What's Happening Near Me, Soon?

How Mobilize.us could transform the progressive organizing ecosystem, starting with events, and where it should go next. Plus, Clearview AI, Clubhouse, NFT madness and more.

Mobilize.us, the progressive organizing platform that thousands of campaigns and organizations use to host events like phone-banks, canvasses and (virtual) house parties, is starting to test its potential to be a networked platform by launching a weekly Friday newsletter that it’s sending to about one million of its users. “The newsletter goes out on Friday mornings (just in time to sign up for events that weekend) and includes personalized suggestions for supporters based on their zip code, past organizations they’ve been involved with, and the past events they’ve attended.” Peter Martinazzi, a senior product manager at Mobilize says, “The newsletter is already helping organizations grow their network and build community around their cause.  It contributed ~5% of RSVPs on the Mobilize platform in the past two weeks and generated over 10% of RSVPs for more than 50 organizations.”

I’ve long thought that if someone could solve the “what’s happening near me soon” question of building a progressive calendar they might fill a key gap and start to start to see a virtuous cycle of more people showing up at organizational events, followed by more organizations listing and tagging their events. (I once suggested this idea to Markos Moulitsas, the founder of Daily Kos, urging him to build a progressive calendar by getting his millions users to add a zipcode and a category tag when the posted about their own events; his reply was something along the lines of, “I can’t get my users to use the right tags.”) As almost 4 million people signed into Mobilize in the 2020 cycle to volunteer somewhere (taking 13 million actions), it has amassed real scale across the progressive ecosystem. This foray into producing cross-movement content bears watching. (And if you run an organization that uses Mobilize, make sure to check out their tips on how to make your events more visible to other users.)

But that said, a cross-movement newsletter built from organizational event listings and personalized to users’ past behavior and interests could be useful, but it’s the kind of incremental innovation that ~may~ make Mobilize a bit more useful, in the same way that ActBlue improving its usability by giving frequent donors a way to stay signed in on that fundraising platform and thus speed up their donations has increased uptake there. The bigger question is whether Mobilize wants to just get better at serving its customers, who are campaigns, or if it wants to leverage what it has built so far by understanding, and solving for, the pain points of its users—the nearly four million volunteers who have used it in the last two years.

There's a specific pain point that many political volunteers have that Mobilize could help resolve that would make it more valuable both to campaigns as well as individual volunteers. Which is that local volunteers have no way of developing a reputation right now. My profile page on Mobilize isn't much of a home base for me as an organizer. It's not discoverable. It doesn't really show if I did the shift(s) I signed up for. It doesn't allow me to give other volunteers kudos or vice versa. And the result is we’re not accreting value. We’re leaving a lot of latent power untapped. And we’re keeping in place a system that causes campaigns to have to reinvent the wheel, cycle after cycle, while centering the power generated by campaigns in the hands of candidates and their paid staff rather than grassroots organizers.

Imagine LinkedIn for political volunteers. Or, if you remember it, My.BarackObama.com (myBO) before the Obama whiz kids decided to remove many of its organizing tools. In its 2008 version, myBO let volunteers create their own organizing page, where they could create events, find friends, set up their own fundraisers and blog. The campaign did lots of other things to train and motivate grassroots organizers; it’s not like the tech did this all on its own. But the affordances of myBO enabled a lot of lateral relationship-building that was valuable in its own right, though not to the campaign’s managers, who eliminated most of those features by 2012. Since then, the core operating principle of Democratic digital tech has been tools that empower managers to extract value more efficiently from volunteers (and low-level staff) rather than anything that strengthens long-term infrastructure. Plantation economics rather than small farm ecosystem. This is understandable up to a point; after all, the job of a political campaign is to win an election, not transform the playing field. If churning-and-burning your volunteers or your list produces a win, who cares if its bad for the base? No wonder the vendors making the tech that supports this world optimize for the needs of (paying) campaigns rather than the needs of the larger ecosystem.

But the result is that all too often today, a campaign relates to its grassroots volunteers as cogs to be collected, used and forgotten. Sometimes, there's enough time for a field organizer to start to learn their volunteers' names and discover who is actually experienced and capable of taking on more responsibilities. But often the field organizer is a fresh-out-of-college kid who has been trained to be as efficient as possible, and the local volunteers are people twice their age and with plenty of experience. If Mobilize were to give volunteers the ability to create meaty profile pages, that would make it easier for campaigns to figure out who they want to work with. The field system we have now tilts toward just-in-time delivery of volunteers to do tasks, rather than longer-term capacity building in place. Tech’s main use in organizing seems to be for helping organizations build lists, which put individuals into vertical relationships with the organization, rather than horizontal relationships with each other. Which is not good if the eventual goal is a 50-state grassroots-based party that engages people year round rather than a high-tech shell with a few thousand well-paid consultants surrounded by a civic desert that gets watered for a few months every two years.

(I’m building on some of the ideas I expressed late last year in this newsletter and want to mention Antonia Scatton, a longtime Democratic strategist with a lot of expertise in volunteer engagement, for sharing her insights on this topic.)

This is Civic Tech

Thomas Asher, Hollie Russon Gilman and Abigail Anderson of Columbia World Projects have published “Digital Tools for a Responsive Government: A Report for the NYC Civic Engagement Commission.” It’s an in-depth look at the potential for increasing public involvement in city life focusing on the use of the Decidim deliberation tool, but it also ranges broadly over the challenges the city faces in building an ongoing dialogue with the public. I was one of a few dozen experts who participated in the working group conversations that fed this report and it’s a pleasure to dig into its findings.

Cat Ferguson of MIT Technology Review talked to five experts—Liana Dragoman, Cyd Harrell, Dan Hon, Sha Hwang and Alexis Madrigal--about why it’s so hard to build good government technology. All of them zero in on the ways that government gets in its own way. My key takeaway comes from Hwang, who started Nava Public Benefit Corp after working on fixing the disastrous Healthcare.gov launch. He says, “We’ve underinvested in adapting to the modern environment. Without technical literacy in-house, we’ll keep seeing failed roll-outs and broken promises.”

Odds and Ends:

-Kashmir Hill has another blockbuster story in The New York Times on Clearview AI, the facial recognition app that vacuumed up millions of photos of people’s faces online without their permission and now sells its services primary to law-enforcement and corporate clients. (This is a service that companies like Google and Facebook could easily provide, but even their ethically-challenged leaders have chosen not to go into this business.) Despite all the negative publicity and lawsuits that followed her first story, she reports now that the company has continued to gain law-enforcement clients to more than 3,100 from around 600 a year ago. Not only that, it has hired renowned First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams to defend it, Hill reports. Hill digs deep into Clearview’s origins, reporting that libertarian Trump-backing Facebook board member VC Peter Thiel was one of its early investors and rightwing blogger-provocateur Charles Johnson one of its co-founders. By the end of her article, I think you’ll be convinced that we urgently need an update to federal privacy laws to insure that Clearview or a company like it can’t just inject widespread facial recognition into society. That is, unless you’re comfortable with anonymity being eradicated from everyday life, starting with powerful government agencies like police and powerful private actors like retail corporations using facial recognition (with all its racist flaws) to identify strangers.

-It looks like Clubhouse, the audio chat app, is at the end of its 15 minutes of fame. This chart from AppMagic shows that new downloads are on decline, and this smart and hilarious thread from Shaan Puri explains why. That said, the backstory to how Clubhouse came to be, as told by Steven Levy in Wired doing one of his patented “backchannel” reporting pieces, is as interesting on how it grew as on why it’s now floundering.

-How the Big Lie keeps spreading: Remember how last year the Center for Tech and Civic Life was given $250 million by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan to regrant to local election authorities to upgrade their voting systems and staffing? Now Scott Walker of the rightwing Capitol Research Center is going around testifying to Republican-controlled state legislative committees alleging that CTCL favored “Democratic jurisdictions” over Republican ones, and that its money resulted in higher turnout by Democratic voters. Talk about spreading the Big Lie and getting cause and effect backwards. CTCL made thousands of grants to election administrators who applied for the funding; it didn’t force the money on anyone and if Republican-leaning counties (where historic patterns of lower voter turnout are no coincidence, due to voter suppression tactics) didn’t apply that isn’t CTCL’s fault. Also unmentioned by Walker is the fact that local election administrators are nonpartisan, and typically their work is overseen by bipartisan boards.

-This could go in the “end times” category, but the latest hot new thing is NFTs or “non-fungible tokens” which is basically a fancy way of saying, a unique piece of digital content that uses blockchain technology to enable creators to verify that this digital thing is unique (since it’s so easy to make digital copies of stuff). You may have heard about one that sold for $69 million at Christie’s a few weeks ago. Now author and critic Anand Giriharadas has jumped into the pool, putting some unpublished early draft excerpts of his book Winners Take All up for auction on an NFT site, along with other ephemera from his creative process. I hope he reconsiders. Seth Godin explains here why the artificial scarcity economy that NFT makers want to profit from will hook creators into a ugly cycle that is also incredibly bad for the environment. On that latter point, the must-read take-down on the ecological impact of cryptocurrencies and this latest off-shoot, crypto-art, is here, by Everest Pipkin.

-Having said that, it’s hard to resist pointing to this artistic response to the NFT craze. Which came before this non-fungible toilet paper from Charmin, but they kind of go together. (I think the interns at Charmin have got a wicked sense of humor, actually.)

-End times: Are you an “influencer”? Worried that some old tweet (or new one) could bring down your fabulous career? Then check out Filaxis’ Influencer Cancellation Insurance.

Thanks to my new subscribers! (What’s the right thing to do here, mention people by name? You know who you are and I appreciate you!) As always, if you are reading this because someone forwarded it to you, please subscribe and consider coming in at one of the paying levels to help keep this newsletter free. And if you’re a loyal reader, think of someone who might enjoy The Connector and send them a gift sub.