  Carmen Hudson (a former recruiter at Amazon, Starbucks, and Microsoft) summed up how Twitter really changes the game for job searches both for companies and for job seekers — and how much people on Twitter dislike “job spam”.   She describes their technology as being uniquely able to get people information on the jobs that they’re interested in, and applying more broadly than just Twitter.  If so, they’ve got a chance to carve out a nice business, or perhaps be a key feature for a larger company.

So, a very good event. Sarterus has videos, and my tweetstream has some details if you scroll back.

pii2010 continues today and tomorrow; if you can’t be there in person, you can follow along on the #pii2010 hashtag.  Seattle Geek Week goes on through the weekend, and the hashtag is #seagw.  Stay tuned!

jon

* a good example of yet another way that it’s easier for guys to get funding then women.

• If you’ve launched an innovative business with growth potential….
• And you’re looking for expert coaching and some exposure to the investment community….
• And you have not yet presented your plan to an angel group membership or VC partnership…
  

…then NWEN’s First Look Forum could be the perfect opportunity for you!

Indeed!  Dog food, e-forks and other ideas in TechFlash, Software Vs. Medical Startups: Online Travel Is the Winner in XConomy , Why We’re Shouting “Thank You” from the Rooftops, and For the Love of the Craft on Qworky’s blog tell the story of April’s finals, where Mikal’s awesome 5-minute presentation got Qworky to the top five.  We also participated last fall, when we made it to the round of 20 and got some great feedback, calibration, and connections.  It’s a great event, and was really worth the time and energy we invested.

The next FLF is fast approaching, and the application deadline is August 18 has been extended to August 23.  Submitting by the early-bird deadline of August 2 gives an extra round of feedback and a bonus shmoozing opportunity at the “Early-bird reception”. If you’re potentially seeking for angel funding in the next six months or so,  it’s worth investing the time to put together a one-page executive summary.  The application form and the full schedule are on NWEN’s site.

Event chair Rochelle Whelan and NWEN executive director Rebecca Lovell asked me to be part of the volunteer organizing committee to represent the entrepeneurs’ perspective.  My pleasure!  And when I think back on my perspective back when Sally, Mikal, and I were first thinking about applying application, the word that springs to mind is “uncertain”: did it make sense for us to participate?   If we went for it, how to maximize the value we get from participating and our chances of doing well?  Presumably others are in the same boat.

So I’d like to pass on some excellent advice we got from our advisors and a learning from our own experience.  And if other past participants have suggestions, please drop them in the comments.

But first, a public service announcement.

Guys talking to guys about guys surveys some excellent recent discussions in the business press about the challenges women entrepeneurs face getting access to funding even though women-run businesses are more likely to be successful.and one consistent theme that emerges is that women often aren’t in the loop to find out about opportunities.*

So please, if you know women who have launched innovative businesses with growth potential, and could benefit from expert coaching or exposure to the venture community, let them know about the First Look Forum.

Thank you kindly.

And now, onto the tips in the comments.

jon

* To verify this myself, I dropped by the CRAVE Seattle buzz party last night at Wallingford Center, with sponsors including Trophy Cupcakes and Girly Girl Wines.  Quite a few of the women there are involved with companies where participating in FLF could be really valuable.  Sure enough, a lot of them had heard of the event.   Ah, if only all diversity research involved wine, shopping, and cupcakes!

Update, April 20: Rrevised version has been posted on Qworky’s blog, Better Software/Better World

We’re now only a week out—next Tuesday, April 20th will mark Equal Pay Day—the point in 2010 when the average woman’s wages finally catch up to her male counterpart’s salary from the prior year. It’s an opportunity to reflect on the movement for pay equity and the impact of unfair pay.

– Andrea Maruniak, National Women’s Law Center, on womanstake.org

Yeah really.  Women working full-time, year-round are paid only about 77 cents for every dollar earned by men; in 2008, this meant the average “wage gap” was $10,622.  For women of color, the numbers are even worse — African-American women earn 62 cents and Latinas earn 53 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men.

What would it mean if this wage gap didn’t exist — if, on the average, women were paid as much as men?

How real is the wage gap?

Conversations about this topic like the one Mikal kicked off on LinkedIn often fall into a familiar pattern.  Sometimes guys who aren’t familiar with the data mistakenly attribute the wage gap to “obvious” but incorrect reasons.   Yes, it’s a complex situation with multiple causes.  That said, Nancy M. Carter and Christine Silva’s recent Women in Management: Delusions of Progress from Harvard Business Review describes a reality that matches the experience of most women I know:

Even after adjusting for years of work experience, industry, and region, Catalyst found that men started their careers at higher levels than women. And that isn’t because women don’t aspire to the top—the finding holds when you include only women and men who say they’re aiming for senior executive positions. It’s not a matter of parenthood slowing women’s careers, either. Among women and men without children living at home, men still started at higher levels…. After starting out behind, women don’t catch up. Men move further up the career ladder—and they move faster.

What would it mean if the wage gap didn’t exist?

One way I think of it in terms of my female friends and colleagues.  How different would they and their families’ lives be if they were fairly compensated?  actionforeequity describes it far better than I can, discussing how the gap can mean the difference between a living wage and living in poverty, fewer obstacles to face between being trapped in an abusive relationship and getting out, being able to afford a college education, a reliable car to get her to and from work, a home of her own, medical insurance …

One of the things that’s changed since my #fairpay and Women Don’t Ask post from last year’s is that I now also look at this issue from the perspective of a software startup.  Jennifer Hunt’s research, summarized in Why do Women Leave?, suggests that the single biggest contributor to the exodus of women from technology fields is that they’re dissatisfied with pay and promotion opportunities — and with numbers like these, who can blame them? And while it’s  hard to know how much it contributes to the overall number, the investment patterns described in Restructure!’s White, male startup companies get money for being white and male further entrench these inequities. Without the wage gap, we’d have a much more diverse workforce, corporate cultures that were far more supportive to women — and a lot more women-led startups.

As xxxx said on the LinkedIn discussion,

“….”

Well said.

What do others think?

jon

I’ll be splitting this into two posts, which will appear on the Qworky blog

Thanks also to those who expressed interest … if you’d like to get involved, stay tuned — or get in touch via the contact information at the bottom of the post.

As a company we view diversity as a vital ingredient to sustained business success.  We value unique perspectives and traditionally under-represented viewpoints in the software design process. We welcome collaborators from every walk of life. We welcome people of any gender identity and expression, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, experience level, discipline, educational background, culture, and political opinion.

– Qworky’s draft diversity statement

In early January, we’re going to be kicking off an open-source project to build a key component of the Qworky Meetings V1.0 product.  How to attract a diverse team?  Kirrily Robert’s outstanding Standing out in a crowd OSCON keynote and earlier Dispatches from the Revolution look at two highly-diverse open-source projects, and provide some excellent suggestions for this situation.  For example, Dreamwidth started out by posting a clear diversity statement.  Hey, we should do that!

And when Organization for Transformative Works’ Archive Of Our Own started up they resisted the trap of focusing primarily on experienced programmers.  Instead they invited everybody who was interested and had a passion for getting involved, chose a language that was accessible to non-programmers, and put the effort into organizing and documenting the project well enough that newcomers could easily see what was going on and where they could help.  Hey, we should do that too!   So we spent some time at this Saturday’s engineering meeting discussing what else we could do to make things easily accessible, and how we’ll reach out.

A common theme in these examples, and one that Selena Marie Deckelmann also touches on in What works? Getting more women involved in open source, is to make sure that people who might be interested in the project know they’re invited.  One of the great things about working on software for meetings is that it’s a topic almost everybody relates to — these days, even high school and college students have to deal with action items.  So do small businesspeople, moms, teachers, activists, consultants, administrative assistants, system administrators, customer support experts, designers, programmers, testers, etc. etc. etc. … So please, consider yourselves invited!

It’s a great chance to get involved at the early stages of an open-source project with world-class software engineering that’s truly committed to diversity.*  And if we can make meetings better, we’ll make all of our lives easier and earn the world’s gratitude.  Talk about upside!

If you’d like to get involved, please join us at our first planning meeting early next year — check back here for details.  If you’re so eager (or so bored over the holidays) that you can’t wait until then, please get in touch with us.  We’re @qworky on Twitter and I’m jon@qworky.net — or just leave a note here in the comments.

If you know anybody else who might be interested, please pass the word.   And if you have any suggestions for how we should be reaching out, please let us know!

jon

* see my professional bio for details

The most recent skirmish on the Patriot Act reauthorization battle ended badly for civil liberties.   Despite passionate speeches all around in the Senate Judiciary Committee public hearings and classified briefings, in the end, only Senators Feingold, Durbin, and Specter stood up for the Constitution. As Marcy Wheeler says, we got rolled.

At the same time, though, the social network activism I discussed in Can Skittles fix the Patriot Act? and on the Get FISA Right blog highlights the opportunity to broaden and recharge the civil liberties community.

Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Care2, OFA and other social network sites:

• provide a way to engage with Millennials and other diverse groups of people who care a lot about the Patriot Act — but are not currently involved with civil liberties activism.
• make it easy for people to let their politicians know their feelings — and recruit their friends in the process.
• allow civil liberties organizations to get beyond the media blackout and provide accurate information to everybody.
• complement in-person local campaigns like People’s Campaign for the Constitution’s local ordinances and good ol’ fashioned letters-to-the-editor

It’s a powerful narrative.  Social network sites epitomize the wave of the future, Obama’s strength in 2008, and youth.  They’re overwhelmingly in favor of civil liberties.  And civil liberties supporters are getting organized there.  As we continue to make progress, every political consultant and politician thinking about a primary or general election challenge in 2010 or 2012 will be paying attention.

Social network activism for civil liberties has made great progress so far.  Some simple steps from organizations and bloggers can take things to the next level.  Before getting to the suggestions, though, I’d like to discuss the diversity aspects in a little more detail.

A #diversitywin

The Get FISA Right poll matches well with the trends described in Jessica Vascalero’s Wall Street Journal article The End of the Email Era. Social networks are now as important a communication mechanism as email. Millennials in particular are very hard to involve via email. And the snapshot of the retweeting stream at the end of this post is a great illustration of the point Tracy Viselli and I have been hammering away on all year (1, 2, 3): Twitter is a place to engage with women, people of color, migrant rights groups, and others who are marginalized from other forms of activism. I mean really, what activism campaign wouldn’t want to have people like @Hegemommy, @ColinCurtisKS, @desidyke, @dreamact, @votolatino, @ColinCurtisKS, @jjpolitics, and @baratunde advocating our cause to their friends and communities? Talk about a #diversitywin! They’ve all got important battles of their own, of course; but they spend so much of their time on social network sites that it’s very easy for them to tweet or share something and help out when they have a few seconds.

Poll from Get FISA Right’s blog, October 2

And yet:

• Civil liberties organizations’ action alerts today invariably push people towards email- and phone-based feedback to legislators — ignoring social networks.
• The “big blogs” of the “progressive blogosphere”, even when covering issues sympathetically, virtually never include discussions of social network activism**
• Activism toolkits underplay, or even leave out, social network approaches

In some ways, this isn’t surprising.  There are huge generational differences in attitudes towards social network sites — and most progressive bloggers and professional civil libertarians are over 30.  And from a privacy perspective, Facebook and other sites are creepy panoptic environments that institutionalize tracking and behavioral targeting.  So it’s not a matter of bad intent.

Still, the message to Millennials and others who hang out on social networks is clear: “we don’t care enough about your involvement to reach out to you on your terms.”

The #1 recommendation from the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy “birds of a feather” session on New Strategies for Fighting FISA and the Patriot Act was to build a broad-based coalition — including students and migrant rights groups amongst others.   And not to sound like a broken record or anything, but: social network sites provide a unique opportunity to engage with diverse audiences.

Taking it to the next level

Discussions of the Patriot Act on Twitter, via Twazzup

Organizations like ACLU,  EFF, and the Cato Institute are becoming increasingly effective at using social network sites.  Combined with Get FISA Right and our allies, we have solid presences on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Organizing for America, Care2, Change.org, and in the progressive blogosphere.

The challenge now is to leverage this strength and turn it to action.  Here are a few suggestions to kick off the discussion.

• for civil liberties organizations, including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, information in action alerts could broaden reach significantly.  Providing social network-specific ways of contacting politicians (act.ly, a Facebook app, etc.) would similarly get a lot more people involved.
• progressive and libertarian bloggers and new media should include links to activism information when they cover the story.
• Twitter is a particularly attractive place for civil liberties activism right now.  Civil liberties organizations and bloggers should get in the habit of using the #patriotact hashtag; retweeting important information and action alerts;taking advantage of technologies like Twazzup, act.ly, and  2Gov; and engaging with the people who show interest.
• as Chip Pitts, and Sarah Burris pointed out in comments on an earlier draft of this essay, social network activism is an ideal complement for and local in-person organizing.  Somebody needs to take the lead on putting this all together — and then replicating it in all 50 states.
• Get FISA Right’s online and phone organizing meetings involving social network activists, bloggers, and non-partisan organizations have led to sharing value information and creating and deepening connections.  More of this, please!

The Patriot Act battle’s far from over. Representatives Conyers, Nadler, and Scott have introduced some much stronger Patriot Act reform legislation in the House, and there’s still the floor debate the Senate.   If you look at the votes from 2008 and the seats that have changed hands since then, we have a chance to win this one if we get organized.

And if we get really organized, well, there are at least a handful of seats where the civil liberties vote could make the difference in a primary or general election: Harman, Specter, Reid, Feinstein, Leiberman ….   So our leverage will only increase.

Social network activism has proved very successful for civil liberties (Strange Bedfellows, Get FISA Right) and other causes (Jena, Join the Impact, the DREAM Act, Obama).

Now’s the time to take things to the next level.

jon

A #diversitywin, as we say on Twitter

]]> http://www.talesfromthe.net/jon/?feed=rss2&p=1113 2 http://www.talesfromthe.net/jon/?p=966 http://www.talesfromthe.net/jon/?p=966#comments Thu, 20 Aug 2009 20:26:52 +0000 jon http://www.talesfromthe.net/jon/?p=966 Draft!  Work in progress!  Feedback, please …

My frustration at the anti-computer attitude goes beyond the generational gap of an academic conference. I’ve found that this same attitude tends to be present in many workplace environments. Blackberries and laptops are often frowned upon as distraction devices. As a result, few of my colleagues are in the habit of creating backchannels in business meetings. This drives me absolutely bonkers, especially when we’re talking about conference calls. I desperately, desperately want my colleagues to be on IM or IRC or some channel of real-time conversation during meetings.

– danah boyd, in I want my cyborg life

danah’s excellent essay, and another by Paul Graham that I’ll discuss below, provide a great chance to expand on the strategic importance of diversity that I started discussing in Qworky: the adventure begins and Guys talking to guys who talk about guys.

As danah describes so well, when people who are used to a multi-tasking collaborative cognitive style are forcibly cut off from information and social networks, it can feel like being lobotomized.  On the other hand, some people prefer to focus on a single task may find the presence of a multi-tasker distracting. An added complication is that everybody’s skills deteriorate to some extent when multi-tasking.  On the other hand, some people are notably better at it than others, and especially when applied judiciously it can be a big help.  Are there ways to better accommodate both styles?

There was a great example of this in our team meeting last night.  One of the key participants came down with a virus, and so wound up having to call in — but the meeting was being held in a room without a decent speakerphone.*  Yikes!  Fortunately, there was a good multi-tasker in the room (me), and so by providing a running commentary in a chat room and relaying her input to everybody else, we were able to bridge the gap to a large extent.  The chat log also proved useful when somebody who had been stuck in traffic showed up late: she was quickly able to see what she had missed.  As a result, the meeting as a whole was remarkably productive.

Imagine meeting software that’s designed from the beginning with multiple use models in mind: highly-connected multitasking discussions, “laptops off, please, we’re going to concentrate here”, and the whole range of possibilities in between.  There are a lot of situations where that’d lead to much more effective and efficient meetings.   For people and organizations that have a lot of meetings, the return on investment for improvement here could be very significant.

“Makers”, “managers” — and everybody else

Paul Graham’s Maker’s schedule vs. manager’s schedule focuses on different attitudes towards time.   Paul describes a manager’s schedule as “embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals.”  Programmers and other “makers”, by contrast, prefer their best work with long unscheduled blocks of time; Paul does a great job of discussing how the prospect of a meeting in the afternoon affects his productivity and his emotional state throughout the day.  As Steven Dubner’s Read this if you hate meetings on the Freakonomics blog and the various commenters there illustrate, it’s a distinction that resonates with a lot of people.

While there are a handful of companies like 37 Signals and Fog City Software that come at things from the maker perspective, it seems to me that most work-related software reflects a managers’ use model.  Even more interesting, though, is who’s not included in Paul’s taxonomy.   As Peter Gibbons says in the Freakonomics comments:

Sheesh! Managers…makers… I guess that means we peons like Peter Gibbons in the movie “Office Space”, (executive or admin assistants, secretaries, etc.) are the real nobodies. Managers have a great deal of autonomy determining what they do and when they do it; so-called ‘makers’ only slightly less so. What about us poor schmucks, uh, assistants?

Yeah, really.  A recent study by Doodle reported that managers and administrative staff prefer different tools for scheduling meetings, and that “managers typically need to rearrange more meetings than their assistants, with 69% of managers needing to reschedule get-togethers compared with less than half (46%) of admin pros.”  So paying attention to these kinds of differences could have huge impact.   Wouldn’t you like it if a lot fewer meetings were recheduled multiple times?

And more generally, imagine products that are designed to take into account the needs of managers, makers, and administrative professional — and the interactions between them — instead of assuming that everybody should operate a single way.  For example, suppose we could make it easier for admins to allow makers with key information to participate in meetings without having to interrupt their unblocked time.  It’d be a big win all around: not only would it increase everybody’s productivity, meetings wouldn’t be filled with (justifiably) surly makers, and so they’d be much more pleasurable experiences.

An opportunity

If you combine these two dimensions of diversity with Ronna Lichtenberg’s pink and blue communication styles, there are a dozen different types: pink multi-tasking managers, blue single-tasking admins, and so on.   So one huge potential opportunity is to identify underserved audiences.  For example, offerings that work well for pink manager styles may have some major advantages to a significant market segment — advantages that’ll be very difficult for existing products to respond to, because the biases are likely to be baked into their conceptual model and implementation.   And as I hoped the examples above convey, there can be also opportunities from bridging the gap between styles.

From Qworky’s perspective, we’d ideally like to have all these different dimensions of diversity reflected in our personas — and tracked as part of the feedback we get.**  Even if this proves too ambitious for us right out of the box, we’ll want to find ways of keeping these aspects in mind as we define our products and get feedback on them.

Even before all this happens, though, what I’m noticing is that just by being aware of these differences we’re starting to develop some very innovative approaches to meeting design and notetaking.   Our own early results are extremely promising, and while we’re clearly far from representative of our target audience a lot of the prinicples seem surprisingly general.  Of course there are still all kinds of open questions; but judging from the effect on our own productivity and team dynamics, it seems like we may well be on to something.

And from a strategy perspective, if we are, whoa baby.  People who have built companies and designed software without taking these considerations into account are likely to have a very hard time adapting: others’ company culture, user interaction patterns, staffing, community, and revenue streams are all likely to have biases that are so deeply ingrained that they’ll have a hard time evolving quickly to greater diversity.  So a combination of a design that respects diversity and a highly-diverse company and community is potentially an unusual and remarkably defensible sustainable competitive advantage.

Sounds like an opportunity to me!

jon

* note to self: buy decent speakerphone

** as well as the traditional dimensions of diversity: gender, age, race, …

We received 189 valid proposals for talks at Expo Showcase.  A few people, men and women, submitted two proposals, but the vast majority submitted just one.  Of these 189, only 41 (or 22% of the total) were from women, with 147 proposals submitted by men.  I have no reason in particular to offer for this. Perhaps women would like to comment on this blog about why a two month open call for proposals for anyone with a good idea for a five minute talk about Government 2.0 was dominated by 78% men.

– Mark Drapeau’s Government 2.0 Expo: Women by the Numbers

The women in technology community has been doing a great job of highlighting lack of diversity in conference speakers, using mechanisms like the #diversityfail Twitter hashtag and act.ly.   Mark’s post provides some interesting data on how an O’Reilly conference he’s co-chairing wound up with more than two-thirds of the presenters being male.  While I’m not actually a woman, I’d nonetheless like to take him up on his invitation for discussion about how the submission process became so male-dominated.

Some context here: I’m writing this from the perspective of somebody who’s been a program committee member of the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference for the last couple years, and will be co-charing in 2010.  CFP’s gender ratios have similary hovered around 2-1, and other dimensions of diversity have been equally problematic.  There’s no denying that it’s a challenge to get diverse speakers for conferences in male-dominated fields, and it’s almost never a matter of bad intent.   As Ellen Spertus said almost 20 years ago, “women’s underrepresentation is not primarily due to direct discrimination but to subconscious behavior that tends to perpetuate the status quo.”

In the process of thinking through how to improve things for CFP 2010, I’ve talked a lot with gender equity and other diversity experts — and with other conference organizers as well.   Based on those discussions, and what I was able to discover about the Government 2.0 Expo with some quick web searching, here are some questions and observations that may help explain the gender skew that Mark has documented … and point to future opportunities for improvement.

• Did the conference establish and publicize explicit diversity goals?
• How many diversity experts (gender equity and other dimensions) did the conference recruit for the program committee, and how much power did they have?
• Did conference materials and communications channels feature women as much as or more then men in the videos, phtoso, and quotes on conference materials? [The overview page currently has two videos by guys, and links off to a page where five of the six videos are by guys; the names mentioned gov2events twitter profile are overwhelmingly male.]
• Were the male and female co-chairs perceived as equals, and did they have equally big roles in outreach and shaping the program?  [On the program committee page, there are two long paragraphs with many links describing Mark's credentials; co-chair Laurel Ruma is described in one short paragraph with no links.]
• Only 38% of the program committee are women.  Why wasn’t their gender equity here?  And given this bias, what did the connference organizers do in their outreach to counter the potential impression that this was a male-dominated event?
• How did the conference reach out to the “women in technology and politics” network, Shes Geeky, Women Who Tech, the womanist and feminist blogospheres, and organizations like Women in Technology and the Anita Borg Institute?
• Did the conference organizers investigate the possibility that the unfamiliar five-minute rapid presentation format might be a barrier to entry? What coaching or mentoring did they offer? [In conference general manager Jennifer Pahlka's response on the act.ly petition about increasing representation of women at another O'Reilly conference , she said she's been meaning to start up an "Women's Ignite" series, which implies to me that there's a perceived need here ...]
• As the program committee noticed early on that the proposals were skewing male, what did they do to adapt? For example, did they discuss inviting specific women who hadn’t submitted proposals in order to get a better balance?

Mark ended his post with the comment that “no one likes being publicly blindsided with baseless accusations,” and I certainly hope these questions don’t come across that way.  I certainly don’t mean to be accusatory, and I hope it’s clear that I’m not attributing bad intent or blaming anybody.  With over a month before the Expo and the related Gov 2.0 Summit (whose initial speaker list is 90% male), there’s still time to adapt and improve gender equity and other aspects of diversity.  A better understanding on all sides of the dynamics that have led to the current situation is crucial for making progress.

And I also don’t mean to single out the Government 2.0 Expo.  While a 2-1 ratio is a long ways away from gender equity, it’s much better than a lot of other technology conferences out there.  In part 2 of the series, I’ll take Tim and Jennifer up on their requests for suggestions on  improving gender equity at the Web 2.0 summit.*

jon

PS: While I’ve followed the lead of the discussion so far by focusing on gender, this isn’t the only dimension of diversity to consider.  How many blacks and Latin@s speak at the Gov 2.0 Expo and Summit or similar events?  How many people with disabilities?   People under 25, or over 70?  So while the increasingly-well-organized women in technology are taking the lead here, it’s important to view it as a more general challenge.  Hopefully the conference organizers will take this feedback and generalize it to other dimensions as well.

* Update, September 4: I did a very rough draft of this, but never actually published it.

Welcome to Qworky!

Pardon our construction, we’re busy designing software to revolutionize the way people work together.

Software doesn’t have to suck. Instead, it should fit in smoothly with your work life — and make you more efficient so that you can get your weekends back. By listening to you and focusing on your needs as an end user, and working closely with a diverse community throughout the design process, we’ll build products that work with how people get their jobs done today.

– the Qworky web site

The startup I’ve been hinting at for the last couple months finally has a name. w00t! We’re at a very early stage: just starting the research phase for Qworky Meetings, the codename for our first product. In parallel, we’re working on creating our community, deciding on our technology base, putting together a business plan, and developing our strategies.

Diversity is a key strategy for us because we see it as vital to building better software — and marketing it, too. Guys talking to guys who talk about guys and my other posts discuss the evidence that there are some huge opportunities being overlooked.  One example: Ronna Lichtenberg’s Be fluent in both pink and blue emphasizes that “Half of your business world may have a different relationship style than you do.” Because pink and blue are gender-linked styles (most guys tend to be more blue than pink) and blue styles are particularly normalized among software engineers, most software winds up optimized for a blue style. If we can develop products that support different styles effectively, they’ll be a lot more usable for many people and market segments whose needs aren’t being met well by today’s software. That’s a huge strategic advantage.

Easy to say, of course. To succeed, we’ll need to get initial input and ongoing feedback from a community that’s diverse in multiple dimensions, have a diverse team defining and implementing the product, and work with diverse groups of partners and advisors. There are likely to be a lot of engineering and support challenges as well: how to provide the wide variety of experiences optimized for different styles without creating an unmanageable burden? So I’m not saying we’ve got it solved. But as Shireen Mitchell says in Marcia G. Yerman’s Women Who Tech, it’s a lot easier when you think about this stuff from the beginning.

And speaking of things we’re thinking of from the beginning … many thanks to Twazzup for providing a customized Twitter search experience for Qworky! If you haven’t used Twazzup before, check out their Iran page, which I find a great way to follow breaking news, first-person reports, and activism. We think they’ll be just as useful for discussions about Qworky, and especially since Twitter is likely to be a key strategy for us (1, 2), we’re delighted to start out by making it easy to follow tweets about meetings and diversity as well as what we’re up to at Qworky.

In Change the Way You See Innovation, my former colleagues Kathy Cramer, Hank Wasiak, Eve Enslow, and Michael Foster analogize the innovation process to Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey”.  Coincidentally enough, a couple of days ago a Facebook friend changed her status to a quote from Campbell: “It’s amusing the way in which the landscape and conditions of the environment match the readiness of the hero. The adventure that he is ready for is the one that he gets.”

Well, I’m ready — and based on all the help and encouragement we’ve gotten so far, a lot of others are ready too. Everybody we talk to sees the opportunity as huge, and thinks we’re attacking it in a promising way. The people we’ve gotten early feedback from — on the name, on the logo, on our thinking — has been refreshingly diverse.  Yeah, there’s a heck of a lot of open questions and ambiguity … that’s natural for this point in time.

So it should be an exciting adventure.  Please join us!

jon

Scott Page’s book The Difference highlights the importance of diversity in situations like this. The way I think of it is that a non-diverse crowd will fail to explore a lot of the possibilities.  Strategically the best opportunties are likely to be in the areas that the are getting marginalized today.  So whenever I see a #diversityfail related to the “web 2.0″ and mobile technology/business world, my ears perk up and I start paying attention.

Alex Iskold’s Free: It Works, It Cries, It Bites on ReadWriteWeb is a roundup of reactions to Chris Anderson’s new book FREE — as well as his own opinion that free can be dangerous. Alex does a nice job summarizing opinions from Malcolm, Seth, Mike, Fred, Mark, and Brad … hey, wait a second, I’m noticing a pattern here …

Alex replied to me on Twitter, asking for links to posts by women and saying he’d be happy to add them. Janet Maslin’s Absolutely, Positively Free … if You Think You Can Afford It from the New York Times was near the top of Google’s main page so I sent him the link — and also suggested that he try reaching out to women. After thanking me, he told me that he thought it was better not to reach out.

Responses like this don’t even surprise me at this point. Shireen Mitchell (aka @digitalsista) of Social Media Women of Color describes this as a “your problem not ours” attitude: we can’t find them, so it’s not our fault. Intelligent women with plenty to say on this subject are out there, and easy to find if you make the effort.  If you don’t bother, who else is responsible?

A big problem with not reaching out is that it tends to confirm your own blind spots. For example, in environments where you’re listening primarily to guys, you’re a lot less likely to hear women’s perspectives. Virtually all the commenters on Alex’ ReadWriteWeb post are male; so is just about everybody who replies to or retweets him on Twitter.  And a lot of the guys he’s talking with also seem to be the kind of guys who don’t talk a lot with or about women — look at Chris Anderson’s blog and Twitter feed, for example.*  The net effect is what network theorists describe as a clique of male nodes with preferential attachment to other male nodes.

Guys talking to guys who talk about guys.

It’s not like this is new behavior. Shelley Powers described it vividly four years ago in Guys don’t link. Plenty of others have documented it too, including me (1, 2).   Same old same old.  Oh well. However …

From a startup pespective, great products together with a business model that takes advantage of a collective blindspot creates the potential for a unexpectedly huge opportunity that everybody else is overlooking.

Who knows for sure, but it’s distinctly possible that there are a lot of promising variations of “free”-related business models that all the guys talking to each other on the subject haven’t aren’t explore.   And there are may also be some aspects of what makes a product great that the guys aren’t paying enough attention to either.  With the right people and company culture, there could be some really interesting opportunities here.

So stay tuned for my upcoming post: #diversitywin: pithy title here.

jon

PS: If you want to check out Chris Anderson’s FREE, he’s providing it in a time-limited free version in a variety of formats: a Scribd ebook, Audible audiobooks, and GoogleBooks.  If any women — or anybody else whose perspectives aren’t getting heard in the discussions of “free” business models — have any insights, please feel free to share!

* or Chris’ book Free, for that matter, where almost every name mentioned is male.

• building a broad, diverse coalition
• focusing on cost, dignity, and human rights issues as well as privacy and the constitution
• using anti-corporate activism against the companies supplying equipment and profiting from surveillance
• involving the technical community and domain experts

and a lot more. We also discussed some of the tactical issues about the upcoming PATRIOT Act vote: the need for an accurate vote count; a pressure campaign on key Congresspeople like Jane Harman, Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, and Harry Reid; and the importance of powerful visual images.

Check it out!

jon

7-8PM Pacific/10-11PM Eastern
Draft agenda and discussion here
Please join us!

Twitter is an opportunity to engage with communities currently marginalized by the “progressive blogosphere”

– Tracy Viselli and Jon Pincus, The #p2 Hashtag and Strategies for Progressives on Twitter on The Exception

#p2 is a resource for progressives who prioritize diversity and empowerment

– #p2’s wiki and Twitter profile

Because #p2 (aka “progressives 2.0″) is the closest thing to a broad communication mechanism for progressives on Twitter so far, I’m not sure how many people realize that the primary focus is on diversity. So here’s some background reading about #p2 for Thursday’s tweeting  on how progressives can organize more effectively on Twitter.

Let’s start with a question that I think doesn’t get asked enough.

Do progressives care about diversity?

A few weeks ago, a large corporation with an unhealthy amount of market dominance changed its online search so that information for LGBTQs, feminists, people with disabilities, and other marginalized people no longer appeared. You’d think that progressives would be all over it. Yeah, everybody’s busy … but most of the action for #amazonfail was on Twitter and blogs, so it took almost no time to help. How many progressives who weren’t members of the affected communities got involved, or even paid attention?

This follows on the heels of progressives’ obliviousness to Join the Impact. Last November, as JTI got over 150,000 people in the streets in ten days for marriage equality (another cause progressives support), there was virtually no coverage in the “progressive blogosphere”. Since then, I’ve seen very little discussion — at the Politics Online conference, for example, progressives and conservatives almost completely ignored it.

Or consider this tweet from Sunday’s #fem2 Twittercast laying the groundwork for Equal Pay Day:

Yeah really. And sure enough on Tuesday, while the #fairpay hashtag was hopping, only 15 or so of guys helped out.** For that matter, well-known progressives were almost completely absent. The same dynamic occurred in the “progressive blogosphere”, where the big blogs studiously ignored it.

Notice a pattern here?

The same dynamics occur in a lot of other dimensions of oppression: class, race, age, geography, language … the list goes on. How often do most progressives think about — let alone do anything about — accessibility or bilingual issues? Access to knowledge and technology?

A lot of progressives say they care about diversity … but don’t act like they mean it.

Why it matters

This is a huge problem for progressives for several reasons. Most obviously, these are all causes that fit in squarely with progressive values. By failing to act as good allies, progressives weaken their cause and expose their intellectual inconsistency And if progressives don’t actively helping feminists, people of color, people without computers (etc.) why should they help progressives on other priorities?

And there’s so much learning to be done. On Twitter, for example, conservatives have out-organized progressives … which makes it all the more critical to apply techniques like #fem2’s effective conferences and Twittercasts, #dayofsilence’s and #rword’s outreach-to-Twitterati, or #amazonfail’s attracting coverage and building community. Elsewhere, Join the Impact has similarly set the bar for wiki-based activism; Get FISA Right on my.barackobama.com; the DREAM Activists for a networked blogging campaign. Alas, most progressives don’t bother to pay attention — which makes learning very difficult.

There are even bigger opportunities. In The Difference, Scott Page shows the advantages of cognitive diversity. On Twitter, in Cognitive evolution and revolution: #polc09 and a #diversityfail, I illustrated how Twitter hashtags can enable effective collaboration by marginalized groups.***  In a political environment where the vast majority of youth, blacks, Latinos and Latinas, LGBTQs, migrant rights activists, and feminists oppose conservative policies, this potentially creates a huge advantage for progressives …

If they prioritize diversity.

Which we have on #p2, And the results are great. The quality of conversation is high (especially if you filter out cross-posts to #tcot****) and the range of topics and people is very diverse. We’ve spawned technology like Chris Meserole’s TweetLeft. Our Ask the President activism was very successful. People consistently tell me that our Twitter overview page is useful — including its mention of Accessible Twitter. We appear to have the only list of progressive hashtags out there. And so on. Scott Page is right: diverse groups outperform.

Of course #p2 is only one piece of the puzzle on Twitter, and Twitter’s only one part of the online world. Still, there’s a lot to build on here.

Hopefully #p2 can serve as a catalyst and proof point to get more of the progressive community to start acting like diversity matters. Or even better, prioritize it.

jon

* Twitter-based meeting … like a Twitter chat, but with an agenda and action items

** kudos to @jespi55 @joegerstandt @davidhodgson @rootwork @adrielhampton @matttbastard @adamsargant @KansasJackass @TheFakeJoeBiden @GottaBook @Stardragonca @SFCityAttorney @_kbm and @BrettBrownell

*** Julie Germany’s Avoiding the old white man syndrome followup has some broader discussion of this dynamic as it relates to Social Media Women of Color and Women Who Tech

**** a lot of which are trolling, by progressives as well as conservatives

According to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2007 the ratio of women’s and men’s median annual earnings reached almost 78 cents on the dollar for full-time year-round workers, up from just under 77 cents in 2006. This is the narrowest the wage gap has ever been, but it’s only an additional one cent on the dollar. One cent is chump change. It isn’t real change.

– from AAUW’s Equal Pay Day, April 28

African-American women earn 62¢ and Latinas earn 53¢ for every dollar earned by white, non-Hispanic men. #fairpay #fem2 #p2

– @NWLC on Twitter

One of President Obama’s first actions in late January was signing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law.  That’s only a first step, though; the next battle in the fight against wage discrimination is the Paycheck Fairness Act.  The PFA updates the 45-year-old Equal Pay Act in many important ways, and passed the House with strong bipartisan support, and is currently before the Senate as S.182.

The AAUW’s site has a bunch of ways you can help: call your Senators, wear red,* blog about it, share on Facebook and join their group and cause, and tweet about it using the #fairpay hashtag.  It’s all important; do as much as you can.  There are a couple of things I’d specifically like to highlight.

Let’s start with Twitter, where this is another great opportunity for hashtag-based diversity activism.  Activity via #fairpay accomplishes several things.  Most obviously, it raises awareness: whenever you tweet, all your followers are reminded of the wage gap.  If some of the Twitterati start retweeting, or there’s enough activity that #fairpay winds up in the top 10 “trending” hashtags, a lot more people will see it.  So tweet away!  If you’re not sure what to say, the National Women’s Law Center has some tweeting points you can use as inspiration.

Even more importantly, people interested in gender equity can find each other via #fairpay, make connections, exchange information, and start working together on this and future projects.  Equal Pay Day has already benefited from a similar dynamic via the #fem2 hashtag:  the Sunday night Twittercast helped get people up to speed on the issue, resources, and talking points — and generated ideas for more effective activism.**

However there are plenty of people interested in fair pay for women who don’t identify as feminists, or don’t know about #fem2.  The issue-oriented and inclusive nature of #fairplay is a valuable complement to hashtags like #fem2, #woc, #sgp, and #p2.

Tweeting doesn’t substitute for other ways of getting involved … but that’s okay: it takes very little time (a lot less than a blog post, for example) and it’s something anybody can do.  So what are you waiting for?

Looking beyond Equal Pay Day, if you haven’t already read Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever’s Women don’t ask,  Ask for it, or similar books about the effect of gender differences in negotiating styles, you should.  Even more importantly, make sure that women you know are aware of the underlying dynamic: in general, men are more likely than women to try to negotiate a higher salary.  Of course, this is far from the only factor; the structural discrimination issues addressed by the Lilly Ledbetter and Paycheck Fairness acts are critically important as well.  And especially in the current tough economic climate, negotiation options are limited.

Still, this kind of empowering information can make a big difference.  Back when I was at Microsoft, the stated policy for new college hires was that the company wouldn’t negotiate salary and stock.  However, what nobody told the new hires was that if they pushed back there was often some flexibility in relocation packages … and if there was an offer from a competitive company like Google or Amazon, gee, it sometimes turned out that salary was negotiable after all.

If women don’t negotiate this as aggressively as men, they’re at a disadvantage from the get-go — and differences in initial salaries tend to be reflected in career earning potential.  So I made it a point to recommend Women don’t ask to every female intern I met.  Wouldn’t it be great if everybody at Microsoft and other companies did the same, and so did professors and mentors?

Again, this isn’t a substitute for other things you can do … but it’s easy enough, takes virtually no time, and can really help.

So please, get involved — on Twitter and elsewhere, today and in the future — and let’s help create some real change.

jon

* which is why my blog’s colors are temporarily red instead of their usual blue or pink

** In fact the  tweeting points came about because I mentioned that this approach had been useful for other campaigns.

Image: The People I Follow On Twitter (June 18, 2007), CC Chapman
licensed under Creative Commons

Opening slide from early draft of Hashtags at #polc09

Politics Online (1, 2) was a great conference, at least from my perspective.  Starting with the opening session by Secretaries of State Debra Bowen and Jennifer Brunner, every session I went to had great content.   It was a wonderful opportunity to meet friends and colleagues in-person, many for the first time,* and to be on a panel with people like Judith Donath and Clive Thompson.   And of course was also a good chance to continue the Twitter *is* a strategy debate and explore progressives’ bizarre resistance to embrace social network activism; more on that soon.

First, though, I’d like to follow up on the experiment in cognitive evolution and revolution I kicked off in the opening panel.

On hashtags and diversity

Jill Miller Zimon’s live blog is an excellent summary of the opening panel.  The topic was how the technologies we use shape our thinking — and what impact this has for political organizing online.  All the panelists are doing interesting work here and had interesting things to say, and so I hope they’ll accept my apologies for not doing them justice … and that they’ll take the opportunity to blog about the session!

With only a few minutes to speak, I decided to talk about Twitter hashtags … and to invite attendees to experiment with evolving their consciousness in a revolutionary way.  My presentation’s available on the #p2 wiki, along with a chunk of references.

In retrospect, I probably should have been more explicit about what this had to do with cognitive evolution.  Like wikis and my.barackobama.com, Twitter hashtags are hard to wrap your head around.  They’re simultaneously a mechanism for collaboration, a communication channel, name for a campaign, word in an emerging language, tribe (in the Seth Godin sense of the word), and a lot more.   To fully take advantage of their potential, you need to evolve your thinking; and the more deeply you get into them, the more your thinking evolves.  So it was a great opportunity to give people first-hand experience with cognitive evolution as applied to politics online via the #polc09 hashtag.

More specifically, I chose to focus on diversity.  As anybody who’s ever been at a conference where the speakers are overwhelmingly white, mostly male, and dominated by technologists knows, it’s very difficult to have discussions of this issue.  While there were some great women speaking at Politics Online, there were also plenty of sessions like  “six guys talking about how email is the future” , “four guys talking about advocacy 3D“, and “four other guys talking about fishing for users.”  Evolving thinking and using technology to give more voice to perspectives typically marginalized in these discussions would truly be revolutionary.

In Strategies for progressives on Twitter, Tracy Viselli and I proposed using the #p2 hashtag as a way of engaging with communities that have been marginalized by the progressive blogosphere, and early results have been very encouraging.  This session seemed like a great opportunity to continue the experimentation with a different hashtag.

#diversityfail

The next fifty minutes of the session were filled classic examples of marginalization.  Like @JillMZ pointed out on Twitter, people largely vanished from the discussion partway through as the overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male panel shifted to technology triumphalism … and the usual privileged and techie-elitist perspectives emerged:

• APIs and access to data change everything!
• The barriers to writing your own application are so low anybody can do it!
• It doesn’t matter if technologists ignore issues like class and ableism because if there are underserved niches somebody will fill them!

etc. etc.

Y’know, I’ve seen it enough times that I shouldn’t be shocked … but as always I was.  In response to the “somebody will fill the niches” I asked for a show of hands: how many people in the audience emphasized access for people without computers, non-native English speakers, people with disabilities?

Each time only a few hands went up.*

At this point the data-driven guys I was debating with all said “Wow, Jon, you’re right, thanks for calling it to our attention!  This is something I personally need to be paying more attention to … and I will!”

Just kidding.

The actual response was the hoary chestnut: “well, as long as there’s one application that addresses these issues, that’s enough.”  Because, you know, having a broad array of tools to choose from the way all of the panelists do isn’t an advantage that should be shared with others.  Or something like that.  Sigh.

So while there were plenty of interesting things being said, the panel discussion was a classic #diversityfail.

Meanwhile, on #polc09 …

At the same time, on the Twitter backchannel, there was a very different conversation happening involving much more diverse perspectives.

Here are some excerpts:

Hmm.

It sure looks to me that by evolving our thinking and focusing on a Twitter hashtag, we were able to give more voice to perspectives being marginalized in the discussion in the room.  And in my closing statement, I wove together @jillmz and @digitalsista’s points from Twitter as well as my own observations — a great example of how hashtags can indeed enable collaboration that countered the matrix of oppressions … just like I said in my opening slide!

So no doubt at this point the data-driven guys I’ve been debating with will all say “Wow, Jon, you’re right, thanks for calling it to our attention!  Use of Twitter hashtags can counter these kinds of dynamics, just as you and Tracy suggested!  And I guess that means we should try to understand your view that Twitter is a strategy rather than mocking it!”

A guy can dream, can’t he?

But wait, there’s more

And this was just the opening panel of Politics Online!  #polc09 remained a valuable backchannel throughout the conference and is now shifting focus to include community building and information dissemination.  Diversity issues came up again in Jen Nedeau’s session on old media paradigms shifting to a new media world.  And Twitter was a major focus at the conference, including a Golden Dot for Twitter Vote Report and the great panel moderated by @arimelber featuring @clairecmc @timryan @cathymcmorris and @repsteveisrael (for more, see the CSPAN video and the live blog, once again by Ohio political blogger extraordinaire, Jill Miller Zimon on Writes Like She Talks ).

One of the topics that came up a lot was conservative leadership on Twitter — how real it is, why progressives are going to do about it.  I got some great insights here from Patrick Ruffini, Soren Dayton and others I don’t usually get to talk with.  It was also a chance to get perspectives on Get FISA Right and Facebook activism from different folks, including Sam Graham-Felsen, Bob Fertik, and Ari Melber.

So there’s much more to talk about. Coming up soon:  Cognitive evolution and revolution part2, Let’s talk about Twitter (and myBO and diversity too).

jon

* I hope I was complimentary enough to those willing to tackle these tough issues!

Update, April 21: added some additional links here

Amazon’s stock has recovered, bouyed by Friday’s report that Kindle sales have exceeded expectations. Traffic on the #amazonfail hashtag is much lighter.  The auction for AmazonFail.com is over, at least for the time being.

But I don’t think this issue’s going away quite that quickly.

Right now it feels like everybody’s taking a step back and reflecting.  There’s general agreement on the narrative described in the National Coalition Against Censorship’s #amazonfail explained in a flowchart and there’s a theme starting to emerge in the tweets on #amazonfail and blog posts:

It’s not over.

All the attention being paid to Clay Shirky’s view obscures the fact that most of the participants don’t see it that way.  Here are some perspectives that for some reason don’t seem to be getting as much visibility:

• Storm Grant’s DEAR MR. BEZOS, I HAVE SOME HELPFUL SUGGESTIONS on The I of the Storm
• The Amazon Backlash is an LGBTD issue on amazonfaildotorg.wordpress.com (moving soon to http://www.amazonfail.org)
• Sarah Zettel’s Tempest in a Tweet on Bookspot Central
• Janet D. Stemwedel’s Morality, outrage, and #amazonfail: a reply to Clay Shirky on Adventures in Ethics and Science
• Francine Saint Marie’s Amazon “Glitch” Myth Debunked on After Ellen
• Em’s About #amazonfail and ableism on I’m Just Not Impressed
  
• Craig Seymour’s My AmazonFail timeline on Craig’s Pop Life
• Nadia Cooke’s On the resolution of #amazonfail on The Ink Spectrum
• James Bridle’s It’s Still On: The real failure of Amazonfail, Dubai, and Internet Outrage on Bookkake
• Mike Edwards’s Who failed with #amazonfail?
• my own My Reply to Clay Shirky on Liminal States
• Bill Thompson’s How Amazonfail was born on the BBC
• Patrick’s #amazonfail and the cost of freedom on Vroman’s
• ABA Offers Suggested Guidelines for Appropriate Responses to Amazon Policy, Bookselling this week
• Cheryl Morgan, #AmazonFail — where are we now?, Cheryl’s Mewsings
• Chris Walters, DRM: Amazon can ban you from your Kindle account whenver it likes on The Consumerist

April 21: and …

• Avi Rappaport, Amazonfail: How Metadata and Sex Broke Amazon Book Search, Newsbreaks
• Brianna Snyder, All-male review, Hartford Advertiser
• Nancy Johnston, What I’ve learned from Amazonfail, Read Street
• #amazonfail a success, Fagadget
• Lisa, #amazonfail, Lisy Babe’s blog
• Mary Hodder, Why Amazon didn’t just have a glitch, TechCrunch
  

Meanwhile in the mainstream world the backlash continues with Nick Carr’s analogizing the “hashmob” to a pillowfight etc. etc.  Whatever.

So many lenses …

Moving forward … now what?

Especially in light of the backlash that attempts to rewrite history to reverse blame, characterize the activists as a “mob”, and turn the page on the “glitch” without addressing the deeper issues, I think it would be very valuable to collect and highlight the history as it happened.  More on that in a comment.

There’s so many things happening with #amazonfail that I find I have to look at it through multiple lenses to try to understand it.  The posts I link to include writers, publishers, lesbians, gays, queers, disability rights activists, feminists, independent bookstores, ethicists, and anti-DRMers.  All of those are important and to focus on any one as “the” issue risks marginalizing the others.  I’d like to suggest a couple more lenses on the table as well.

It doesn’t look like a mob to me

One important one is “internet mobs”.  The abstract of Danielle Citron’s recent Cyber civil rights law review article makes the point that

Social networking sites and blogs have increasingly become breeding grounds for anonymous online groups that attack women, people of color, and members of other traditionally disadvantaged groups. These destructive groups target individuals with defamation, threats of violence, and technology-based attacks that silence victims and concomitantly destroy their privacy…. Today’s cyber attack groups update a history of anonymous mobs coming together to victimize and subjugate vulnerable people. The social science literature identifies conditions that magnify dangerous group behavior and those that tend to defuse it. Unfortunately, Web 2.0 technologies accelerate mob behavior.

There’s no question that Twitter is an incredible accellerant.  There are a few examples of statements I see as defamatory or targeting an individual.  Overall, though, very little of this applies.  With #amazonfail, it’s activists from traditionally disadvantaged groups calling attention to how they’ve been silenced.   And neither “Support independent bookstores” and “Boycott Amazon” are ‘dangerous group behavior’; it’s consumers organizing to leverage their buying power against a large corporation — something that Clay talked about approvingly in his book.   Hmm.  Doesn’t seem like a mob to me.

Danielle’s December 2007 presentation “Destructive Crowds: New Threats to Online Reputation and Privacy” has more background on this. Dealing with hate speech, flaming, and trolls on the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy 2008 Wikia page has a lot of related links, including the Kathy Sierra case.

Self-organizing in action

Another good lens for #amazonfail is the general context of Twitter-based activism.  #motrinmoms is the most obvious parallel; Joanne Bamberger’s Don’t call me a mommyblogger is a good starting point, and I have a lot more links in #MotrinMoms: from Twitter to the New York Times in 24 hours.  More generally there are some intense debates about Twitter activism going on in the political space right now, for example with progressives’ reactions to the perception that conservatives are dominant on Twitter, and #pman’s role in the ongoing protests in Moldova.

If you’re interested in this lens, there are zillions of links, along with my perspectives, in my guest-blogging series Lessons from Skittles for poets and activists on The Seminal and the Building engaged communities that act presentation that Tracy Viselli and I gave at the #nim09 have more.  Twitter *is* a strategy (DRAFT) and the comments are an attempt to sum it up to a higher level.

Motrin Moms, #pman, the activism against the Facebook Terms of Service, Join the Impact, and Get FISA Right all self-organized within 48 hours.  It seems to me that #amazonfail did the same, discussing and preparing for purchase-shifting and potentially a boycott while waiting for more facts to emerge and giving Amazon time to respond.   A lot of the people involved are also connecting with each other, on Twitter and elsewhere.

It’ll be interesting to see where this goes.

Your thoughts?

jon

PS: thanks to @newlady1 for the suggestion of linking to Clay’s thoughts, and to Mia for the info about AmazonFail.org.

Hilarity ensued, with “#skittles” shooting to the #1 Twitter term for the day. With over 4000 blog posts and positive articles in the Wall Street Journal, LA Times, the Financial Times and Advertising Age, it’s a viral marketing success story for the ages!  Emily Steel’s Skittles Cozies Up to Social Media, David Amaro’s Skittles Goes Modernista! With A Distributed Experience on Logic and Emotion and Tiphereth Gloria’s Why it takes balls to Skittle on Digital Tip are some thought-provoking discussions.

What’s particularly fascinating to me, though, is something Katrin Verclas of MobileActive.org pointed out on the Progressive Exchange mailing list: the significant gender differences in people’s reaction.

Sure enough, the pattern is there in blogosphere as well.  I classified the opinions in Skittles articles on the Google News page and a handful of the top hits on Google Blogs as positive, neutral, and negative. The results:

• women: 6 positive, 4 neutral, 0 negative
• men: 12 positive, 3 neutral, 8 negative

And when I say “negative”, whoa baby.  David says “By just about any rational indication, Skittles went too far.“    Noah characterizes it as “generally A Bad Idea” and “a gaffe”. Harry sees it as “social-media marketing nihilism.”  Riche thinks it’s “the worst strategic decision I have seen online in a long time.”  Yow.

There’s no easy way to know how much this reflects an actual difference in opinions.  It could be that women avoid harsh criticisms in favor of neutrally-worded posts like Allyson Kapin’s and Shannon Nelson’s raising questions about the effectiveness of Skittles’ strategy.  One way or another, though, it’s really striking.

Twitter is an opportunity to engage with communities currently marginalized by the “progressive blogosphere”.

– Tracy Viselli and Jon Pincus, Strategies for progressives on Twitter in The Exception

There’s an important lesson here for anybody trying to understand social media, and Twitter in particular.  Make sure you’re getting a range of opinions — as well as gender-based differences, there are also age-based differences.  In particular, if you’re getting your political news from the male-dominated “progressive” or “conservative” blogospheres (or the mainstream media and pundits who look to the big bloggers as being on the cutting edge), be aware of the possibility that you’re getting a distorted view of social network sites and their value.**

Today Skittles’ home page instead redirects to their Facebook page.  Any bets on how people will react?

jon

PS: in the credit where credit is due department, Modernista! took a similar approach with their own web site almost a year ago.  Allison Mooney’s Modernista!’s new siteless site on pfsk has more.

Skittles photo from ambibambie39507’s flickr page,
Twitter graphic from joomlatools on flickr,
both licensed under Creative Commons

* a horrible trans-fat-based chemically-tasting candy, if you ask me, although some people loooooove them.

** see for example my comments in Petitions are soooooo 20th century.

Update: #topprog Tweetup : Tuesday Night 7:30 EST : Subject – topprog.org features, functionality, and community. Please Retweet!  H/T @cacardinal

The new #topprog Twitter hashtag for progressives continues to make progress with a good range of topics and tweeters — including big names like @blogdiva, @PunditMom (who’s moderating a breakout session at fem2pt0 tomorrow), and @JoeTrippi.

The progressive blogosphere’s ignoring it, of course,* but the conservatives of #tcot are nervous enough that they’re already labelling it a #fail, thinking about flooding it, and coming up with euphemisms for trolling.  And in fact @The_Anti_Guru’s “active engagement” probably accounts for over 50% of the traffic, counting replies.  Guy attempts to disrupt and dominate conversation in potentially-woman-friendly-space, film at 11!

Gender issues aside, a lot of people are skeptical whether it’s possible to have meaningful conversations on Twitter.  Won’t the loudest voices drown everybody else out?  The three loudest tweeters yesterday had 46, 30, and 29 tweets yesterday.  As calibration, @drdigipol, aka Alan Rosenblatt, who as the creator of the list presumably has as much to say as anybody else, had 7.   So it’s easy to overlook @lizandra311’s updates on the Rootscamp in Philadelphia, or the occasional posts from @blogdiva, @Heardtfelt, @myrnyatheminx, @GetFISARight and others.

It’s a place where a little functionality would help a lot.  If only each user had a way of ignoring people they thought were trolling and everybody replying to him!  Or wouldn’t it be cool if I had a knob for the RSS feed that said “ignore everybody who posts more than 10 times in a 24-hour period”?   As more political debate discussions happen on Twitter, hopefully Twitter user interfaces will incorporate funcationality like this [in fact for all i know they already do].

In  the meantime, oh well, people will probably learn to ignore @The_Anti_Guru quickly enough.  “Please don’t feed the trolls.”  And with a little practice it’s easy enough to skip over the posts by the loudest posters even using Twitter’s generic search page.  At least for now, with a little practice it’s not too hard to separate out the wheat from the chaff.

And now back to the gender issues.  Thus far, according to Google, there have been four blog posts about the new #topprog Twitter hashtag for progressives.  Here’s what the linking pattern looked like between mine on Liminal States, Nancy Scola’s on techPresident, Stefan Deeran’s in Exception Magazine, and Colin Delany’s on e.politics.

- I didn’t link to anybody

- Nancy linked to me

- Colin linked to Stefan

- Stefan didn’t link to any of us

To be clear: nobody linked to the only woman who posted about #topprog.  See Shelley Powers’ Guys Don’t Link on Burningbird for more discussion of this dynamic.

It’s also interesting to look at who gets quoted in the articles. Nancy quotes @anotherpundit and me; Stefan quotes Alan and Michael (aka Mr. #tcot).  Colin quotes Alan.  I wonder if women have any opinions on this?

Hmm.  These all sound like good topics for fem2pt0.

jon

* on the surface it seems like the kind of thing that should interest “progressive” bloggers, but it’s on a social network site so it might as well not exist

I set up a petition here, and I’ll be sending the comments onward to John Podesta and Michael Strautmanis of the Obama transition team.

– Matt Stoller, Larry Summers At Treasury: A Fox in the Henhouse, OpenLeft

The first two replies to Matt’s post were

JoelN: Is it still possible to start new ‘MyBO’ groups?

Oly: I would like to see the netroots take up the anti-Summers cause as we took up the anti-Bayh cause.

When I made a similar suggestion later on Thursday in another thread, Matt responded by banning me.    So I went into a little more detail Friday morning in a comment in Melissa McEwan’s Action Item: No Larry Summers thread on Shakesville, talking about why social network sites are a good complement to petitions for stuff like this:

On sites like myBO, Facebook, and MySpace, it’s single-click for the people who are already members; you get additional viral effects; plus, everybody can see who’s signed on (as opposed to a petition where knowledge and the oh-so-valuable email lists are reserved for the people who set up the list).

Not only that, the media looooves stories related to social networks and new technology, so you’re more likely to get publicity — as Twitter Vote Report just showed so dramatically. When was the last time a petition got that kind of coverage?*

Imagine my delight when I searched Facebook and discovered I wasn’t the only one thinking that way.

Nancy Scola has the scoop in techPresident’s Daily Digest:

Ivan Boothe, formerly with the Genocide Intervention Network, has started a Facebook group called “Obama Supporters AGAINST Larry Summers, Architect of the Financial Crisis!”

The group’s very well laid out, with a summary and links to some excellent critiques of Summers by Naomi Klein, Kim Gandy, and Dean Baker, as well as a pointer to the petition, so it reinforces the other effort.  Gotta like that.  If you’re on Facebook, please join the group by clicking on Join this group on the top right hand side of the page — and invite your friends by clicking on Invite other people, right below the group’s logo.  Pretty easy, huh?

There are some obvious next steps: highlight the Facebook group as well as the petition on the Media Consortium’s new Cabinet Newsletter,** get some action in the blogospheres, start tweeting about it.  More ambitiously, now might be a good time for Republicans against Summers to start up their own group, or for people to start something up on myBO, MySpace, and/or BlackPlanet.  All of these are likely to reach complementary audiences to the OpenLeft petition and the Facebook group.  Of course, at some point the negative energy needs to be turned in a positive direction (how long until somebody starts up a group for, say, Laura D’Andrea Tyson?) … but it’ll be a lot harder to unify on the criteria for a good choice, let alone the actual people, so it’s one of those occasions where starting with a strong rejection of an unacceptable candidate makes a lot of sense.

A great thing about Summers is that there’s so many reasons to be against him that the activism campaign is likely to spread down many different paths.  Most obviously this builds on the multi-partisan anti-bailout activism, which while it didn’t get reported in the press was pretty significant.  On top of that, comments about women’s intelligence and Africa as “under-polluted” mean that this is likely to get a lot of attention in the feminist, anti-racist, black, and women of color blogospheres.  So, while it’s always hard to predict, the conditions are good for something spectacular. Larry’s presumably a little nervous right now.

And man, what is it about progressives and online petitions?  Within a period of four hours Friday, a friend forwarded me Mormons Stole Our Rights‘ No tax credit for hate and then something from Rick Jacobs about Courage Campaign’s Repeal Prop 8, and guess what?  Repeal Prop 8 has a Facebook group too, Mormons Stole our Rights is up on Facebook and MySpace

Update, November 11: I missed two of the biggest anti-prop 8 efforts, Join the Impact’s protests for November 15 and Stephanie Geffeller’s Re-open Prop 8 petition. See the comments for more.

Courage Campaign has used social networks very effectively in their campaigs this year, so it’s not surprising they’re approaching it this way; I don’t know anything about the people behind Mormons Stole Our Rights, but they appear to get it too.  Todd Beeton’s Turning Passion into Action on myDD sets the stage for Repeal Prop 8:

For three straight days, we’ve seen massive marches in the streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco. This just doesn’t happen here. It’s amazing to watch take place but there’s a danger that this anger won’t be harnessed and converted into a longterm marriage equality movement.

There are marches in San Diego and elsewhere, too, on an even larger scale than September’s online anti-bailout actions around the country sparked by Arun Gupta’s call-out for a Wall Street Protest on Naomi Klein’s site.  In September, however, the online component focused mostly on, guess what, petitions: petitions from Bernie Sanders, CREDO Action, the Center for American Progress, the SEIU the National Taxpayers’ Union, and many others.***  Sanders’ petition got a lot of attention in the progressive blogosphere, about 50,000 signatures — but not a lot of press.

How much energy was harnessed?  Well, the people who ran those petitions can send a blast email to all their members; that’s about it, really.  By contrast, social network-based activism creates a lot of assets: connections between members, one-to-one communication channels, and discussion threads that can help organize and shape the future.

Let’s face it: in a time when there are 200,000-person viral email campaigns, multi-million person protest groups on Facebook, and viral videos reaching 20-million-plus people, petitions have to rack up mighty big numbers to even have a chance of mattering.   By contrast, Ari Melber described Get FISA Right’s strategy back on July 7: “fan the flames of coverage by making the novel outreach approach a story in its own right”.   Sure enough, it worked: with 23,000 people we were all over the mainstream media.  Ditto this week for Twitter Vote Report, with 10,000.  And let’s not forget #dontgo and 100,000 Strong against Evan Bayh, which got into mainstream media blogs with only a few thousand members by emphasizing the Twitter and Facebook angles.****

Social network sites are hot.  Many journalists and MSM sites are looking for stories to show that they get it.  The overall narrative of social network activism, including disaster relief and Voces Contra Las FARC, is a powerful one.

Petitions are boring.

And just in case anybody’s forgotten, we just came out of an election where youth activism was hugely important.  Guess where kids today hang out?  Facebook. Twitter. MySpace.  Not blogs.  Not email.

A couple of other important sites for the Repeal Prop 8 and Mormons Stole our Rights folks to focus on are myBO, BlackPlanet, and Eons.  Reaching out to Obama supporters looking to build on their success is a no-brainer; starting to engage now on BlackPlanet and Eons is critical for making progress reaching out to demographics which supported Prop 8 in 2008.  Also important: linking up more effectively with other new efforts like the Repeal Prop 8 TV campaign (started by Brendan of SaysMe.tv) as well as existing “No on 8″ groups on Facebook, MySpace, and all these other sites … and of course continuing to coordinate with on-the-ground activism and new efforts.  A lot to do … but you can see the possibilities.

I certainly don’t mean to imply that social network activism is a panacea: the technology bases are all problematic, and as danah boyd points out, it’s challenging to convert the identity group to an action nexus if one doesn’t already exist.  On top of that, many people aren’t members of social network sites — and for reasons I’m very sympathetic with, such as Facebook’s creepy and Orwellian vibe and horrible privacy practices.  For that matter, a lot of people just plain prefer email.  So petitions are a valuable complement to these other mechanisms.

But they’re not the only game in town.  Instead of a petition, what about a blog post with a signature thread, so everybody can see who’s signed on and what they’re saying? It’s just as easy to sign on as a petition; there’s much more value.

And in any case, when you’re thinking about an activism campaign, think of how to incorporate social network sites.  There are plenty of good resources out there.  For myBO, Micah Sifry’s Can We Talk?  Will They Listen?, Carlo Scannella’s Nomadic Democracy, and Mike Stark’s Why progressives should keep organizing on MyBarackObama.com — all from the early days of Get FISA Right — are the best I know of.  For Facebook, the Wired How-to wiki and the Computers Freedom and Privacy wiki are decent starting places.

Of course, the best way to learn about activism is to engage in it. So, if you’re on Facebook, please join the Repeal Prop 8 and Obama supporters AGAINST Larry Summers groups — and invite your friends. And you hang out elsewhere (or you’re not an Obama supporter but similarly oppose Larry), start up your own group and learn by doing.

It’s 2008, for heavens sake.  What are you waiting for?

jon

Facebook graphic from AJC1’s flickr site
licensed under Creative Commons

Thanks to Adriel and Ryan for the title!

* probably Avaaz.org, with there 250,000+-signature petitions, although these days it seems like their ads and events like the  “Fossil of the Day Awards” at Bali are what’s really driving the media attention.  Update, 10/11: oops.  Courage Campaign got coverage in late October for launching their petition to the Mormon Church to stop funding Yes on 8 — here’s the AP story.

** as I wrote the first draft of this, the #2 story on Cabinet Newsladder is Beth Dozoretz’ Larry Summers: The country needs him, a reaction to NOW’s opposition to Summers added to the Newsladder by none other than Max Bernstein, of Max and the Marginalized and 100,000 Strong Against Evan Bayh fame.  I still haven’t seen the petition anywhere on the front page — surprising, in light of James Boyce’s front-page OpenLeft post from Thursday inviting people to try Cabinet Newsladder out.

*** okay, it’s not just progressives.  Moira Herbst’s Bailout Outrage Races Across the Web in Business Week from September 25 is an excellent roundup of the first round of anti-bailout activism, and Micah Sifry’s More plutocracy, or the rise of people-powered politics? on the Huffington Post is a good retrospective.

**** It doesn’t always work of course.  The largest anti-bailout Facebook group has a little less than 4,000 people, and No Blank Check for Wall Street clocks in at about 900, but with so little discussion of these anywhere in the blogosphere there wasn’t any way to generate media interest.  On the other hand, if half of those 50,000 people from the Sanders petition had joined on Facebook as well, we quite possibly could have played the “bigger than Get FISA Right” card and been off to the races.  Oh well, maybe next time.  For more  on the successful pro-drilling activism campaign #dontgo, please see the links in the footnote of Reflections.

Welcome to those who have gotten here via my appearance on Meet the Bloggers! The Voter Suppression Wiki is a non-partisan hub of information and action around efforts to suppress votes in the 2008 U.S. elections. For more information, please see our strategy and talking points, Baratunde Thurston’s launch post on Jack and Jill Politics, and my series of posts on Liminal States (most of which are cross-posted on Pam’s House Blend and Oxdown Gazette).  If you’d like to get involved, please introduce yourself, check the help wanted, roll up your sleeves, and jump in!

If you’re hear to watch me, Brad Friedman and James Rucker on Meet the Bloggers, the video is at the end of the post.

If you’d like to help fight voter suppression, please get involved!

One of the things we’ve talked a lot about with the Voter Suppression Wiki is the importance of looking at bridging the gap from the online to the offline community.  A good way of understanding this is by imagining two congressional districts: Techville and Reality City.

Techville is relatively affluent, mostly-white, and as the name implies, a high-tech hotbed.  “Everybody” uses Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, and a whole bunch of cool web 2.0 thingies I’ve never heard of — as my brother Gregory K would say, they’re pretty well connected.  Their local election board is well-funded and very proactive; they’ve got a great training program for election-day pollworkers, and many local high-tech companies encourage their employees to take the day off to volunteer.

Reality City, by contrast, is poorer, with a lot of minorities and Spanish speakers, and several large retirement communities.  It’s on the “wrong side of the digital divide”, so while there are some highly-wired residents  (especially students), computer usage in general is low.  Just like everywhere else in America, people are fired up about the election, and so registration has surged.  Unfortunately, there’s no money, so there aren’t enough voting machines to go around; and they haven’t been able to hire enough staff to validate all the registrations or find enough volunteers for election day.

Voter suppression is almost certainly likely to be more of a problem in Reality City than Techville; and so from an election protection perspective, that’s where we’d like to focus our efforts.  In practice, though, an online focus risks doing exactly the opposite.

It starts with getting the word out and finding people to get involved.  In Techville, a lot of people read techPresident, Wired, and the YouTube blog and watch Meet the Bloggers regularly — so they already know about the grassroots election protection movement and are finding ways to get involved.  How to get the word out equivalently in Reality City?

It’s not like this is an impossible problem, and in fact it’s something that we’ve kept in mind with the Voter Suppression Wiki, from the initial launch through our ongoing community planning.  Baratunde’s launch post was on Jack and Jill Politics, and I cross-posted in Pam’s House Blend — two top-ten blogs in the black blogosphere.  Of course, this doesn’t directly reach people who aren’t online; but it is likely to catch some people’s attention, and lays the groundwork for outreach to community newspapers, radio stations, and hubs like community technology centers.  We’re also talking with groups like Color of Change who have strong networks in the Reality Cities across the country, and brainstorming ways to reach out to highly-connected groups like college students within the community and enlist them as contact points.   Our community media strategy page has some additional thinking in this area.

The important thing to notice is that none of this “just happens”.  If you don’t spend a lot of effort thinking about how to reach people in Reality City, you’ll come up with talking to folks in Techville.

A couple of interesting election monitoring projects highlight some of the complexities.  Wired’s Report your issue here and the Twitter Vote Report give a couple of different ways for people to self-report any issues they run into during voting.  The possibilities here are exciting: if we can use these results to get a live “heat map” of where problems are on election day, it’ll be a real help to election officials, campaigns, non-partisan organizations — and to voters as well.

A caveat, though: there are almost certainly much higher percentage of Wired readers and Twitter users in Techville, so it’s much easier to imagine things getting to critical mass there.  If that’s all that happens, it’s not clear whether it’ll have a significant impact on voter suppression.  In the grand scheme of things, Techville’s not where the biggest problems are likely to occur.

In fact, depending on what information is reported, these kinds of monitoring projects could give a misleading impression.  If 100 times more people are participating in Techville than in Reality City, then the data’s likely to show more reported incidents in Techville no matter what the reality is.  From a statistical analysis perspective, there’s a straightforward way to mitigate this: report successes as well as failures and use the ratio of success to failures as the indication of likely problems.   Unfortunately, Wired — at least their initial announcement — only asks for problems to be reported.  Sorry, Reality City.

We spent some time on the last Twitter Vote Report (TVR) phone call thinking about how to involve people in the communities most at risk for voter suppression.  One of the very appealing things about using Twitter — or any phone-based reporting mechanism — is that cellphones are much more pervasive, even in at-risk communities, than computers.  True, most cellphone users aren’t on Twitter, but maybe there are ways around it.  For example:

• Could TVR set up a “shared” Twitter account that anybody could use to text this information in on election day?  That’s not how Twitter usually operates, but maybe they’d be willing to work with us to make it happen — other companies like Google (or for that matter my consulting client Coverity and their arch-rival Fortify) routinely helping out with election protection activities as part of being good corporate citizens, and Twitter’s probably no exception.  At the very least, it certainly seems worth asking.
• Getting Twitter-enabled requires a signup, which is a bit of a hassle (especially if you don’t own a computer) but once you’re signed up it’s as easy to use as texting.  Could TVR partner with community technology centers, internet cafes, libraries, and maybe even schools — in other words, places where there are computers and knowledgeable people — and help people in Reality City sign up for Twitter *before* the election?  Could there be volunteers near polling sites on election day for those who want to sign up on the spot?
• Or how about enlisting the Reality City residents who are already highly-connected as election observers, asking them to report others’ experiences?  This would be a great way for students to get involved, whether or not they’re legal voters.  To make this work TVR would need to provide some basic training material (which should be easy enough) and then partner with groups like Rock the Vote, Future Majority, and Color of Change who are likely to be able to reach some highly-connected people in Reality City — and perhaps once again look to community technology centers.

It’s hard to know whether any of these things will happen … there’s a lot to do in just 17 days between now and the election, and as always, a lot depends on how many people get involved.  Once again, it won’t just happen by default.  Still, the enouraging thing is that once you start to think about things from Reality City’s perspectives, there are some straightforward approaches that can make a big difference.

From the Voter Suppression Wiki’s perspective, I think our biggest impact can be with Reality City and other marginalized communities across the US.  To start with, we are thinking about them; in fact, we’re treating them as a high-priority goal.  The diversity of our initial group of users means that lots of good ideas are coming forward — and they’ve got the connections to make it happen.  And I think our inclusive nature, cool technology, and respect for the power and technology prowess of youth means gives us a shot at attracting a lot of the heavily-connected online hubs of Reality City … to the Voter Suppression Wiki and hopefully other election protection projects as well.

Will that be enough to get us out of the Techville ghetto and into the other 99% of the US?  We shall see ….

jon

Video for Meet the Bloggers:

I think I’ll let other tell the story for me …

September 25:

In collaboration with Harvard sociology graduate students Kevin Lewis and Marco Gonzalez, and with UCLA professor Andreas Wimmer and Harvard professor Nicholas Christakis, Berkman Fellow Jason Kaufman has made available a first wave of Facebook.com data through the Dataverse Network Project.

The dataset comprises machine-readable files of virtually all the information posted on approximately 1,700 FB profiles by an entire cohort of students at an anonymous, northeastern American university.

– Tastes, Ties, and Time: Facebook data release, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University

September 29:

The “non-identifiability” of such a dataset is up for debate….  According to the authors, the collection of the dataset was approved by the IRB, Facebook and the individual college.  The dissemination of the dataset appears to be approved by the IRB.

– Facebook Datasets and Private Chrome, Fred Stutzman, Unit Structures

September 30:

Of course, this sounds like an AOL-search-data-release-style privacy disaster waiting to happen.

– On the “Anonymity” of the Facebook Dataset, Michael Zimmer, michaelzimmer.org

October 2:

I think it’s hard to imagine that some of this anonymity wouldn’t be breached with some of the participants in the sample. For one thing, some nationalities are only represented by one person.

– Eszter Hargittai, in a comment on Unit Structures

We did not consult w/ privacy experts on how to do this, but we did think long and hard about what and how this should be done.

– Jason Kauffman, as a comment on michaelzimmer.org

OK, OK, I’ve held my tongue long enough.  The arrogant attitude of “we’re smart and we thought about it so we didn’t bother to ask the experts” is a well-known recipe for disaster in privacy (or security or software engineerig or …).  People like Cynthia Dwork of Microsoft Research and Latanya Sweeney of Carnegie-Mellon University have been studying data anonymization and reidentification for years; this stuff is hard.   How can the Berkman Center not know that?  And how can Facebook and Harvard be so cavalier as to share data with a research team with an attitude like this?

October 3:

Well, I’m pretty sure this “anonymous, northeastern American university” is Harvard College. And I didn’t even have to download the dataset to figure it out. Here’s how.

– More On the “Anonymity” of the Facebook Dataset – It’s Harvard College, Michael Zimmer, michaelzimmer.org

See, I told you this stuff is hard.

October 7:

In the comments, Jason Kaufman implies that the data really isn’t that private, asking what could go wrong, and why would someone post it to Facebook expecting it to remain private.

I have just one question on all of this. If the data isn’t private, why did they attempt to anonymize it?

I believe they attempted to anonymize it because it’s fairly obvious that the data is private, and releasing it with names obviously attached would be pretty shocking.

– Researchers Two-Faced on the Facebook Data Release, Adam Shostack, Emergent Chaos

Yeah, really.

The original research mission (to collect and analyze a set with proper safeguards) was within bounds; the follow-up distribution is the element that clearly poses risk.

– Facebook Dataset Identified, Fred Stuzman, Unit Structures

Well, except it turns out that the original research mission also clearly posed risk: for example, the proper safeguard might not be in place.  Did the IRB (Institutional Review Board) look at this?  Did Facebook and Harvard?

Fred goes on to make the excellent point that the researchers should have convened a panel to discuss before releasing the information, and suggests as a potential takeaway “Research that pushes the boundaries of technology and privacy provide IRB’s with unique challenges.”  True enough, and his post and the comments — along with all the other ones I’ve linked  to — are well worth reading.

But it seems to me that this is letting the Berkman Center, Facebook, and Harvard off the hook a little too easily.  They just put information about 1700 students, at least some of whom (and probably most) are likely to be identifiable, up on the internet … without even asking their permission.

It’s late at night and so maybe I’m feeling irritable but I find myself asking questions like: In what universe is this supposed to be okay?

The Berkman Center’s mission is to explore and understand cyberspace; to study its development, dynamics, norms, and standards; and to assess the need or lack thereof for laws and sanctions.

– the Berkman Center’s mission statement

The Berkman Center recently hosted a conference and gala on The Future of the Internet.  People look to them as authorities.  Is this the future they want to create?

As far as I know, none of the Berkman Center faculty have weighed in on this yet.  It’ll be interesting to hear what Yochai Benkler, William Fisher, Charles Nesson, John Palfrey, Jonathan Zittrain, John Deighton, Jack Goldsmith, Alexander Keysser, Charles Ogletree and Stuart Scheiber have to say about what this episode says about the “need or lack thereof for laws and sanctions.”

And in terms of understanding, given the potential for gender-, race- and culture-based differences in attitudes towards privacy, I’m also looking forward to what they — and others — think about how events might have been influenced by the Berkman Center’s, and the research team’s, diversity.   Or lack thereof.

jon

Facebook graphic from AJC1’s flickr site, licensed under Creative Commons

First draft July 26; substantial revisions August 2.

Originally written as a three-part conclusion to

Gender, race, age, and power in online discussions, chapter n

Introduction

The “mutual guest-blogging” project I’ve been leading on OpenLeft has been taking place in the context of a surprising amount of coverage of diversity issues in the blogosphere in the mainstream media recently. Articles like Amy Alexander’s The Color Line Online: Minority Bloggers Fight Inequality in The Nation and Karen Jesella’s Blogging’s Glass Ceiling in the New York Times (nicely analyzed by PhysioProf in Teh Laydeez Are So Cute When They Try To Blog on Feministe) are the highest-profile treatments I’ve seen of this topic since Jose Antonio Vargas’ A Diversity of Opinion, if not of Opinionators in the Washington Post a year ago.

It’s also come up in a broader context in stories like Jose’s Liberal Bloggers Brace for Victory in the Washington Post, and Kirsten Powers’ Net-roots Ninnies: Dem’s Left Dum Bam Slams in the New York Post.* As Kirsten, who’s also a Fox News reporter, says:

Newsflash to the netroots and the media (which seems perpetually confused on this issue): The netroots are not the base of the Democratic Party.

Overwhelmingly white, male and highly educated, they’re a loud anomaly in a party that’s wholly dependent on the votes of African Americans, women and working-class whites.

Not everybody sees it that way. Chris Bowers’ OpenLeft post The Myth Of The Non-Diverse Netroots, for example, presents a different perspective.  (See Is netroots non-diversity a myth?, as well as my responses in Chris’ thread, for my opinion.)   In the aftermath of the nastiness with race and gender we’ve seen so far this election year, with the McCain campaign and New Yorker throwing gasoline on the fire on the race and gender front and a lot of Democrats doing their best to get equally nasty about the age dimension, it’s certainly a good discussion to be having.

Mutual guest blogging on OpenLeft: what happened

The first mutual guest-blogging series, with a goal of bringing diverse voices and perspectives to OpenLeft’s front page, featured four amazing posts: Melissa McEwan’s Perfectly Logical Calculations, and Why They’re Actually Not, Pam Spaulding’s Sexism and racism – what lies beneath…, and rikyrah’s Update: Michelle Obama As Racial Rorshach Test. The broader discussion has been excellent as well, including Invasion of the QCoFM on Shakesville; cross-posts (with very different comments than on OpenLeft) on Orcinus, Pam’s House Blend, Jack and Jill Politics and Mirror on America; and most recently Sara Robinson’s An Open Letter to Open Left followup on Orcinus.

My summary so far in Mutual guest blogging: intermission and discussions elicited a lot of interesting responses, especially after I banned Paul Lukasiak for disrupting the thread, and then repromoted it a couple of times. Some email discussion then ensued between me, Matt Stoller, and Chris Bowers (Mike Lux was on vacation). When it became clear that we saw things differently, I offered to turn the reins over to somebody else and give up my front-page privileges, which they accepted.**

It’s somewhat disappointing in that this has the feel of a missed opportunity — look at the enthusiasm in the comments on Invasion of the QCoFM, skeptical admittedly but nonetheless an encouraging sign. In particular, there’s still time to address issues related to minority blogger representation at the DNCC***, but as long as the issue continues to be ignored in the progressive blogosphere it’s not likely anything will happen. I had really hoped that the bridges built here would lead to some progress on that issue. Sigh. There certainly are some things I’d do differently in retrospect … it’s difficult when everybody’s under a huge amount of time pressure and not used to working together.

Looking at things from a more positive perspective, though …

There were four great posts that probably wouldn’t have happened otherwise, and hopefully at least some new audience for the guest bloggers — and readers for their own. We measurably affected the diversity of OpenLeft’s front page, and several strong non-straight-white-male voices emerged in the comments. The threads are continuing to spark discussion, in posts like zuzu’s Hillary and intergenerational dynamics on Shakesville. And I think the series of threads captures the state of discussions about race and gender in the progessive blogosphere in June/July 2008 about as well as anything out there. These are great results from a first attempt.

What next? These have been amongst the more popular comment threads on OpenLeft recently, with voices and perspectives that are very different from the norm there, so I certainly hope that people will find a way to take it forward there. We shall see.

“As purple is to lavender”: some personal reflections

Over the last week, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on this. I’ve put a lot of time and energy into this project over the last several months — and unsurprisingly, gotten a much much more out of it than I put in. In the aftermath, how do I feel about it?

On a personal level, getting a chance to work with the guest bloggers was like a dream come true for me. Not only am I a regular reader of all their blogs, three of them are in my personal short list of best sources for political news. On top of that, one of the inspirations this project was first inspired by Melissa et. al.’s We Write Letters on Shakesville. I could scarcely believe my good fortune when their names came up in the nominating process. What a treat to be able to collaborate with them on something like this!

And on top of that, I made connections with a lot of people I wouldn’t have gotten to know otherwise, which is leading to new friendships — as well as a better base for activism. As I said in my wrapup post:

We’ve already seen some tangible evidence of that in a totally unanticipated way with the Get FISA Right movement: the connections, shared experiences, and developing trust relationships around the guest-blogging project made a big difference in our ability to use OpenLeft as an early base and start up quickly on Facebook. It also helped us keep the rapid growth going after key links from Nancy Scola, Dawn Teo, Jane Hamsher, Susan G, mcjoan, digby, Sarah Lai Stirland, danah boyd, and many others.**** A focus on diversity almost always brings some unexpected benefits; this was a doozy.

Moving on to implementation details, the mutual guest-blogging approach seems like an effective one, and the “mothership post” (coming soon!) is a significant improvement on the original idea. The clear documentation of goals and making the process as transparent and inclusive as possible both proved very effective. I made a major botch by failing to communicate what many people saw as a subject change; on the other hand, in my wrapup thread, I thought I dealt with Paul’s trolling fairly effectively. [The sequence of threads also provides a particularly good illustration of how guys, including me, tend to dominate online conversations due to volume.]

And of course, I learned a lot. debcoop and others gave me a much richer understanding of the ways in which many older feminists feel marginalized — and that as a result some of them are too angry to speak or so angry they can’t stop speaking. Conversely I think in some cases there’s a real lack of awareness that behavior and attitudes that have been tolerated in the past are seen and reacted to differently today. Not sure if there are any easy answers here but I think everybody trying to treat each other respectfully would help a surprising amount.

And rootless2’s comment is worth quoting one more time:

The “feminist” perspective is defined to be a particular political take from which Code Pink, Kate Michelman, and certainly Barbara Lee, Barbara Smith, Alice Walker, Lani Guinier are excluded.

Indeed (and a point I had completely overlooked about Code Pink).

In the discussions, I was repeatedly shocked at how little awareness of the womanist perspective there still is even among people who are knowledgeable about feminism. From Wikipedia:

Alice Malsenior Walker (born February 9, 1944) is an American author, self-declared feminist and womanist – the latter a term she herself coined to make special distinction for the experiences of women of color.

As Alice Walker says, “Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender” . At the intellectual level, privileging feminist perspectives over womanist perspectives is just as wrong as privileging “the” definition of feminism. Ignoring the racial and intersectional implications of this is unexamined privilege.

It’s not like I’m an expert on womanism (or feminism for that matter). Still, you don’t have to do very much reading in the feminist or woman of color blogosphere before you run into the term, or run into the increasing number of women — including, I believe, at least two of our invited guest bloggers — who are very public about not identifying as feminists. And in any case, I really thought that after both Melissa and I made such a point of it, people who didn’t know the word would look it up and think about the implications.

Conclusion

Like I said above, I think we’ve captured an excellent snapshot of discussions of race and gender in the progressive blogosphere at this moment in time. Here was my attempt to summarize it:

1. dudez in the progressive blogosphere (with many exceptions of course) and elsewhere are remarkably clueless about issues related to gender and race, unwilling to examine their language or privilege, in some cases actively misogynistic and racist, and become hostile while this is discussed
2. they don’t get intersectionality either*****
3. this is a real problem for the progressive movement, the Democratic party, the Obama campaign, Michelle Obama, and more generally women, blacks, persons of color, and most especially women of color everywhere. As Jane Hamsher says And the Big Announcement Is…, the conversation in the blogosphere is — I sincerely hope — about to change. So now would be very good time for OpenLeft to take a leadership role in addressing these problems in the progressive blogosphere.

Others’ diagnosis may vary of course. In any case, there’s a wealth of raw material here to study, both for those who want to change the dynamics as a whole, and for those (including me) who want to reflect on their own behavior and look for opportunities to improve it. And there’s still almost a month until the convention; maybe somebody can learn from this and figure out how to get the “progressive” blogosphere to start discussing issues of blogger representation in Denver in ways that reflect race, gender, age, and other dimensions as well as geography, partisanship, and status.

As for what next, we shall see. For the time being …

Thanks once again to all the participants: guest-bloggers Melissa, Sara, Pam, rikyrah; Aviva, sb, Paul, and Daniel for their help; those who helped come up to the original idea, including Natasha Chart for first linking to Melissa’s post, Taylor for suggesting it as a guest blog and dr anonymous for promoting it, and everybody for suggestions and refinements as it steadily evolved. Thanks also to OpenLeft for giving the space for this experiment; and to all the commenters, including sb, debcoop, Spitball, Englishlefty, fladem, Pam, Joel, Aviva, NCDemAmy, rootless2, L Boom, dr anonymous, sisterfish, Daniel, and Syrith in the “intermission” thread.

I hope you’re all as proud of what we accomplished here as I am. It’s been a pleasure working with you on this, and I look forward to collaborating in the future as well!

jon

* I only ran into Kirsten’s article because she also mentioned Get FISA Right. Much to my relief, she confirmed in email that she didn’t think of us as ninnies. Interestingly, when I posted about it on the on the Get FISA Right message boards, two guys responded by attacking Kirsten without addressing her points, while the one one woman who responded thought as I did that she made some good points. But I digress.

** This in turn immediately led to some unintended consequences: my Get FISA Right, the video! was only on the front page very briefly, so it got more visibility on techPresident and NPR than OpenLeft

*** for example, by training minority delegates (who already have floor credentials) as bloggers and work with the state blogs to use their on-floor stations for filing reports. Not only does this give better diversity in the reporting from the convention, it also helps address underrepresentation in the blogosphere moving forward, both at the state level and the netroots in general.

**** guys linked to us too, of course

***** speaking of which, a resource I’ve found very helpful in understanding the intersections between race and gender is prof bw’s Feminist Reading Tools For Recognizing and Countering Racism on WoC PhD.

Second draft, posted on OpenLeft with a different poll.

the version on OpenLeft continues to evolve

please link and comment there rather than here.

Originally posted July 17; revised July 18-19.

We’re now at the midpoint of our first, more-leisurely-than-anticipated mutual guest blogging series. Thanks to Melissa, Sara, Pam, and rikyrah for their time, energy, and extraordinary posts. In retrospect, our original plan of getting all the posts on OpenLeft and the mutual posts on the guest bloggers’ blogs all in one week was a little over-ambitious. Oh well, live and learn.

Some people were confused by the unannounced broadening of the topic. Oops. Pam and the Jack and Jill Politics folks both said they’d like to take a more forward-looking approach than in our framing, and I said “sure, just relate it in some way to the original topic and it’ll be fine.” Apologies to all for having forgotten to communicate this. In the future, when something like this happens, rather than attacking the guest poster in angry posts, consider simply asking “did I miss something?” or perhaps even contacting the people involved (me and rikyrah in this case) directly. Thanks to desmoinesdem, sb, and Paul for their replies in the thread. For those who would like to read more specifically on Hillary Clinton’s withdrawal, there were several links in an earlier thread, and of course there’s a ton of great stuff out there elsewhere.

And on a similar “oops” theme, apologies to Sara for missing her email and not promoting her post; thanks to Daniel for stepping in and helping. Not one of my better moderation efforts, alas.

Our “stated purpose”

Before talking about what’s next, it’s a good time to revisit how we’re doing against our goals. I’m going to go into some depth here, and start by mocking a remark somebody made in rikyrah’s thread:

what bothers me is the idea that Jon and OpenLeft think that they are actually acoomplishing anything close to their stated purpose of including a feminist/womanist perspective on the primary campaign.

This is one of those comments where there’s so much wrong with it, I don’t know where to start. For example, the incorrect restatement of the topic leaves out a lot including the all-important “… and why it matters to progressives”. And how could the commenter have missed that the guest bloggers are writing from a feminist/womanist perspective? So these posts are squarely on-topic; and some consistent themes in their posts and the discussions relate to lessons from Hillary Clinton’s withdrawal from the race.

For example:

1. dudez in the progressive blogosphere (with many exceptions of course) and elsewhere are remarkably clueless about issues related to gender and race, unwilling to examine their language or privilege, in some cases actively misogynistic and racist, and get hostile while this is discussed
2. they don’t get intersectionality either
3. this is a real problem for the progressive movement, the Democratic party, the Obama campaign, Michelle Obama, and more generally women, blacks, persons of color, and most especially women of color everywhere. So now would be very good time for the progressive blogosphere to take the lead in trying to do something about it.

Returning to the comment, it’s also an unusually clear case of confusion between “topic” and “purpose”. The specific topic we chose is just a means to an end; I had already modified it once without mentioning it (changing “feminist” to “feminist and womanist” in the invitation).

And we’ve been explicit about our stated purpose with mutual guest-blogging. From the initial proposal:

If you look at the front page posts on OpenLeft, it’s rare to see anything by a woman, a person of color, anybody 26-and-under (”Facebook generation”) or 60+. OpenLeft is dedicated to building a progressive governing majority, and understanding the great movement of left-wing activism in America today. Neither of those will happen if most voices continue to be marginalized.

So let’s start changing it.

A good start

Indeed, I think we are off to a good start with the posts so far, and discussions in the comments. Encouragingly, a lot of the people in the meta-thread on Shakesville spoke very positively about this effort, even though reviews as to OpenLefties’ (?) collective performance were decidedly mixed.

Overall the discussions of these difficult issues went far better than I had expected … and of course the posts were magnificent, exceeding even my absurdly-high expectations. rrp made an excellent point on Shakesville that Liss took advantage of the “length and form” here; the same’s true of all the posts. From a personal perspective … wow, what a privilege to be part of this; and how exciting to have a measurable impact on demographic diversity in the netroots!

The original proposal also suggested

The result is improved mutual understanding, links with other tightly-connected networks, and a base for more collaborative and effective strategic actions.

We’ve already seen some tangible evidence of that in a totally unanticipated way with the Get FISA Right movement: the connections, shared experiences, and developing trust relationships around the guest-blogging project made a big difference in our ability to use OpenLeft as an early base and start up quickly on Facebook. It also helped us keep the rapid growth going after key links from Nancy Scola, Jane Hamsher, Susan G, mcjoan, digby, Sarah Lai Stirland, danah boyd, and many others. A focus on diversity almost always brings some unexpected benefits; this was a doozy.

So it’s a great start, and there’s a lot to build on.

Now what?

We’re still only partway through this first iteration. The next step is the “mutual” aspect: posts by OpenLeft founders on the guest bloggers’ own blogs. There’s a lot of interest in this from our guests, so while we still haven’t worked out any details on this yet, it’s still planned. Also, there are still open invitations to Egalia and brownfemipower; we should once again reach out to them and see if they’re interested. And we have about 20 nominations for followon posts on this subject; we should find a way to expand the discussion to give them all a way to participate — details TBD.

And we’ll try to get re-started on choosing a subject for the next round; momentum kinda petered out, but hopefully these stimulating posts will recharge it. More on this front soon as well.

There are certainly ways to improve on the guest-blogging process; please use this thread for discussions and feedback about the series as a whole: things that worked particularly well, what you observed or learned, ways to do better next time, etc.

And shifting to a broader focus …

Mutual guest blogging has taken a concrete step on the path to getting more diverse perspectives on the front page of OpenLeft, an important step in working through the challenges of becoming an inclusive and multicultural space. How do we build on this promising start?

Poll

on a scale of 1-10, where the average front-page thread on OL is 5, how would you rate the overall quality of these posts and discussions?

Comment: useful background reading

If I can get slightly professorial for a second here … as a social computing researcher who’s been spending time in the progressive blogosphere over the last six months, I think it would be helpful if we all had knowledge about some basic texts here. A good place to start is with the pairing of Guys don’t link and Women and children last: the discursive construction of Weblogs.

Shelley Powers 2005 classic Guys don’t link on Burningbird discusses the interaction of links and “Google juice” (ewwwwww). A brief excerpt gives a flavor:

Point of fact, if you follow the thread of this discussion, you would see something like Dave linking to Cory who then links to Scoble who links to Dave who links to Tim who links to Steve who then links to Dave who links to Doc who follows through with a link to Dan, and so on. If you throw in the fact that the Google Guys are, well, guys, then we start to see a pattern here: men have a real thing for the hypertext link.

Well, huh. How about that. Not being a guy, I couldn’t understand this male obsession with the link, so I decided to call on an expert on gender roles about the issue: Lawrence Summers, Harvard’s current President.

If you don’t know the specific guys she’s talking about, you probably know the types. It’s a great party game: which netroots personality would you cast in which role for the upcoming Guys don’t link Showtime series?

In a more traditionally academic style Women and children last, Susan C. Herring, Inna Kouper, Lois Ann Scheidt, and Elijah L. Wright discuss the how media coverage skews towards a particular kind of blogs:

It is [these] blogs that are privileged, consistent with the notion that the activities of educated, adult males are viewed by society as more interesting and important than those of other demographic groups. However, the blogs featured in contemporary public discourses about blogging are the exception, rather than the rule: all the available evidence suggests that blogs are more commonly a vehicle of personal expression than a means of filtering content on the Web, for all demographic groups including adult males.

So-called “objective” measurements of influence like Technorati and Memeorandum reinforce these tendencies. For a quick deconstruction of how this works in the tech blogosphere, see my comment here.

Relating this back to the progressive blogoshere: see Kay Steiger’s The “new” new left is white, male, Morgaine’s and my comments on A.J. Rossmiller’s Myth of the meritocracy, blogosphere edition on Americablog, Kirsten Powers Net-roots ninnies in the New York Post … and many other discussions. It’s not like this is a big secret or anything. It’s just not something the dudez talk about.

Update, June 21: first round on track for week of June 30!

Thanks to all for the feedback and review!

We propose that OpenLeft feature 5-7 guest bloggers each week, prioritizing diverse voices and perspectives not usually heard on the front page. OpenLeft front page posters will reciprocate, by blogging on the guests’ sites, and the combination will (with luck) create a temporary hub in the progressive blogosphere. The result is improved mutual understanding, links with other tightly-connected networks, and a base for more collaborative and effective strategic actions.

Note: This diary entry refines several ideas from the “American Blogger” thread including input from Taylor, Syrith, me, and several others who asked to remain anonymous. Thanks to all the reviewers of the earlier versions!

If you look at the front page posts on OpenLeft, it’s rare to see anything by a woman, a person of color, anybody 26-and-under (”Facebook generation”) or 60+. OpenLeft is dedicated to building a progressive governing majority, and understanding the great movement of left-wing activism in America today. Neither of those will happen if most voices continue to be marginalized.

So let’s start changing it.

Mutual guest-blogging is an easy way to create discussion and connections while improving diversity. It gives benefit in all directions: bloggers get their work exposed to new audiences, commenters get new topics to discuss, readers get to see new ideas and perspectives.

The progressive blogosphere’s (temporary) hub

Focusing each week on a specific topic is a good way of attracting guest bloggers. Most people who write as clearly and articulately as the usual high standard of posts on OpenLeft have plenty of other things they could do with their time, and so guest-blogging here needs to be worth their while. A reciprocal guest-post from an OpenLeft founder is likely to be seen as valuable (one of the reasons their participation is so crucial), but that’s not likely to be enough.

So we’ll also offer guest-bloggers something even more valuable: access, in the form of front-page posts at the progressive blogosphere’s temporary hub for the topic of the week. Here, on OpenLeft.

Well, of course, there’s no guarantee that OpenLeft and the mutual-guest blogs will turn into a hub each week. However, with the site’s reputation for high-quality discussion, and the networks of the front-page posters (the founders, the regulars, and occasionals like Robert Fuller) supplemented by those of a half-dozen or so diverse perspectives, we’ve got a real chance — especially if we pick topics that haven’t gotten a lot of good discussion in the progressive blogosphere. See the comments for a few suggestions.

The selection process

Just how to select the guest bloggers? It’s a tricky question: we want to avoid reflecting our biases and self-selecting to a narrow sample set. On the other hand, this also presents an opportunity to create a good resource list for each topic, and understand gaps in our collective information sources. It’s hard to know what the right answer is, so rather than pick a long-term process, let’s focus on how to get started.

1. select three initial topics. use a similar process to “American Blogger”: a nomination thread that lasts for a couple of days, and then a voting thread
2. for each topic, start up a nomination thread: each reader can propose up to three names [with a little editing, this thread can then be turned into a resource list]
3. filter the topic list to emphasize diverse perspectives, and if necessary have a vote to select the top 10-15 (presumably only half or less will have time and interest)
4. invite the guest bloggers, and schedule topics based on which get critical mass quickest
5. each guest-blogger gets to select a future guest blogger on a topic of their choice (as well as nominating three per topic just like any other reader)

The last point is important for two reasons. First of all, it’s a small token for the guest-bloggers: they allow somebody access to OpenLeft’s front page. Secondly, it helps expand our connections and information sources beyond our initial shortlist.

Next steps

If we want to take this forward, a key next step is to get the founders’ and other front-pagers agreement to participate. In addition, we’ll need somebody to run the initial topic nomination/voting thread. Paul’s already done this for “American Blogger”, and so has a rough idea of how much time it’ll require. After that, we’ll need people to run the blogger nomination/voting threads; and to reach out to the selected bloggers; and, once we’re ready to go, to coordinate the individual topics.

[As the description implies, for this to work, we'll need to get a lot of people involved. If you're interested in helping, please mention it in your comment!]

Before any of that, though, we need to make sure there’s interest — and perhaps to improve the idea. [For example, are there ways to simplify the blogger selection process?] So please use this thread to discuss — and if you think it’s a good idea, let us know if you’re interested in helping.

There’s an interesting thread started on Feb 8 in the One Million Strong for Barack group on Facebook, How many Political Cards Hillary has played and whats more to come? I went back and looked at it today seeing how accurate it was; here was my summary:

This is a really interesting thread to read a month later. Of the Clinton kitchen sink that got her a tie for March 4, Sandeep flagged the “representing Obama as Muslim” card, others brought up “experience” and “ready to lead on day 1″, and the “victim card” (which thanks to SNL turned the press into a poodle for a few days)

We missed a few:

- the “inaccurate leaks from conservative foreign governments” card [NAFTA-gate]
- the Rush Limbaugh card [Republican crossover voters]
- the “help from McCain” card [his timely attacks on exactly the same issue Clinton was focusing on]

I don’t think anybody else predicted these either, so on the whole, I bet the analysis in this thread was as good as just about any other analyses out there — in the press or blogosphere.

Very impressive!

In other words, the 22 group members who posted in the thread seem to have predicted things at least as well as the pundits out there — probably better than most.

It’s great example of the role of cognitive diversity, which underlies wisdom of crowds effect: diverse groups doing a better job than experts. Scott Page’s work provides a good framework for understanding of the vital role that diversity plays in a situation like this, and his recent book The Difference is a very readable discussion; Adam has a good short summary on Emergent Chaos.

The Obama campaign is benefiting hugely from its diversity and resulting wisdom of crowds; if you look at its supporters, you see rainbows in one dimension after another: race, age (including those too young to vote), religion, class, language, gender, geography (including internationally) …. It’s a huge advantage over the Clinton campaign and an even bigger one over McCain. This implies that the Obama campaign in generally will do better on their predictions and their performance. Sure enough, the February spreadsheet is an extraordinarily accurate “we’ll do at least this well” prediction, and the campaign has consistently outperformed.

Have any of the analysts, reporters, or bloggers reporting the election picked up on this yet?

And for those who wonder why I’m so enthusiastic about the One Million Strong group on Facebook: it’s the most diverse group of its size of Obama supporters working together that I know of. True, it’s online-only, so people without access to technology aren’t involved; and I’ve seen relatively few over-50s. But geography, race, language, gender, religion (Muslims, Jews, Christians including evangelicals and pro-lifers for Obama, Buddhists, secularists), field and major …

It’s pretty astonishing — and incredibly exciting to be a part of it!

Update, 3/24: Tim Leberecht’s excellent A New (Obama) Brand of Politics: Yes, We Can…Remix America! touches on some of these issues from a branding perspective.

Update, 3/27: presenting Matt Adler, now delegate to the Democratic National Connection from the 3rd Congressional District of Missouri — with the help of Facebookers. Also, details on the One Million Strong for Barack group’s contribution to getting a story covered on Wired, CSPAN, and the Nation. About that “consistently outperforming …”