Standing in front of the UW communications building this summer.

As some of you know, I’ve started a PhD program in communication (last week, in fact). As part of that institutional transition I’ve created a new digital activism research project with a professor there, Philip Howard, which is called (what else?) the Digital Activism Research Project (www.digital-activism.org).

I realize that I will not have time to work on both that project and MAP, so MAP has come to an end. I’ll still pop into the Facebook group every now and again, and most of the work MAP created (the GDADS, the list of digital nonviolent tactics, the resource list) has already or will soon move to the DARP site.

I’ll still update this site, but as my personal blog. The basic division of labor will be that my speculative work on digital activism will remain here, while my empirical work will more to DARP.

Thanks for your support over the years and I hope you continue reading!

Today Meta-Activism Project Executive Director Mary Joyce was invited to be a respondent on the panel “Voices of the 2011 Revolutions: The Impact of Communication Technology in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa” at the annual conference of the National Communication Association in New Orleans.

The papers presented included a look at information flows during the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, a literature review on citizen journalism, an analysis of how the 2005 WSIS meeting in Tunis laid the groundwork for the Jasmine Revolution, a look at how political cartoons were used in the Egyptian Revolution, and a description of how the Tunisian media environment was transformed between the Gafsa protests in 2008 and the Jasmine revolution in 2010.

In her response Mary noted that all the papers were attempting to describe the effect of the newly networked transmedia information environment on political power. Panelists had described interaction between a number of different media makers and transmission of content across a range of platforms. Citizen activists in different countries are working together: Brazilian cartoonist Carlos Latuff had direct contact with the Egyptian activists whose revolution he was depicting. Mainstream and citizen journalists are collaborating: they worked together to unravel the death of Ian Tomlinson during the London riots. Information flows between broadcast and social media are ever more frequently: Al Jazeera plucked their video footage of the Jasmine Revolution from Facebook.

Beyond individual anecdotes, to what extent can we describe the function and implications of this networked media environment? To what extent do we understand its effect on power? Certainly the networked media environment is an “emergent phenomena,” but how can we as scholars look at these changes in the aggregate in order to understand their aggregate effect on power?

We are pleased to announce that members of the Meta-Activism Project have been selected to act as panelists at South by Southwest Interactive, not only the “geek spring break” but also a major meeting of techies with both a profit-making and do-gooding bent. According to Fortune magazine:

What SXSW has always been about is people. It is the single best place in the creative innovation world to build relationships and get to know people. I have friends from all over the world that I’ve met over the last five years that I can’t wait to see in Austin every year.

MAP Founder and Executive Director Mary Joyce and Strategy Group member Patrick Meier will both be appearing on the panel Internet Power: After Cyber-Optimism and Pessimism at the AT&T Conference Hotel, and other great digital activists and innovative thinkers like Jillian York (How to Run a Social Site and Not Get Users Killed), Mark Belinsky (How Not to Die: Using Tech in a Dictatorship ), and Jeff Jarvis (Honey, We Shrunk the Economy) will also be in attendance. We’ll post more information about the date and time of our panel as we receive it and we hope to see you there.

the new USIP pavilion

Meta-Activism Project founder Mary Joyce will be a panelist at a half-day conference tomorrow at looking about the effects of social media on conflict around the world. The event, which will focus on data analysis, also features panelists such as MAP advisor Clay Shirky, Alec Ross of the State Department, Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Internet researcher John Kelly of Morningside Analytics.

Event: Sifting Fact from Fiction: The Role of Social Media in Conflict
Date: Friday, September 16
Time: 9:00am – 1:oopm
Location: USIP / 2301 Constitution Avenue NW / Washington, D.C. 20037 (map)
RSVP: http://social-media-in-conflict.eventbrite.com/

I don’t usually write about the inner workings of the Meta-Activism Project, but our meeting today on Google+ Hangouts was a bit of a revelation.

We are a virtual organization, which means that we have no office and no two team members are even based in the same city. We rely heavily on email, GChat, and Skype to coordinate and on Google Docs to co-create content. However, none of these tools simulates presence.

I am a firm believer in the value of in-person contact to build trust and affinity. There are subconscious cues that we absorb when we see how someone speaks and gestures that cannot be conveyed through text or voice alone.

In real life there is also the opportunity for non-task interactions, like telling a joke or giving a compliment, that are less likely to happen on an email thread or conference call because of the perception of time scarcity: task-oriented emails and calls enforce a norm of productivity where casual conversation acts only as a time-filler while waiting for others to join a call.

Yet talking about work is a very narrow way to perceive personality and personality is important in a volunteer project where a lot of the motivation to engage is based on whether you like your collaborators. On a virtual volunteer project, any opportunity to build affinity through simulated presence is valuable.

For this reason, I am really excited about the free video-conference feature of Google+: the Hangout (see above). In some ways it is a technology ahead of its time. My computer’s processor was taxed by the four video streams and our Internet bandwidth was not really up to the task either. Still, it was as close to virtual presence as I’ve ever gotten, and as the director of a virtual organization that makes me very happy because I know how important that is.

Josh on the Appalachian Trail

Summer is here and it’s time for interns. Our first is Josh Price, a political science graduate from Haverford who will graduate from the University of Chicago at the end of the summer with a master’s degree in Social Science. Josh is interested in social media, message framing, public opinion, and American politics. He also hiked the entire Appalachian Trail! This summer, Josh will be working the Research Director António Rosas on the Global Digital Activism Data Set, focusing on statistical analysis and building the representativeness of the data set.