| Collaboration Group Second Progress Report (04/04/2005) |
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Group Members
Adam Torgerson, Scotty Allen, Phong Le, and David West.
Progress since last report
We have started to dive deeper into the material, and refine our research area. Some team members have continued to pursue the work of Howard Rheingold, specifically his book Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Other team members have focused on exploring works mentioned in Rheingold's bibliography, as well as delve into the as of yet unpublished book Extreme Democracy, which is available online in it's entirety. We have also started talking about using Hollan's distributed cognition framework as a starting theoretical foundation to understand the structure of technology mediated social action, Rheingold's analysis of contributing technologies to understand the specific dynamics that support the emergence of collective social action, and the readings in Extreme Democracy as specific examples of these collective social action dynamic.
Smart Mobs Themes
As Rheingold examines the different social phenomena where individuals collaborate to act in concert toward a communal goal using mobile and Internet related technology, it becomes apparent that these phenomena are seminal examples of collective social action where individual act for the common good. What is new and different about them is that their organization is mediated by mobile and Internet technology. Indeed, Rheingold argues that under their collective hoods, these phenomena rely on "technologies of cooperation"; some of which are old, some new, and some borrowed to create large scale collective action not seen in the past. These technologies of cooperation are both specfic tools (such as mobile communication devices) and patterns of social organization that supports network-mediated collective action.
Collective Action
Published in 1965, Mancur Olson's book on collective action provides foundation and context for many of Rheingold's ideas. Olson's main premise is that unless a group is small, or there is some kind of coercion or other device to make individuals act in their common interest, individuals will not act to achieve their common interests. In many cases, self interest alone is not a sufficient requirement for action, because people will see their efforts as having an imperceptible effect on the final outcome. With regards to Smart Mobs and political collaboration, these ideas are interesting because they are manifested in the respective social processes. A political group has members that often do not agree on every point, but are willing to make concessions in order to get the vast number of supporters required to put their group in power. At the same time, people may have a hard time being motivated to act in such a group because they do not see their individual contribution as playing a part in the larger picture.
Mediating Technologies
With respect to technologies of cooperation researchers often focus on the hardware and software that enables us to communicate with each other. In our times these technologies are both easily recognized and subtle. For examples, communications technologies that are easily recognized are cell phones, internet access, email, computers, and ubiquitious wi-fi technologies. But Rheingold also discuss emerging enabling technologies that are not so easily discernable such as as embedded surveillance cameras, electronic tag technologies (i.e. RFID), GIS enabled devices, and data mining technologies. These technologies and devices, often connected to the Internet, enshroud each individual in a communication web that allow us to access others and vice versa. Rheingold argues that beyond the issue of privacy, enabling hardware and software is only one component of collective social action, providing in some form the special device pointing individuals towards the common interest as described by Olson. For good or bad, we are starting to see some of these technologies being mandated, as in the recent proposal to integrate RFID chips into US passports.
The Problem of the Common
Rheingold defines the collective action dilemma as the "perpetual balancing of self-interest and public goods." Economists define public goods as "a resource in which all may benefit, regardless of whether they help create it" (Rheingold, 2002, p. 32). A classic public good is public television and national public radio: these service are available to all regardless of their subscriber status. Rheingold argues that understanding the problem of the common will go a long way in understanding the smart mobs phenemena because they exhibit the same types of characteristics of the classic public good. Open source software is a classic example: many users benefit from the ongoing development of a fewer numbers of developers. For Rheingold the question is how does these common goods project sustain themselves when the efforts of the few benefit the many and there is no obvious monetary benefit to the few?
Trust and Reputation
The flip side of the reputation as a motivator is the question of trust in across a network of communities where individuals may not have good knowledge of each other. The fundamental question might be: if I contribute to a software project I can I trust that others will too? If I decide to trust a text message and show up to protest how will I know that others will too? How issue of trust is solved is a critical enabling technology for network mediated social interaction. Rheingold argues that we should look at notions of threshold for social action (e.g. a tipping point) and mechanism that provide information regarding past individual behaviors as indicators of future behaviors (e.g. eBay rating of sellers).
Social Capital
One answer to the question of motivation to contribute to a public good lies in the notion of social capital. Rheingold, like other researchers, argues that developers contribute to an Open Source projects because they gain public recognition for their work. While public recognition is not directly related to monetary compensation, for many developers peer recognition of their expertise is compensation enough. In some cases, the social capital established from work on Open Source projects may lead to recognition of a special skill set, which in turn could lead to monetary compensation, so it is hard to completely separate the two. The importance of this social dynamic is the recognition that social recognition is an important motivator for contribution to a public good. Social capital is also a valuable resource in building the trust and reputation described above. Often the unspecified "leaders" of a group will be the members with the most social capital, they have done something for the group to earn this captial and other individuals in the group will look at that capital and naturally support further action.
Extreme Democracy
Extreme democracy emphasizes the importance of tools designed to break down barriers to collaboration and access to power, acknowledging that political realities can be altered by building on rapidly advancing generations of technology and that human organizations are transformed by new political expectations and practices made possible by technology.
Extreme Democracy proves particularly interesting, as it is comprised of a collection of essays written by a number of online activists, technological visionaries, and political organizers. The essays are loosely centered around the concept of extreme democracy, which is described as "a political philosphy of the information era that puts people in charge of the entire political process." The word "extreme" was borrowed from the programming practice "extreme programming", which centers are techniques and technologies that can be used to enable small groups of programmers to accomplish far more than they would be able to using more traditional software techniques. Extreme democracy means that it is possible for citizens to become easily involved in their government, and make their voices directly heard. This differs from direct democracy, in the sense that direct democracy assumes/requires that that all people must be involved in a given decision. "Extreme democracy emphasizes the importance of tools designed to break down barriers to collaboration and access to power, acknowledging that political realities can be altered by building on rapidly advancing generations of technology and that human organizations are transformed by new political expectations and practices made possible by technology."
One of the most valuable aspects of Extreme Democracy, however, is it's look at specific cases in which technology has been used to empower spontaneous, grassroots participation in the polictical process. The essay "Deanspace, Social Networks, and Politics" by Jon Lebkowsky, does a good job of taking some of the more ideas presented by Rhiengold and others such as David Reed, and applying them to the observations made during the technology centric portion of Howard Dean campaign.
One of the big successes for the Dean campaign was it's leveraging of technology to allow citizens to participate, organize themselves, communicate, and collaborate. Joe Trippi, the campaign manager, operated under the novel concept (at least for political campaigns), that the campaign should not be a top-down military structure, where all orders flow downwards, with little or no interaction in the opposite direction. Rather, his concept was simply to "trust the people, and let the campaign emerge from their efforts."
Out of this trust, and a need for a tool to allow supporters to communicate and collaborate in a relatively grassroots fashion, emerged Deanspace. It was a mixture of blog, forum, and content management system, built on top fo the existing open source application Drupal. It was built in a typical open source, distributed fashion, entirely by volunteers. It allowed individuals with a relatively low level of technical expertise(though some experience with installing similar software was required), to set up their own deanspace site. Out of this tool emereged 1000 different sites, clustered around both geographic locales and specific interst groups.
However, the downfall of the tool, and to some extent, the Dean campaign, was that those that were building the tool had little if any political campaign experience, and weren't very in tune with the needs of the volunteers that were on the ground, trying to recruit votes for Dean in the primaries. They built a good tool, but it was the wrong tool. There was a strong need for the ability to import, manipulate, and share voter files, perhaps more than any other component of the tool. This was missing, until after many of the important primaries were over.
Research Strategy and Planned Activities
We plan to further continue our investigation of Rheingolds work, and to continue to work to tie his theories in not only with other researchers and similar theories, but also with case studies of exisitng applications of technology to politics.