I’ve attended South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) for several years but this year was special since it was my first (last?) as a speaker. My session was intended to be about non-profits using their website to accomplish their mission, but we never seemed to make it there. Since SXSW decided to format it as a discussion, I was relying on content to come from the audience members—who were unfortunately relying on me. The idea of letting people down is not something I’m either terribly familiar or terribly comfortable with, so now I’m sharing what I would’ve said if my session had been just me with a microphone (two turntables optional).

Edge of the Web

Every new medium emerges from the husk of the old, inheriting a number of soon-to-be anachronistic metaphors. The early web brought with it the book’s concept of pages, whose final vestiges as a mode of organizing content have been all but erased by the Web-as-Platform concept. The web as a place where you read is no longer true, if it ever was. The web is where you do.

Should the last point not be self-evident, go now and count how many of your bookmarks are about reading vs buying, selling, searching, inspiring, or communicating. I’ll wait.

One thing we increasingly do on the web is self-organize. On every social network from Facebook to Flickr, we form groups. Most of the time, these groups are purely recreational alliances of common interest. Every once in a while, they are political. Consider some recent examples:

1. The Facebook Bill of Rights & Responsibilities group that achieved greater democracy in the site’s management
2. Concerned citizens flocking to support a designer whose work was stolen by a stock art company
3. Last weekend’s #AmazonFail uprising that investigated why gay, lesbian, and feminist books vanished overnight from best-seller lists

These three particular victories are interesting because they all have two things in common. First, none of their efforts are centered around or guided by an outside organization, non-profit or otherwise. Second, they were all—what’s a nice way of saying this?—wrong.

1. Facebook’s back-pedal traded a vital discussion (Do I “own” my comments on your Wall? Should I have access to them even if you delete your profile?) for Democracy Theatre.
2. The designer, it turns out, may have been plagiarizing others’ work himself.
3. Even Clay Shirky, “Here Comes Everybody” author and post-organizationalist, admits that #AmazonFail was about misguided emotion and not justice.

The lesson that I take from this ad hoc activism is that the general population is neither apathetic nor disorganized. The multitude is brimming with passion about even “niche” issues like intellectual property law or transgender rights (which have received far less media coverage than global warming) and have the means to come together to make demands of top decision-makers. But, given their respective failures, these campaigns also illuminate the need for non-profits to assume a new role in online activism: providing a strategic avenue for collective action.

No more educate-motivate one-two punch? Their most primary roles wrested from them, where does this leave non-profits websites that raise awareness and compel action (two things they no longer need) only to then bill you for it with a donation request?

Your mission, online

It seems appropriate to confess at this point that I feel blessed to work with non-profits on exactly these issues. This post is written not out of frustration with them but a desire to vastly improve their lot.

If a committed and easily mobilized online audience seems like a burden, it’s clearly because we’re looking at the situation incorrectly.

It might be as simple as structure. If your website is handled by Communications, it’s going to be a place to read and not a place to do. If it’s handled by Development, donor conversion is probably your #1 metric. Ben Rattray, founder of Change.org, once noted there was a trough of online stagnancy in middle-sized non-profits. The larger have independent web teams, the smaller has a “web team” who also happens to be the Executive Director. At this top level, directly in service to your mission, is precisely where a tool so powerful as “the Internet” belongs.

Is it as simple as looking at your mission and saying, “How can we use the Internet to achieve this?” Almost, but before you go running off to reinvent your whole website, my experience has found two crucial principles that should guide you: sincerity and granularity.

Consider the top 3 actions on WeCanSolveIt.org: sign a petition, tell friends, donate.

Robin Beck, an online organizer and co-worker emeritus of mine (uncharacteristically optimistic here), claims that we’re so used to dodging the Internet’s scams and spams that to really provoke online activism requires a higher order of sincerity. Non-profits are offering big boxes of “make the world a better place” or at least “feel good about yourself”. If we take the lid off and discover instead a “fundraising ploy” or “list-building exercise”, we’re not going to buy another box.

On its most basic level, this means that the action you’re requesting has to directly solve the problem you say it will. Adam Green of MoveOn and Change Congress publicly dropped some science on a recent email action alert he received in a blog post entitled, “Profiles in Bad Online Organizing, Part I”.

I’m not saying the DSCC has no role to play in getting Coleman to step down. I’m just saying they should play an honest and effective role.

But beyond that, it means asking for something that you couldn’t do without your supporters. You have a task that seems impossible, but you’ve figured out how to break down into smaller pieces so—if everyone does their part—it’s a snap. Which brings us to granularity…

A full academic discussion of granularity is available in “Wealth of Networks” if you can wade through it.

The root of granularity is “grain” and sand provides a great metaphor for understanding it. A sand castle is made of very small granular contributions. A single grain or a heaping bucket all contribute to the achievement of building the sand castle. Donations are granular, as supporters can give any amount they choose. Signing a petition is not, as you can only sign it once—lacking the heaping bucket. A video contest is also not, as it takes a high initial investment—lacking the single grain.

Online, this translates into the scope of transactions that your website is capable of handling. Wikis are notoriously successful at granularity. I could write an entire article on “Wookiees” or, if some reason I lacked the time or motivation to do so, I could merely correct someone else’s spelling of “Wookie”. This range of involvement allows for increased participation (and increased accuracy, but that’s a different article).

Enough theory. Let’s see these in action.

A case study

In my final year as Senior Webmaster for Rainforest Action Network, we pulled off an online campaign using exactly these principles. The organization’s mission is:

Rainforest Action Network campaigns for the forests, their inhabitants and the natural systems that sustain life by transforming the global marketplace through education, grassroots organizing, and non-violent direct action.

The impossible goal was to catalog enough products that contained palm oil or its derivatives to map the supply chain back to the primary forces of deforestation in tropical rainforests. The team consisted of a palm oil campaigner (Brihannala Morgan), an online organizer (Robin Beck, see above), a web designer/developer (me), and three awesome interns.

Step 1 was to ask supporters to go to their local supermarket and find products that contained palm oil, palmitate, etc. For this step, the team created an instructive yet entertaining video on YouTube. We further incentivized the mission by awarding the top “Supermarket Sleuths”.

Step 2 was to ask our online activists to enter the UPC numbers (the form is down now) of products they found. For this we connected to a third-party database to help verify that products were real. Since activists could also mark certain products as not containing palm oil, it was mostly self-regulating.

Step 3 was to ask those same online activists (I use the term “online” loosely here, since they’ve spent most of their time in grocery stores) to return, warning stickers in hand, to mark those products containing palm oil. RAN headquarters followed this up with a letter to companies whose products were getting stickered.

Was it sincere and granular? Cataloging every product that contains palm oil was certainly not something that three staff and three interns, all located in San Francisco, could pull off. It was also sincere in its intention to find the major players in rainforest destruction. The project was granular, too. An individual could find, submit, and/or sticker just one product and still add value or could spend a whole weekend (and we had activists that submitted hundreds). If you just wanted to correct false positives, that was also an option.

Was it successful? Wildly. On the first day of Step 3, the phones were ringing off the hook with companies whose products contained palm oil. A few days and they were disclosing their supply chains. A few weeks and the major producers were calling to schedule meetings.

I don’t want to downplay the amount of energy that the team dedicated to this project but, in absolute terms, it was a small investment. Everything from the online form to the backend database could’ve received a lot more attention—although the stickers were sweet—but they still managed to do the job with only a few weeks of staff time and a few hundred dollars (mostly the stickers). Not bad ROI for getting a meeting with a major player in the palm oil business.

Next steps for your organization

If you’ve read this far and want to shift your website to a mission-driven strategy, here are your next steps:

1. Put together a team. Find folks with a past history of pushing the technology envelope (anyone who secretly signed you up for Twitter or has been caught on Yahoo Pipes will suffice). Balance these with folks who have a handle on the strategic goals of the organization. Bonus points if these are the same folks. Three is ideal.
2. Give the team some space. If they’re successful, these people are about to pull off a task that your organization currently deems impossible. Give them some time to figure out how. Tell them not to come into the office for a week and instead generate 100 ways to accomplish your organization’s mission online. The first few dozen ideas will be boring, but then things will pick up.
3. Ground it in reality. Wow, the team came up with seriously wacky stuff, some of it ignoring current realities. Cut anything that you can’t start small and then slowly build up, along with ideas that aren’t both sincere and granular. From the remaining list, ask the team which idea they’re most excited about and do it first.
4. Provide success indicators and time limits. Measure the impact. At what point will the team get more resources and at what point will you pull the plug or say, “That didn’t work, try something else?” Make the measurements matter to the mission.
5. Start small. Don’t try to do everything out of the gate. Do the most important thing. Then the next. Then the next. All the while, keep an eye on those indicators.
6. Celebrate. It can get lonely on the edge. If you’re really doing something innovative, make sure you take the time to pat yourself on the back. Valuing your team’s motivation, rain or shine, is going to be the key for long-term success. Because…
7. Repeat. The first project may catch or it may not. Even if it does, repeat this process. Figure out how often you can afford to take a chance on something new (every quarter? twice a year? annually?) and re-assemble your team when it’s time.

If this seems exciting but a little bit daunting, then we should talk. Diligent was started with organizations exactly like yours in mind and with a mission “to harness the dynamic and democratic power of the Internet for social change.”

That’s mine, what’s yours?

As such, I’ve missed being a part of the ubiquitous post-SXSW blogging feeding frenzy that happens every year. By now all of the good bits are gone. Those more articulate than I have already dissected Bruce Sterling’s Greenspan-esque deflation of 2.0′s collective egos, noted the increased stratification of “celebrity” that vlogging has offered, and marveled at how Twitter has ushered in the beginning of a new medium or the death of all that is good about human relationships (depending who you ask).

All that’s left to blog about is how crazy sick I am.

I would classify the disease I’ve managed to come down with as half influenza and half streptococcus. Whether strepfluenza or influcoccus formally, it’s called “the Stroo” by common folk. Me, anyway. The Stroo has three exciting parts: a wicked cough, a throbbing headache, and fevered delusions.

It’s cough is nasty enough that the slightest lung tickle instantly fills me with dread. I search for a means of escape. When it finally arrives, it’s as if the Devil’s own trident has been jammed into my weakened solar plexus. I cry out. The pain rings like a church bell across a foggy meadow. Field mice look up, then scurry their children into their holes before the rain comes.

It is not enough to say that the headache throbs. Of course it throbs, all headaches feel like the throb. Yet just this morning I looked at myself, bleary-eyed and utterly destroyed, in the mirror and could see it throb. My head was growing bigger, then smaller. Like the waxing and waning moon, it seemed. Indeed, all five senses were accounted for. Not only did it feel and look like it was throbbing. It sounded, smelled, and tasted the same.

Finally, no stranger to strange dreams, the Stroo has taken my twisted id to a new level. So far I have dreamt that my cat was suing me, my officemate was bit by a vampire, and that I dropped a #2 in the middle of my bed. These dreams are not flat sketches, my fever develops them into full delusions with just enough reality to keep me worried they might be real. I was sitting at the defendant’s table with my counsel, looking my cat in her eyes as she testified from the witness stand, thinking, “How could she do this? She knows it was an accident. I’d never hurt her on purpose.” Next, before my co-worker developed full-blown vampirism, talk turned to whether our HSA would cover prevention therapy, if such therapy existed, or whether firing someone for being a vampire violated our diversity and anti-oppression policy. Finally, I lay in my bed in horror for literally hours for fear the my third dream had actually transpired—unsure how (or if!) I wanted to confirm it hadn’t.

Four different people have now all apologized for giving me whatever they had. I politely joked that I was sure I picked it up from some stranger in a crowded bar, defenses lowered by rain and free wine. Now I’m not so sure. I’m beginning to believe that each and every one of them gave me whatever they had and all of the diseases combined like the Constructicons into one massive, and probably evil, illness.

My supervisor was crafty. She could sew—and not just with a machine, she’d sew frontier style. In fact, one of her weekend hobbies was “rendezvousing”. Alright, I don’t actually know the verb for it. She’d go to mass get-togethers where participants camped without modern technology. It was like a Renaissance Faire, but without the dorky falderal. Or survivalists, without the spooky lust for automatic weapons.

I asked the illustrator what he would do if one morning he woke up and robots could do his job. His reply was, “I guess I’d fight robots.” After some more thought he decided that a life of tending to tomatoes was more his speed; he would be a gardener “after the blast”. He was a good enough illustrator (and a mite skeptical of them new fangled computers) that he probably could have made a fine hunk of money drawing wanted signs or whatever else we’ll need in the future.

This left the senior web designer and me scratching our heads. With no marketable skills that did not involve an internet connection, let alone electricity, we’d be stuck doing dishes we figured. I can play drums, but my office said that musicians would probably be even more worthless in the future than now. If only I believed in any one religion, I think I’d be a fine preacher—and heaven knows that the future needs those.

Seeing “Children of Men” again last weekend made me realize that I have nothing to fear. Post-apocalypses hardly ever happen in the U.S. “Children of Men” = England. “V for Vendetta” = England. “1984″ = England. “Mad Max” = Australia. “Tank Girl” = Australia. The only two post-apocalypse movie franchises that take place here are “The Postman” (not the one that won an Oscar) and the “Escape from New York” series (skipping the novelization and going straight for the pizza chain). Okay, technically “Planet of the Apes” took place here… but it also had humankind enslaved to apes. Not a good resource for “after the blast” career paths.

Leaving the theater and using the high-tech urinals that sense when you’re finished and automatically flush themselves, I realized that we’re pretty much doomed if we lose power now. We couldn’t even flush our urinals. Perhaps I can find work as a garcon de pisse.

I’m off to South by Southwest next week, to frolic amongst the other interactive designers/bloggers/coders/etc. I’ll ask them what their “after the blast” plans are.

“My Final Prediction”, Bruce Sterling’s last column with Wired, ends:

As a futurist, I’ve often licked my chops over rather grim possibilities. But my lasting fondness for the dark side is a personal taste, not an analysis. I’m frequently surprised, and when I consider the biggest surprises, I’m heartened that they were mostly positive. The Internet, for instance, crawled out of a dank atomic fallout shelter to become the Mardi Gras parade of my generation. It was not a bolt of destructive lightning; it was the sun breaking through the clouds.

Please, Bruce, you’re not a Futurist. And your “fondness for the dark side” is like my “fondness” for The White Stripes. I would like to like them, but I don’t actually like them. As soon as no one’s looking, I switch back to AFX and Autechre.

Futurists are violent, callous, and remorseless. An art project in college had me memorizing the 1909 Futurist Manifesto, and I can still recall the good bits:

Oh, maternal ditch, half full of muddy water! Oh, factory gutter! I savored a mouthful of strengthening muck which recalled the black teat of my Sudanese nurse!

We want to glorify war—the only cure for the world—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.

Look at us! We are not out of breath, our hearts are not in the least tired, for they are nourished by fire, hatred, and speed! Does this surprise you? It is because you do not even remember being alive! Standing on the world’s summit, we launch once more our challenge to the stars!

Futurists would love the world we’ve created today. Essentially, their manifesto has manifested. Even television commercials have wholly adopted Futurist values. Faster transactions with your credit card! Higher horsepower for your SUV! More blades on your safety razor! Louder crunch in your snack food!

Nope. I’ve heard Sterling speak before and I was not left wanting to destroy museums or build my own rocket pack. He had the closing remarks at last year’s South by Southwest Interactive conference. After an hour of decrying the state of the world, failed governments and devastated ecosystems, he described the beautiful world that was possible and, in a tearful rendition of Carl Sandburg’s “The People, Yes!” drove the point home. I couldn’t continue without quoting the poem myself.

The people yes
The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
They will be tricked and sold and again sold
And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,
The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,
You can’t laugh off their capacity to take it.
The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas.
…
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?

In the darkness with a great bundle of grief the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people march:
“Where to? what next?”

No, Bruce. Sorry to say it, but you’re a humanist. Maybe, on some days, a transhumanist—but mostly just a humanist. I know it sucks to be a happy, optimistic writer sometimes (what do you do for angst?) but you’ve given us a beautiful vision of an ecological sustainable future, so don’t fight your nature. No pun intended.

Sorry this post looks like a Clips Show. I’m getting sick and needed some extra sleep.

Thinking that I could provide some sort of public service by summarizing the document here, I began to do so—but gave up quickly when I realized I was quoting almost every other page. It’s really just tremendous. From mental models to making software with forgiveness, all the bases are covered. Instead of drooling over it in a public place, I’ll just take my favorite bit and dive in a little deeper (and drool on my own time).

Near the end of Chapter 1, “The Design Process”, almost offhandedly, it mentions the “80 Percent Solution”:

During the design process, if you discover problems with your product design, you might consider applying the 80 percent solution—that is, designing your software to meet the needs of at least 80 percent of your users. This type of design typically favors simpler, more elegant approaches to problems.

This is a big idea contained in a tiny paragraph. I heard Eris Stassi refer to this rule with near fanatic devotion at last year’s South by Southwest. If nothing else, it soothes the designer’s headache brought on from wondering, “but what if someone wants to be able to do X?”

Have you ever used a hammer to do things other than pound nails? Open paint cans? Pull out drywall? Can you imagine a hammer that was designed to do all those things? Do you think it could still pound nails as well with all that extraneous crap?

Beyond that, the 80 Percent Solution forces you to identify who you’re designing this for. “Everyone” is not really an answer (unless you’re making water or oxygen or, possibly, love). Who are these people? Why are they using your product? What do they really need? I should note that it’s important to consider this along vectors of desire and not of ability; accessibility is still paramount and the 80 Percent Solution should not be an excuse for failing to provide usability for disabled visitors.

Finally, you must make important decisions about how you’re providing solutions to the users’ needs. New features are all the same until you start implenting them. If you consider a jar as a model of your user’s attention, each rock you put into the jar takes up a proportionally larger amount of the remaining space. You want to make sure the important rocks are in the jar early, especially since you don’t really have any idea how big the jar is (my dad’s jar is pretty tiny).

It should be noted that the 80 Percent Solution is not entirely different than the 80/20 Rule (aka the Pareto Principle). It is conceivable that most demanding 20% of users do account for 80% of the struggle to get the damn thing to work.

The poor RIAA plays right into the archetype, defining piracy thusly:

No black flags with skull and crossbones, no cutlasses, cannons, or daggers identify today’s pirates. You can’t see them coming; there’s no warning shot across your bow. Yet rest assured the pirates are out there because today there is plenty of gold (and platinum and diamonds) to be had. Today’s pirates operate not on the high seas but on the Internet, in illegal CD factories, distribution centers, and on the street. The pirate’s credo is still the same—why pay for it when it’s so easy to steal?

If that’s not a rallying cry for internet piracy, I don’t know what is. The first “Pirates of the Carribbean” made almost $50M in its first weekend, certainly telling people that they can be like Johnny Depp if they download some Shakira will not be a successful deterrent. Tragically, stories about all the heroic copyright lawyers (though some do exist) never seem to break out of the local art houses.

Is the pirate’s credo really as simple as “why pay for it?” Is that why people buy sexy pirates costumes for Halloween? Is that why there’s a Talk Like a Pirate Day? Is that why ninjas and pirates don’t get along? I somehow doubt it.

Personally, I think that pirates represent a postconventional morality where an individual has interrogated “authority” and found himself the only true metric of his own integrity. Pirates are do not break the law, they transcend it. Cap’n Jack Sparrow himself says that a pirate ship is freedom. Contrast this with the very un-freedom-y actions of the media Old Guard.

The “Future of Radio” panel at South by Southwest this year was downright depressing. The panelists were young, innovative, creative people with a complete grasp over the potential of the web to transform music and its role in our lives. However, for practically every question asked from the audience, the answer was “our licensing agreement won’t let us do that”. How much longer will we let the Old Guard play gatekeeper before we just make a new gate? The situation transforms from sad to laughable when you consider that pirate radio, in its most recent incarnation as podcasts, has essentially won. Afterall, why pay for it when it’s so easy to innovate around it?

Yarrr!