As we mentioned, the Netroots (i.e. online progressives) have been using MixedInk to draft their platform online.  This was the first time our beta tool’s been used by the general public, so this was a big moment for us - and it kicked butt!

Whether you agree with the Netroots or not, there’s no denying that the final result is a remarkably eloquent 29 pages of rhetoric, ranging from the lofty to the highly specific, that seems to capture the community’s viewpoint pretty well.  Check it out!

www.NetrootsPlatform.org

The project’s been covered in the political and tech blogosphere, including DailyKos, MyDD, and TechPresident.  From Nancy Scola’s write-up at Tech President:

How do you effectively harness the wisdom of the crowds when the goal is political ideas, not pinning down the weight of an ox at a county fair? [link added]

Does MixedInk point to a way of governing that effectively harnesses the intelligence and energy of bigger groups than we’re used to? It might offer some direction to a campaign like Obama’s that claims to tap into the wisdom of, for example, more than 300 foreign policy advisors. Managing all that smarts can’t be easy.

Here’s the press release we put together with a few members of the Netroots Platform committee.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

PROGRESSIVE ONLINE ACTIVISTS ENGAGE OBAMA CAMPAIGN ON POLITICAL PLATFORM

Netroots Develop Policy Platform Aimed at Influencing Obama/DNC Platform Using Participatory Online Process

WASHINGTON, DC, August 13th, 2008 - Members of the “Netroots” - a loosely affiliated group of progressive bloggers, activists and private citizens-released their political platform this week, after three weeks of online collaboration.

The Netroots Platform was first proposed by Jerome Armstrong, a prominent progressive blogger and founder of MyDD.com. “The idea was for the Netroots to speak to the Obama Campaign and the DNC with a collective voice.” The project seemed to take on a life of its own after being introduced to the progressive blogosphere, as members of the Netroots used progressive community blogs, listservs, social networking sites and the MyBarackObama site to invite greater participation and keep each other updated about the Platform’s progress.

The platform was developed entirely online at www.NetrootsPlatform.org, a site where anyone was able to participate in the process and contribute their ideas. MixedInk, an Internet startup, created the democratic, collaborative writing tool that was used for the project. The company aims to empower the public to participate meaningfully and democratically in discussions once limited only to political insiders. “The process itself was truly a metaphor for the Netroots ideals of openness, transparency and democracy,” said Armstrong.

The final Netroots Platform includes 10 different policy planks addressing everything from National Security & Foreign Policy to the Economy to Food & Agriculture, in addition to an introductory “General Principles” section. Community members contributed by writing new planks, editing existing submissions, and remixing the best ideas from different versions to create new ones. Contributors also rated planks on a scale of 1 to 10, and the version with the highest average rating within each category at the end became part of the final platform.

While the official DNC draft platform and the Netroots platform overlap significantly on some policies, including net neutrality, the patients’ bill of rights, and greater federal investment in renewable energies, other policies advocated by the Netroots - amending the recently passed FISA bill, military budget cuts, and the abolishment of the electoral college - diverge significantly from the official Democratic party line.

“The people who participated support Senator Obama overall, despite some differences in our approach and results,” said Ellen Mendlow, one of the platform’s contributors and a member of the organizing committee. “Our platform is unique because of the collaborative way it was drafted. It’s a very positive step forward that we are part of the process, and I think we are all looking forward to developing even more rigorous opportunities for two-way dialogue between citizens and our government in the future.”

According to MixedInk, over the course of the process, thousands of people visited the site, 246 registered, and 164 contributed a total of 167 planks and over 925 ratings. “The Netroots Platform covers general principles as well as very specific language advocating the expansion of “the Nunn-Lugar program to guard nuclear weapons” and “catalyzing innovation by private space entrepreneurs.” “Some really smart and well-informed people participated in the process,” said David Stern, co-founder of Mixedink.com. “The fact that the most articulate ideas rose to the top shows how wise a crowd can be.”

The platform site launched on July 18th, in tandem with two workshops held at the Netroots Nation conference in Austin to introduce the idea and discuss the process. It ended three weeks later, on August 9th, with the submission of the platform to the National Democratic Platform Committee. The committee has acknowledged receiving the document and will be holding a conference call with the activists shortly.

The Obama campaign had previously asked supporters to contribute their platform ideas through its “Listening to America” initiative. Small groups of supporters met all across the country to develop short planks to be submitted through the campaign’s website.

“This project dovetailed nicely with the Listening to America platform sessions but with a spin that’s unique and that fits the collaborative, ensemble nature of the blogosphere perfectly,” said Mendlow. “We’re fully transparent and democratic in our approach to politics.”

# # #

About the Netroots Platform Committee

Support for the Netroots Platform was loosely organized by an ad-hoc committee of citizens that formed at the Netroots Nation conference held in Austin, Texas, in late July. It initially consisted of six individuals and grew to nine members over the course of the project.

To contact the committee or schedule an interview with one of its members, please email netrootsplatformcommittee [at] gmail [dot] com.

About MixedInk

MixedInk LLC is an Internet startup that provides an online tool for democratic, collaborative writing. MixedInk enables large groups of people to brainstorm and express a collective point of view by weaving their best ideas and opinions together.

The company was founded in April 2007. After launching in September 2008, its application will be available for free at www.mixedink.com. A white-label, enterprise version of the service will also allow organizations to integrate the application within their own websites.

For more information about MixedInk, or to schedule an interview with one of the founders, email press [at] mixedink [dot] com.

Got ideas for how MixedInk could be useful to YOUR group?  Send us an email at info [at] mixedink [dot] com!

==========

Update - an fairly heated exchange about the Netroots Platform is happening on some of the leading progressive blogs:

Chris Bowers at Open Left

Natasha Chart at MyDD

Jerome Armstrong at MyDD

This year’s Netroots Nation Convention marks the launch of a bold experiment in participatory democracy.  The Netroots (i.e. the left half of the blogosphere) will use MixedInk’s collaborative writing tool to craft their very own political platform in advance of the Democratic Convention.  At two working sessions, participants will kick off the initiative by putting their best ideas and language together.

If you’re going to be there, come visit on Friday, July 18th and Saturday, July 19th, and stop by our exhibition booth!  These sessions are just the beginning of what will be an ongoing, public process that will continue in the weeks following the conference.  The final, collectively written platform will be presented to the DNC before the convention in Denver.

If you want to be involved from the beginning but won’t be at NN, sign up at MixedInk.com, and we’ll email you the URL as soon it’s launched.

We’d like to thank the folks at Netroots Nation and wmtriallawyer for helping to organize this!

This effort builds on a growing movement to use online tools to make our government more transparent, representative, and accountable.  Both Barack Obama’s campaign and the RNC have launched exciting initiatives allowing people to help shape their platforms.  Using the Barack Obama website, Democrats can organize “Platform Meetings” in their communities, during which they can discuss and then submit policy “planks,” or one- to two-sentence policy suggestions.  These planks will be reviewed by the team writing the Platform and some will likely be incorporated into the final document.

The Republican Party also has an exciting grassroots-driven platform development effort underway.  The site highlights a range of issues and enables people to submit policies and comments that will be considered by platform authors as they prepare for the convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Also along these lines, 21st Century Democrats wrote their own Alternative Democratic Platform, which is currently being circulated as a petition.

We are thrilled to see the platform-making process opened up to the public - and proud that MixedInk will be the platform used by the Netroots.  MixedInk was built to enable exactly this kind of participation, and we look forward to seeing the results of these incredible people-powered efforts!

Don’t forget to sign up if you want to be notified when you can help create the Netroots platform.

Check out this video, singing praise for tools that tap people’s knowledge - whether using prediction markets to forecast everything from election results to American Idol winners to asking the audience tough questions answer on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.  They point out that people - collectively - perform consistently better than the pundits and experts.  Our post on prediction markets makes many of the same arguments.

Based on our last test of MixedInk, we’re convinced that our 30-headed pundit did better than any individual one of us could have alone!

We just tested out the latest version of our tool, and I wanted to share the results.  The short version: the test was a success!

Last week, 30 beta testers (read: friends) used MixedInk to help write a letter to the editor explaining why Barack Obama shouldn’t choose Hillary Clinton as his VP.   (We did not select this subject on our own - we gave our participants a few topics to choose from, and this is the one where there seemed to be greatest consensus.)

Here’s what they created together:

For years, wide-eyed journalists, politicos and academics have captured people’s imagination with musings about the many ways the Internet would democratize our society.  A decade and a half after the Internet’s emergence, the anticipated transformation is certainly underway.  Media, political, and corporate institutions have begun to incorporate readers, constituents and consumers into their regular operational and decision-making processes.  However, relative to the initial projections, the pace of change isn’t fast enough – at least to the impatient ones, including us here at MixedInk!

There are a couple of reasons for this.  First, government, media, and corporations are hesitant to cede real power to their stakeholders.  News reporters and editors don’t want to be fact-checked by their readers because it threatens their perceived status as “experts.”  Politicians want complete control over their policies, platforms and messages.  Companies want to know what their consumers think, but they don’t want consumers to have a say in decision making.

This reluctance is increasingly beside the point, however.  New, more democratic norms are coming to govern the relationship between reporter and audience member, elected official and constituent, company and consumer.  This is because free markets and elections provide these institutions with an existential reason to engage citizens transparently and democratically that overrules their hesitance: doing so brings them more votes, more dollars, and more attention.

Another challenge is that the trial and error process of testing social technology takes time.  Social processes are often counter-intuitive and difficult to manipulate, so it’s hard to build web-based tools that are a natural social fit.  New online tools thrive not because they solve some previously impossible technological problem, but because they provide “elegant organization” that offers an outlet to harness people’s energy in a productive (or at least entertaining) way.  It’s difficult, if not impossible, to predict how people will interact with each other using a new tool in advance.  Thus, finding ways to ‘organize elegantly’ requires a slow process of trial and error.

In practice, this has meant that innovative media and political organizations simply try out different tools to see what works, and then, over time, others imitate the tactics that turn out to be successful.  Being currently immersed in this trial and error process, the MixedInk team is very much aware of the time it takes; the way people use our private beta site sometimes surprises us.  As a startup, however, we don’t face the same risks as those at large, prominent institutions.  If things don’t go so well for us, few people will notice.  If they fail, everyone pays attention!

There’s plenty of cause for optimism, though.  The pace of change seems to have increased within the last several years between the growth of new media and the beginnings of a shift towards more democratic user engagement among corporate, political, and media organizations.  As Vanessa mentioned in a recent post, Dell’s IdeaStorm and MyStarbucksIdea are significant innovations in the world of corporate America.  Others, like the YouTube/CNN primary debate here in the US and the UK Prime Minister’s “Ask the PM” represent the beginnings of a democratic transformation within the media and political sphere.

To continue our online democracy’s forward progress, it’s important to recognize and address the risks involved with each of these efforts, though.  Each one engaged a large, critical mass of stakeholders with an up-front promise to publich, incorporate, and respond to their input in a meaningful way.  This sudden, very public democratization of communications meant risking that users might overwhelmingly contradict each institution’s official message and branding.  Yet by capitalizing on citizens’ desire to communicate directly with decision-makers, these efforts have been quite successful.

For all of us who aim to contribute to the emerging wave of online democracy, understanding the risks that that innovators like Starbucks, Dell and CNN face can be the difference between success and failure.  Only by adequately balancing risk and reward will new social technologies and applications be able to bring our emerging online democracy to its inevitable tipping point.  In my next post, I’ll describe a few different models for engaging citizens that provide varying degrees of risk and reward, allowing institutions with a range of risk-aversion and participatory ideals to strike the balance that’s appropriate for them.

In searching for a hosting solution, we were surprised by the lack of trustworthy information online to help people decide between them.  We set up a quick survey and are posting the results here.  There were 27 usable responses (the rest were missing too much information to use).   So the results are far from statistically significant, but hopefully they’re useful to others in the same situation.  It’s available as a Google Spreadsheet here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pmbNeL2NbqdCUSddkHmCAbw.

Here’s some snapshots — the document itself is a bit overwhelming to look at.

The following hosting services received “excellent” ratings for uptime, speed, and customer service:

• Alticon (2 ratings)
• Bob
• Contegix
• Edgeweb Hosting
• ExchangeGuru (2 ratings)
• Grassroots Enterprise
• SoftLayer
• Verizon Business FIOS

The following hosting services received a mix of “excellent” and “good” ratings for uptime, speed, and customer service:

• ActiveHost
• Amazon (EC2+S3)
• Aplus
• VPSlink
• Web Hosting Solutions

I just stumbled on this article Marc Ambinder wrote in The Atlantic Monthly last month about how Barack Obama may “transform governance just as he has transformed campaigning.”  This little nugget stood out and I thought it was worth sharing:

Communication and transparency are virtues only up to a point; as students of bureaucracies know, both eventually become an enemy to efficiency. Moreover, if [a] presidency invited more input than it could reasonably weigh and respond to, it would quickly squander the networking capital that the campaign has built.

MixedInk’s was built precisely to address these challenges.  We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.  Thanks, Marc!

Sorry for the big pause in MixedInk’s musings. It was a busy Spring!

Over the past few weeks and months, there have been some notable developments in the crowd-powered arena, and I just want to take a moment to highlight a few interesting examples.

We’re always excited to see forward-looking companies embracing the collective wisdom, so cheers to Starbucks
and Dell, both of which opened the door to major customer feedback. Both companies have embraced a platform called Salesforce Ideas, which TechCrunch aptly described as “Digg-for-ideas.” It allows people to share their ideas, discuss them, and then vote on the ones they like. Participants also get updates from the company responding to the top-rated suggestions. Pretty cool! To many skeptics’ surprise, the Starbucks page has been very popular, with ideas coming in by
the thousands and garnering hundreds of thousands of votes. Starbucks has embraced this feedback as an opportunity to offer their customers the ultimate form of respect – asking their opinion – and to get some new and innovative ideas for free. Dell’s “IdeaStorm,” which was the first site to solicit consumer feedback in this way, rightly earned PR Week’s Innovation
of the Year Award in 2007.

Radiohead has also opened the door to crowd-sourcing. The band surprised fans earlier this year by letting them decide whether or how much to pay for their last CD. In April, they upped the ante by offering “stems” (or different tracks: bass, guitar, drums, vocals…) of their single “Nude,” and then letting fans remix the song. Fans could post the remixed versions to Nude Re/Mix, where the public then could vote their preferences. As SocialMediaInsider points out, “This practice views the original content creation as the mere starting point for what happens to it once it is embraced. Some artists dabble in this area, but most don’t.” This is exactly how MixedInk views the collaborative writing process. Each person’s written contributions are like stems – ready to be edited, remixed, and ranked – that together build the best possible response, reflective of the wisdom of the different people involved in the process.

Most recently, MoveOn challenged its members to make a 30-second TV ad that tells the nation why Barack Obama should be the next president. A whopping 5.5 million votes were cast on 1,100 entries. The top 15 videos were sent to a panel of filmmakers, artists, musicians, and progressives, including Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Lawrence Lessig, Jesse Jackson, and Moby. The winner was recently announced, and will be aired on TV during the campaign.

We’d love to hear about other applications that show the power of the crowd. Please feel free to highlight any innovative examples in the comments!

There was a great NY Tech Meetup last week that got me thinking about collective organizing. For the first time the NY Tech Meetup had a theme, “Power to the People: The Future of Organizing.” It’s exciting to see great new ideas promoting people power – and forums that uncover and celebrate their budding existence online.

It was especially appropriate that Meetup identified this as a theme, being huge innovators in the world of local, do-it-yourself organizing. For anyone who isn’t familiar with it, Meetup is a website with an elegantly simple premise: let people post an idea for a community meeting about anything – whether it’s saving the earth, starting a business, or knitting – and allow interested people in the area to attend. In hosting this event, the NY Tech Meetup (run by Scott Heiferman, the co-founder and CEO of Meetup) aimed to bring kindred spirits in the online world of organizing together.

The seeming legendary Clay Shirky was there to chat about Here Comes Everybody, “a book about organizing without organizations.” He made an interesting presentation, mostly about how much easier group action has become – and how often it’s happening these days. The simple fact that people with something in common can now find one another is a huge step. Philosopher William James once said “thinking is for doing.” Clay says “publishing is for acting,” meaning that publishing is increasingly used to gather and coordinate people.

Check out this excerpt from Clay’s book about Meetup here. He makes the point that Meetup groups can’t be organized top-down – being self-organized is key: “Though it seems funny for a service business, Meetup actually does best not by trying to do things on behalf of its users, but by providing a platform for them to do things for one another.” The book is brand new and promises to be an inspiring read. Update: Check him out on the Colbert Report…

A bunch of interesting online innovators presented at last week’s Meetup, but I was most excited about ThePoint. The Point is a brilliant new website run by Andrew Mason in Chicago that’s based on a few basic principles: (1) People want to stand up for themselves and their beliefs (2) standing up for yourself is usually a waste of time, because you’re just one person and it’s hard to be heard, and (3) people don’t want to waste their time. So he figures that people are generally being pretty rational when they skip out on standing up for themselves.

Here’s how his site solves the problem. Say you love KFC, but you want them to treat their chickens a little better. You don’t want to boycott the place by yourself, which would certainly deprive you of that deep fried goodness without much chance of sending a strong message to KFC. So you head to ThePoint, sign in to the “Tough Love for KFC” campaign:

“KFC, your chicken is so tasty. Your biscuits are so buttery. Your colonel is so regal. You’re hard not to like. But maybe you could be just a little nicer to your animals?”

And you pledge to stop eating there if KFC doesn’t adopt the suggestions of their animal welfare board only if 1,000,000 join the movement.

Now you know you won’t be forgoing those tasty morsels for naught. You can assume your actions are sure to mean something when pooled with a million like-minded souls. So ThePoint allows you to be sure the conditions exist for your actions to be meaningful.

But this tool is not confined to social movements – you can use it to make anything happen that requires cooperation. For example, you can use it to organize your neighbors to build a new community garden, only if 1,000 of them pledge $10 each to pay for it. Pretty cool. PledgeBank, a UK-based site, provides a service that’s similar to ThePoint.

This whole people-powered online revolution thing seems to have caught on in the news this week as well. There’s an interesting article in the Guardian, “People power transforms the web in next online revolution.” Like Clay’s book, the article looks at how we are going to organize ourselves “without the trappings of traditional organizations.” It talks about flash mobs - when a group of people gathers somewhere to do something random together, like smile in October Square in Belarus. Flash mobs have affected elections in Spain, Philippines, and South Korea. In China, flash mobs are staging campaigns despite 54,000 cyber police, and it seems it will soon be impossible for even the most totalitarian governments to stop people from organizing. Update 4/16/08: Check out this story about a student twittering his way out of jail in Egypt! The article also discusses Wikipedia and other movements to make information openly accessible, including the Encyclopedia of Life (about all the Earth’s species) and the Public Library of Science, an open-access journal.

At MixedInk, we certainly plan to play our part in helping folks self-organize and harness their collective power. We just came up with an exciting idea that could make our democracy a little more people powered, which we submitted to the NetSquared Mashup Contest. It’s called Government by the people. You can help us win by voting for us! Anyone can register as a NetSquared user, making them eligible to vote - the contest is being decided, appropriately, by the people.

Update 4/16/08: Check out Seth Godin’s interesting article on the power of organizing.

In my last post, I described the vertical disaggregation process occurring within the news industry, wondering aloud (as is fashionable these days) what business model will support the news in the new media environment.

Actually, this question needs to be more precise. A better one is: Which business models will support which types of news generation processes – regardless of whether they happen in a newsroom or not? I believe that, in addition to vertical disaggregation, there will be a simultaneous process of horizontal disaggregation. That is, various types of news that have historically been created within a single company will end up within distinct entities, which are in turn supported by different revenue streams and cost structures.

The gurus of news 2.0 believe geographical scope will be a (if not the) major fault line along which content creation and aggregation are broken down, though hyperlocal journalism has had limited success so far. The national and regional news sites that already exist will be complemented by hyperlocal sites that tell you what’s going on in your neighborhood, on your block, or even in your apartment building. As it would be hard for a single neighborhood to generate enough advertising revenue to support paid reporters and editors, this type of hyperlocal site will only become possible through partial reliance on user-generated content, which the site obtains practically for free. A number of startups are already targeting this market.

But geographical breadth is just one of a number of social and technological fault lines along which horizontal disaggregation can occur. Any social or technological variation in the news content creation process could necessitate a different business model, and thus, be housed within a distinct entity.

Jeff Jarvis (CUNY professor of journalism and well known blogger) proposes separating the functions of newsgathering, editing, and analysis:

So maybe we need to disaggregate the newsroom yet further into its distinct and, we hope, marketable skills. Reporting and news-gathering (words, images, sound, video, data, investigation) may well be something that freelancers (professionals and amateurs) do. And editing — curating, vetting, enabling, educating, to cut up the task yet further — may find new value. Analysis may happen more and more in the commentsphere that the community has become.

This makes sense. But why stop there? Why not further divide the news generation process into its component steps? Conversely, will it make sense in some cases for news production processes remain unchanged? (Indeed, some magazines are thriving even as other print media declines.)

It will all depend on what type of news is being produced. Let’s consider five types of journalism. These are by no means exhaustive, or completely distinct from one another:

- Investigative journalism involving in–depth interviews, breaking news from private sources, or a high degree of technical expertise
- Crafting narratives from widely available, understood, and agreed-upon facts (e.g. sporting events, political events, market information, etc.)
- Opinion and analysis
- Hyperlocal news
- Collection and dissemination of raw data

These vary in the extent to which they can be crowdsourced, in citizens’ desire to participate in their production, in their need to be fact-checked, and in the degree of subjectivity involved in crafting narratives.

If we were to do an analysis of how much it costs to produce each category of journalistic text, either in per-article or per-word terms, I suspect we’d find huge variation, perhaps even an order of magnitude or more. We’d also find huge differences in revenue per unit, as some news is more viral, and some news inherently leads users to spend more money (which generates higher demand for advertising). In other words, it makes perfect sense that they would need separate business models!

These days, somewhat counterintuitively, news crowdsourcing experiments often create more work for the journalists who organize them – not less. Someone must generate internal support for the project, set up one or more technology platforms, encourage the community to participate, and/or monitor large numbers of contributions (the quality of which varies significantly). But eventually, as the technology improves, and as news sites institute permanent, flexible processes and deploy them with greater frequency and scale, these costs will shrink on a per-unit basis. Technology will selectively afford opportunities to crowdsource expensive components of the news creation process, thereby eliminating those costs from newsrooms. In this way, technology will magnify the differences in cost and revenue per unit between different types of news.

My prediction is that we’ll end up with multiple, distinct business models, each associated with different processes for gathering first- and second-hand information, crafting narratives, editing copy, fact-checking, etc. These processes may happen within a single company or within separate firms – I imagine there will be some examples of each. The point is that different types of news will become sustainable in different ways.

Intensive investigative journalism will probably always require a high level of professional journalism. The others, theoretically at least, could some day be largely crowdsourced, though the processes for crowdsourcing would likely vary significantly. A lot of data is already being collected by readers (polls, photos, comments, videos, etc.), though one might argue we have a long way to go in finding a structure that approaches traditional journalistic standards and fully exploits the value of this content.

Eventually, I think it will be possible to crowdsource a much larger share of journalism than we currently anticipate. MixedInk will be a socially and technologically different way to produce some types of news. It will enable motivated crowds of readers to assume responsibility for certain phases of the news generation process. Along with other technologies that facilitate crowdsourcing of content creation, it will help to cushion the fall of traditional media while producing a more democratic public sphere.

It’s important to acknowledge up front, though, that there won’t be a single solution to the news ‘crisis,’ but many distinct solutions. Journalism may be transformed almost beyond recognition, but I, for one, do not worry about its future. The demand for news is clearly not going anywhere. If anything, by providing pressure for change, the crisis is helping to avoid stagnation in our public discourse. It will result in a stronger news product that better engages and reflects the priorities of readers.