Fast and raucous notes from the other presenters in Oxford at the E-campaigning Forum’s public event, Who’s Leading Who?

It was all good content, but the presentation that really blew me away was Jon Parsons of the Woodland Trust, and his Native Wood Hunt website (still in Beta) which gives people a mapping tool for finding, identifying, and protecting 500 year old trees all over the UK. Jon is just a great, empassioned champion of ancient trees and he’s building a gloriously intricate and beautiful tool for doing something about keeping them from falling anonymously to the developer’s chainsaws. “Many communities walk by these trees every day and have no idea how old they are. Simply identifying them, and giving school kids a chance to name them and learn about their history and their stories, can be a powerful way to ensure that somebody speaks up when someone wants to cut them down.” Magic.

As ever, I don’t tweak my raw notes so WYSIWYG. The wisdom nuggets and snicker captures that are here are embedded in a sea of typos and misspellings. Selah.

Raw Notes, Who’s Leading Who

eCampaigning Forum: Who is driving Who?

Riken Patel, Avaaz.org: Five reasons he’s excited.

1. Democracy Members of the global south in increasingly larger circle of particpation. Democratization

2. Geography is meaningless: virtual global team, everywhere. Quarter of a billion people on txt messaging in India, 1 billion on broadband in China. Gandhi: We are citizens of the planet first, and citizens of our countries second.

3. The Money. It’s the type of money. Foundations are slow, suffer from learning disabilities, the easiest money with no strings attached is the stuff you raise online.

4. Culture. The open source movement has a reverance for all things free and collaborative. That culture can change society and make it more collaborative, less competitive.

5. Cause. We need to put the campaigning into ecampaigning: we’re facing a global climate crisis, but poverty, war, continue despite best efforts of governments. It’s not the tool, it’s the context. Like when revolutionary pamphlets started being distributed.

The public square, and where we come together is online. And in that space, it’s not money or media that determines your power, it’s your participation.

Don’t pay attention to differences of 10% or less in surveys. Look at 30-40% differences.
Experiment. Try out stuff to see whether it has legs or not.

Crisitunities: Why is this important now, why do they need to respond now. If something isn’t contextualized as important immediately, response rates drop off.

Tipping point: if people get together and do x, the world could go this way or it could go this way, need to convey that your action will contribute to tipping the issue.

Winnability: Most people are cynical. Need to tell a compelling case for winnability.

Movement Story: A lot of people do one thing that’s public oriented. Need to speak to that part of them and make them feel part of something bigger, makes them feel connected.

Technological things you need to get right: Men take 2 seconds to decide whether to close an email or not. Women take 7. Every line above the first link drives your response rate down.

Get people in the door, then it’s a fertile space, and you can ask deeper, volunteer, donate, make it dead easy to do all this stuff. Naval gazing comes in a lot here: you want to pitch all your favorite ideas, but you need to be ruthless. Write for people who scan.

Feedback, follow up.

Global, multilingual campaigning. 12 languages. We had to build a custom CMS. We start in English, match across languages, they have ReTranslate buttons.

960,000 members, growing by about 20,000 a week. 45% in Europe, 30% in the global south.

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Steve Ward, Oxford Internet Institute

Conventional UK Politics and online

Low numbers participating online 3-10% actively engaged, 20-25% online news gathering.
Increasingly fed up with survey evidence. Those who engage online are already politically active. Age 30 male suburban, thinks survey’s not picking up new evidence. School age generation not represented. The Under 21 segment is where the revolution is happening.

Focus groups on use of “ICT Tools for political purposes.”

Informational skimming and scanning.

Trust levels skyrocket for messages from their friends rather than organisations.

Humour hugely important motivator.

Politics and campaigning were considered something others did — not them.

Online tools can deepen people’S activism. They didn’t stop doing offline stuff, they supplemented that with email, blog, etc.

Politicians felt the purposes of the net was to inform and educate voters and activists. People who joined organisations online had to have frequent contact or they dropped out.

People increasingly connected, through email, mobile phones, weak links. How you build on weak links.

Participatory Challenges:

Accleration: People feel under increasing pressure to respond. Governments and the legislative process can be extraordinarily slow. There’s a crisis of formal politics vs a thriving grassroots theme.

Amplifying the voices of the priveledged: these technologies amplify voices of people we already hear from, and the powerful. They entrench gaps.

Fragmentation of representation: If you live in a relatively poor part of the UK, the MPs are unlikely to offer online communication methods and advanced ICT.

Private sector: high expectations of what both policy makers and activists should be doing online. If those expectations are not met, you entrench cynicism.

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(comment) Mike from Avaaz:
There’s no really meaningful online party political work being done in the UK. US it may be minortiy, but it’s mainstream. NGO activism in the UK is streets ahead, the UK polticos simply are not paying attention.
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(comment) Beka from Greenpeace USA: traditional forms of online activism are becoming less effective. Congress is filtering, but the parties in the US are examining how blend online activism with offline so that the technology is being used to amplify.

David Wilcox:

Designing a campaign as an interactive process. Says the audience is leading him.

Asks us to invent a campaign, crowd responds with something to address
“Unaccompanied young refugees displaced by climate change.” Targetting governments and church.
Goal: Ratification of an international treaty to get government and church behind.

We then break into working groups and spin out scnearios:

Churches to become activist centres for mobilization. Establish a working relationship with the church. Interfaith groups.

Network of individuals who met at a forum and want to do something about it. Church members of every nation. Bishop of canterbury to have tea parties. Numbers. Need numbers. Make the refugee problem cute enough: not horrible people coming and taking our jobs, but cute victims.

Myth busting, get data by engaging, camera friendly refugees. Give them buddies to make videos about each other to pop up on youtube: life swap between a UK resident and a refugee about to be deported.

After the scenarios, David presents his card game: You spin a scenario, then figure out how to apply the subject of the cards: google on one card, Myspace on another, figure out how to apply them to the scenarios.

Then get out of the project management mode, and get into story mode. In groups of 4 or 5 they come with tremendously powerful stories. Releases richer conversations.

http://www.usefulgames.co.uk get this.

Sara Chamberlain, BBC world service trust
Public service campaigns, ads, programming Reality TV in developing countries, changing individual actions as much as political targets. E.g. campaign to get Indian men to wear condoms. Educating people who missed out on formal education: 20,000 women and girls in Somalia brought to a basic level of literacy. Radio in Dafur providing refugees with info about inoculation and where food is being distributed. Building capacity for locals to create their own media. Training media companies, web producers, radio producers. Participation is at the heart of their approach. Engaging audiences in the campaigns vs engaging the audience in the creation of your campaign? We research attitudes toward issues. We researched interviewed 11,000 people on attitudes toward condoms, then formed focus groups of target audiences, using their ideas to form a pilot, showed it to them, made sure we had something that was designed with them and would appeal to them, as well as being for them. We then continually assess and evaluate performance, talk to people about what people think of your programmes, fed back in, more evaluation, more assessment.

BBC did research into why people participate.

Hierarchy of involvement:

Further along, the more committment required:

Listening Watchin Giving money providing info being ther, giving time starting something

Majority of participation is at the listening and watching level.

Number one motivator was community and asserting your role in that community.
A passion, and interest.
Specific impact? Jamie oliver good school food campaign.
Creativity is a motivator.
Altruism.
Second motivator is the cause. It’s people first. It’s their friends, their families, and work colleagues.

Barriers: apathy, cynicism, contribution not interesting, if anyoe posets in a forum and gets any answer at all, no matter what content, exponentially increases chance that they will contribute again.

Participator types±

Instigators
Evangelists
Followers
REluctants
Happy Bystanders

It’s a pyramid: few instigators.
(graph of hierarchy against participator types.)

Media tech eases the participatory journey. It’s useful at the global level, not useful locally.

Broadcast media can act as a catalyst to mass participation.

In cambodia they developed a soap opera whith HIV aids story lines. Asked people to text what the characters should do. E.g. woman discovers boyfriend is HIV positive, asked the audience should she leave him?

Participation is of course dependent on people. Analogue, offline still has a major role to play. Analogue is considered more participatory: what would you rather do, upload photos to flickr, or meet photographers who upload to flickr.

Analogue plays to the top of the hierarchy of involvement. Digital plays to the bottom of the hierarchy, but htere are a lot more of them down there.

Micro communities promote a sense of security. Providing info breaks down into

signing up
Signing a petition
uploading non-personal information
uploading personal info

All this research done for a project called “Participate on line” Kids getting phones which sample co2 in their area and transmit, aggregate, and map that so it gives a snapshot of the local environment.

Bangladesh question time program in which small studio audiences pose questions but bangladeshis can SMS their questions and chat to each other live in a Txt ticker live on the programme.

zigzag magazine in Pashdue and Persian for Iran and Iranians. Tackles drug use, homosexuality dress codes and alternative music. developed with trainee new media journalists. discussion forums where people participate and become editors and contibutors.

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Jon Parsons of Woodland trust:

Climate change being the biggest threat to woodlands. Handful of people observing their gardens for blue bell appearance, first oak leaf, etc back to the 1800s. Built a website, put people on line, allowed them to register and then record eg. first blackbird feeeding young. 70,000 people observing and recording, they are protected on the mailing list and don’t mail them donation appeals. Mostly over 50. Got featured on Radio 4. Working up a child observation version.

Getting people to do stuff for us. Ancient tree hunt: Estimate there are 80,000 native tree species out there, going to get the audience to put stuff on an interactive map. You can record a tree on the map, upload pictures, invite kids to name it, get it verified and age asessed. Can visit a tree and keep a life list saying I visited this tree. Tree blog and record your experience under that tree. People tell stories of proposing to their girlfriend under this tree.

Activism element: species data, IPCC is using the research. Map and record 500 year old trees so people get a local interest and begin love their tree and protect it from development.

http://www.woodland-trust.org.uk/