Category: Technology

A Brief Genealogy of Digital Teams and Technologies

Author’s Note – This brief history was originally written for internal audiences in the Greenpeace network. It attempts to provide a broad overview of the way digital technologies and digital staffing have evolved over the last twenty-plus years, in particular in the non-profit advocacy sector and political sector. Both because these sectors in particular and digital technology in general have an historic bias towards American companies/organisations and because my perspective is that of an American who has worked in electoral and advocacy spaces, in the US and globally, there is a strong bend in this analysis towards events involving taking place in the US, with US participants. My hope is that this US-centric approach does not undermine the core content of this loose history, which is meant to describe large trends and dynamics within organisations around the world. I view this as a genealogy – a study of the lineage and developmental shifts in three clear epochs of time.

This is not meant to be a literal genealogy, nor an academic investigation of the evolutions of different civic tech platforms and their utilisations over the last 25+ years. I seek to capture in what follows a characterisation of the zeitgeist around technology and digital teams I have been a part of, built and seen operate around the world. 

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Advocacy organisations used the internet prior to 1998. Greenpeace itself was a pioneer in the use of websites and email. But the modern conception of the internet as a place for organising, building people power and engaging large audiences for political and policy ends can reasonably be linked to the founding of MoveOn.org in 1998. MoveOn.org was birthed out of the impeachment of US President Bill Clinton, when two successful California technologists started an online petition which they shared over email calling for Congress to “Censure President Clinton and Move On to Pressing Issues Facing the Nation.” The petition garnered over half a million signatures, as well as helped recruit thousands of in-person petition delivery actions and tens of thousands of phone calls into Congress. 

MoveOn.org became effectively the first major digitally-native advocacy organisation. After Clinton was impeached, they asked petition signers to commit to engage in electoral activism and donate to candidates opposing those who had voted to impeach him. In short order, MoveOn.org had created a conceptual framework for digital advocacy that relied on emails, petitions, online donations, volunteer cultivation, phone calls to decision makers, and connecting people to elected officials. 

EPOCH 1 (~2000s): All-in-one (or two)

In this first epoch of digital advocacy, which I loosely place from 1998 to 2012, the industry had common hallmarks for teams and technologies. 

Epoch 1 – Teams

The MoveOn.org model relied primarily on ‘campaigners’ who were responsible for delivering multiple types of digital engagement, in different channels and settings. They managed email lists and used them for advocacy, list growth, fundraising, volunteer recruitment and earned media. They engaged with allies, elected officials and the media. They fundraised – almost exclusively through small dollar asks from their supporter base. They created videos and ads. They used digital tools to organise offline events – from house parties to protests. Somewhat anachronistically, MoveOn.org had almost no real website. For years, the domain was a compendium of petitions and little else. 

Moving on from MoveOn.org, there are common hallmarks of early digital teams in this epoch. While the naming convention varied (Internet? New Media? Digital?), teams were often similar in structure and skillset. 

Digital teams tended to be small. The people in them were usually generalists or people with multi-disciplinary responsibilities. If there was differentiation, it usually started with a web or visual designer and did not go much farther than that. Digital campaigners of this era were expected to: 

  • write emails, 
  • create web content, 
  • write blog posts, 
  • fundraise over email and on the website, 
  • recruit volunteers & drive attendance at offline events,
  • create social media content (as these sites started to exist), 
  • produce web videos, 
  • manage data (primarily email list segmentation within a digital toolkit), 
  • create and place digital advertisements, and 
  • conduct blogger and digital media outreach.

The notable exception may have been with the visual design and development of websites themselves. Those discrete tasks often required technical hard skills. If organisations did not have them, they were outsourced to agencies or skilled volunteers.

In most organisations that existed prior to the creation of the internet these tasks required close collaboration with other departments (Fundraising, Communications, Policy, Volunteer, etc). At MoveOn.org, campaigners were responsible for all of it. 

Early digital teams may have been independent departments in some organisations, but often they sat within a Communications department or grew out of an IT department. 

These multidisciplinary, generalist teams (augmented by expert designers and in some instances database or web developers) benefitted from operating in a domain that was nascent. There were no long-agreed best practices.  There were no degree programmes that turned out young graduates to staff organisations with similar people, with similar perspectives and philosophical approaches to the use of technology in advocacy and elections. In contrast, American electoral campaigning as it related to field (offline) organising, communications, and fundraising had best practice approaches that reached back to the days of Abraham Lincoln. Teams of digital generalists essentially had a blank slate to determine what would work best when it came to building power online.

Epoch 1 – Technologies

For the bulk of the first epoch, digital teams relied on online two types of digital tools. 

First and foremost were websites. Content management systems (CMS) became common as ways for non-technical or low-technical generalists to put content on web pages. The popularisation of CMSs as a tool for digital teams aligned with the emergence of Web 2.0 – which allowed for interactive websites, user-generated content, unique URLs for pages and posts. By using WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) content editing, CMSs allowed more people of limited technical skills (like myself) to post frequently and bring attention to specific posts and pages via directly linking to URLs. 

The other primary tools were all-in-one digital toolkits. Products designed for advocacy and non-profit practices included broadcast email senders, email databases, fundraising functionality, petition pages, tell-a-friend pages, letter to the editor pages, and geomapped elected official datasets that allowed organisations to directly send petitions from constituents to elected officials. Practically speaking, these toolkits enabled digital teams to build lists, engage them with numerous types of engagement asks, raise money, and re-engage to build lists even more. They did not require hard technical skills – usually some basic HTML knowledge was sufficient to get the most from these toolkits. 

Early digital toolkits included products like GetActive, Convio, NGP, Engaging Networks, Action Kit and Democracy in Action. Later in this epoch also included Blue State Digital, Salsa Labs, EveryAction, NationBuilder and Action Network.

One critical factor at this stage of digital technology development in nonprofits is that there was little to no movement of data between websites and digital toolkits. Digital toolkit landing pages were generally styled to look similar to websites, but not be a part of them. If there was movement of data, it was periodic, manual transfer of donor information or membership information from fundraising or volunteer databases into or out of the digital toolkit. The processes for the bulk of this period were manual and infrequent (weekly? monthly?). Digital teams got to work primarily within one major platform (the toolkit) beyond the website – and email was the primary channel that was relevant for data-generating and data-utilising purposes.

From a technical perspective, the only necessary skills for effective use of most digital toolkits was basic HTML. This, conveniently, was also all that was needed for producing content on CMSs. And even this wasn’t totally critical, as both toolkits and CMSs had WYSIWYG interfaces that allowed emails and web pages to be published without any coding knowledge. 

Digital teams benefited from web developers and visual designers who had the technical capabilities to go beyond WYSIWYG editing, but campaigns and organisations could launch a substantive digital presence with only a CMS, a digital toolkit and a single campaigner with the responsibility of producing content across multiple digital channels. 

In essence a functional digital presence could be achieved through one person, of no to low technical skills, using as few as two technology platforms. (An exception could be noted that ActionKit always required SQL developer capacity and the MoveOn campaigners relied on some technical support to deliver email segmentation and list management). 

EPOCH 2 (~2010s): CRM at the centre  

Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign in 2007-2008 was the first instance of a national campaign or major organisation to invest in building a massive, mature digital team. (“Taking Our Country Back” by Daniel Kreiss is an excellent look at how digital evolved from the Dean and Kerry campaigns in 2004 to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.) While the first campaign falls within the first epoch, it presaged what we would see as digital crew in other organisations: growth in teams and specialisation in roles. 

By the time President Obama ran for reelection in 2012, the shape of the next digital epoch’s teams and technologies was becoming clear. No longer was the structure of a US presidential campaign the outlier for digital team taxonomies – it was now a common structure. This included a more varied use of digital technologies.

Epoch 2 – Teams

OFA 2008 gave digital teams around the world a model for how resources could be allocated across different areas of digital practice to get the best results. This included heavy investments in design, in email and web page optimisation, in SMS programmes, in large-scale testing, and advertising.

More capacity allowed for greater specialisation. Greater specialisation allowed for more experimentation, the deepening of the best practices playbook within those domains, and, theoretically, greater organisational impact through higher efficacy. 

In practice this evolution saw the movement away from generalist digital practitioners and towards domain-level specialisation. A robust digital team might now include different people responsible for:

  • Email (but not necessarily differentiated between fundraising and non-fundraising emails)
  • Website content
  • Data management
  • Analytics & reporting
  • Web design & user experience
  • Video 
  • Mobile
  • Advertising 
  • Social media

The rise of bloggers as respected journalists saw the responsibility of blogger outreach move out of digital teams and back into more traditional communications/press teams. 

Practically speaking, we see a digital team that may have been composed of one to two types of job description in the 2000s become a team with eight or more differentiated roles in the 2010s. For national and international organisations, this proliferation of roles and headcount was not a fundamental barrier. Digital was a promising domain and unit heads were able to justify increased investment. That is, unlike most incumbent organisational functions, digital teams grew with the expectation that they would deliver measurable value and impact for their organisations. 

Epoch 2 – Technologies

For the early years of this period, most digital teams still employed a CMS and an all-in-one digital toolkit. But parts of the digital toolkit were beginning to be segmented off from use in favour of some ‘best in breed’ tooling choices. This could include things like purpose-built broadcast email platforms, highly optimised tell-a-friend or after action pages, and donation processing platforms. 

CRMs sought to unify online supporter and donor data across digital and non-digital platforms. Storing data about the same people in different systems required new technology and new skills for moving data and managing what constituted ‘truth’ about who someone was, what they had done with an organisation, and how they wanted to be communicated with. While fundraising teams had used CRMs – customer/constituent relationship management – for a while, CRM companies like Salesforce sought to integrate more marketing functionality that was relevant to digital engagement and campaigning. 

The rise of point to point APIs (application protocol interface) allowed simple data movement, often through visual interfaces but sometimes in code-based environments. The data movement was generally not too complicated – records moved from A to B to C and back again through linear processes. This required greater stewardship of data and provided a more clear benefit for segmentation and list management that went beyond email as a channel. 

Beyond this more simple technical infrastructure for data movement between systems, we also begin to see more advanced matching of email and donor data records to the voter file (in the US in particular). This requires developing a more sophisticated view of who individuals are and what data updates from external data sources (voter files, organising databases, consumer data) with datasets maintained by organisations and campaigns. This sort of person matching was between data sets where there were clear, unique identifiers (email, phone number, street address, name). In later years matching of supporters across differing data sources becomes more challenging, due to a lack of common unique identifiers (e.g. social media handles) or anonymisation of tracking data.

The growth of channels as domains of practice similarly led to an increase in the need for reporting dashboards and analytical tools that sat outside of the digital toolkit itself. Data could now be brought together across web, email, social, and fundraising channels. 

As the 2010s progress, we see an increase in the number of people in teams, an increase in the options for tooling to deliver largely similar digital outcomes as the 2000s, and a commensurate increase in the skills required to effectively manage those tools. Or, framed in the other direction, as we built teams with more people and specific skills, they sought out tools that would best enable them to achieve their narrowed areas of responsibility. Generalist digital campaigner roles became less and less common, but the perceived opportunities of specialisation and domain expertise made this feel like an easy choice for managers to make. 

EPOCH 3 (2020s): Data warehouse at the center

While the 2000s were a time of explosive digital growth that saw the emergence of social media and mobile smart devices by the later parts of the decade, the 2010s saw consolidation of tools and platforms used by campaigns and organisations. The internet was no longer a place of wild growth in the types of tools and platforms providing opportunities to organisations. Instead, it became a place where massive Silicon Valley corporations and their funders reduced innovation, limited competition and locked audiences in as commodified eyeballs to sell to advertisers or sources of data to, well, sell to advertisers too. 

The Covid-19 pandemic pushed organisations even further towards digital reliance. The loss of offline and face-to-face engagement channels due to the risk of illness and death led to even more investment in digital teams and technologies. 

As the world began to come out of the pandemic, Silicon Valley introduced us to a new technology at scale – generative artificial intelligence. It arrives as an offer to solve the problems organisations and exchanges face – problems derived from the arc of digital team growth and technology proliferation. 

Epoch 3 – Teams

The 2020s see an increase in specialisations that were started a decade before. Email staff get split into different domains of practice. In some cases (INGOs), it is likely  fundraising experts and everything else experts, while with political and marketing contexts, the division may be between email writers and email optimisers. Social media staff proliferate with each new large platform and content type. Writing for a website is no longer the same job as writing for email or writing for a microblogging platform. Different engagement channels and platforms require their own staff to manage them and their audiences. (“Require” here reflects a common choice, but it is one to be examined soon.)

Data teams show even more signs of specialisation. Data analysts, data engineers, data scientists, data visualisation experts, data architects and more roles have become commonplace, both in terms of the sorts of job descriptions we see in organisations and the need for specialisation to make the tools we procure work effectively.

Generalist roles are largely gone from national and international organisations. The siloing of digital teams – which may also include the fracturing of these digital roles across digital, engagement, campaigning, fundraising, data and IT departments – means there is reduced integration between and interaction with different digital functions. There is a greatly reduced literacy of cross disciplinary knowledge – that is, someone whose job is to create content for Twitter and engage audiences there may not be able to write fundraising emails or draft website content. Someone tasked with web analytics may not be able to effectively strategise about email list segmentation or after-action conversion page design.

What are the consequences of the proliferation of headcount, specialisms, and tools? Different digital practitioners are reaching different, but overlapping, audiences through different channels. From the outside people may not perceive these differences directly, but many organisations find it harder to remain coherent. This in turn leads to poor messaging engagement in different channels, pasting content from one channel to another without a recognition of different audience and stylistic needs. 

It is critical to note that this is not simply a negative consequence of Conway’s Law reaching digital engagement outputs. Audiences that campaigns and organisations are trying to reach have indeed fragmented across social media channels. Greater investment and capacity is needed to reach them in this landscape. Algorithmic content delivery contributes to the same trend—you’re constantly chasing the trends that the algorithm favors in a given moment.

Organisations effectively have different internal digital stakeholders, with limited structural integration and less ability for people to be interoperable across roles and channel responsibilities. This leads to a loss of flexibility in resourcing (be it for crisis moments, or simple things like vacations or sick leave), competition for resources within digital channels, a lack of understanding of what works in different contexts. In my eyes, a critical consequence of this is the loss of creativity about how to stay on the cutting edge of digital engagement. 

Staff rely on stale best practices, meaning many organisations’ outputs look the same, regardless of what issue they are working on, what their brand is or which individuals are creating outputs. ‘Best practices’ need to be the baseline for creation of new emergent practices. Yet team structures and specialisation often limit this in reality.

Epoch 3 – Technologies

The ‘best in breed’ approach has proliferated further into this era, with even less reliance on all-in-one digital toolkits. The big difference is that breeds are getting smaller. Previously large platforms that provided multiple functions are being atomised into smaller and smaller technology domains. A single data platform has been replaced with multiple cloud solutions and new tooling choices at each stage of the data pipeline. On-platform functions are increasingly done off-platform. Many tools are required today to do what one or two tools did in previous eras. 

The architecture in place for systems and tools has evolved to seeing a data warehouse at the center of the map. The movement of data in and out of the warehouse, the production of data products that deliver value to ranges of stakeholders, the construction and maintenance of integrations and pipelines are consuming activities for digital and data technology teams. The pursuit for efficient data storage and movement practices, along with canonical understanding of who people are as they interact with numerous digital systems, is an essential dimension of this technological era. 

With the rise of smaller and smaller technology classes, increased specialisation of skills is required, forcing more FTEs to fill different technical roles (as we see above). The key here is the technology trend is driving a staffing and budgeting trend. 

Another dynamic in this era is that the companies selling all-in-one style digital tool sets have gone through a period of massive consolidation. Private equity has gotten involved, buying up competitors and degrading the quality of products on offer. This, paired with the availability of cheap money for Silicon Valley to apply into new investments and acquisitions had a powerful impact on the technology landscape.

Convio acquired GetActive, then Blackbaud acquired Convio. BSD split into two companies, both of which were acquired by larger firms. NGPVan / EveryAction acquired BSD Tools (BSD Kit?), ActionKit, DonorTrends and SalsaLabs. Then EveryAction was acquired by Apax Partners, a private equity firm. 

Only a handful of competitors are independent – notably companies like Action Network, Engaging Networks, and NationBuilder.

Major tech players like Salesforce, Hubspot and Microsoft have sought to offer an array of tools and functionalities that at least appear to have a level of unification and interoperability as to replicate past vintages of all-in-one digital solutions. However this is often not as clean as past tools – Salesforce’s offerings are closer to a Frankenstein monster, with body parts stitched together from other acquisitions, as opposed to technology built by one company with one coherent approach.  

AI as a Solution?

Looking across this genealogy, there are a number of meta trends:

  • The movement from generalist to specialist roles
  • The growth of the number of technology domains that require staffing and tooling
  • The atomisation of product offerings within technology domains (with associated increases in costs from procurement processes to maintenance)

Through all of this – from the creation of digital teams to their growth and proliferation – it is unclear if each epochs’ trends bring better results for organisations. Does each FTE today bring the same ROI as 15-20 years ago? Does each new platform that is switched on bring the same ROI as 15-20 years ago? Does the level of specialisation and technical hard skills make organisations more able to achieve their core outcomes of winning on their issue and having financial security? 

Teams are bigger. The quiver of tools in use is larger. But are the results any better?

Generative artificial intelligence products are being sold to executives who are asking these very questions. Whether or not generative AI actually can be a solution to organisations (and my sense so far is that they are not a solution at all), the appeal is obvious. I recently saw an AI company advertisement on LinkedIn targeting executives that was framed simply “For less than a third of the cost of a new Analytics Engineer, you can have a year long subscription to our AI data product.” The continued growth in staffing demands is untenable and AI is being sold as a solution.

The market for AI is with executives who, at some point, must stop hiring new FTEs as every incumbent tool is replaced by more and more niche products, each requiring their own technical expertise and product management. Regardless of whether AI can actually solve the problems of integrating systems, moving data, creating content and increasing staff efficiency – the market demand is a consequence of the trajectory of the last 25 years of digital teams and tools. 

Calling the Question

The enshittification of the internet – especially search and social platforms – also looms large in my thinking. I don’t think our teams and structures are well suited for the necessary period of adaptation, experimentation and innovation that we will have to muster in order to thrive in an enshittified internet. The calcification of thinking into rigid best practices is no longer right for digital teams. (See: Cynefin framework. We are no longer in an Obvious domain. We are in, at best, a Complex domain that requires emergent practices, or at worst a Chaotic one, that requires rapid response.)

As a manager of teams and someone supporting a network of organisations that are resource constrained, the current direction of travel feels unsustainable. The proliferation of tools and requisite numbers of digital and data staffing FTEs simply cannot continue without significant improvements on ROI and organisational impact. It is based on assumptions of arithmetic growth that simply are not reliable in most organisational contexts.

If technology isn’t working for organisations and if the results are not getting better, then there has to be a strategic and functional reset. The missions of nonprofits and campaigns are not waiting while technologists build more and more integrations, or onboard more and more staff. At some point, we must get on with the strategic work that digital and data teams are meant to support. 

Ultimately it should be clear that the freedom, the flexibility, and the lack of binding best practices of the first epoch of digital teams and technology are things that I find missing in today’s working environment. It is up to us all to find new pathways forward – hopefully with a commitment to creativity, courage, and collaboration to once again unlock the transformative power of digital technology in nonprofit organisations.

Special thanks to the feedback and input from Matt Compton, Maria Julia van Boekel Cheola Torres, Sebastian Sibelle, Chad Stein & Mike Townsley. 

Live streaming isn’t new to American politics

Dan Pfeiffer puts it well when he describes Meerkat as a platform “no one seems to know how to use…yet.” It’s brand new and may well be offering something that people find applications for, in politics or beyond. But for now descriptions of how Meerkat is going to change the 2016 elections are premature. Pfeiffer’s hype of Meerkat seems to be a bit much to me, particularly given his apparent ignorance of other live streaming platforms from the present and recent past.

For starters, Pfeiffer seems to be unaware that live video streaming technology already exists and has been around with varying degrees of success since before Barack Obama was even nominated by the Democratic Party for President in 2008. UStream and Justin.tv launched in 2007. Qik launched in 2008. YouTube has had live streaming functionality for quite some time too.

These platforms launched before smartphones with decent video cameras were ubiquitous. But they existed and they have been (and are) used quite widely — to broadcast live streams of puppies, of baby bears, of concerts, and yes, American politicians.

In spring 2007 I went to work for Chris Dodd’s presidential campaign. Dodd, at the time a five term Democratic Senator from Connecticut, never got above two or three percent in national polls and exited the race after the Iowa caucus in early January 2008.

Prior to that exit, though, we deployed live video streaming as a core part of our campaign’s engagement with the public. As deputy internet director, I traveled with Dodd on essentially all of his political trips to Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina, Michigan and other early states. Along the way, I used UStream to live stream anywhere from one to three speeches and Q&A sessions per day.

People following the presidential primary were able to engage in the same dialogue with a candidate as residents of the early states. Using UStream’s embedded chat functionality, as well as monitoring comments on the sites where our streams were embedded, we were able to bring in questions from people across the country into Dodd’s Q&A sessions with voters in New Hampshire and caucus-goers in Iowa.

The technology was simple and easy. A small camcorder hooked up to a laptop and broadcast on UStream. For the best streams we would use an ethernet cable, but the best was rarely possible. Most of our streams were done over wifi or even a Verizon air card. I was able to set up live streams in back yards at house parties in New Hampshire or in greasy spoon diners rural Iowa. At big political forums I was able to run live streams from the press risers alongside CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News.

We promoted live streams on Twitter and kept a scroll of recent tweets and streaming feeds on the home page of the campaign’s website.

During the Google & YouTube-hosted debate in South Carolina we even UStreamed senior campaign staff commenting and fact checking what was being said during the course of the debate in real time. According to UStream, that feed have over 10,000 views. Following the debate commentary, I broadcast live from the post-debate spin room while Senator Dodd answered questions from reporters.

Again, this was in 2007.

The Dodd internet campaign, under the leadership of Tim Tagaris, turned our website into a video hub for speaking directly to voters. Tagaris’s vision was to give people greater access to Dodd and the campaign via streaming video — to create “Big Brother” for politics with brand new technology. We built DoddTV — a multi-channel repository for live streams of speeches, saved videos of Dodd talking on key political topics, and interviews with senior campaign staff talking about our work. DoddTV even included a live stream of the Dodd campaign headquarters to watch staff work (naturally we didn’t broadcast sound).

To state the obvious, the Dodd campaign’s innovative use of live streaming technology and public engagement via streaming video did not move the needle an inch in the Democratic presidential primary. Maybe it’s because we were eight years ahead of our time. But more likely it’s because the forces of political sentiment in America are too big to be influenced by one technology platform or one medium of engagement.

I have no clue if Meerkat will revolutionize political engagement during the 2016 cycle and neither does Dan Pfeiffer. Maybe the spread of smartphones with good video cameras and faster data connections will bring live streaming into politics in a bigger way than we did in 2007. Maybe the fact that recording broadcasts for later viewing is actually a really key feature for spreading what happens at political events won’t be relevant to Meerkat’s growth in politics or beyond.

I just hope we can have a discussion of Meerkat that recognizes the technology platforms that came before it, as well as the applications that those platforms were deployed in, before we anoint live streaming as the “new” technology of the 2016 election cycle.

Cross posted from Medium.

#BlackLivesMatter + Net Neutrality

As I’ve noted recently, there is a need for left movements to recognize their intersectionality. While anti-racism, economic justice, and environmental justice may have strong claims at being the left ur-movement in the early 21st century, the only way I see towards achieving real transformational change is by building off of the intersectionality of these movements and pushing forward together.

Likewise, I believe there to be tremendous potential in marrying these thrusts into an agenda that also includes strong provisions for internet freedom and civil liberties, ideas which resonate in a transpartisan and transnational contexts.

It’s incredibly heartening to see the #BlackLivesMatter movement openly campaigning for preserving a free, open internet and network neutrality. Writing in The Hill, Patrisse Cullors makes a powerful case that net neutrality has been a prerequisite condition for the birth and growth of this anti-racism and police reform movement. Organizers and representatives also held meetings with Congressional leaders, including John Lewis and Hakeem Jeffries, as well as regulators at the FCC, to push for net neutrality.

“We were founded clearly in response to the murder of Trayvon Martin, on the key premise of the failure of the media to adequately report on the murder,” said Dante Barry, the director of the group Million Hoodies. “If we don’t have access to open Internet, and we don’t have net neutrality, then it limits the ability for black people to save themselves.”

Racism will persist if impacted communities cannot communicate and cannot organize online. Police violence, disproportionately targeting Black Americans, will persist if net neutrality disappears.

Movements are connected. Most of the time, issue-oriented movements tend to diminish this interconnectivity. But it’s hard to imagine lasting, meaningful change being possible while left movements remain atomized, isolated, and at odds with each other as to whose issues are The Most Important. Finding common ground to campaign on builds trust and trust creates opportunities for greater change.

Hat tip to Sarah Jaffe for sending these stories my way. It’s genuinely some of the most heartening activism I’ve seen in a while.

Another liberal tech company doing work for conservatives

Updated below

NationBuilder is an online campaigning tool kit, providing clients with the ability to do online advocacy, email supporters, raise money and integrate social media. NationBuilder was founded by a group of progressive and Democratic technologists with campaign and grassroots non-profit organizing experience in the Netroots. It’s not particularly different from other online tool kits like Blue State Digital, Salsa or Action Kit, with the notable exception that it is dramatically cheaper, with pricing starting at $19 per month for smaller campaigns and non-profits. Online tools can be quite expensive, beyond the reach of many state level campaigns, or even congressional candidates. NationBuilder has, in my estimation, been successful at making online organizing tools more accessible to people with less money to spend.

All of this is preface to another disappointing development: NationBuilder has announced a deal to be the “exclusive software provider for the Republican State Leadership Committee.”

Excuse me? The RSLC helps elect Republican state legislators, the very people who are going around the country passing things like bans on marriage equality, racist laws targeting immigrants for deportation, and rolling back reproductive rights and environmental protections. These reactionaries think passing laws banning Sharia law is a good use of time. And NationBuilder is going to provide the technology to help more of these people get into office.

Have no fear, despite being started by progressives and made popular in large part from progressive and Democratic business, NationBuilder is only a technology platform.

[Co-founder Joe] Green said he has no misgivings about providing technical assistance to candidates with whom he likely disagrees vehemently.

“Our ultimate goal is simply to level the playing field and let the people decide based on the strength of the arguments, not based on who has the biggest TV ad budgets,” Green said. “We’re proving that political software can and will be nonpartisan.”

I’m sure Green and his business partners won’t mind, then, if Democratic campaigns and progressive organizations fire NationBuilder today.

Much of the controversy around Change.org revolved around their construction of an open campaign platform, staffing themselves with many notable progressive campaigners, accepting the mantle (both earned and perceived) as being a progressive piece of infrastructure, and then deployed a defense of “But we’re an open platform!” when criticized for working with union busters.

In fairness, NationBuilder has been more open about a willingness to work with the Tea Party from its earliest days. But its founders’ backgrounds in Democratic electoral politics and the activist-progressive film and organizing group, Brave New Films, have lead to many grassroots progressive organizations to embrace the tools. Again, NationBuilder has said they’re non-partisan, but there’s a bit of a difference between being an open platform and inking a contract to provide tools to just about any Republican state legislative candidate in the country.

It isn’t openness when what you mean is you’ll work for anyone who gives you a big check. That’s what Lanny Davis does with his lobbying services and I don’t think it’d be accurate to call him an open platform.

Technology can be used to do anything. At its most basic level, programming may be fundamentally non-ideological. But once code enters the world, it is used for specific ends. The people who sell technology can decide whether they want their code to be used for good or ill. They have a choice. And NationBuilder is choosing to work for people who want to put women in jail for getting abortions and deport any brown person with a Hispanic-sounding name. That anyone can pay to use NationBuilder’s tools is no defense. It’s an excuse and a sad one at that.

I think it’s time for progressive activists and organizations to start putting out clear expectations about the behavior of companies who want our business. Clearly there is a problem with ostensibly left-leaning technology firms and their willingness to do work with conservative activists.

My recommendation is to deny business to technologists who are working with conservatives to turn America back to the late 1800s. If you are a client of NationBuilder, fire them. If you are considering hiring them, don’t. Make your decision public and make sure that even if NationBuilder isn’t going to change, other technologists will know that progressives won’t work with the people whose code is being used to attack the human and civil rights of women, gays, immigrants, people of color, and workers.

Update 6/29:
I’ve received feedback on this post, both in the comments and offline, and I think it was inaccurate for me to describe NationBuilder as a “liberal tech company.” They are non-partisan and honest about that fact. I noted this in the post, but the headline and lede do not make that clear.

That said, the criticism of any company for objectionable business practices is fair, especially one which derives a significant portion of its revenues from progressive organizations and campaigns. NationBuilder should be treated exactly the same way as any other business which works to help get reactionary Republicans elected. Recent examples would be Waffle House, Koch Industries, and Coors Brewing Company, though online progressive groups regularly run campaigns pressuring businesses which support conservative work, as we saw with tremendous campaigns against ALEC’s corporate donors.

In short: There’s no reason to give technology companies that progressives use any different treatment from any other companies who are doing objectionable things.

The Guardian Project

orbot
Tor+Android=Orbot

Nancy Scola at techPresident has a long article about The Guardian Project, an effort lead by my friend Nathan Freitas, that seeks to create secure software for mobile communications. Mobile devices are critically important for activists, dissidents, and leaders of change movements. But most are incredibly insecure and using them can put activists at risk. The Guardian Project seeks to make open-source technology that gives people the ability to talk, message, browse the web, and store data securely on their mobile devices.

[T]he Guardian Project is working on tools to make those devices more secure. Their flagship product is Orbot, an implementation of Tor, a network of servers that routes users in ways that obscure where they’re coming from and where they’re going. Freitas built Orbot with computer security expert Jacob Applebaum. And then there’s Gibber, an encrypted, firewall-evading chat application. The Secure Smart Camera App is an innovation in the works with Witness.org, the group that sprang up after the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles that works to document situations where human rights are at risk. The camera app aims to use automatic facial recognition software to obscure identifies on video taken from mobile phones. It uploads the documentary footage extra-slowly. That’s useful not only in low-bandwidth spots on the globe, but for shielding the video from network censors by making it look like any other type of Internet traffic. There are plans in the works for a “poison pill” program that would allow you or an ally to wipe your phone clean in a dangerous situation. (All Guardians apps in progress are listed on their website.)

This is some of the most inspiring and important work I see taking place at the nexus between technology and progressive activism.

Melber v Gladwell on Egypt & Organizing

With global attention on the protests in Egypt, it’s not shocking that some people have fixated on the role of social networks like Twitter as driving the activities of anti-Mubarak protesters. Indeed, one of the first major steps Mubarak took to try to stymie the dissidents was completely shutting off the internet in Egypt (it was recently restored). Not shockingly, when it comes to triumphalism of technology in activism, Malcolm Gladwell, devote skeptic of all things digital, chimes in as an anti.

Without going at the thin and dismissive post by Gladwell myself, I’m turning it over to Melber, who writes:

The overarching problem here is the false premise, frequently employed in these disputes. No one is arguing that this is the first protest in world history. Very few people think the Internet is an essential prerequisite to revolution. Instead, they’re exploring whether the web and networked communications open up new and effective ways for citizens to converse and organize each other in repressive societies. (Access to mobile phones and text-messaging, for example, may have helped young people organize in Egypt and Tunisia in a different way than landlines or websites.) We can engage these issues without taking anything away from the French Revolution. Now, whether people “always” communicate grievances in authoritarian societies—a dubious claim—is less important to foreign policy than what comes of those communications.

…

[W]hen Gladwell simply announces that how people communicate is “less interesting” than why, he’s just stating his personal, editorial preference as accepted fact. The banal reality is that different people find different things interesting. And really, by ending his defensive post with that line, Gladwell sounds a bit like the recent Onion headline tweaking his predicament: “Panicked Malcolm Gladwell Realizes Latest Theory Foretells End Of His Popularity.”

Actually, Melber’s conclusion reminds me a lot of his demolition of Lee Siegel’s book, Against the Machine. In 2008, Melber wrote:

By combining the fact-free observations of a futurist pundit and the hypocritical tirades of a sinful preacher, Siegel’s book is as unreliable as it is insufferable. Ironically, he sounds like the caricature of bloggers he denounces: uninformed, shrill, defensive, and self-obsessed. The nascent web culture does have problems, which fine thinkers have tackled before (Cass Sunstein and Yochai Benkler, for example). But Against the Machine fails to support its antiweb hostility, let alone offer specific reforms, because it’s too busy ranting in the mirror.

Gladwell really does sound eerily like Siegel, whose old man yelling to get off his lawn routine is getting quite old by now.

But to back up a step, Gladwell’s overall critique is that social networks and the internet are incapable of building the sort of deep ties which he says are requisite to produce meaningful social and political change. First, this denies that most social networks are, in fact, social and built upon close personal relationships. But more importantly, in the situation we have in Egypt now, what evidence is there that this mass uprising is built on deep ties between the anti-Mubarak activists in the street? What says that two strangers standing next to each other, sharing shelter from thrown rocks, must or even do have a deep tie? More likely they are there because they both knew it was time for change and time for action. They may have been brought there by a tweet or by a phone call, but they’re there. There’s no unitary way that people come to action and that’s totally fine. Hopefully Gladwell grasps this and will stop pissing into the wind sooner rather than later.

Mid-East Protests & The Internet Kill Switch

As the world watches massive demonstrations in Egypt, the Egyptian government has shut down the internet. There are also reports that Syria has done the same. These are desperate acts from governments that are terrified of their citizenry. Killing the internet is an effort to silence their citizens.

With that as a background, let’s take a look at Joe Lieberman, who is still pushing for an internet kill switch under control of the President in the United States. CNet reports:

A controversial bill handing President Obama power over privately owned computer systems during a “national cyberemergency,” and prohibiting any review by the court system, will return this year.

Internet companies should not be alarmed by the legislation, first introduced last summer by Sens. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), a Senate aide said last week. Lieberman, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, is chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

In the pantheon of bad ideas that Joe Lieberman has pushed over the last 20 years, this has got to be one of the worst.

More Chinese Internet Espionage Exposed

Articles in the Globe and Mail and the New York Times document the work by researchers at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto to expose a new network of global hack attacks originating from China. From the Globe and Mail:

The report is careful not to conclude the Chinese government is behind the operation, since it is difficult to tell who is orchestrating the attacks. Last year, the Chinese government denied any involvement in GhostNet after the researchers uncovered nearly 1,300 infected computers in 103 countries linked to servers in China.

But computers belonging to exiled Tibetan leader, the Dalai Lama, who is denounced by China, have been the most compromised.

Almost every e-mail sent to or from the Dalai Lama’s offices in 2009 has shown up in the files, the report says. Nearby India has also taken the brunt of the cyber attacks, with numerous secret government documents recovered by the Canadian researchers. They include 78 documents related to the financing of military projects in India, details of live fire exercises and missile projects, and two documents marked “secret” belonging to the national security council.

Sensitive data from 16 countries, such as visa applications by Canadian citizens, were also recovered. It is believed the hackers accessed those files through computers at India’s embassies in Kabul, Dubai, Nigeria and Moscow, which were corrupted.

As is often the case, while there are potential ties between these hacking rings and PLA military schools and think tanks, there is little explicit evidence that the perpetrators are, in fact, the Chinese government. The two things that stand out, though, are that the biggest targets are the Tibetan Government in Exile, human rights activists, and the Indian government. I find it hard to believe that your run of the mill hacker cares too much about the emails from the Dalai Lama’s office nor the movement of human rights activists in North America and Europe.

Moreover, if the Chinese government wasn’t behind these particular attacks (or GhostNet or the attacks on Google), why are they allowing these high level hackers to remain in operation? If they are not connected to the Chinese government then surely the Chinese government knows more about who these criminal hackers are than a few researchers in Toronto, Canada? And if not, what does it say about the actual grip the Chinese Communist Party really has over control of its power?