Algorithms of Fear

Each week, it seems, brings some new incendiary rhetoric in our presidential election cycle or some new global political disruption emerging from the overlapping social, economic, technological, and environmental systems that govern our lives. Each disruption seems to shock us; and the most severe of them become political milestones, referred to across our digital networks in a kind of digital shorthand: Zika, Trump's wall, Ferguson, Flint. And now, of course, there's Orlando.

Yet despite all of the displays of solidarity and outrage that digitally trail each new disruption or debate, civic technologists are becoming convinced they need to do much more, much faster, to help make the Internet a greater force for civility, resiliency, and broader civic engagement.

One big reason for that, say many civic technologists, is Donald Trump and his high-boil candidacy for the White House. Another reason is that we now live in a world run by algorithms—computer programs that make decisions or solve problems for us. They decide our credit scores; they determine stock prices and even the movies we watch. And especially in this Trump-driven presidential election cycle, say civic technologists, media companies are using content algorithms to drive readers to a lot of highly emotional content that is triggering human behaviors meant to accentuate our differences and stoke our fears—in part, to better hold our attention; people tend to share more content if it makes them afraid or angry, they say.

The trouble is, fear is the most powerful enemy of reason in a democratic society, says Micah Sifry, co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum (PDF), an annual conference that follows how the Internet is influencing politics, governance, and advocacy. "We should be helping those online learn how to navigate their differences other than driving them into daily or hourly flame wars," he said at the annual PDF gathering in New York over the weekend. Sifry believes it's time to create new algorithms and data tools to help find new ways "to ease polarization when there are differences" online.

"The issue of how technology is now affecting our awareness and our responses to triggers in the news, or our personal triggers, and what that is doing to our politics, is a really critical issue right now," Sifry said in an interview. "Digital media that we were all celebrating a few years ago as being better, more social, more personal, and more decentralized than the old broadcast media are now being re-centralized through channels designed by giant companies like Facebook and Google." Bots that have the effect of accentuating our differences online might be good for the media business, Sifry says, "but they're not so great for democracy."

Wael Ghonim, the Egyptian activist and former Google executive who helped to catalyze the 2011 Tahrir Square pro-democracy demonstrations in Egypt, says US social media companies are using what he calls "mobocratic algorithms" that give us a "missing middle" between the extremes of "likes" and "comments"—which Ghonim says tend to quickly devolve into flame wars on social and digital media platforms. In an interview, Ghonim said, "We who use the Internet now 'like' or we flame—but there's [very little] now happening [algorithmically] to drive people into the more consensus-based, productive discussion we need to have, to help us make civic progress. Productive discussions aren't getting the [media] distribution they deserve. We're not driving people to content that could help us, as a society ... come together without a flame war."

danah boyd, another PDF speaker and social media scholar, said another problem with today's content algorithms supports concerns about fear-mongering. Many content algorithms, she said, also carry data sets "rife with racial bias, and if you're not fixing that, you are building racist systems."

Hossein Derakhshan, an Iranian-Canadian blogger imprisoned in Tehran from November 2008 to November 2014 and the author of the essay, "The Web We Have to Save," says Internet technologists need to "re-imagine new algorithms with new kinds of social values, such as diversity and equality." Can it happen? Derakhshan says yes. "DJs do this all the time," he said. "Their selections are not based on what's new and what's popular. They play old tracks we all loved in the past, and they surprise us with great stuff we would never have listened to otherwise. Maybe it's time for states to intervene and push big social networks to open up their algorithms, and to allow third-party developers to create different kinds of algorithms as plug-ins. What we need now, more than ever, is ... to be surprised."

One of the biggest challenges facing civic technologists today, Sifry says, is a lack of enough funding to build someof the tools needed to "feed us into consensus and conflict resolution," rather than "merely feed our own echo chamber of somebody's flame war." There is also a kind of "disruption fatigue" setting in among some civic activists, Sifry says. "The danger is that we're not building new systems and tools fast enough." The danger, he says, is that "people might eventually give up the notion of having a democratic debate (online) and ... will start saying they've had enough: 'Give me a strongman who will solve it for me' or ...'I'm tired of this disruption for social good.'" To help civil society create better tools faster, Sifry and his PDF co-founder, Andrew Rasiej, used their conference to launch Civic Hall Labs, a new nonprofit that aims to build technology for the public good through a collaborative, multi-disciplinary approach.

Ghonim is optimistic and happy for the wake-up call issued at the conference—to build the tools we need to promote a more respectful public discourse. He agrees that building a more democratic, civil space online won't be easy, but believes it's technically doable. "You can build algorithms and experiences that are designed to get the best out of people, and you can build algorithms and experiences that drive out the worst. It's our job as civic technologists to build experiences that drive th ebest. We can do that. We must do that now."

—By Marcia Stepanek

(This article originally ran in the Stanford Social Innovation Review and is being reprinted here with permission.)

Speed as Strategy

Social media scholar Clay Shirky likes to tell the story of Russia's Voina street-art activists and the June night in 2010, when some of its members painted a drawbridge leading to the Bolshoy Dom, the former headquarters of the KGB and Soviet secret police in St. Petersburg, where Russian President Vladimir Putin would be arriving the next morning. To passersby, what they had painted wasn't immediately clear —until the drawbridge was raised slowly the next morning, revealing a giant phallus rising skyward in full glory at precisely the time Putin pulled up in his motorcade.

Fast forward almost six years, to this past Thursday, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation released an article detailing 65 things the public did not know about NSA surveillance at this same time last year. EFF had been working on the analysis for weeks, based on a year of reporting on NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's revelations of mass NSA surveillance of U.S. citizens. The EFF's article was released to mark the first anniversary of the Snowden leaks—as well as EFF's 25th anniversary.

Both Voina's overnight street provocations and EFF's months of reporting are examples of cause activism—but occurring at two vastly different speeds. "Voina's drawbridge stunt occurred in the Internet's native time signature of right now," Shirky said, in remarks at this week's meeting of the annual Personal Democracy Forum in New York. "EFF's occurred in the institutional time signature of a quarter of a century."

Causes need activism at both speeds to thrive and survive, Shirky says. "As online cause communities grow and mature, it's tempting to think we should move the time signatures we operate at from the short-term to the long term, away from quick actions to longer ones. But I think that's wrong. I think what we should do is expand the window of the time signatures in which we can operate because things work better when (the two speeds) can be made to work in tandem."

Just don't underestimate the strategic power of short-term actions, Shirky cautioned. Slacktivism works, he said.

"We've been hearing for some time now that slacktivism is ridiculous, stupid and, 'How can you think that would work, right?'" Shirky said. "But if (slacktivism) never worked, Brendan Eich would still have a job," Shirky added, referring to the former CEO of Mozilla who was pressured into resigning earlier this year following an online protest of his support earlier this year for taking away the right of same sex couples to marry in California. The online campaign to oust Eich, Shirky said, "was a pure slacktivist movement. It was an entirely virtual uprising and it was about public humiliation, and yet it worked."

Slacktivism also works, Shirky said—even when short-term defeat is absolutely assured. "Putin is still very much in control of Russia," Shirky said. "But Voina's action and a thousand other public manifestations of one sort or another robbed incumbents there of their ability to insist that the seeming consensus of the Russian public is real. That (short-term) activity, even if it doesn't lead to revolution, is incrementally achieved."

The takeaway here? If you're a cause organization, don't ask which speed is best, but rather consider how the organization can operate better at both speeds.  "If you're an institution, ask yourself what would happen if something on your issue forced you to react overnight, what could you do? Could you only issue a press release or could you also paint a bridge if you had to?" Shirky asked PDFers. "Or, if you're part of a ragtag group fighting for net neutrality and you know you're up against a September 10th deadline, ask yourself what you might do differently if you knew you'd be having that same fight over and over and over again over the next five years."

"And if you're going to pull a stunt, ask yourselves what residue of human connection and trust will it leave," Shirky added. "When people turned out in Tahrir Square, the social media that turned out to matter the most was that which fed the physical occupation of the Square. It wasn't Facebook or Twitter. Those were good for broadcasting things internationally and nationally. The social media that mattered most was SMS. The biggest social media predictor of physical presence in Tahrir Square was whether your name was in the address book of the phone of someone already in the Square."

"Stunts don't leave that residue of trust. They don't introduce people to each other.  If you're building an institution, ask yourself of all long-term thinking: 'What if we had to surprise the world tomorrow? What would we do?' Because you might have to, "Shirky said.

"I think we cannot forget the lessons of complex movements like the Arab Spring and like Occupy Wall Street, which is that the various time signatures work better together," Shirky said. "Shorter-term is good for surprises but it is lousy for continuity and capacity-building. Long-term is great for continuity but lousy for surprises.  ...We need to start thinking of time itself as a strategic weapon."

-- Marcia Stepanek

[Photography: Bowie15]

Slacktivism Works

Go ahead. Call online activism slacktivism. Just stop underestimating the impact of small actions such as Facebook likes, status updates or re-tweets for social change. New social research shows this micro-messaging can have a powerful emotional and psychological impact on the recipients of these messages—and, over time, can be key to the success and staying power of social movements.

"We know that these small actions online—anything that takes a few minutes to complete, like a status update or a comment to share, or a re-tweet—are things that many people do just to get attention," says social scholar An Xiao Mina. "But what we're just beginning to understand is how important these small actions are to individuals on the receiving end of these messages." Micro-actions and affirmations can tell people, "We see you, we love you, we care that you are there," An told the annual gathering of the Personal Democracy Forum (#PDF14) meeting today in New York. "Over time, these micro-affirmations can have a cumulative effect. They can create visibility. They can provide emotional uplift for people facing trauma. Creating a cycle of these micro-affirmations," she said, can create the "emotional fuel" that social movements need to launch and to survive.

Consider Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei, who "was just getting his feet wet with Twitter" in 2010, An said. Ai, who expresses himself and organizes people through art and social media, would start tweeting each day by saying 'Good morning' to his followers. "This would happen dozens of times," An said, "perhaps even hundreds of times, every day, when people would say "Good morning" back to him. And then he would re-tweet all of the 'Good mornings' he got from his followers. In the evenings, he would also say 'Good night' and with that, he might also give a weather update. And again, he'd re-tweet the replies, and his followers would re-tweet his replies each other, across the community. It was a way for Ai to make sure that the conversation was not just between him and his 60,000 followers, but that his 60,000 followers saw each other."

In this way, An said, Ai made the Chinese Twitter community visible—to itself and to others. Before, it had been in hiding. "This visibility," An said, "jumped geographic boundaries. People could now participate at any time of day throughout China and throughout the Chinese diaspora. He showed people they were not alone in their interest in Ai Weiwei and his work."

And that's not all. About a year later, An said, when Ai was disappeared by the Chinese government, many of these same people from this same community spoke out for him and helped to keep him visible.  [See Free Ai Weiwei, an information hub that continues to serve as a source for news about the artist and his work.]

In Uganda, micro-actions via social media also have proven to be powerful. An cited that country's Kuchu movement, a fledgling gay-rights movement which has found organizing strength and sustainability in Twitter hashtag communities, where Kuchu members share the struggles of Uganda's LGBT community—and recruit new followers. Members, An said, have come to rely on Twitter and texting to stave off isolation and to provide the emotional uplift they need to endure media and government harassment. "Twitter is not tangential to the work of human rights in Uganda," An said. "It is essential to it, especially in the face of major human rights violations."

"...Hashtag memes make people feel better about who they are and give them strength and a voice as they continue their work," An said.

Emily Parker, author of the new book, Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices from the Internet Underground, says the emotional strength and connection that activists can find online continues to make social media "a serious threat" to authoritarian regimes—despite some governments' efforts to quash the use of social media or use it as a tool for surveillance and oppression.

Parker, also a speaker at #PDF14, said the Internet provides ordinary people with an alternative to isolation, fear, or apathy—the very things authoritarian regimes depend upon to stay in power. "Now, in large part because of the Internet, ordinary people are overcoming their paralysis, and discovering they're not alone," Parker said. "For a dissident in China, or Cuba, or Russia, this can be a life-changing experience."

And perhaps most importantly, Parker says, social media can make activism convenient for apathetic people who might otherwise do nothing.

Consider Russia, she said. As recently as a few years ago, there was no serious Internet censorship in Russia. "The Kremlin didn't need to censor the Web because the Web wasn't a serious threat to its power," Parker said "Russia was plagued by its apathy. Most Russians believed they had no power at all to change or to influence their political process." People were afraid of being arrested in protests and figured the protests wouldn't change anything, so they stayed home.

Then along came a Russian commercial lawyer who began blogging against corporate and government corruption and started using his blog to launch campaigns against specific corporations he suspected of corruption. "He understood early on that he was trying to get a weary, cynical population to rally for change," Parker said. "He told me in 2010, 'You have to propose to people the comfortable way to struggle.' In other words, this was not the time to haul Russians into the streets. It would be far more practical, he said, to just say please, just fill out this online form. And so that's what he did. Encouraging lazy, non-committal Internet activism—which many of us derisively refer to as 'slacktivism'—was all part of his master plan. He wanted to show Russians that they can fight corruption from the convenience of their living rooms, and that they could win."

Parker said this lone blogger's repeated calls to readers to write to authorities and demand they investigate alleged corruption eventually led to the annulment of suspicious government contracts worth millions of dollars. "He waged years of these online campaigns," Parker said, "and sometimes he got results. Maybe an official would resign, maybe just a pothole would be fixed. But most importantly, he showed ordinary Russians that they can make a difference and in the process, took a powerful swipe at the apathy that had become the Kremlin's best protection."

Says Parker: "Of course, a Facebook 'like' is not the same thing as on-the-ground participation. But seeing tens of thousands of people expressing virtual protest can have a powerful psychological and emotional effect."

"I'm not going to downplay governments' oppression of the Web," she added, "but what's important to see is that the Internet is helping to create a new kind of citizen. They're networked, unafraid and ready for action. Social media is helping them to overcome the isolation, fear and apathy that are the lifeblood of authoritarian regimes."

PDF14 runs through today. Watch this space for further highlights.

-- Marcia Stepanek

Stealth-wear

Suddenly, privacy is becoming fashionable again—literally.

Adam Harvey, a Brooklyn photographer and computer software and hardware specialist—whose most recent work explores the impact of surveillance technologies on society—unveiled samples of his new Stealthwear clothing line at today's annual Personal Democracy Forum in New York. The centerpiece of the collection is an anti-drone Burka that uses metallized fabric to reduce one's thermal signature from aerial heat-seeking probes.

"People are more aware today of how they can be tracked and so are interested in learning how they can protect their privacy," said Harvey, who last year opened the Privacy Gift Shop, a pop up store and collaboration with New York's New Museum. Harvey also is working to build a community of artists, designers and hackers and connect them into an online marketplace for counter-surveillance art and privacy products. "People who understand the strategies and technologies being used to track them have a better chance of doing something about it," he says.

Harvey's ultimate goal? "To inspire people to engage with privacy," he told PDF attendees today. One of Harvey's most recent products is the Off Pocket, a phone pouch that uses special metal fabric to shield mobile phones from cellular, wireless and GPS signals.

But that's not all. Since 2010, Harvey has been exploring how fashion can be used as camouflage against facial recognition technology, which the NSA is using as part of its post 9/11 surveillance net. According to 2011 documents obtained from whistleblower Edward Snowden, the NSA intercepts "millions of facial images per day." Harvey says that "once computer vision programs detect a face, they can extract data about your emotions, age, and identity."

Harvey has formed a research project called CV Dazzle, which grew out of his 2010 master's thesis at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. Harvey says he derived the name, Dazzle, from a type of naval camouflage used by the United States Navy in World War I. It  used cubist-inspired designs to break apart the visual continuity of a battleship in order to conceal its orientation and size. Harvey says his Stealthwear is based on the same principle, with the goal of interrupting the visual continuity of one's appearance for the sake of "jumbling" what spyware is intended to see.

"Fashion is about staying one season ahead of the latest trends, and counter-surveillance is about staying one season ahead of the latest surveillance algorithms," Harvey told PDF attendees. "Both rely on models of deception, but surveillance thrives on conformity and fashion thrives on the unique, which can make surveillance difficult."

For more information about Harvey, check out his "Style Tips for Reclaiming Privacy, on his site, here.

-- Marcia Stepanek

[Photography, top: Courtesy CVDazzle, part of Adam Harvey's anti-surveillance facial recognition line, developed to reduce what is scannable by surveillance machines. Photo, bottom: Twitter photo by @climatebrad of Harvey with some visuals of his anti-surveillance wearables.] 

Snowden Urges Privacy Fight

The NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden today—on the one-year anniversary of the first published surveillance leak from his revelations—urged those attending the annual Personal Democracy Forum in Manhattan to "take back their privacy with technology."

Appearing via Google Hangouts from Russia in a conversation moderated from the PDF stage by Electronic Frontier Foundation cofounder John Perry Barlow, Snowden said "we're seeing a growing appetite for surveillance control among government institutions and it is something we're not just seeing locally, but around the world." A year ago, Snowden said, "none of us really had the full picture" about how far the government had gone to track citizen cellphone calls as well as facial images across the social sphere. Today? "Public interest in privacy has grown," Snowden says. People are worried about their privacy again. "Our government has created programs that are watching not just everybody in America, but also everybody in the world."

The good news? Snowden says Netizens don't have to rely on governments to protect their privacy rights anymore. "We're past the point where citizens are entirely dependent on governments to defend our rights," he said. "We don't have to ask. We can take back our privacy with technology."

Snowden endorsed the Reset the Net campaign, officially launched from the PDF stage earlier today, which calls on tech companies and citizens to work harder to strengthen privacy rights online and "shut off the lights to government surveillance" by popularizing anti-snooping technology. The campaign, backed by a nonprofit called Fight for the Future—the group behind last year's successful Stop SOPA initiative—urges major websites like Google, Tumblr, Wordpress, Twitter, Dropbox, Tumblr and others to promote consumer encryption tools that would make it harder and more expensive for the NSA to snoop indiscriminately on American citizens. The campaign also is working to drive more Web traffic to a coalition of personal encryption companies like Text Secure, ChatSecure, RedPhone and others. "Today, we can begin the work of effectively shutting down the collection of our online communications, even if the U.S. Congress fails to do the same," Snowden said. "The first effective step that everyone can take to end mass surveillance is to adopt encryption."

One of the nation's top encryption experts, Bruce Schneier, addressing PDFers just before Snowden, said fighting back also will require legal firepower and a more strident, pro-privacy mindset among public advocates of greater privacy. "Fighting back is going to be, primarily, a legal battle and we (who oppose government spying) are not going to win this unless we also win the social battle"—meaning the fight for more citizens' hearts and minds, Schneier said.

"The drivers of all of this surveillance and control," said Schneier, "are fear and convenience—if you're the U.S., it's the fear of terrorism, and if you're China, it's fear of citizens rebelling—and convenience, of all of these products and services we consumers have at our fingertips. As long as people on the street are scared [about security threats] and want free stuff," Snowden added, "we are not going to do better here. We've got to fix these things."

Both Schneier and Snowden called on netizens to get more political, and Barlow suggested people also need to exhibit more courage. [Barlow used the PDF stage to announce the launch of the Courage Foundation, a fund amassed to support Snowden's legal defense.] But Snowden insisted he didn't do anything that anyone in the audience wouldn't have done themselves, were they in his position, knowing what he knew at the time. "I'm no hero," he said. "...We all have the ability as citizens to act."

"When I look over the last year," Snowden added, "I had to give up a lot to do what I did, and my biggest fear was that nobody would care or talk about this. But people in this room today show me how wrong I was. The fact that we are talking about this here, today, means we will get a better, more accountable government. All I did was return information to public hands that should have never been turned over in the first place."

PDF14 continues through Friday afternoon. Watch this space for updates.

— Marcia Stepanek

[Twitter photo, top, by CauseGlobal]

Feminism 2.0

Hashtag activism — Twitter campaigns to affect fast change or raise public awareness in a heartbeat — is gaining frequency, and is becoming an especially potent tool for networked feminists to shed new light on everyday misogyny.

Consider the trending hashtag #YesAllWomen, created just after Memorial Day Weekend, when details began emerging that Isla Vista mass-shooter Elliot Rodger  was driven by sexual hatred and misogyny to take the lives of six people in Santa Barbara. First to Twitter was the hashtag conversation, #NotAllMen, started by some to convey that not all men feel similar anger and resentment towards women. Then, #YesAllWomen emerged as a counter-narrative, asserting that while not all men are predators, most women are culturally conditioned to fear male violence. When that conversation began to trend internationally, amassing more than 2.5 million participants at its peak, some feminist activists were inspired to create the Tumblr, "When Women Refuse." Its intent, says co-creator Deanna Zandt, is to collect news stories from around the world about violence committed against women who refuse male advances. "I'm hoping to use this site as a tapestry that we can weave together to demonstrate what's happening in our culture, (to show) that these are not isolated incidents," Zandt says.

In an NPR interview that aired today, Zandt—a media technologist and author of "Share This! How You Will Change the World With Social Networking"—talked with On The Media Host Brooke Gladstone about the power of Twitter and other forms of social media to amplify issues.  "Hashtags are digital consciousness-raising," Zandt said. "...These conversations are a mirror of what's actually happening in our culture, when we have free and open spaces in which to have these conversations. ...The power of digital tools to shift the cultural consciousness is incredible at this moment, if we use these tools wisely."

The #YesAllWomen outcry on Twitter underscores the growing power of loosely organized feminist networks that are gaining influence across social media platforms.

What follows is an abridged transcript of the NPR interview. [The full segment can be heard here.]

NPR: Does it take a hashtag to start this kind of conversation? And then, what do you expect it to achieve?

ZANDT: A hashtag is not required but it is often super useful, often in the same way that "Yes We Can" and "Si se puede" became rallying cries for a movement. Hashtags are doing the same thing in the digital space. And what I see is that this is happening whenever we have these extremely emotional moments that are very traumatic for a lot of people. Most people, before they come to a conversation, they feel isolated.  They feel like they're the only ones that this happened to.  So when they start sharing their stories with one another, they realize, 'I'm not crazy for feeling this way. I'm not crazy for feeling scared in this situation.' It's very much like digital consciousness-raising. Consciousness-raising of the second wave of feminism was such a huge part of the movement, and connecting women together and people together to share their stories of systemic problems and make systemic change.

NPR: Someday, this hashtag #YesAllWomen will stop trending. And so what happens then?

ZANDT: There's a lot of discussion right now around the lifespan and the lifecycle of a hashtag. I find them very useful as in-the-moment tools. These hashtags will live on until someone deletes them. They will become an archive and a reference point, a point for journalists to dig into stories, as other related stories come up. It doesn't have to be a platform at any given moment.

NPR: After Sandy Hook, there was such a strong movement and a strong possibility that there would be some substantive gun control. It never happened. I know it's a rich lobby, the NRA, but it would seem that it would take decades for a change in the culture that you're pointing out in the Tumblr.  

ZANDT: I don't actually think that it has to take decades. You know, we look at something like street harassment. Emily May started HollaBack!, to stop street harassment, 10 years ago. And many people said, what? Cat-calling? Why is that dangerous? Why is that bad? And some people still, obviously, say that. But the headway that they've been able to make as a movement around the world has been incredible for people to stand up and say, 'Wait a minute. No. That does feel bad and dangerous when that happens to me on the street.' And that's only been less than a decade. So again, the power of digital tools to really shift a cultural consciousness is incredible at this moment—if we use the tools wisely.

NPR: What's the biggest impediment?

ZANDT: Apathy. People feeling apathetic because they've never felt like they've been able to move a needle before. And I think these are some of the differences that we're seeing when people are contributing to these social media moments. This is, often times, their first experience with contributing to some sort of social change. And they see what happens when it goes from their Twitter stream to their local news station or to a mainstream cable news station, or something on the radio."

-- Marcia Stepanek

(PHOTO, top: A selfie of the participants in an April 28th panel talk about networked feminism, a part of NYU's #WOMENIMPACT conference organized by CauseGlobal. Panelists included, from left to right: Jamil Smith, a producer of The Melissa Harris-Perry Show on msnbc; Penny Abeywardena, head of women and girls issues at the Clinton Global Initiative; Tom Watson, a Forbes contributor and co-faculty at NYU; Deanna Zandt, and author Allison Fine in the foreground.) 

Turning the Outside In

The continuing disclosures about National Security Agency (NSA) leaks are either totally unsurprising, or the stuff of shock and outrage. Spying on friendly governments and their citizens? Tell us something new, right? Still, many ordinary people around the world are genuinely alarmed. Each new Snowden leak—mostly recently, that the NSA has broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world to collect data from hundreds of millions of user accounts—is either earth-shattering news, or simply confirms what many already knew or suspected.

Wikileaks triggered similar debates: What did we already know? What should we have known? Who should have known it?

It's true that spying by governments—including spying on their own citizens, enemies, allies, and frenemies—is not new. It’s even expected, post 9/11, and comes as no surprise to government insiders. But the vast scale of NSA spying, enabled by our nation’s shift to a high-velocity digital infrastructure, is novel. Millions of ordinary people suddenly have detailed knowledge that only insiders previously had. Their shock at the extent of the spying is real and consequential.

But focusing on who-knew-what-when misses the real significance of the ongoing Snowden leaks. Civil libertarians and digital freedom activists assert that the issue is less about whether governments spy on each other and their citizens, and far more about how our massive, digital infrastructure is rapidly eroding our long-standing and accepted boundaries between society’s insiders (those “in the know”) and those who know far less—insider-outsider boundaries that diplomacy, good governance, and politics have relied on for centuries.

Suddenly, those who were once exclusively privy to the inner-most secrets of our government are not the only insiders anymore. “Our digital tools have empowered dissenting insiders and are emboldening them to shine a light on all sorts of shadows previously left uninvestigated,” says sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, “ensuring there will always be dissenting insiders if an action is controversial or if oversight is weak.” There will be more Edward Snowdens, she asserts, because leaking is not only getting easier, it’s becoming more expected, if not more respectable. Public polling data continues to reflect rising support for Snowden’s whistle-blowing.

And the blurring of lines between who’s inside and out is happening everywhere. According to digital researcher danah boyd, it’s why teens are leaving Facebook in droves; they’re spooked by their parents’ ability to interrupt their insider postings with embarrassingly jarring, off-topic commentary or “reminders to bring a sweater.” It’s why institutions are finding that the internal communications they meant for a few insiders are suddenly exposed to the world. Consider last year’s high-profile leak by a dissenting insider at the Komen Foundation, disclosing the breast cancer nonprofit’s plans to defund Planned Parenthood under political pressure from GOP opponents. The leak, which Komen’s leaders refused to address for days amid supporter uproar, spread like wildfire through social media networks, and cost the organization thousands of supporters and millions of dollars in lost or cancelled contributions—the organization has never fully recovered.

The eroding insider-outsider boundaries fostered by our expanding digital infrastructure are also upsetting political strategists. This past weekend’s progressive Stop Watching Us rally against NSA spying began as a progressive anti-NSA rally, but Libertarian groups insisting that they should be included just days prior to the event crashed it. The resulting “joined-hands” dissent against government excess triggered a controversial, pre-rally blog post by writer Tom Watson, who urged some of the biggest names in civil liberties and digital freedom of information to stay home rather than march with political outsiders: “[Progressive] organizers trade their own good names and reputations to stand alongside—and convey legitimacy to—a [Libertarian Party] that opposes communitarian participation in liberal society and rejects the very role of government itself.” Critics of Watson’s column accused him of working against political compromise. Supporters, though, suggested that the Libertarians were intentionally crashing a political party not meant for them but unavoidably open, thanks to the digital political infrastructure that makes insider strategy secrets—and organized surprise—ever-harder to handle on all levels. (An informal data survey of marchers revealed that crashers mixed in with political compromisers from all sides of the political spectrum.)

Information will always be power, but now more people have it—and increasingly, they’re not always the “right” people, depending on who is drawing the lines. Our 21st-century governance and leadership can no longer depend on old, established norms about what constitutes “proper” levels of public knowledge and who gets to know more. Security clearances? No longer are those at the top of the leadership pyramid that can control access—nor the conversation.

What really makes the Snowden leaks so provocative—and, frankly, so unsettling to so many—has less to do with Edward Snowden and much more to do with the power of our digital tools to flip who’s out and who’s in—across society.

“The outsiders are peeking in and moving in, and they are here to stay,” says Tufekci. That is the big story to watch. Each new Snowden leak is just another wake-up call about how profoundly our digital tools are redefining the balance of power, big and small.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration by Elisabetta Stoinich; reprinted with permission from the Stanford Social Innovation Review) 

#StopWatchingUs

Last updated at 9pm EST

Thousands of people marched on the streets of Washington, D.C., today to protest the National Security Agency's post-9/11 national security apparatus, in a public demonstration they called The Rally Against Mass Surveillance. The crowd, representing an online and offline coalition of more than 100 public advocacy groups from across the political spectrum known as Stop Watching Us, demanded an end to government spying, chanting and waving banners that read "Yes, We Scan" and "Thank you, Edward Snowden." Many showed up wearing costumes and carrying props, including cardboard spy cameras and plaster drones. One protester wore a papier-maiche mascot head of Barack Obama and carried an "Obama-cam"; others wrapped their heads in yellow police barrier tape reading, Caution, Do Not Enter.

Protesters were cheered on in absentia by Snowden, the exiled NSA whistleblower who first disclosed the agency's surveillance programs. In a rare public statement prepared for the rally and read to the crowd, Snowden said "it is time to remind our government officials that they are public servants, not private investigators." The NSA, one of the biggest surveillance agencies in the U.S., was Snowden's workplace before he began leaking some of the agency's top-secret documents to the press in June.

"In the last four months, we've learned a lot about our government," Snowden said. "...Today, no telephone in America makes a call without leaving a record with the NSA. Today, no Internet transaction enters or leaves America without passing through the NSA's hands." Americans are fed up with government and with their lawmakers in Washington, Snowden added. "We are witnessing an American moment in which ordinary people from high school to high office are standing up to oppose a dangerous trend in government. ...We're told (by those in Congress and government) that what is unconstitutional is not illegal, but we will not be fooled. It is time for reform. Elections are coming, and we are watching you."

Another NSA whistleblower, Thomas Drake, showed up in person, talking to reporters about recent revelations that the U.S. government had tapped the phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and some 35 other world leaders. Drake told the crowd that any domestic surveillance legislation that may result from the Snowden leaks "must include whistleblower protection" because with them, "government employees will be more likely to turn a blind eye" to abuses of power.

The publicity campaign for today's rally kicked off on Wednesday with the release of a celebrity-studded public service announcement, a video that urged people to join protesters today "to end mass, suspicion-less surveillance" of American citizens. By the end of the rally, the video had wracked up more than 875,000 views on YouTube.

Indeed, more people attended today's rally digitally than in person. Rally organizers said before today that they expected more than 500,000 to participate in the march and in live-streamed "rally watching parties" occurring concurrently in eight other cities. The number of marchers who showed up in Washington, including several busloads from New York City, appeared to number only in the single-digit thousands, a smaller in-person crowd than organizers had hope for and expected.

The march was not without its critics on both sides of the ideological divide, with some saying the coalition of progressive liberals and right-wing Libertarian Party leaders represent, at best, an unsustainable mix of those who would change government and those who would abolish it completely. Rally supporters included members of the American Civil Liberties Union, Chinese activist Ai Weiwei, journalist Glenn Greenwald, as well as leaders of the uber-conservative Libertarian Party, including Gary Johnson, its 2012 candidate for U.S. President.

But Snowden, in his remarks today, insisted that "this isn't about red or blue or party lines and definitely not about terrorism. It's about power, control and trust in government. ...It is about the unconstitutional, unethical and immoral actions of the modern-day surveillance state and how we must all work together to remind the government" to stop "trampling on our right to know, our right to associate freely and to live in a free and open democratic society."

Chief rally organizer Rainey Reitman of the progressive Electronic Freedom Foundation, a pro-privacy group founded in 1990 to protect online privacy and free speech, said "we are not building this coalition for a rally today. We are starting with a rally and we will stop when the NSA stops spying on all of us." Added former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party nominee for U.S. President last year: "There are members of Congress who wrote the Patriot Act (after 9/11) and are now vowing to fix it, but the only way to fix it is to repeal it. ... We're mad as hell."

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Graphic, top, courtesy rally co-sponsor Ben and Jerry's. Photos: CauseGlobal)

Cause Week 2013

It's Cause Week again in New York, that wonky week-long stretch of mid-September when a perfect storm of three global-class, do-gooder gatherings floods Manhattan.

[Concurrent with the opening sessions of the United Nations General Assembly, Cause Week also means the start of the annually high-powered, invitation-only Clinton Global Initiative in Midtown, as well as the run of the annual Social Good Summit , the social-media-for-social-change crowd's Millennial version of CGI that's held across town.]

What all of these events have in common—besides their ability to paralyze Midtown traffic—are A-list attendees and speakers from all sectors pushing new policies, new partnerships, and tech-driven social innovation. From Barack Obama, Bono, Sean Penn, and IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde, to Queen Rania of Jordan, philanthropists Bill and Melinda Gates, and Facebook's Sheryl Sandburg, the goal of these thinkfests is to take stock of the world's most pressing social problems, and to rally society's brightest minds to work more effectively for solutions.

First to launch this week is the Social Good Summit, which is being livestreamed to 120 locations around the world in 8 languages. Among top takeaways so far:

* Internet freedom is under growing attack around the world. Samantha Power, the Pulitzer Prize-winning human rights activist, former Harvard scholar and the new U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, warned #2030NOW attendees of a "crackdown on civil society" by governments around the world. "It's clear that a lot of governments are now sharing worst practices on how to crack down on civil society," she said. They are doing this "to impede the kind of connectivity that can occur virtually, even as they close off public streets and squares." The goal: to dissuade cause-wired activists from using social media and other methods to demand human rights and economic reforms. "Governments are getting more and more sophisticated at shutting down the Internet, and are blocking, filtering, and using technology to trace human rights activists" for retribution, Power added. "They are aware of the explosion in civil society and of the power of social media. It is time to sound the alarm."

* Millennials' passion for "good" products is growing.  Tina Wells, CEO and Founder of Buzz Marketing Group, cited "conscious consumption" as the No. 1 trend driving Millennials today. "Millennials don't just want to buy things that are cool. They want to buy things they love that also contribute to the world in a positive way," Wells says. That's not news, of course. But 80 percent of Millennials are now spending more than three hours a day online, and brands are getting smarter at working with the cause-wired online, inviting them to participate in conversations around the issues that are important to them. Wells is working with the United Nations to elevate the voice and input of youth globally via MyWorld, a UN initiative that enables youth to participate more broadly in the conversations around the UN Millennium Goals. "Millennials understand there is room for digital nonprofits and for-profit organizations to work together for change," Wells said. Note to social marketers and nonprofits: shared experiences equals trust equals consumption and support.

* Drones aren't all bad. Most people would associate them with military strikes, but a handful of activists are finding ways to use drones and tech surveillance capabilities to promote peace and stability in countries experiencing conflict. John Prendergast, co-founder of the Enough Project, is working in partnership with Google and satellite companies "to get eyes on remote locations in conflict zones, where there is no other way to verify that human rights abuses are occurring." Prendergast said that monitoring for mass grave sites and rebel movements, for example, can help warn innocent civilians and prevent human rights abuses from occurring in some areas. Kevin Kennedy, chief of integrated training services at the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations and Field Support, said his office is using drones for good in four countries—the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, South Sudan, and Haiti, to help monitor public health and rebel movements.

* The news is going social. It's no longer enough to be informed by the media. A couple of new journalism startups also want you to act on the story you just saw, read, watched, or Tweeted. "I think any of us who are Millennials would argue that if you have a microphone plugged into an amplifier, it's wrong of you not to sing," says Ian Somerhalder, co-founder of RYOT.org, a new news platform that drives readers and viewers to get involved in embedded action steps that appear at the end of each article. "We take readers to the next step with calls to action," Somerhalder added. "No longer do you have to read an article and that's it. Dead. Social media engages people. It has changed the world and we're all here witnessing it, and we're all part of it, and it's a really phenomenal thing."

* There is a new Africa rising. Two social entrepreneurs working with social media to fuel support for their organizations in Africa talked extensively about the rapidly growing entrepreneurial scene there. "Charity? Rather than support the traditional NGOs in Africa, support the African social entreprenuer," urged Magatte Wade, founder and CEO of Tiossan, a cosmetics startup that uses proceeds to benefit local education. Teddy Ruge, an Africa-based entrepreneur and a leader of the social enterprise movement there, agreed that local African entrepreneurs are reshaping their own communities for the better, and it is time for traditional aid organizations to work with these new innovators—and to hear their input—rather than drive their own agendas without collaboration.

* Traditional nonprofit philanthropy is dead, reimagined by social media.  In a world of social media, philanthropy and nonprofits can no longer remain in fortresses and operate without partnering with businesses and governments. "Philanthropy needs to collaborate more across sector and with supporters," said Jean Case of the Case Foundation. "We need to help nonprofits master social media and help them to communicate with these tools. When we think of philanthropy, our definition is any effective effort that promotes human progress, which doesn't mean we should get just anyone in the tent. We need talent and help from companies, too. The traditional sense of charitable giving is not where we should stop, because stopping would mean we're not using all the tools in our toolbox." One recent attempt at new engagement: feedbacklabs.org, a mobile app that asks nonprofits what they're trying to do and helps them measure their effectiveness by putting them in touch directly with their aid recipients. Another sign of change? The ACLU is now raising its digital voice, busting out of the gate with soon-to-be-launched multimedia campaign called "My Big Gay Illegal Wedding." The campaign asks supporters to help it find and marry five couples in hotspot states. Think crowdsourcing for mobilization. "The thing about social media is that it demands boldness and excitement," Romero said. "Social media makes us all activists. We can redefine who we are."


The Social Good Summit ends tonight, just as CGI begins. Keep current with the highlights. Follow us @CauseGlobal for coverage and watch this space for updates.

-By Marcia Stepanek

(Photograph: Ripped posters on a wall, Carrer de Bailen, in Barcelona, Spain, by Rene Mansi)

Crackdown

At this week's Social Good Summit in New York, Samantha Power, the new U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, told conferees that governments around the world are increasingly cracking down on Web activists "and it's time to sound the alarm." She said social media have the potential to counteract these forces against Internet freedom, but urged young conferees to "team up to make your voices heard."

What follows is an edited transcript of that interview, conducted from the #2030NOW stage by Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore:

Q: Your entire career has been about the importance of human rights. Why do those things matter so much?
I was very moved when I was in college, when I saw for the first time the footage from Tiananmen Square. I was working as a intern in the sports department of the CBS affiliate in Atlanta at the time, and I was taking notes on the Braves game and I looked up, and there was Tiananmen and the crushing of this democratic movement and moment. So that kind of got in my head, looking at what the citizens in China were trying to do for their country, for their children and their grandchildren. And then when I graduated from college, I was struck by images in The New York Times of emaciated men behind barbed wire, again in Europe—just 50 years after the Holocaust. It was a time when the Bosnian Serbs were cracking down brutally, committing ethnic cleansing, and I thought there has got to be something we can do about this.

Q: Are people more informed or less informed in a world of social technologies?
Well, as tech evolves, it feels like people are alert to the risk of seeing and hearing only what they want to see and hear and not, necessarily, what they need to be discovering, serendipitously. On one hand, we've become more insulated and cocooned, and other the other hand, more and more people are trying to seek out greater connections. There are inconvenient topics—topics and issues we wouldn't voluntarily really seek out because they're depressing or disempowering because of the magnitude of the badness. I think a lot of us have those emotions. Syria is the latest example of that. It's just so heartbreaking, and you can imagine why young people might not want to spend a lot of time watching videos of people getting gassed by chemical weapons. But I think technology also can be a force for good, a dream. It's a force multiplier like nothing we've seen.

Q: Is social media and communication technology fundamentally pro- democracy and civil society, or is it neutral?
We've got examples on both sides of the ledger. Governments are growing more and more sophisticated at shutting down the Internet, blocking, filtering, using technology to trace human rights activists. There was that devastating incident not long ago in Homs, Syria, where Marie Colvin, one of the greatest war correspondents of the last century was we think, tracked down by the coordinates of her cellphone and then struck by the Assad regime and killed. I just came from a meeting with civil society activists to talk about the use of technologies to impede rather than expand democratic accountability and civic activism. This one young Syrian activist was describing that Assad has used SCUD missiles and fired them in Syria, on his own people. He said it takes 8- to 15 minutes for these missiles to land from the time of launch. Young activists in Syria now have people organized to text ahead if they see anything in the launch phase, then text the coordinates of that launcher from where that launch occurred, which helps activists predict the missiles' path. Texters then send their messages into a central hub, and people can see where this SCUD is likely to land, and when—so they can get out of the way. It's an example of the creativity and ways in which people are using digital technology. And here's another example. I traveled with the President a couple of years ago, to India, and there's this amazing web site there called "I Paid a Bribe" and it's people sharing their personal stories around the indignity of having to have paid a bribe. Social media is good so far at creating communities of concern in this way. The Satellite Sentinel Project, which George Clooney and John Prendergast are using, gets companies to donate satellite time as resources so activists can document mass graves in parts of the world that are not necessarily accessible to humanitarian organizations. So technology has an upside and a downside, and it's all about how you use it.

Q: To what extent is government responsible? What is the role of the civilian and what is the role of government?
I think it depends on the situation. Citizens have the capacity, as they did in Darfur, to put an issue on the map. Young people and people in the faith community made Darfur matter in Washington and did impressive fundraising using tech. Once people get moved by what they see or what they're exposed to,  social media can be a great way to pool resources and get them to people in need. ...We were talking a minute ago about Twitter. I just joined but already I'm seeing the power of it. In the old days, you'd almost have to stage a press conference to get your voice out there, even as the UN Ambassador. But not anymore.

Q: Are you increasingly using Twitter to break news and decisions on social media?
A: I think that because you can move information so quickly, it's very easy to do it that way. But I also think that all forms of media still do remain relevant. Sometimes doing things so quickly is not always the way to get out the nuances of a policy, which is challenging anyway—especially on issues that are as complicated as many we work on. But when it comes to putting pressure on a government that has a mission here or an embassy there, you can use social media to connect with people in European countries or in African countries and have them raise issues that are critical. There are ways to build coalitions, particularly around the fate of civil society and the prospects for human rights, that just didn't exist when we were relying solely on the mainstream media.

Q: How are global activists engaging with tech to get their voices heard?
Tech is a major piece of how they connect with one another but this crackdown on civil society by many governments around the world is very sad, whether it's shutting down the Internet or blocking Twitter or blocking Facebook or, just as egregiously, using plain old-fashioned laws and regulations to restrict foreign funding to NGOs or to inhibit the space that activists have to protest publicly, or to crack down on their freedom to associate. So tech is not the only problem, and it's not the only solution. this strangulation by regulation can also be very effective. We used to talk in development and in human rights about best practices, about how we can push for best practices. It's now clear that a lot of these governments are now sharing worst practices on how to crack down on civil society, how to use the tools of tech to impede the kind of connectivity that can occur virtually, even as they close off public spaces and public squares. They're migrating those kinds of practices that they've used over time to the Internet, and to the social media space, and we're pushing governments in our meetings now to bring civil society back to the table.

Q: How can individuals get involved? What actions can they take?
A: We've seen activists in Haiti, for example, famously creating crisis maps and crowd-sourcing, where you could document who was buried where by virtue of people using technology to track them. We've seen tech being used in the U.S. and also in Kenya, during elections, to stop fraud. These kinds of things are very important. Tech also is a great feedback loop. Now that I'm on Twitter, if I give a speech and people are telling me that it didn't make sense when I said something about this, or didn't square with what I'd earlier said about that, it's not aways pleasant reading but it's important to hear. I don't think that leaders before these tools were able to have such direct and rapid sharing with the people they service. This is important.

Q: Finally, what's the outlook for civil society in the future, by 2030?
I think right now the trend lines are not positive. The truth of the matter is that many governments, in the last five years, have become more sophisticated in their response to cause-wired movements by the people to get their voices heard. More than 40 governments now are restricting freedom of speech and association and religion—the basic stuff. These governments are sharing worst practices but they are doing so because they are aware of the explosion in civil society and of the power of social media. Who will win going forward? I've always been on the citizens' side but right now, a crackdown on civil society is a pattern across the globe. It's time to sound the alarm. If we can get other like-minded governments and citizens and NGOs and foundations to team up to contest this worrying trend, then it won't be a close call between anachronistic governments trying to crack down on basic human dignity and the power of the people. History shows who's going to win that one.

-Marcia Stepanek

(Photograph: Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore interview Samantha Power (left). Photo by Mashable with permission.)  

Cause Video: A First-Ever Survey

YouTube, See3 and Edelman just released a first-of-its-kind survey on nonprofit sector use of Cause Video, asking 500 cause leaders and experts how the social good sector is using video stories to make an impact. [The report, Into Focus: Benchmarks for Video and A Guide for Creators can be found here.] Full disclosure: We here at Cause Global were among those experts polled, based on our work to create a cause video curriculum and lab at NYU's Heyman Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising to help the sector take video-making in-house.]

The survey's big takeaways? First, nearly all of those polled (91%) say video is important and will get more important over the next three years. Second, most nonprofit leaders (87%) say they intend to produce a lot more video. [No surprise so far: Cisco projects that by 2017, just five years from now, two-thirds of the world's global consumer data traffic will be video.]

But here's the rub. This video enthusiasm is not (yet) being reflected in nonprofit spending—and in a big way. Only 6% of the cause leaders queried say they anticipate a significant increase in their video budgets in the coming year, 24% said they expect only a slight increase, and the rest think allocation of funds will remain about the same as it is today, or even slide. "Only about a quarter of those polled expect some increase in their video budget and 70% do not," says Michael Hoffman, CEO of See3 and one of the founders of the survey. "That's a full two-thirds of organizations who won't be spending more than they do now, and maybe even less. There's definitely an underlying discomfort behind all that video enthusiasm."

So what's driving it? There are four top barriers:

* The biggest barrier cited, by far, are budget restrictions. Nonprofits would make more video if their budgets were bigger, 79% of respondents said. [Annual video expenditures for 66% of the organizations surveyed were $10,000 or less.] According to the survey, a full half of the respondents currently outsource what video projects they have to outside studios rather than try in-house projects which can be just as good, if not better. By tapping volunteers with special expertise or turning to lower-cost equipment, such as smartphones and free editing software, a rising number of organizations are starting to make short, high-quality videos themselves at very low cost. "The excuse that we nonprofits don't have the equipment has gone away," Hoffman says. "It's not just you who has a camera in your pocket. Your constituents do, too." Still, about 20% of organizations said they lack the skillsets needed to make their own videos.

* Staff resources aren't ideal. Slightly more than half of those polled (52%) said the staff lacked the time to focus on video production. People are already overworked and are reluctant to take on more, respondents said, especially if they won't be paid for their efforts. "Trouble is," says Hoffman, "video is here to stay. If you want to reach people with your message in this hyper-connected world, you need to incorporate video into your marketing and fundraising plans, and then assign the necessary personnel to take responsibility for producing it and overseeing it." Better yet? Start building internal capacity for video editing and storytelling with your very next hires in all departments. And meanwhile? Ask volunteers to film or photograph your on-the-ground programs as they occur. Sharing your organization's work in simple videos posted on YouTube is a good way to start.

* Internal departments don't collaborate very well. Nonprofit cultures still tend to be more hierarchical than collaborative. Cultural factors, such as a not-invented-here syndrome, and departmental silos, were cited by nearly 40% of respondents. In many organizations, both large and small, each department has its own budget and task list. "In some cases, we found that the communications department would have a video budget but the fundraising department down the hall didn't have access to that," Hoffman said. "Very few nonprofits are doing joint projects internally with shared budgets and goals—yet."

* Nobody knows how to measure the impact of a video. A large number of respondents said they don't know, and have no way of knowing, if a video works or not against nonprofit objectives. They don't have video metrics, and to be sure, most nonprofits are still struggling with measurement issues across the spectrum of their new media efforts. During the Philanthropy 3.0 Speaker Series  we curated and moderated at NYU this spring, both Hoffman and DoSomething.org's top data scientist, Bob Filbin, cited the frustration. "How many views from people does it take to consider a YouTube video a success? Try 1.5 million," Filbin said on one of our NYU panels on the use of Big Data in advocacy. "We got that many views on one of the videos we posted in 2011, and we all thought it was a success, right? But then came the data report. Only eight viewers had signed up to donate equipment, which was what the video was trying to get people to do." So what happened? "We were concerned with the wrong metric," Filbin and colleague Jeff Bladt wrote in the Harvard Business Review on March 13. "...As we learned, there is a difference between numbers and numbers that matter."

Hoffman and other survey founders caution that maybe the sector is looking too hard at conversion rates as a way to measure the impact of a good video. Maybe something is getting overlooked, Hoffman says, suggesting the biggest survey takeaway of all may be this: "Videos provide the emotional framework for the ask," he says. "People respond to a good story more than anything else. Emotion leads to attention leads to support."

Among other survey findings:

* Who's in charge of cause video production at most nonprofits? Not surprisingly, the communications department (58%), followed by digital/social media (32%), fundraising (20%), and volunteers (19%). Outside video producers are contracted for about half of the total videos, though the trend is moving toward more in-house production, says Hoffman.

* Shorter is better. Viewers of all stripes start tuning out after 10-15 seconds. According to Hoffman, if you don't put the ask within the first 15 seconds of your video, you will lose most of your audience.

* 'Thank-you' videos are gaining in popularity, mostly because they can be made in-house, at less expense and by volunteers using their smartphones. These types of short videos can be an important part of your donor relationship management strategy; donors love to see themselves in a video or to be personally and publicly thanked in one. Here's one made by charity:water.org.

* What are the top social media channels used to distribute cause video? YouTube ranked No. 1 with 81% of respondents, followed by Facebook (78%), Twitter (55%), Vimeo (16%), Google+ (10%) Pinterest (8%) and private social networks at 5%.

* What's the best way to get your videos viewed? Send your videos to known supporters of your cause and organization rather than to people who have shown no previous interest in your mission. "It is much more effective to get your video to 100 of your organization's most passionate supporters, who will share, promote, and engage with your content," Hoffman says. "These 100 are most likely to work for you, and their friends are more likely to view something that comes from someone they already know."

How is your organization using video? Are you experimenting with Vine? Our cause video news team here at Cause Global would love to hear from you.

-- Marcia Stepanek

Funders: R U (Really) There?

When Nancy Lublin's social media team at DoSomething.org began texting teens a couple of years ago to get more of them to focus their extraordinary energy on issues they care passionately about, what Lublin found was surprising. Mixed in with teens' texts about the need to help the homeless and rescue abused animals were many other texts that had nothing, at all, to do with DoSomething's social good campaigns at the time. "We started getting texts like, 'Help, I'm being bullied and I don't know what to do' and texts on eating disorders," Lublin said.

And then, Lublin told those attending today's Personal Democracy Forum, there was one girl who sent in a text that said exactly this: 'He won't stop raping me. It's my dad. He told me not to tell anyone. R U there?'"

It made Lublin, DoSomething's CEO, decide to start work creating a text-only crisis line, the first real-time teen crisis network —and a promising alternative to the thousands of pre-Internet crisis telephone hotlines that Lublin says can "make people wait two hours to get help" and largely fail to communicate with teens in their language, using the medium most common to their generation.

Fast forward two years, and DoSomething's Crisis Text Line, set to launch August 1, will attempt to use social media and text-messaging technologies to create the world's first data-driven text hotline for teens—and all at a level of cross-sector collaboration that Lublin hopes will break new ground in the nonprofit sector, involving unprecedented levels of cooperation among organizations that now compete to tackle teen bullying, rape and incest and sex trafficking. Lublin says DoSomething is still getting a steady stream of texts from a significant portion of kids that are unrelated to its dozens of cause-texting campaigns in any given month: Just last week, she said, during the launch of the group's new Undocumented for a Day text campaign, which simulates for teens what it's like to live in the United States as a teen without U.S. citizenship,  Lublin says up to 15 percent of those texting the nonprofit sent messages about sexual abuse, bullying and eating disorders. For Lublin, Crisis Text Line can't start soon enough. "This will help save more lives than penicillin," she says.

Designed with the help of Mobile Commons and the MIT Media Lab as an always-on, real-time conversation with kids in crisis that can scale nationally, Lublin says the text line should significantly improve DoSomething's ability to support teens. "Texting is a medium that teenagers prefer. It will be private. No one hears you, unlike when you're calling a hotline. It's quiet. You can be bullied at the lunch table at school and be texting for help in that moment. It's fast." But beyond rapid response, Lublin also hopes that Crisis Text Line will become a critical new example of how social media can be used to reinvent and vastly improve the way the nonprofit sector does its work—more effectively, using  only the latest data rather than outdated suppositions to tackle social problems. "In real time, we will have a map," she says. "We will have our finger on the pulse of what is going on in every zip code in the United States with these teen crises." School boards, police, journalists and local communities will now have better data to help drive policy change and reallocate public resources for better impact, Lublin told PDFers, "so politicians can be basing decisions on facts" rather than "just spewing policy based on their own personal convictions."

But Lublin says that creating the text line has been tremendously difficult—and shouldn't have been. "That girl who texted us (about her dad raping her) came to us two years ago," Lublin told her peers in the PDF audience, "so why is it taking us so long to build this thing? ... Why is it so hard for all of us (in this sector) to make something new?"

It's not that Lublin hasn't met big start-up challenges before. In her 20s, she founded Dress for Success, the not-for-profit organization in over 80 cities worldwide that provides interview suits and career development training to women making the transition from welfare to work. At Do Something, Lublin has transformed what had been a small New York City cause mired in red ink to one that now has 45 employees, 1.6 million members worldwide and enabled more than 2.4 million 13- to 25-year-olds to make an impact last year, alone. DoSomething.org's social media and information tech team is the envy of nonprofit tech activists; the organization has become one of the leading examples of smart social media innovation-for-good in the world.

The problem, Lublin says, is that for all of the nonprofit sector's talk about collaboration and the need to support technology innovation in the sector, "we're really, really bad at it." (Lublin said she wanted to deliver her talk today at PDF—an annual gathering of some of the nation's top minds in technology-driven social innovation—because its theme this year is Think Bigger.)

"There are lots of things that traditional foundations are doing to hamper this new disruptive stuff," Lublin said. In part, it's a vision thing. Traditional foundations, she said, tend to be innovation-averse. "So often I'll hear (when fundraising for this project) that this is a great idea, but you don't fit our (funding) bucket," Lublin said. "No shit," she offered as a response to PDFers, who applauded. "It's new."  She also said she wonders if large traditional foundations, like the Ford Foundation (one of PDF's sponsors), have simply become too "comfy" to take big risks funding the kinds of social innovation they say they now want to support.

"Do you really need to sit in that $400 million building, Ford Foundation?" Lublin asked. Most of the foundation's massive headquarters near the United Nations, she said, "is not even usable space" and suggested that Ford should sell the New York City landmark and move to a loft space in Brooklyn. Like the smaller, scrappier Blue Ridge Foundation, she said, Ford—which cited $10 billion in assets in 2011—should use more of the money it has tied up in overhead and real estate to support more start-up innovation.

But that's not all, Lublin said. Traditional foundations' insistence on seeing a business model as a prerequisite for funding also is hampering nonprofit innovation. During her fundraising for the text line, Lublin said, "I would keep getting asked, 'Is this sustainable? What is the model for Crisis Text Line? Maybe you should sell that data.'" Lublin said she refused. "No, I'm not selling the data," she said, to applause. "I'm not going to sell the data to some hedge fund or for certain police departments to use. It's going to be open."

Governments fund health care, provide education and build roads in some places "because it's what they think is important for the value system and for a state or the country," Lublin said. "Private industry does things because it thinks it can make money on it. And then there's us," she said, the nonprofit sector, which does its work because it thinks it can help people in need and tackle social problems that others often cannot or won't.

"We matter. We are worth funding," she said. (Click here for the video of her talk.) "Foundations, please don't forget that. This is not a pitch (for funding). Crisis Text Line is launching August 1st. We're doing fine. This is a request for all of us to take this conversation and put it out in the open."

Consider it done.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration by Andrew Polushkin for istock.com)

Filter Failure

The New York Times book reviewer, Janet Maslin, recently characterized Douglas Rushkoff's new book, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, as "one of those invaluable books that make sense of what we already half-know."

Agreed. For those of us who sleep with our smartphones within eyeshot—and Pew Internet tells us this is roughly two-thirds of adults who own a smartphone—Present Shock offers some comfort in numbers. The Internet (and social media), Rushkoff says, were supposed to give us more time to get things done, to let us stop punching the clock and work at home in our underwear, in our own time, "on stuff we wanted to do and exchange information with others in our Burning Man, pre-Etsy universe of slack."

But "something happened on our way home from Wired magazine," Rushkoff told the annual Personal Democracy Forum of social and technology innovators yesterday in Manhattan. Instead, "we are overwhelmed by an always-on, livestreamed reality that our human minds and bodies can never truly, fully inhabit." Rather than use our social technologies to create a new digital universe of possibilities, Rushkoff said,  we have—at least for now—turned human time and attention into a new commodity. We are living—live—"in a state of perpetual emergency interruption that used to be only endured by 911 operators and air traffic controllers."

Go ahead, says Rushkoff. Feel it. "Instead of using these new technologies the way they were designed, to time-shift, we strap our devices to our bodies and have them vibrate every time somebody pings us or updates us or Facebooks us or tweets about us, or tweets about something we might have tweeted about," Rushkoff says. "We are unable to really embrace the present ... because we're always trying not to miss what else is supposedly happening now."

Present Shock—which plays off the title of Alvin Toffler's influential 1970 book, Future Shock—not only diminishes everything that isn't happening right now "amid the onslaught of everything that supposedly is," Rushkoff says. Institutionally, present shock forces us into a weird state of crisis management. "Just as the individual is only really dealing with this tweet or that tweet, look at Obama. Look at any leader right now," he says. "It's the same thing. It's not governing. It's not managing. It's just crisis after crisis after crisis. There are no goals. It's all becoming purely tactical."

At PDF Thursday, Rushkoff offered up two recent Internet-aided political movements as examples of how present shock is reshaping politics—the Tea Party movement and the Occupy movement. "Tea Partyers," he said, "want everything right now. Right now. Immediate closure. No goals, no policy talks, no weeks of work seeking compromise. Just 'I want it now.'" On the other side of the spectrum, Rushkoff says, is Occupy's "unbearable perpetual quest for an eternal present. ...We are here, we are in the park, we have no goals yet. We are going to sit in the park until we reach complete consensus."

He urged PDF attendees to help the world create better and "more humane filters" against what he calls "digiphrenia"—digitally provoked mental chaos—to help social good advocates and others start focusing their energies and attention spans into building more effective, locally-networked online communities for longer-term social change. "I am much less worried about what technology may be doing to people than what we are choosing to do to one another though technology," Rushkoff writes. To be sure, it's not the technology tools that are driving us to distraction. "Human intelligence made these tools this way because there is a lot of money in reducing people to predictively modeled profiles and algorithmic battlegrounds"—to sell them something or do something, or to vote a certain way, Rushkoff says.

This isn't just a form of shock. It's a new form of exploitation for commercial and political profit, he says, and we're all just starting to wise up as our personal productivity plummets. For Rushkoff, it's time to take back the clock.

For more on Rushkoff's book, see his PDF talk from yesterday, below:



-- Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration: Cloudytronics for istock.com)