RDVP Seminar: Zack Rosen, Civic Spaces (3/9/2005)

A lingering event from before spring break that I didn't yet post notes for... On March 9th, Zack Rosen from Civic Space came to speak about this content management system for community organization. Zack talked a bit about his background (interest in technology and society pursuing a degree at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign), as well as his experience in working on the Howard Dean political campaign. He was proud of what he called the innovation of the Dean campaign: opening the doors to anyone. But although the "Meetup" system brought Dean supporters together, it didn't provide the direction needed to have an impact on the election. The role of the campaign was not to direct a master plan, but to facilitate the grass roots discussions and plans.

Zack started with the "Hack for Dean" effort, focused on open source grass roots organizing tools. Starting with Drupal, and expanding it to a network of communities that could talk to each other. Zack cited Reed's law: The number of (potential) groups within a network grows exponential with the number of members of the network. So their focus became to form, build, network groups, share content, profiles and events across sites. By doing that, Dean was able to raise $15M in one fundraising cycle, compared to Clinton, who, as an incumbent, had raised $10M.

With the end of the Dean campaign, they attracted funding from Andy Rappaport and are now an independent non-profit organization with 6 full time people. They're refining their business plan ("a community organiaing platform that works with others to service verticals (like schools, churches, civic organizations) and sells services to vendors"). In March, there were 150 organizations using it. Now there are 187 (see current list of known sites).

In spite of the failure in the ballot box, Zack felt the Meetup idea was a success: it went against the mores of the time separating the virtual world from the real one. Zack saw it as one of the signs of increased political power of the online world, and pointed to South Korea's Oh My News (English Version) where users submit the content, and it is selected for inclusion by an editor. It is, he said, the news medium with the broadest reach in South Korea, and its political endorsements helped candidates win the presidency and congressial elections. Zack mentioned the project that Dan Gillmor is starting in the area of citizen journalism.

Mans, acting partially with his Reuters' hat on, warned against the danger when people start debating facts, rather than keeping an objective reporting, and confining advocacy views to an editorial page. Zack responded: "We're already there. They lied and they won."

And so as not to end on that grim note, Zack pointed out that there was a large market for these services: some $100M annually, currently being fulfilled by companies like GetActive and Kintera.