MembersOur group consists of Scotty Allen, Phong Le, Adam Torgeson, and David West. Focused TopicWithin the broad topic of collaboration our group would like to learn about collaborative tools, web sites, or web services that facilitate political and social activism, particularly through pervasive computing devices (e.g. cell phone or personal digital assistant). ContextThe idea of pervasive computing presents many interesting opportunities for collaboration on political or social activism issues. In our global society, increasingly knitted with improving information and communication technologies, citizens have taken advantage of information technology to support their political activities. A few events illustrate how information technology has been used. For example, when the World Trade Organization met in Seattle in 1999, it was met with a huge protest lead by a broad coalition of groups concerned with prevailing economic and environmental policies.[1] Information technology enabled these groups to mobilize their members, and in some cases, allowed them to take direct “cyber-action” against members of the WTO.[2] Recently, at a World Economic Forum protests in Europe, protesting was not allowed. Activists tried to spread throughout the city, but on several occasions authorities would try to arrest them. Members of the boxed-in activist group would send distress messages to other activists present at the protest. Upon receiving these messages asking for help, other activists formed another protest group behind the authorities, boxing the authorities in. Once the authorities realized they were surrounded, they broke up, as did the activists.[3] Even more recently, in Venezuela, there was a mass uprising against a CIA sponsored coup that would probably have not occured without an infrastructure supporting alternative media content. The people siezed the presidential palace and overthrew the military that tried to put in a new chamber of commerce. Finally, in recent years we have seen the appearance of flash mobs, which are large groups of people which typically organize through the use of a computing device such as text messaging on a cell phone or through email.[4] The new tendency, which coincides with the current rise in Social Computing, is that people have increasingly been organizing real protests in virtual space. These protests have been enacted in countries all over the world and have been very effective. A great example is Critical Mass, which was created to protest the frivolous consumption of oil by consumer cultures. In its case, bulletin boards, email, and the world-wide-web were used very successfully to organize protests to block cars with the aid of mobs of bikes. In more mainstream political circles, supporters of the presidential candidate Howard Dean used tools such as Meetup.org and a custom, open-source software they developed, called Deanspace, to mobilize and organize hundreds of thousands of people, in a very grassroots, organic fashion. The tools empowered relatively nontechnical people to perform vital online organizing and campaigning, ranging from posting content, to fundraising, to helping to organize offline gatherings. Moveon.org continues to use similar tools to mobilize millions of people within hours, to take specific action on specific political issues. Research Questions(1) What kind of systems can be built to support planned or spontaneous political or social collaboration? (2) What are some of the cognitive and design theoretical underpinning of such strategies or system? Is the concept of distributed cognition or intelligence useful? And if so how has these organization applied or implemented these concepts? (3) Can systems be developed that properly facilitate sensible political communication in a non-top-down manner? How do you enable many people to have a say in political matters? What would such a system look like? What are the pitfalls? MethodologyWe plan to conduct research primarily through web based news outlets such as The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com), weblogs (http://www.andrewsullivan.com/), websites sponsored by political action groups such as moveon.org (http://www.moveon.org/front/), and research databases such as the ACM Digital Library (http://portal.acm.org/). We may supplement our research by interviewing a professor. Initial References(1) Guide to Online Activism. http://backspace.com/action/ (2) Rheingold, Howard. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. http://www.smartmobs.com/ (3) Forlano, Laura. Tech, Art, Protest, and Politics. Gotham Gazette. http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/tech/20041019/19/1154 (4) Many2Many. http://www.corante.com/many/ (5) Shirky, Clay. Power Law, Weblogs, and Inequality. http://shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html (6) Global Issues. http://www.globalissues.org/ (7) CivicSpace. http://civicspacelabs.org/ (8) Deanspace. http://deanspace.org/about (9) Operating Manual for Social Tools. http://www.corante.com/om/ Endnotes(1) http://depts.washington.edu/ccce/civicengagement/WTOHistory.htm (2) See the Electrohippies Collective, http://exn.ca/Stories/1999/12/03/03.asp (3) http://zeppox.ath.cx/~chall/wordpress/index.php?p=89#comments (4) Wired magazine article. http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,59297,00.html
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