A big believer in restraint, you are, Billy. What was more frightening was the Pat Buchanan did not try to contain him; he cheered.
Harvard: Scott Heiferman & Meetup
: Meetup has been a star of this conference, discovered by all. Scott Heiferman tries to deflate the hype a little; humility.com.
Meetup is 15 percent politics vs. 30 percent a year go. The new version of the site has doubled the activity of meetups. That new structure moved to having organizers out there in the world.
I always like Scott's pictures: The NYC Ukelele meetup ("it's ok, you can laugh, they're not here"). More: the fight human trafficking meetup, Atlanta Hungarian language meetup (there are meetups for most major languages in most major cities), knitting meetups, South Jersey Department of Peace, Townhall (it's not just liberals), female bikers, stay at home moms (a fast growing grouping), expat Indians in Frankfurt, and, of course, pugs. Former Dean people still meetup (to cry ... or scream, I guess).
What it's all about is about power, having a voice, pride, he says.
Scott says Meetup came about because he read Bowling Alone (and its author, Robert Putnam, is up next).
He lists ways you can avoid talking to someone: Jetblue, iPod, Bose, FreshDirect, ATMs, cars.
Scott points to Meetupsurveys.com as a source of surveys about these folks.
The biggest revenue source for Meetup is people paying for the privilege of emailing directly on the site. So the allegiance, he says, is to people and not to sponsors. Some of the Meetups charge dues/admission for their own gettogethers.
There are workers using Meetup to organize at the same time that Scott shows quotes from union officials recognizing that union structure is outmoded.
You dont' need fancy buildings in DC to be an association anymore, he says. Associations, too, are distributed. The net disrupts and distributes.
What is emerging, he says, is "flash, emergent, people-powered, long-lasting, open, influential, agile, chapter-based, institutions/organizations/unions/associations with card-carrying members that engage in collective action."
This is the napsterization of organization. But it's really just old-fashioned face-to-face meetings.
What's the internet good for? It gives people more power to know anything, sell anything, publish, communicate better, be more efficient... and have collective power ("and we haven't scratched the surface yet").
"People are watching Big Bro, too." Case in point: Abu Ghraib.
The dynamic due of people able to publish and organize gives voice.
He's nice enough to quote my first law of media (and life): Bet on that which gives citizens control.
This is not just about changing the world but saving the world, he says.
This is all about the democratication of democracy.
: Now Robert Putnum responds. He says "the master trend of the 20th century was the privitization of leisure time by technology." It used to be you could enjoy music only together; now technology allows you to listen alone.
Yes, but I wonder whether this isn't a bell curve. I was just talking with someone about trends in TV and said the grand shared experience of TV we too often celebrate was short-lived and that today's choice and fragmentation really mean choice and power. That's a push-pull: More power sometimes means more fragmentation but fragmentation also allows you to meet people you enjoy through things like Meetup: You're not just a dog owner now but you're a pug association member.
Putnum says the debate about whether virtual community was real community was a misleading, wasted debate. It's much more interesting to see how the internet can blend communities between virtual and real.
Now he switches gears to talk about the emergence of large evangelical churches, "by far the best organized part of American civil society." See: Brent Bozell. He talks about a church run by Rick Warren, author of The Purpose-Drive Life, with 30,000 members. He talks about the church: an open structure you can wander into or not; a Starbucks-like cafe where you can sip coffee and watch the service or not. But belonging to the church doesn't mean going to large services but belonging to one of thousands of small groups: geeks for God, mountain bikers for God, and on and on.
Even this is fragmented. Even this is niches. But the niches together make the mass.
The mass market is dead, I say. Welcome to the mass of niches.
And the niche is supported by social capital -- by people agreeing with each other, liking each other, supporting each other, working with each other.
And that social capital has to build. So people who want to dance around that huge church go have coffee and check it out. People who want to join a group go to a Meetup and check it out. The niche gathers its gravity that way.
: I ask a very confused circular question about much of that and the professor makes point of it and says there are two kinds of social capital: bonding (people like us) and bridging (people not like us). Places with high bonding look like Bosnia or Belfast. Bridging, then, is about diversity. Bonding is about support. Neither is good or bad, then, but our challenge is to come up with more bridging experiences. And Meetup does that by bringing together surprisingly diverse groups (so a pug owner finds that a fellow pug owner voted for Bush and he's not the devil). He says that the risk is that the internet will provide mostly bonding capital (the echo chamber argument); I will argue that the internet is proven to build bridges (see Meetup, see friendships with Iraqi bloggers).
: A student at "the college" (as they call it) asks whether the democratic extreme of this looks like California propositions with every cause emerging. "How do you maintain a republic?" he asks. It's a good question and I'm not sure we know the answer yet.
: Chris Lydon asks Scott to explain Dean in Iowa. "I cannot sit in a Harvard Law School auditorium and hypothesize about anything," Scott says.
Harvard: Business
: Tod Cohen, VP of eBay, which is sponsoring this gettogether (thank you, eBay) talks about eBay and politics. He reads from a "values card" employees get. "We believe people are basically good... We believe everyone has something to contribute...."
Esther Dyson says of her time as head of ICANN, "we learn a lot more from mistakes and I learned a great deal there." She says in business, the internet means "you can get rid of the customers you don't like." That's the snarky way to say "targeting." Government, of course, can't do that. It can't segment markets. In politics, you can target but you always want to expand that target market and what the Dean and Kerry campaigns did wrong, she says, is that they did not expand their target markets. In the election, she saw the internet used too much to broadcast. "The internet should be used as a listening tool," She's brief and damned well to the point.
(In the break, I pulled Dave Winer over and congratulated him for breaking this form of conference: people lecturing from podium to audience. He beamed.)
I'm putting the rest of this post below the "more" link because this isn't not making for a very interesting post.
A Harvard Business School prof, Debora Spar, gives a rather obvious primer in the recent history of internet businesses. She has nothing new to say.
Esther, bless 'er, says it does make a difference in society when people feel empowered in one sphere.
Now Craig Newmark talks. He says his intro left the fact that he grew up with a pocket protector and taped glasses and that's relevant to the way his company runs.
"I'm going to ignore such matters as business plan and business model, largely because we have neither." He says that instinct and experience are more reliable than planning.
"What we're learning running Craig's list is that people are overwhelmingly trustworthy." That is the democratic view of the world.
He talks about nerd values: Once you make some money, you want to change the world. "And it gets me out of the house."
"What's working for us is that we seem to be run by what I heard in a Woody Allen movie is called a moral compass. We're trying to do what's right for people... The community drives us.... We're pious about it. We're just trying to be real about it." So when they asked about charging, the people told them to charge for services people are paying too much for elsewhere.
"The Golden Rule really is how people want to operate how people want to be." People want to respect each other and be respected. "Nothing fancy there. Just about being fair and leveling the playing field... What I think people expect from us is righteous behavior."
What he's saying should be but too often is not obvious: Good values yield good value.
Harvard: Hoder speaks
: Hoder now speaks to the group and at last gets recognition. "He began a blog but he began a phenomenon," says Nesson.
He begins with some facts about Iranian society and the internet. Out of Iran's 70 million people, 70 percent are under age 30. He says there are 75,000 active Iranian weblogs in Persian. (I had been quoting higher numbers; probably included inactives over three years.)
"The internet in Iran is now the most trusted medium among Iranians... (versus) even satellite TV."
He says that elsewhere, the internet came first and then blogs; in Iran, blogs came first and showed Iranians how great the internet is as a medium.
"The internet is not having a real large impact on politics in Iran right now." There are no parties, no free press, "and maybe it's not the time." It's more about social and cultural change, "which could be translated into political change in a few years."
He sees blogs as windows: people can see inside Iran and vice versa. We can see how profoundly the young Iranian people have changed in terms of self-expression and tolerance.
And he sees blogs as bridges, which is particularly important in a developing nation. "Blogs in particular are making bridges between genders, which may be the first time that is happening in Iran." Women, for the first time, are "free to epress themselves... about how they see the world." It also creates a bridge between generations as parents read children's blogs -- and he says that's a global thing. And there is a bridge building between voters and polticians in Iran.
He tells about the former vice-president of Iran as a blogger. When we saw Hoder in Toronto, he shows pictures of cabinet meetings moblogged by the VP. "He has repeatedly said that this is the best tool with which Iranian officials can see what is going in in the people's minds, in the younger generations... Some female bloggers have even been invited to some official ceremonies as representatives of young people."
The hardline religious people have blogs, too. "For the first time you can see what's really going on in their minds."
His third metaphor: Blogs as cafes. "The government has a total monopoly on Iranian media.... So discourse or debates about important topics like the nuclear program or the relationship with Israel... is not even talked about. It is a red line you cannot cross and if you cross it you will go to jail. It's very serious."
"Blogs are the only open window where people can talk and have a debate." He quotes a famous reformist who says blogs have replaced taxi talks. This was something Hoder taught me: Iranians like to argue and do it in cabs.
Hoder said the American election was a big topic of conversation and surprisingly, many liked Bush, perhaps because the government doesn't like him.
What's next? "They're preparing the ground for the real and effective change in Iran in the next, maybe, couple of years." The other sign that it is effective is that it has made the hardliners so frustrated that they cannot control it, they have started a huge crackdown and Iranians cannot get to any political web sites. He tells of an editor at a major paper who wrote up a conspiracy theory that all blogs are funded by the CIA. And, of course, the authorities have been arresting bloggers.
I ask Hoder what the world can do to help. He says they need technology and education. Young people in Iran have not seen elections, for example. For technology they need tools that are localized; Blogger.com is a great service and a great opportunity, he says, but it needs to be translated. The services in Iran have poltiical difficulties. He adds that getting internet access is vital.
Harvard: voting and citizenship
: Charles Ogletree gives a good introduction to the topics the conference will cover (good but not terribly bloggable, since it's a summary). One key issue for us today, for the world today is whether votes really count and whether we, the people, trust those who count our votes.
: Charles Nesson, founder of the Berkman Center (bless 'im) runs the next panel. Tom Sander, of the Kennedy School of Government, presents a study of Meetup.com.
Three brief conclusions: They think that Meetup.com is succeeding in building social ties. They think that this is happening among different users than expected. And political meetups are rare birds among Meetups; political meetups would do better focusing on social ties. They hold to the view of Robert "Bowling Alone" Putnam that social connections are worse than they were -- and, no, that's not the fault of technology; it started "when Bill Gates was in diapers." So they see Meetup as a promising technology to create social capital even among strangers.
Conclusions:
Meetup is not a young person's phenomenon. (Last night, we heard that the average of of Dean Meetuppers was 47.)
Meetup is "not engaging the civically disengaged." Meetup participants are more educated that the population (no surprise on a few levels: internet and computer use and the high degree of political activism at the time of the study).
Meetup is not disproportionately attracting newcomers; "only sometimes was it strangers meeting strangers." (Again, no surprise; it takes a friend to bring a friend; no one wants to go where no one knows them.)
They found "low member stickiness." (I continue to not be surprised; I've seen such gettogethers where people come out and try but joining a group is still -- and always has been -- a high hurdle.)
They say there is a "left-leaning tilt" to Meetups. (Well, hell, Dean was the one who promoted it; Bush did not.)
Yet, he says, Meetup has success at building social capital. They found that people made new personal friends at Meetups. (Well, if it happens at bars, it can happen at Meetups.)
Later, Micah Sifry properly points out the ways in which the timing of the research makes it anamolous.
(He's essentially reading findings in a paper. Boy, I'm spoiled by Bloggercons: No speeches, conversation. I'm not used to presentations anymore.)
Pippa Norris, also from Kennedy, talks about whether technology -- that is, evoting -- will boost turnout. They studied evoting vs. postal ballots. Postal won. The PDF of all her results is here, so I won't butcher them with fast typing.
(I blogged Hoder's talk above.)
Nesson says he hears a pessimism about technology and voting and a prof in the crowd says he hears issues about trust and technology. The problem is that this is not a comprehensive view of technology and voting and poltics; it's a smattering of three small topics and it's not the basis for grand conclusions.
Harvard: Thank you
: The Harvard Internet & Society session is beginning and so I want to take a moment to thank Harvard Law School and the Berkman Center and John Palfrey for holding this -- and the prior Bloggercons. No university in the nation has done more for citizens' media than these folks.
(I also need to thank them for letting me online. Because of university politics, it was going to be difficult to get online. I threw a rude hissy fit and they got me online. So I'll be blogging the event.)
: IRC: Joi Ito, of course, has an IRC channel set up at Freenode. #harvardbits.
Just listen
: Jay Rosen tells CBS what they should do next: Listen.
Before they decide who gets the anchor chair, or what happens with CBS News, they could engage in an extraordinary, one-of-a-kind, national act of public listening, where the entire divison, CBS News, just listens to Americans state their views about broadcast news. Lots of Americans, lots of views, lots of time to hear about all sides of the problem.
Maybe it's a tour of America: CBS comes to you. There's a public forum in every stop on the tour. Listening week. Instead of the Big Eye, symbol of CBS News, the Big Roving Ear.
But, of course, I doubt that they'll listen about listening.
Recapturing Islam
: The New York Times reports today on Islamic scholars trying to recapture their religion -- at last -- from terrorists and murderers.
Meet your censor
: The Washington Post went into the bowels of the Parents Television Council to meet the censors who sit there watching TV all day so they can try to decide what you should not watch. You see, this isn't at all about Americans outraged at smut. That's a fraud. This is about Brent Bozell's agenda to censor our free speech.
: Separately, see David Weinberger joining in the conversation about the FCC.
Harvard: The world meets
: There will come a moment today when the world meets in Cambridge as the pioneers of citizens' media come together: Hoder is in America (at long last!). Maylasian blogger Jeff Ooi is here. Oh Yeon-ho, the founder of OhMyNews, the people's news service that is changing South Korea, is talking. Omar and Mohamed from IraqTheModel are coming this afternoon. Add to that Ethan Zuckerman and his work in Africa and Joi Ito and his work around the globe and all the Americans and you have all the veggies you need for one helluva great global succotash.
Harvard: Beggar at the feast
: Last night after the opening event at Berkman's internet-and-society confab, I crashed the official dinner at the Harvard Faculty Club, where you'll find the smartest cocktail chatter anywhere.
I was delighted to find myself sitting next to Craig Newmark, customer service representative and founder of Craig's List. I saw Craig at Web 2.0 and so when I ran into him in the lobby of Time Inc. by the slimmest of coincidences a few weeks ago, I knew he looked familar and so I gave him that don't-we-know-each-other look. He shrugged it off and said, "I run a web site." Oh, yes, that web site, I said; you're Craig. He shrugged again: Yup.
Merrill Brown told me a great story a day later about being with Craig when they saw they were in the same building as a New York real estate agent Craig has had to deal with. Craig just went into their offices: "I'm Craig." People got excited and got their cameras out to take pictures with the most unassuming celebrity in America. And then Criag straightened them out.
Last night, I got to say to Craig what I often say about him: He is disrupting the news business more than any other person. And that's not a bad thing, I'm quick to add. The newspaper business is seeing a lot of classified revenue shift to Monster and Craig's List and other new marketplaces (which I contend will, in turn, be replaced by the unmarketplace, the distributed market, but that's a subject for another dinner). And that is hard to take, of course. But whenever any industry goes through disruption for any reason, good things can come out of it. As Kathleen Matthews said about politics last night, when you face change, you can try not to or you can blow it up (she said it better than that).
Craig talked about the desire to get and support news he trusts.
That inspired a great conversation with Jay Rosen on one side of us and Rebecca MacKinnon on the other. Jay said that there should be a marketplace where citizens can buy the journalism they want to see -- what Chris Albritton did getting his audience to underwrite his trips to Iraq brought to a larger scale. Jay said that in the earliest days of journalism, rich people hired correspondents to go to far away lands and tell them what they needed to know about, oh, camel futures. Of course, that was private news. This new way is about public news. It is about the public getting the news it wants thanks to a direct way join up with others to support it.
What stories would you underwrite?
: See Steve Rubel's speculation about this.
The news is out
: Dan Gillmor is leaving his column to create a venture in citizens' media. Dan has the courage and vision to not just talk about this movement (like somebody you know) but to do it. Watch out for what comes next.
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