So now what?

Okay, the crowd's all here. The cause-wired came out for Barack Obama. They delivered. They're still hanging around, for the most part. So now what?

Is this crowd-force sustainable? Can it be turned into a perpetual vox populi for the soon-to-be Obama administration? Or, more significantly, can any crowd amassed via the Web for any purpose be persuaded to stick around as a cohesive group for a while? It's the question of the hour as nonprofit advocacy groups (and corporate America) look to evolve their as-yet-untested social media strategies to raise new money and court more supporters, Obama-style. Obama proved it's possible to build an effective viral marketing machine and an online mega-fundraising army for a cause. Can nonprofits apply some of those same strategies to, say, saving the whales?

Yes—and no, not yet. Even Obama's people are locked in a spirited debate over how to keep everyone engaged post-election. (According to Los Angeles Times reporters Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten, some Democratic Party insiders are pushing to make Obama's Internet operation part of the party apparatus, while deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand fears that pulling it into the DNC might alienate Obama's cause-wired following: many of Obama's Net faithful have not necessarily seen themselves as party devotees, and could easily flee if they felt that someone or some group was trying to co-opt or control them, insiders say. Click here to see that LA Times piece.)

Jeff Howe, the author of the book, Crowdsourcing, is asking the same questions. In an interview earlier today, Howe says that "building a community is really, really hard; maintaining a community is much, much harder." Sustainability of any crowd-sourced group, he says, depends on the ability of the cause—in this case, Obama's social media gurus—to keep engaging group members in ways that reassure them that they're truly having an impact. One has a much better chance of being able to influence a volunteer army of supporters via social media if the cause or candidate keeps winning ongoing victories. (There's a cause-and-effect momentum in a campaign primary season that's easy to exploit.) But when it comes to governing, that input-equals-results factor that feeds the self-organized might not be so easy to demonstrate and maintain—at least not in a system where change can often take months, if not years, to accomplish.

Perhaps, then, the Web is ushering us into a new era of hyper-incrementalism, a time when it will be more important than ever in social advocacy and politics, alike, to tout—if not to really start sweating—the small stuff. "You have to give the people in a crowd-sourced group lots of stuff to do, all the time, and they have to feel like they're genuinely having an affect...or they'll dissipate and move on," Howe says. "Communities form as long as they're needed or feel like they're having an affect day-to-day." It's a crowd-management challenge, at the very least. It used to be said that all politics is local. Now it's becoming even more important, in a digital world, to make it feel that way to potential supporters.

As a hopeful campaign blogger, Christopher Hass, recently wrote on MyBarackObama.com: "The tools here are your tools now—they always have been."

The promise of social media in politics and advocacy is empowerment, for better or worse. It's all about engagement. Social media make it easier to organize a group to make change. (See the four-day-old Jointheimpact.com, a flash-reaction to California's anti-gay Proposition 8.) Now let's see if social media can help to make the often more tedious, sticky business of democracy and compromise easier, too.

(Illustration: "Expectant Crowd" by Philip Atherton for iStock.com)

Peep Show

For cause-wired advocates this week, there’s been no missing the irony of China’s Olympic slogan, One World, One Dream. The aggressive push by China’s 30,000 cybercops to continuously monitor and control the information that citizen advocacy groups are able to send in and out of China is only boosting the perception of this year’s Olympics as a qualifying heat for one of the biggest contests of the coming decade—the battle between an expanding, cause-wired citizenry and governments around the globe who would block the free flow of information. (For a comprehensive overview of the battle, click here.)

Indeed, like the athletes competing for Gold in Beijing’s Water Cube, China's censors have wasted no time showing off their speed and muscle: their moves to censor Twitter, crack down on video-sharing sites (both YouTube and a Chinese version of it called 56.com), and make it hard (if not utterly impossible) to load some Web sites such as Human Rights Watch and Reporters sans Frontieres from inside the Foreign Press Center remain firmly (and predictably) intact as of today.

But what's happening this week in China, despite the widespread use of beefed-up, anti-censorship software by those would not be bowed, is more than simply an internationally-broadcast dust-up over who gets the last word (or the first online).

Internet censorship is on the rise in many countries, partly a reaction by nervous governments to the rapid and growing use of social media by citizen activists around the world. John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, says there has been a surge in the scale, scope, and sophistication of Internet filtering. In the past five years, he says, "we have gone from a couple of states doing state-mandated Net filtering to 25."

But there's another big reason for social-change advocates to pay attention to Net censorship. The issue isn't just about the type and number of Web sites accessible to Netizens at home and abroad. It's also about what a free flow of digital information enables people to do. Social media, unfettered, change the way people in society organize themselves to get things done. Such things as mobile phones, Twitter, video-sharing services, and social networking sites make it really easy for people to self-organize into groups from the ground up rather than to be organized by others from the top down.

New media expert Clay Shirky, the author of Here Comes Everybody, a new book on the impact of social media on society, says this Net-driven social revolution (with a small "r") won't be occurring at the expense of existing institutions (like governments or nonprofits, for example). But it could, he says, provide compelling alternatives that may, over time, weaken them considerably.

And that's mostly what's making officialdom from Beijing to Washington really nervous lately: this Web-enabled shape-shifting is already starting to happen. "Newly capable groups are assembling," Shirky puts it, "and they are working without the managerial imperative and outside the previous institutions and structures that bounded their effectiveness in the past." (Quick—remember that panel you missed at the last Net conference you attended about the waning influence of government? Odds are, they weren't talking about George Bush.)

For now, the information war has no definitive winners or losers: governments, as seen in China this week, are winning some rounds; citizen activists are wracking up other wins elsewhere, as in Burma during last fall's Myanmar revolt and again in May, after Cyclone Nargis. But Net activists fear that sooner or later, governments could get the upper hand—and they've been using China's Olympian censorship efforts to get everyone into the pool. (Amnesty International’s new Uncensor Web site named July 30 a Day of Protest against Net censorship in China. The Uncensor campaign is a joint fundraising effort with an Australian Facebook Cause group and organizers hope the partnership will last well beyond the Olympics.)

Not sure you're ready to jump in yet? Go ahead. Re-read your mission statement. Take it global. Welcome to the war.

(Illustration: Copyright2008 by Cathy Gendron for theispot.com)

The New Watchdogs

I’m sitting in a movie theater just outside Washington that is jammed with cause advocates, filmmakers, philanthropists, and nonprofit leaders. It’s the second day of SilverDOCS, one of the nation's top documentary film conferences, and attendees are buzzing about the transformative power of digital storytelling to engage audiences and create social change locally and globally. This is an edgy, influential crowd: 108 long and short documentaries from 64 countries are being screened here this week; most were made to expose global social ills.

I’m thinking about Tom Bettag—a lot. In May 2001, some four months before 9/11—a day the world got smaller—Bettag, then the executive producer of ABC's Nightline, invited me to attend a conference at Columbia University. Ironically, he and other top journalists were meeting to explore how new digital video technologies—then just emerging—could be used to fight moves by network cost-cutters to slash foreign news budgets and close overseas news bureaus.

Bettag did not hide his frustration. "They (TV executives) say Americans don’t care much about foreign news but that’s a canard put out by the accountants," he told those gathered at Columbia. Presciently, Bettag knew the digital video revolution would make foreign news-gathering far less costly and give more power to those in the field. Why not move immediately, then, to proliferate the technology and give Americans a more authentic, urgent knowledge of the world?

Fast-forward seven years. Much has changed—and hasn't. Digital video documentaries—"cause news docs"—are the hot new medium of the moment. News budgets are still under assault.

Bettag's 2001 activism came to mind this morning, when Michael Markarian, the executive vice president of The Humane Society of the United States and author of a blog called Animals and Politics, spoke on a SilverDOCS panel about the erosion of traditional news gathering, this time by newspapers. “Big cuts in news journalism staff, in funding for investigative journalism and the rapid decline of newspapers is affecting advocacy and is having an impact on documentary filmmakers, as well,” Markarian said.

Markarian knows this well. One of today's "cause-news docs" producers, Markarian in January famously drummed up more than a half-million hits to the Humane Society's fundraising Web site after posting a digital video investigation by his staff that reported the abuse of downed cattle at a California slaughterhouse. In the video, Humane Society executives said the poking, prodding, and forklifting of sick and downed cows there endangered food safety in school lunchrooms across America. CNN and The Associated Press picked up the humane society's story, pretty much unquestioned, and it led to the recall of 145 million pounds of ground beef, the temporary removal of beef from many school lunch menus, and eight congressional hearings exploring the possibility of a link between animal cruelty and food safety. The story also helped the Humane Society raise millions of dollars in new and expanded donations.

“Obviously,” Markarian said, “the news media is changing but the issues remain—so it’s falling more and more to advocacy groups to investigate and uncover what’s happening and play the role of the watchdog in society, which the media are playing less and less.”

Maybe so. Hooray for a concerned, enlivened citizenry. But is this new "cause-news docs" movement entirely a good thing? When does advocacy become propaganda?

Seven years ago, Bettag and other journalists worried about whether the American public was getting enough information. Now—with nonprofits and philanthropists increasingly using digital video technologies to create their own news stories on social issues near and dear to their hearts—there’s a question of whether the public is getting enough of the right information.

Markarian's story, for example, did not include interviews with outside experts, independent food safety officials, meatpacking officials, slaughterhouse managers, or government regulators. It did not investigate the source of the problem nor prove that the abuse had, in fact, tainted the public food supply. (The slaughterhouse, for example, when finally questioned much later, said the cows in question were never processed into food and that forklifts were required to move them, since they couldn't walk or stand by themselves.) Further, the only people quoted in the Humane Society video were employees of the Humane Society, convinced that what was happening at the slaughterhouse was abuse and that the abuse was threatening the health of millions. (see video clip, below)

Appropriately, one SilverDOCS panel was entitled “Is it Propaganda? Using Media as a Tool for Social Change.” Markarian was there. So was Sameer Padania, the director of The Hub, a Web site that debuted in December that offers video training to citizen news documentarians. The Hub is part of the nonprofit Witness, which gives people digital video cameras so they can document human rights abuses around the world. Padania says that ideally, The Hub “will be a platform eventually for citizens, filmmakers, and news organizations to pull together.” Its motto: See it. Film it. Change it.

To be sure, this is a critical, exciting time for filmmakers and journalists—one filled with tremendous opportunity. But even some of the new citizen journalists are starting to question the rise of partisan media. Ethan Zuckerman, the cofounder of Global Voices Online, a new international news site that aggregates news blogs from around the world, asked recently: “Should we expect that people are aware that media has changed and that they should expect every voice to have strong, visible bias? Or is there a need to re-learn how to read/view both online and offline media to understand that we’ve got far more activist media and far less neutrality?”

Back in 2001, Bettag (now the top documentary film producer for the Discovery Channel, a cosponsor of the SilverDOCS festival) and Parisa Khosravi, CNN's chief of international news gathering, warned that the digital storytelling movement would bring with it a critical need to guard against staged news events, misleading and one-sided reporting, inaccurate assertions and lack of context. “It’s going to take some people who have great journalistic voices who know how to tell a story extremely well” to do it properly, Bettag had said. “There are going to be a lot of people who are going to do it irresponsibly, and they will make people hesistant.”

The Humane Society's Markarian, today defending his efforts and those of other nonprofits to break news, says he's confident that viewers "know propaganda when they see it."

But do they? If propaganda is really good, it feels like fact. Let’s hope that citizen media activists of all stripes keep trying, at least, to recognize the difference.

To view the Humane Society's digital video investigation, click on the screen below: