Gideon Rosenblatt's Blog

Aggregating Civic Engagement at "The Point"

gideonr — 2007-12-03T22:17:25Z

The Point is a social platform for people to solve problems they can’t solve alone.

Here's a quick highlight of something cool (thanks Marty for the heads up). The folks at The Point have rolled out a very interesting service for allowing people to build critical mass for civic and other forms of engagement. The service addresses the challenges of overcoming tipping points that can stop people from becoming involved in civic engagement. Take a look at the animated introductions that highlight different potential approaches to using The Point - and you'll see what they mean.

And that's the point. This idea is not new. Fundable is conceptually similar and has been around for a while now. What I like about The Point is really the packaging that surrounds it. By framing this idea in a slightly different way and doing a nice job of illustrating different usage scenarios, The Point is opening this idea to a bunch of exciting new applications.

Nice job folks. I would love to see you implement this in a more distributed way (e.g. like the ChipIn widget) that doesn't tie it so tightly to your website, but makes this cool functionality more widely available in lots of websites and online social networks.

Engagement that Influences Decisions

gideonr — 2007-11-30T22:01:44Z

Clarity of purposes is the single most important factor in successful engagement. Whether it’s civic engagement, commercial engagement or even personal engagement, without clarity of purpose, even the world’s best strategy and execution just take you further off target.

This post is an extension of my last one where I defined what I mean by “engagement.” In that piece, I wrote that “to engage someone is to attract them, build connection and commitment with them, and facilitate working together with them in shared purpose.” The focus of this post is defining what that purpose is.

In a very generic sense, the purpose of almost all forms of engagement is to influence decisions. Allow me to explain, and if you can find exceptions by the time you’re finished reading this post, I’d appreciate your letting me know.

Types of Decisions

The purpose of commercial engagement is to influence a particular type of decision – a purchase decision. There’s lots of decision influencing that goes on inside companies that has nothing to do with purchasing of course, but what I’m talking about here is engagement of people outside the company’s organizational boundaries. In most cases, this means customers and influencing them to decide to purchase the company’s goods and services. The same is true for stockholders too; it’s just shifting the purchase to an equity stake in the firm’s future.

The purpose of interpersonal engagement is to influence personal decisions. But wait - if I’m a teenage guy trying to convince my girlfriend to go all the way with me, or a parent trying to convince my young child to brush his teeth every night, aren’t the end goals something besides the decisions themselves? Aren’t they sex and clean teeth?

Decisions as Levers of Change

Decisions represent a critical moment in time when a person internally commits to a particular course of action. It is true that it’s that action – and ultimately the outcomes of that action – that are the ultimate, underlying purpose. Teeth brushing and healthy teeth are clearly the end goals, but from an engagement perspective, the decision to brush is the critical commitment that makes it all happen. The decision is the lever that, once pulled, sets in motion a chain of activities that get you to your end goal.

This is what I meant in my last post when I included building connections and “commitment” as a key component of engagement. The decision to commit to something is a huge lever, literally capable of moving mountains. That’s why clearly identifying decision makers and their decision points is so critical to the success of all engagement campaigns. It’s why product companies invest millions of dollars researching consumer purchasing decisions.

Decisions and Civic Engagement

Influencing decisions is the purpose behind all engagement, and that includes civic engagement. The purpose of civic engagement is to influence decisions that impact society. Those decisions – and the people who make them – come in lots of shapes and sizes, which is what makes civic engagement so darn challenging – and interesting. It might be the head of a major corporation or a lowly clerk in its purchasing department. It might be a city council member, a state or provincial legislator, a premier or governor, or just someone doing their very specific job in a very specific agency.

All social change organizations need to start with a clear understanding of their mission. From there it is also important that they can articulate exactly what social changes need to happen in order for them to fulfill that mission. A “theory of change” is an excellent tool for articulating these goals. With that in hand, the task then shifts to identifying the decision makers and decision points that the organization needs to influence in order to effect their desired change. These decisions are the levers of change. To move them is to move mountains. For when a person commits to something on the inside a powerful shift occurs; one which brings you together working in shared purpose.

Engagement Capacity

Wielding that kind of influence is not easy. It requires investment and focus in strengthening an organization’s “engagement capacity” – that is, its ability to attract people, build connection and commitment with them, and facilitate working together with them in shared purpose.

In later posts, I will explore the new models that ONE/Northwest is developing to help environmental organizations strengthen their engagement capacity. For now, I simply wanted to share some of these ideas about decisions being the lever that engagement uses to move mountains.

It’s a simple idea really, but one so important that ONE/Northwest has reoriented itself as an organization around this principle. Our new strategic framework centers on helping the environmental movement influence decisions that impact the environment. Innovative engagement tools and strategies are how we will do that, but the purpose behind what we do is influence – influence over decisions – and that, I believe, is the purpose for all engagement.

“Engagement” – What Is It?

gideonr — 2007-11-26T19:03:57Z

The new ONE/Northwest is centered on “engagement.” All of our programs are now aimed at engaging people and organizations in influencing decisions that impact the environment. You’ll hear more about these exciting new directions on this blog over the next few months. For now, it’s worth taking a quick look at what we mean by the word “engagement.”

Dictionary definitions of “engagement” encapsulate why I like the word for describing our new work. To engage is to occupy the attention or efforts of someone, to secure for aid, to attract or please, to attract and hold fast, to bind, to betroth, to bring into conflict, to take employment, to pledge one’s word and to cause to become interlocked.

In other words, to engage someone is to attract them, build connection and commitment with them, and facilitate working together with them in shared purpose. In short, engagement is part relating and it’s part doing.

This “relating and doing” or “task and relationship” is a dynamic that is critical to understanding how engagement works. It’s a give and take, a push and pull…a Yin and a Yang, if you will.

In healthy engagement, investments in “doing” are balanced by investments in “relating.” When we invest in building strong relationships, be it with constituents, staff, or even family and friends, we also invest in our collective capacity to get things done. Closer connections mean that we understand one another better. We know where shared interests lie, what impassions us, and what turns us off. We build trust. We build commitment. When we invest in getting things done together, we also strengthen our relationships. This is the esprit de Coeur that comes with high-functioning teams and the comradery that comes with jointly overcoming adversity. The best community organizers understand this dynamic intuitively and balance investments in doing and relating in all their work with constituents.

Unhealthy engagement comes from lopsided over-investment in either doing or relating. Organizations that over-invest in relating at the expense of doing, suffer from an inability to execute. Friendships may flourish, even long after the organization that once housed them has long since disappeared for failure to deliver. Organizations that over-invest in doing at the expense of relating often suffer from burnout, attrition, a failure to tap constituents’ passion and purpose, and an inability to exert the kind of real influence with decision makers that only comes through close relationships.

After nearly seven years of serving environmental organizations, I would say that far too many fall into this latter category. And just in case you think I'm pointing fingers, I would lump ONE/Northwest - and even me personally - into this group as well. We're talking about deep behavioral patterns here that percolate through organizations and their people.

This task and relationship dynamic is a good frame for thinking about how we engage people in creating social change. It points the way to interesting new tools and powerful new approaches to strengthening organizations’ “engagement capacity.” These new strategies and systems build relationships and put those relationships to work. This is the focus of ONE/Northwest’s work going forward.

Stay tuned.

Long Tail meets local in the “Local Tail”

gideonr — 2007-11-26T19:03:19Z

Every once in a while someone will come up with a name and explanation for something that you’ve experienced repeatedly and know is important but can’t quite label. This happened to me just recently with Chris Anderson’s concept of the Long Tail. The core idea here is that the Internet changes many of the hit-driven business models we’ve come to take for granted. In the old physical retail world with limited shelf space, blockbuster movies dominate the video store racks and movie theaters, while best seller books account for the bulk of shelf space in bookstores. Then along come companies like Amazon and Netflix who use cheap storage and distribution, coupled with powerful user interfaces for discovering less popular titles, and boom, the whole model flips. Titles in the Long Tail . those less popular books, videos, albums, etc. that never really sold before, suddenly start selling. Maybe still not by a whole lot individually, but collectively their sales can start to rival or exceed sales of the bestsellers. This is the notion of the Long Tail.

So I’ve been thinking about the Long Tail as it relates to connecting people back with the places that they live. For kicks, let’s call it the Local Tail. The Local Tail is similar in many respects to the Long Tail.

Take news as an example, big important stories that happen at the national and international level tend to get lots of coverage by lots of media. They choke off other stories of potential interest to smaller numbers of people. So yeah, a story about the war in Iraq or a Presidential campaign is likely to bump the story about the Pez collector convention. But it also bumps the story about a particular bill that is working its way through my state legislature. No sweat. That's what my local paper is for, and quite frequently they do carry a story like that if they're a decent enough paper that hasn’t been gutted of its editorial staff in some buy-out and that doesn’t pull most of its stories from Reuters feeds. So far, the system works. That bill may not be getting picked up in the New York Times or Washington Post, but at least somebody is covering it. But now let’s take it down one more level. What about the stuff that’s happening in my neighborhood? Very, very interesting to me, but not really to the rest of Seattle. So my local paper doesn’t cover it. It can’t afford to; just as the corner bookstores couldn’t really afford to carry all of those titles in the Long Tail.

End of story right? No, not exactly. A few years from now; maybe quite a few years from now admittedly, but one or more of my neighbors is going to start blogging about what.s happening in our neighborhood. Seeing him or her do that might actually motivate me to post a few myself that are tied to things going on in the neighborhood. Easy enough to do, but what’s missing right now is an easy way to find them. Chris Anderson touches on the importance of discoverability toward the end of his Long Tail article but I think this is really one the critical factors behind the whole concept. Finding news that is really local just isn’t that easy right now, but Google getting into mapping services along with Amazon with its A9 search engine with mapping capabilities suggest to me that this is about to change very quickly. I would be shocked if they don't eventually come up with solutions that make it easy to tag certain sites and individual content chunks with some sort of geo-coding. When that happens, the Local Tail will explode.

The Local Tail is likely to start with information, but my guess, and my hope is that it will not stop there. I use Bloglines for my RSS reading and I’ve noticed that since using it I've become way more connected with news from my local paper. We don’t get the local paper at home because it bothers me to see all that paper stacking up - usually unread. And I never really got into the habit of regularly visiting either of my two local papers. websites. But now that I get both of their RSS feeds into my Bloglines, I read them all the time. And if I had a few streams coming in from one or two neighborhood activists or even neighborhood busybodies, I’m convinced I would read those too. So the hope is that once this stuff starts being easier to discover more people will start blogging within the Local Tail about stuff too local to get picked up in mainstream media. And when that happens, we will hopefully start seeing a renewed interest in neighborhoods, and ultimately our neighbors. It's not at all whacky to imagine. This is where you live. News about planned roadwork on your street or improvements to the nearby park really matter.

So will the Local Tail stop there with news? I don’t think so. I think it will have an impact on our civic engagement and loyalty to local businesses. Think about hearing that those nearby park improvements you heard about last month were now being scuttled and some of your neighbors were getting together to do something about it. You know no one else in Seattle’s going to do anything - too local to matter to them. It’s up to you and your neighbors. Right now, I don.t hear about most of this kind of stuff. As for local business, I think that the Local Tail has tremendous potential to shift the way we shop - particularly for services. Combine it with reputation systems like those found on eBay and more useable browsing with geo-tagging via cell phones and you start to get something very interesting. Sure, there are some impediments. While I was working at Microsoft, I was tangentially involved with its local Sidewalk business (which was sold to CitySearch) and it was tough to get local merchants to maintain their information online. But sales have a way of motivating behavior changes. Retailers will likely also find that The Long Tail trumps the Local Tail; meaning that it will be hard to compete with the inventory management advantages of sophisticated outfits like Amazon. But even that is changing. Amazon is no longer primarily about running big warehouses. They are moving into the e-commerce platform business in a big way. Imagine what happens if an when they figure out how to tie in local merchants into a distributed network of local showrooms and fulfillment centers.

The world has a very good chance of changing as we know it as we move away from monolithic, centralized information sources and service providers to a more distributed, more convenient network of the local made discoverable by the online. Long live the Local Tail.

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Special thanks to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, which enabled me to rescue this post from my old blog. This article was originally posted March 6, 2005. There is a great new piece by Alex Iskold, called The Rise Of Hyperlocal Information that inspired me to bring this piece back. Alex's pieces is way more up-to-date and detailed. Lots has happened since I wrote this two and a half years ago. I still like the term "local tail" though....

Plone for a blog...

gideonr — 2007-11-26T19:08:45Z

I used to blog a bit a few years ago using a Movable Type site. Now I'm blogging with Plone.

I'd like to say it was something I planned. It was not. My site got accidentally deleted and I just never bothered to lift the "do not resuscitate" order. I had found that my posts were getting unfocused and so I decided that it was time to give the world a break and stop posting for a while.

Well, it now feels like enough time has gone by that I can once again show my face on the blogosphere. This time, my focus will be a bit sharper. And this time I tie my musings much closer to my professional affiliation - in short, to my job as executive director at ONE/Northwest.

This time, I'm also trying Plone out as my blogging platform. Over the last three years, I've come to really love Plone as a content management system (CMS). We've used it to build websites for well over 100 environmental organizations.

Plone appears to be on the verge of Cambrian Explosion of creativity right now, fueled by its latest release and much tighter integration with Zope 3.0.

So I'll close this first post with one small prediction - this time next year many more people will be talking about Plone -- and a few of us will be talking through it...