MoveOn's Missed Opportunity
[I just posted this over at Personal Democracy Forum, a site on technology and politics that I edit, but thought it worth sharing here too.]
Yesterday, I got one of those occasional e-mails that MoveOn.org sends out to its list, entitled "Help Set MoveOn's Course." It read:
Dear MoveOn member,
MoveOn works for the same reason democracy does: when lots of people work together, they generate great ideas and accomplish great goals. That's why we need your help.
To get direction from our members, we have set up an online forum. There, you can share your ideas and goals for MoveOn and our nation. Comments are read and rated by other members and the best ideas float to the top. These help set MoveOn's course.
Take a few moments today to contribute to the Great Goals forum.
Even if there's nothing on your mind, come read what others are saying and help us find the ideas we should pursue:
http://www.actionforum.com/
Thanks for strengthening democracy by participating in these important conversations!
Sincerely,
--Eli, Wes, Joan and the Whole MoveOn Team
I followed the link and cringed. MoveOn is still using the same crappy "ActionForum.com" that it has always used. A page comes up showing about ten suggestions from MoveOn members, along with some "scores" indicating how many people have rated that suggestion, and the percentage that agree. On the right-hand rail, there's an option to add your vote and to indicate, by picking one to five stars, how important the suggestion is to you. (They explain the system further here.)
At first glance, this may seem innocuous, even well-intentioned, but given the robust tools now available for fostering real community discussions (such as phpbb, or civicspace, it's time MoveOn entered the 21st Century. What's idiotic about this platform is that it really doesn't nurture grass-roots participation, quite the opposite.
Here's the first problem: since suggestions only appear ten or so to a web-page, there's no meaningful chance that a MoveOn member is going to have the patience to read more than a few screens' worth. And when you've got something like 11,000 discrete suggestions posted, this can lead to a not inconsequential problem.
I remember when MoveOn first rolled out its ActionForum a few years ago and someone who took Eli, Wes, Joan and crew at their word that this was meant to be a real community conversation posted an angry complaint that she couldn't possibly read through all the thousands of ideas that had been posted. She begged MoveOn's leaders to institute some kind of tagging process that would help sort the plethora of posts and thus help insure that people were really engaging with the broad spectrum of ideas being offered. Alas, there was no reply and soon her valiant post itself disappeared off the first web page of forum suggestions.
And that's the second problem with this kind of scrolling forum system: If you have an interesting idea, but you don't get it in early where lots of other people will see it and rate it highly, you have little chance of catching up to the early birds. MoveOn's system tries to address this problem by sprinkling some new posts in among the top ranked topics on its first few forum pages, but that doesn't prevent some old suggestions that literally have thousands of votes from continuing to rank high. And it also means that a good idea deep in the bowels of the forum list will never get lifted up to the light. This is called chopping off your own long tail.
And that gets to my last complaint about MoveOn. If Wes, Joan, Eli and crew were indeed interested in "strengthening democracy," why aren't they enabling their members to talk to each other directly? You can post something to the ActionForum and use your own name, but there's no lateral linking going on inside the MoveOn membership, other than what may happen on the ground if you go to a MoveOn-sponsored vigil, such as the ones happening today to mark the 2000th American soldier killed in Iraq.
And that's really a huge lost opportunity. It may not matter that much for the purposes of sifting ideas if a MoveOn member only reads and rates the suggestions of, say, ten or fifteen other members. From a statistical point of view, there's probably a leveling factor that kicks in once some number of people have read a post, and either it's great and it's going to continue to rise to the top of the forum, or it's not and it will fall.
But if you're purpose is to actually strengthen democracy and the engagement of your members in that valuable effort, MoveOn's failure to open up its walled garden is a huge disappointment. It's ActionForum system is useful in the same way a giant focus group might be useful to the people sitting behind the one-way mirror watching people talk. But it's not a way to empower anyone else.
I repeat a suggestion I made a while ago, as part of the conversation of Chris Nolan's detailed exploration of MoveOn for PDF. What if MoveOn were to invite its members to form state-, county- and city-level MoveOn spinoffs, give them a wide tether to self-organize and invent new forms for engaging each other and the issues, and then see what happens?
Very good post! I have just about given up on MoveOn for anything but collecting thousands of dollars to run TV ads, or thousands of petition signaturs. Those jobs they do very well. About a year ago MoveOn tried to set up local MoveOn action groups, with a dozen or so members each, meeting at each other's homes, and we were to be given tasks, like picketing a union hating business, for a bad example. This system very quickly fell apart, as the MoveOn staff was unable or unwilling to keep their website up to date, to provide any followup information when a task was announced, and some really poor downloadable flyers to hand out. The group I belonged to disbanded, and I have heard nothing about this for several months from MoveOn.
My impression is that the MoveOn staff has this wonderful, well oiled machine, with lots of great functions, a chromed control panel, and.....they just have no ideas for what to do with it. Frustration is the major thing they are now doing with it.
October 26, 2005 10:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
Whenever I get frustrated with certain particulars at this site -- such as the LACK OF AN EASILY ADDED EDIT FUNCTION and the fact that the whole ratings system should be replaced with a choice of either flagging an item negatively (as at Huffington Post) or just giving it a "star" as a recommendation I can always think about MoveOn.Org and their unbelievably lousy system. Your description of it is almost as confusing as the system itself, but bottom line -- you are absolutely right that it is worthless and needs to be fixed.
MY SUSPICION -- and don't forget the John Lennon comment that paranoia is "heightened awareness" -- is that there are some unwritten "rules" or indignantly usurped power enforcements (IUPEs) which is the way our society is governed, over the internet. I have elsewhere at this site talked about how 'glass walls' keep media and Democrats silent about the flimsines of the flipflop spin in the 2004 election, or the "Bai Lie" that followed it in October, with a NY Times Magazine justifying the lying piece casting Kerry as soft on terror was echoed throughout the national media with columns daily repeating and exaggerating the unresponded to Bai Lie. Then we had Votergate 2004 (see Fitrakis and Wasserman, the leading figures on the stealing of Ohio at oped news (+ their new book)http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_bob_fitr_051018_why_can_t
_the_left_f.htm)
At any rate, we see this in the one-sided media "debate" about NOLA. We see it in the stonewall and stresses I personally face. We see it in how ANSWER can get a rally permit more easily than United for Peace and Justice. We see it in the invisible hand that makes for more organizing parmesan on the issue of animals' rights (to suit an "equal rights for lobster tails" as I call it agenda) than any organization around the politics of absolute poverty. We see everywhere, including the protestations for kudos about how this is all just "conspiracy thinking".
What we see is the 'invisible hand' not of the free market, but of underground repression, that governs politics in our pretended democracy. On the internet, Democratic Underground started an activist corps, which seems to have been quickly abandoned though it attracted over 1000 and worked very well. And there has been NO explanation from its organizers. (When it's verboten to pursue something democratically, the most verboten thing to do is to point it out. Since I DO point such things out, you can imagine all the eggplant tennis anyone & engineered hypersensitivity & credentialled protestations from what I call "family bohemians" and "red-headed league" type pseudo-progressives, & forcible if veiled excommunication (chadiche-regulated access) and unaccountable bloviation-attainders etc etc that result. You don't rat on a genocide machine in a society like this without consequences. And you don't have real acccountability or serious second estate mitigation either -- only pandering to the powers that pee.
Now, as for MoveOn, they are activist. So effective discussion is cut off. On the other side of the ledger you have the mysterious suspension of the Democratic Underground Activist Corps. All this is why internet activism and discourse, which on the internet could be headquartered anywhere, should be based in many instances outside the grip of the US elite, so that there cannot be underground retaliation as I mentioned above.
So if you think MoveOn's "missed opportunity" is just an unfortunate oversight or sustained insensitivity by the people running it, you are just whistling past the graveyard of American democracy. We have a theatric of a democracy and a free marketplace of ideas. But the reality is simply a genocide machine manipulating appearances so the elite can enjoy the kudos and palm off the blame as they destroy the planet's ecology.
LESSON ONE, the basics of how our society REALLY functions
October 26, 2005 10:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
Not in every way, mind you.
But, Kos has the rating system, he has the group categories for diaries, etc., and now has the tagging system.
October 27, 2005 1:26 AM | Reply | Permalink
Very well put, I agree completely. Immediately after last falls Leave No Voter Behind campaign, which I was very involved in, I emailed Eli Pariser and other staff with specific outlines/plans to keep the grassroots network alive in the seven swing states and develop them in other states. No replies whatsoever.
They are throwing away a great opportunity with the database and grassroots base they built last year during the campaign.
October 27, 2005 1:38 AM | Reply | Permalink
Good Topic and right on target analysis. While once a force and active player, it's hubris and one way attitude is a sign that "Move on" has outlived its usefulness.
Were they still a viable force, Eli, Wes, or Joan would be posting here.
While to be commended for early initiative, they totally fail to understand markets, and the concept that "none of us is as smart as all of us together". They seem clueless re the issue of particapatory decision making, process and vetting, morphing into a "cabal" of their own. For someone arising out of a technical background, it is sad that they failed to recognize what's possible, and instead replicate the decision making process I thought they recognized was as much responsible for our current mess as the misguided ideology and ethics themselves.
Time to truly move on.
November 6, 2005 2:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
MoveOn's not exactly a model of transparency, is it?
Even at the kinds of actions it's good at, there's significant room for improvement. For instance: the recent nationwide events to mark the death of 2000 U.S. soldiers in the war on Iraq.
The groups who first organized to encourage grassroots activists to prepare vigils and actions in response to the 2000 mark were members and affiliates of United for Peace and Justice: American Friends Service Committee, Military Families Speak Out, Gold Star Families for Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War. UfPJ put out an alert on October 11, and AFSC hosted the site where events could be listed and found. Weblogs spread the word somewhat, aided by right-wing smears that the planned vigils were to be 'celebrations' of the Iraq war death toll. By the day of the 2000th fatality, when the first MoveOn alert went out, the day of the 2000th fatality, the AFSC site had 500 events listed.
MoveOn sent no alerts until that day, unless I missed one, and the call to action made no reference to the already-existing network of events. I can understand the reluctance to use any but their own site to track the MoveOn-inspired vigils, but the email alerts and especially the web page where people were sent to find and list local events could at least have contained a link to the AFSC listings.
The complete separation and lack of acknowledgement gave the impression that MoveOn and partners True Majority and DFA wished to distance themselves from the UfPJ groups. There's room to doubt that that was really the intention: the content of the events being planned was the same, and MoveOn has actively supported MFSO and GoldStar activities in the past (in support of Cindy Sheehan).
Another possible interpretation is that of isolation and cluelessness on the part of MoveOn. Again, it's difficult to believe that no one at MoveOn had learned of the the planned UfPJ vigils. I guess it's possible; the AFSC site had no reference to the MoveOn vigils, either. But it's hard to hold that against them if they only learned of MoveOn's call at the same time as the rest of us, i.e., the day of the 2000th fatality. It appears that no one from either network ever talked to the other.
MoveOn and UfPJ alerts reach different, partially overlapping, groups of people. MoveOn's reach many more than UfPJ, particularly if DFA and TrueMajority names are added in. About 1300 events were listed at the MoveOn site, with only a small percentage cross-listed at AFSC.
The good news: close to 2000 known events. The bad news: the appearance, if not the reality, of MoveOn considering itself to be the antiwar movement.
The same set of questions arises around the TV ads. MoveOn's ad is good. So is the one from Operation Truth. Is it better from an advertising standpoint to have two similar campaigns? I'd like to know the answer, because it isn't better from the point of view of organization-building. Once again, it gives the impression of tunnel vision.
Perhaps, in the case of the vigils and the ads, a decision was taken to work separately and NOT to appear coordinated. But for the life of me I can't imagine any good reason for it.
If there was such a decision, given the opaque structure of MoveOn, where a small staff plus founders (plus....??) make the decisions, I don't expect an explanation anytime soon.
October 28, 2005 6:26 AM | Reply | Permalink