Activism On Weblogs

The blogosphere has thus far mostly been about "Say". As people get more engaged, they start sharing their opinions and discussing them online - they reinforce each other's views, pile on to causes, and start engaging in that dangerous practice - idealism. The blogosphere is perfectly built for this because it is so easy to find someone else with the same whacked-out crazy mix of interests. Hundreds of thousands of small ponds, with all of us as big fish.

So far, however, the blogosphere has not been a great fit for "Do". There are a myriad of cynical ways to say it - pajama-clad bloggers agreeing that something needs to be done, and then not doing anything - but the truth is simply that there is often still a long distance between "Say" and "Do".

However, the blogosphere broke down the barriers for "Say" already. Anyone can go to blogger.com to create a free weblog, and there are clear upgrade paths.

Similarly, it's just a matter of time before more barriers are broken down for "Do". All it takes is the creation of more tools. The tools that will work best are the ones that can easily be dropped in to a person's existing weblog, regardless of platform. This requires open standards. Eventually all weblogs could have a spruced up open "plugin API" that supports more functionality than simply posting to a weblog.

In order to break down the "Do" barrier, here are some possible tools we could see:

• A congress tracking system: Thomas sucks. There should be a system where any bill can be readable as text, annotated by the public, with discussion underneath. It should be hooked up to a congressperson-tracking system so we can track how they have been contacted by the public, what they think of the bill, and how they are likely to vote. It should be easy to look up a congressperson's complete vote history.
• A public issue-tracking system: These have existed for software developers for a while - bugzilla; mantis - but they're so obtuse that only geeks get into them. Plus, they tend to only be for actual bugfixing of existing issues. There needs to be a new system where a community can
  1. Identify an objective
  2. Start working to publicly create tasks supporting that objective
  3. Assign those tasks to willing community members
  4. Track progress and make reports
  It's similar to bugtracking, but instead for public use and activism.
• A better "volunteer tracking" system. A marketplace for matching up projects with specialized needs, with people that have specialized skills. Someone who needs a thirty-second music soundtrack for their political ad, or a large tab-delimited text file of precinct data put into a mysql database, should be able to define those needs somewhere for someone else to snap up. I can do either of those things, but no one would know it without that service.
• An action aggregator: Right now we're being bombarded with tasks to call about this or that, and it's like they are competing with each other. It's nonsense - a service could be created to let people subscribe to daily missives for all the causes they care about.

Many of these tools are in development, and some are further off into the future. There are some closed systems like CivicSpace that require a certain weblog platform to take advantage of their tools, and many other standalone tools that can be dropped right in to any weblog. In addition, the blogosphere always jumps around in strange directions - will we be seeing a blog-driven public lobbying organization with paid lobbyists? An actual blog-driven shadow democracy with elections and office-holders?

Politology will be tracking these developments and analyzing how they are affecting politics. We'll also be actually working on developing some new tools; write if you want to be part of a development team.