DigiActive.org

Case Study: The Report Card on Vote Report India Version 1.0

The 2009 Indian Lok Sabha elections have come to an end and so has version 1.0 of Vote Report India.

We have had our successes and failures and I have talked about some of them before.

I think we did a lot of things well –

- We were able to get the website up within a week, thank to some great work by the Ushahidi and eMoksha teams.

- We were able to build a number of important relationship, with civil society organizations (like Jaago Re/ One Billion Voters, National Network for India, Liberty Institute, Citizens for Justice and Peace, and Women’s Political Forum), traditional media organizations (like Al Jazeera) and new media organizations (like Global Voices, Indipepal, Desipundit, BlogAdda, NGO Post and Digital Democracy). In fact, our partnerships page looks like a literal who’s who of the important players working on the Indian elections.

- We were able to generate a lot of buzz for Vote Report India, on blogs, on Twitter, and in mainstream media within a very short time.

- We have been able to build a vibrant Vote Report India community that has been active in supporting us on both the technical and outreach side.

Here are some things that have not gone well –

- We haven’t been able to establish a relationship with any big Indian media organizations on one hand, and National election Watch and the Election Commission on the other hand, in spite of some serious discussions.

- We haven’t been able to integrate the Swift functionality into Vote Report India (aggregating feeds from multiple sources and crowdsourcing the tagging etc.) on our original timelines.

- We haven’t been able to get users to submit reports in large numbers. We have a little more than 200 reports in the system, which isn’t bad. However, we would have needed many more reports to capture the complexity of the 2009 Indian elections.

- The voter turnout in all four phases has been low, putting a question mark on the effectiveness of all digital civil society campaigns like Vote Report India.

Here are some lessons from Vote Report India version 1.0 –

- It’s still difficult to build a grassroots movement in India exclusively on the internet. Even online campaigns need to be supported by mainstream media for reach and SMS for the feedback loop. We had SMS, but we didn’t have the resources to advertise on mainstream media.

- In a country like India, which has a free and noisy news eco-system, transparency initiatives like Vote Report India need to not only get original reports from users but also aggregate reports from mainstream media.

- Transparency, in terms of availability of information in a usable format, is not a big enough incentive for Indian users. Users expected Vote Report India to closeloop the issues and give them feedback, and we were not set up to do that.

On the whole, I think that we did quite well, given our time and resource constraints.

Our biggest achievement, I think, was being able to build a vibrant community around Vote Report India and we are grateful to all the people who contributed to the project.

As I said, this was only version 1.0 of Vote Report India. We will take a short break and then relaunch Vote Report India as a platform to crowd-source the performance monitoring of our elected members of parliament, using the Ushahidi/ Swift engines. We will move the present homepage to 2009.votereport.in and start new pages like 2014.votereport.in for new elections, including local assembly elections.

Selvam and I, along with the other members of the core team, will continue to devote a substantial part of our time to Vote Report India. We are looking to expand our team, so do write to us at votereportindia@gmail.com, if you would like to become involved in a significant way.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics, my blog on social media and social change.

Digital Activism & the 4Cs Social Media Framework

The Need for the 4Cs Social Media Framework

Over the last year, I have had to explain how social media works to diplomats, defense officials, and academics and students focused on fields as diverse as international affairs, management and sociology.

I have found that first-timer find social media confusing because of two reasons.

The first reason is the excessive focus on specific social media tools. Many first-timers are introduced to social media via specific tools. Many ’social media experts’ who are practitioners rather than thinkers also focus on specific tools. Since social media encompasses many different types of tools, and each tool has specific characteristics and a steep learning curve, a toolkit approach can quickly become overwhelming. Blogging (Wordpress), microblogging (Twitter), video-sharing (YouTube), photo-sharing (Flickr), podcasting (Blog Talk Radio), mapping (Google Maps), social networking (Facebook), social voting (Digg), social bookmarking (Delicious), lifestreaming (Friendfeed), wikis (Wikipedia), and virtual worlds (Second Life) are all quite different from each other and new and hybrid tools are being introduced almost everyday. Mastering each tool individually seems like a lot of work and a lot of people give up even before they begin.

The second reason is a clear definition of what social media is, even within the social media community. Different thinkers and practitioners use different terms to describe similar tools and practices. Terms like social media, digital media, new media, citizen media, participatory media, peer-to-peer media, social web, participatory web, peer-to-peer web, read write web, social computing, social software, web 2.0, and even crowdsourcing and wikinomics can mean similar or slightly different things depending upon who is using it. Journalists, marketers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, software vendors and academics approach the space from their own perspectives and have their own preferred terms. Used precisely, these terms can mean very different things. However, very few people use these terms precisely and almost nobody agrees on the exact definition of these terms.

The 4Cs Social Media Framework

My own approach to social media is both tool-agnostic and terminology-agnostic. So, I use the term social media to encompass all the tools and all the practices that are described by the terms I mentioned above.

Instead of getting distracted by the tools and the terminologies, I focus on the four underlying themes in social media, the 4Cs of social media: Content, Collaboration, Community and Collective Intelligence. Taken together, these four themes constitute the value system of social media. I believe that the tools are transient, the buzzwords will change, but the value system embedded in these 4Cs is here to stay. So, let’s look at these 4Cs in some detail.

The First C: Content

The first C, Content, refers to the idea that social media tools allow everyone to become a creator, by making the publishing and distribution of multimedia content both free and easy, even for amateurs.

User generated content, and the hope of monetizing it through advertising, is at the core of the business model of almost all social media platforms. User generated content is also at the core of citizen journalism, the notion that amateur users can perform journalist-like functions (accidentally or otherwise) by reporting and commenting on news. Citizen journalists have repeatedly emerged as critical in crisis reporting and several citizen journalist platforms have emerged to harness their potential to report hyper-local news.

However, just because everyone can become a creator doesn’t mean that everyone does. Most users prefer to consume user generated content, by reading blog, watching videos, or browsing through photos. Some user curate user generated content, by tagging it on social bookmarking websites, voting for it on social voting websites, commenting on it, or linking to it. Researcher have found support for the 1:9:90 rule in many different contexts. The 1:9:90 rule says that 90% of all users are consumers, 9% of all users are curators and only 1% of the users are creators.

The Second C: Collaboration

The second C, Collaboration, refers to the idea that social media facilitates the aggregation of small individual actions into meaningful collective results.

Collaboration can happen at three levels: conversation, co-creation and collective action.

As consumers and curators engage with compelling content, the content becomes the center of conversations. Conversations create buzz, which is how ideas tip, become viral. Many social media practitioners who are from a marketing or public relations background are focused on creating conversations.

However, some of us recognize that conversations are a mere stepping stone for co-creation. In co-creation, the value lies as much in the curated aggregate as in the individual contributions. Wikis are a perfect example of co-creation. Open group blogs, photo pools, video collages and similar projects are also good examples of co-creation.

Collective action goes one step further and uses online engagement to initiate meaningful action. Collective action can take the form of signing online petitions, fundraising, tele-calling, or organizing an offline protest or event.

Even though conversations, co-creation and collective action are different forms of collaboration, the difficulty in collaborating increases dramatically as we move from conversations to co-creation to collective action. The key is to start with a big task, break it down into individual actions (modularity) that are really small (granularity), and then put them together into a whole without losing value (aggregating mechanism). It is also important to bridge online conversations into mainstream media buzz and online engagement into offline action.

The Third C: Community

The third C, Community, refers to the idea that social media facilitates sustained collaboration around a shared idea, over time and often across space.

The notion of a community is really tricky because every web page is a latent community, waiting to be activated. A vibrant community has size and strength, and is built around a meaningful social object.

Most people understand that a community that has a large number of members (size) who have strong relationships and frequent interactions with each other (strength) is better than a community which doesn’t. However, a community is more than the sum total of its members and their relationships.

People don’t build relationships with each other in a vacuum. A vibrant community is built around a social object that is meaningful for its members. The social object can be a person, a place, a thing or an idea. The Netroots community is built around progressive politics in America. The My Barack Obama community was built around Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. The Obama Girl community was built around a series of videos Amber Lee Ettinger made to support Obama’s campaign. Sometimes, choosing the right social object can be crucial for building a vibrant community. HP can choose to build a community around printers, printing, or corporate careers, all of which will have very different characteristics.

The Fourth C: Collective Intelligence

The fourth C, Collective Intelligence, refers to the idea that the social web enables us to not only aggregate individual actions, but also run sophisticated algorithms on them and extract meaning from them.

Collective intelligence can be based on both implicit and explicit actions and often takes the form of reputation and recommendation systems. Google extracts the pagerank, a measure of how important a page is, from our (implicit) linking and clicking behavior. Amazon and Netflix are able to offer us recommendations based on our (implicit) browsing, (implicit) buying and (explicit) rating behavior and comparing it to the behavior of other people like us. eBay and Amazon assign ratings to sellers and reviewers respectively, based on whether other members in the community had a good experience with them. On the day of the 2008 US elections, the Obama campaign was able to assign trimmed down telecalling lists to volunteers by ticking off the names of the people who had already voted.

The great thing about collective intelligence is that it becomes easier to extract meaning from a community as the size and strength of the community grow. If the collective intelligence is then shared back with the community, the members find more value in the community, and the community grows even more, leading to a virtuous cycle.

The4Cs Social Media Framework in Summary

So, the 4Cs form a hierarchy of what is possible with social media. As we move from Content to Collaboration to Community to Collective Intelligence, it becomes increasingly difficult to both observe these layers and activate them. Also each layer is often, but not always, a pre-requisite for the next layer. Compelling content is a pre-requisite for meaningful collaboration, which is a pre-requisite for a vibrant community, which, in turn, is a pre-requisite for collective intelligence.

Although I designed the 4Cs framework to explain how I see social media, I have also found it to be a useful tools to evaluate specific social media initiatives. The best social media initiatives leverage all these four layers, but I have seen that most initiatives get stuck between the Collaboration and Community layers. Examples of social media initiatives that leverage the Community or Collective Intelligence layers are few and far between. It’s important to note, however, that each layer is valuable in itself, and it’s OK to design an initiative to only exploit the Content or Collaboration layers.

The 4Cs Social Media Framework Applied to Digital Activism

Let me explain what I just said my applying the 4Cs framework to digital activism initiatives.

Many digital activism initiatives like Social Documentary and Witness primarily focus on using social media tools to create and share compelling multimedia Content. Some of this Content generates Conversations and becomes viral and some of it might even lead to Collective Action. However, the focus is on Content.

Other initiatives, like Vote Report India or the Pink Chaddi Campaign, start off with a strong focus on Collaboration around a specific event. In its first iteration, Vote Report India leveraged Co-creation by creating a platform for collectively tracking irregularities in the 2009 Indian elections. The Pink Chaddi Campaign leveraged Collective Action by asking its supporters to send pink panties to the Sri Ram Sena as Valentine’s Day gifts. As these campaigns become successful, they try to move to the next Community level, but don’t always succeed in building a long-term community.

Very few digital activism initiatives are able to leverage the Community or Collective Intelligence layers. The Netroots community in the US, especially Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo and MoveOn.org, have been able to build a strong Community around progressive politics in the US. My Barack Obama leverage some aspects of Collective Intelligence during the 2008 presidential campaign.

What About You?

If you are a social media practitioner or a digital activist focused on the Content and Collaboration layers, I would urge you to think about how you can move to the Community layer. If you already run a vibrant community, I would urge you to think about introducing reputation and recommendation systems in it and leverage the Collective Intelligence layer.

If you are designing a new social media initiative, I would urge you to use the 4Cs Framework in the design and strategy phase itself. Perhaps, in phase one, you would want to start with a campaign built around Content and focused on Collaboration, with elements of co-creation and/ or collective action. You would do well to plan for a phase two which is focused on Community, with a dash of Collective Intelligence built in. The question you want to ask yourself, then, is: how can I design a Collaboration based campaign so that it can be used to build a long-term Community?

If you are a journalist, analyst or academic in the business of understanding social media initiatives, you’ll find the 4Cs Framework really useful. What are the boundary conditions needed to succeed at each layer? What are the boundary conditions needed to move from Content to Collaboration, from Collaboration to Community, and from Community to Collective Intelligence? Can you think of other digital activism or social media initiatives that leverage the Community or Collective Intelligence layers?

Do share your thoughts.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics, my blog on social media and social change.

Tool: Build Your Own Alltop For Advocacy

Background: I’m sure that many of you are familiar with Alltop. It creates destination pages for topics of interest by aggregating them on a dashboard that displays the five latest headlines from each feed. The items can be previewed by doing a rollover on the headlines and read by clicking on the headline. If you haven’t checked out Alltop yet, the Social Media, Social Entrepreneurship, Non-Profit, Good, and Human Rights pages might be a good place to start.

For some advocacy projects, it might be useful to build an Alltop-like dashboard that aggregates relevant content related to the cause on one page. So far, I had thought that it wasn’t really possible, without some serious coding.

Then, I built the Indian Election Dashboard for Vote Report India in two hours, and realized how simple it was.

Tool: The trick was to discover the wonderful OneNews theme for Wordpress, which is especially designed to build Alltop clones.

Using a special template, the theme converts a page into a collection of widgets, which can be arranged to form the dashboard. The widgets support text, photo, video and search feeds, and can also be used for entering PHP or HTML code, to add elements not built into the theme.

The theme supports an unlimited number of dashboards on a single Wordpress install, as each page can be converted into a dashboard.

So, apart from the Indian Election Dashboard I hacked together for Vote Report India, I also built a Indian Bloggers Dashboard for Global Voices (please note that Global Voices hasn’t yet endorsed the dashboard).

The theme also supports blog posts, apart from pages/ dashboards. The blog posts have a RSS feed, like a normal blog, but aren’t displayed in the usual reverse chronological order on any single page.

The theme is built on Wordpress, so almost all the features native to Wordpress, like support for multiple languages, should be available for the theme. Also, all the hacks that can be done on any Wordpress theme should also be possible here.

Here is a hack that converts the Alltop-like dashboard view to a Techmeme-like river view, using the same OneNews theme.

The OneNews theme is available for $49 for a single use license and $199 for a multiple use license. Based on my experience, it is a small investment worth making for an appropriate project.

Application: While I won’t encourage you to make a dashboard just because you can, I can see many applications for such dashboards.

The first application is to build a destination news micro-site for an important event. This is what I have done with the Indian Election Dashboard.

Another application is to aggregate content for a community or a topic of interest. This is what I have done with the Indian Bloggers Dashboard.

Yet another application will be to aggregate conversations around your advocacy project, to showcase the buzz and the impact on one page.

I would caution, however, that such dashboards might not be very useful on a standalone basis. They would work best when used as part of a bigger project, to showcase everything else you are doing on the project.

What other applications of this tool can you think of?

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics, my blog on social media and social change.

Action Alert: Citizen-Powered Election Monitoring With Vote Report India

What: Vote Report India is a collaborative citizen-driven election monitoring platform for the 2009 Indian Lok Sabha elections. Users contribute direct SMS, email, Twitter and web reports on violations of the Election Commission’s Model Code of Conduct. The platform aggregates these direct reports with news reports, blog posts, photos, videos and tweets related to the elections from all relevant sources, in one place, on an interactive map.

Vote Report India aims to not only increase transparency and accountability in the Indian election process, but also provide the most complete picture of public opinion in India during the month long elections.

Vote Report India is built on the Ushahidi and Swift platforms and managed by eMoksha, a non-profit organization that aims to enable stronger democracies through increased citizen awareness and engagement.

When: The month-long Indian Lok Sabha elections will be held in five phases on April 16, April 22/ 23, April 30, May 7 and May 13, and the results will be announced on May 16.

Why: This is an important election for India, in the context of a series of terrorist attacks last year that shook up the country, and a worldwide financial crisis that threatens to derail its strong economic growth.

However, as India’s 714 million voters elect their 543 representatives, we are sure to see the usual controversies that surround general elections in India: the illegal use of government resources for campaigning, incidences of divisive and inflammatory rhetoric in campaign speeches, and allegations of violence, intimidation and other irregularities during the elections.

Vote Report India will provide a platform to report and track these irregularities, and help to increase transparency and accountability in the Indian election process.

How: You can help Vote Report India in three ways.

Step 1: Evangelize It

We would encourage you to spend some time at our website and project wiki to get a sense of what we are doing. If you like what we are doing, please join the Vote Report India community at Twitter (@votereportindia), Facebook, Orkut, SMSGupShup or Google Groups and subscribe to our blog. If you have a blog or a website, please consider writing about Vote Report India and displaying our banners (200X200 and 150X150) on your blog or website.

Step 2: Use It

The next step is to actually use the Vote Report India platform and encourage others to use it.

Incidents can be reported in four ways –

- By sending a message starting with VoteReport to 5676785
- By sending an email to report@votereport.in
- By filling a form on the Vote Report India website.
- By sending a tweet with the hashtag #votereport

Step 3: Volunteer

We can use all the help we can get. Volunteer opportunities are available in many areas, especially for software developers, designers and journalists. Please email us at votereportindia@gmail.com to explore these opportunities.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics, my blog on social media and social change.