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27 March 2008

Finding Political News Online, the Young Pass It On

Interesting story in today's New York Times on how younger voters acquire news. This article highlights (1) the partial disintermediation of traditional media (e.g., because some content comes from sources like Youtube), (2) the increased power of the word-of-mouth second step in the classic two step model of diffusion afforded by e-mail/internet, and (3) how the medium facilitates grassroots mobilization. Excerpts:

According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one.

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A December survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press looked broadly at how media were being consumed this campaign. In the most striking finding, half of respondents over the age of 50 and 39 percent of 30- to 49-year-olds reported watching local television news regularly for campaign news, while only 25 percent of people under 30 said they did.

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The way consumers filter their news is being highlighted now that a generation of Americans is coming of age in the midst of a campaign that has generated intense interest and voter involvement. Exit polls in 22 states estimate that more than three million voters under the age of 30 participated in Democratic primaries this year, up from about one million four years ago.

Posted by David Lazer at 8:10 AM | Comments (0)

23 March 2008

The deliberative presidency

Very interesting piece in NYT last week on the decision by the US to dissolve the Iraqi Army in 2003. An excerpt:

Colin L. Powell, the secretary of state and a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he was never asked for advice, and was in Paris when the May 22 meeting was held.

Mr. Powell, who views the decree as a major blunder, later asked Condoleezza Rice, who was serving as Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, for an explanation.

“I talked to Rice and said, ‘Condi, what happened?’ ” he recalled. “And her reaction was: ‘I was surprised too, but it is a decision that has been made and the president is standing behind Jerry’s decision. Jerry is the guy on the ground.’ And there was no further debate about it.”

In this election season, perhaps the hardest thing to evaluate about the candidates is one of the most important: how would she or he create a deliberative Presidency? We are in the midst of a paradigm shift in our policies at home and abroad, and the next Presidency will be built brick by brick through the myriad of decisions that need to be made in response to the particular challenges that arise on a daily basis. Those decisions must reflect the President's vision of the world, but through the prism of the information and options that exist at particular instances in time. What does it take for the Presidency to successfully navigate the uncertainties of the 21st century?

Extensive research on individual and organizational decision making, including my own work on networks, highlights one prerequisite to high quality decisions: diversity of perspectives and sources of information. The modern Presidency is made up of a mix of careerists and transient political appointees in the Executive Office of the President, connected to relatively slow changing agencies. The key challenge is one of how to manage the connections among these individuals, in order to balance the simultaneous needs for deliberation and decision. Disagreement offers Presidents a menu of choices, where dissent can keep options open, and forces others to critically examine their own perspectives.

The successful President is one who can manage this complex network, creating a pull of information and viewpoints upwards. Doris Kearns Goodwin, in her study of Lincoln, presents a compelling portrait of a President who filled his cabinet with individuals with strong personalities and often conflicting views. In a rather different fashion, Franklin Roosevelt also structured his network so as to receive multiple perspectives, through privately soliciting information from rivals within the White House.

Recent Presidents have developed more institutionalized mechanisms to funnel information upwards. My colleague, Roger Porter, has documented the collegial, if sometimes adversarial, process of soliciting input from agencies regarding economic policy in the Ford administration. I have studied how the regulatory review processes instituted in the Reagan administration has offered the White House a steady stream of signals about regulatory policy in the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations. Both of these processes took advantage of the natural differences of perspective that are embedded within the bureaucracy. These differences can be used to provide illumination as well as heat.

The President also needs to admit some degree of uncertainty as to the best course of action. No President, of course, has begun a speech "I am 51% certainty that I have made the best choice." But internal discussion must begin with an assumption of uncertainty and a respect for alternative points of view. That deliberative foundation must come from the President.

The general set of issues to balance is how distribute involvement in various decisions. Who has information, perspective, and expertise to contribute to a decision? How does one not clog the decision making network with issues of secondary importance so that the key decisions get the collective attention they deserve?

The history book has not yet closed on the current administration, but insider portrayals suggest a systematic mismanagement of the decision-making network. The decision to dissolve the Iraqi army is an example par excellence. This was one of the fundamental strategic decisions post invasion, and one where different bureaucratic actors had different things to contribute to the decision. Clearly, Bremer was in a privileged position vis a vis some of the information, but that did not mean that he was even the best person to process that information. Nation building generally, and rebuilding Iraq specifically was a domain that no one in the US government could claim such unique expertise as to require such deference. This case, and others like it, suggest a fundamental mis-management of the inter-agency process in foreign policy in the Bush Administration.

There is a potential trade-off of decisiveness and discipline on the one hand, and deliberativeness on the other. Clearly, the costs of dithering sometimes exceed the benefits of discussion. However, we face long run existential threats at home and abroad: with radical changes in the distribution of power in the world, and a restructuring of our economy at home. This next Presidency may well prove to be a pivotal one in history, and, to be successful, will require a network that supplies information and perspectives with which to choose the future.

Posted by David Lazer at 10:09 PM | Comments (0)

8 March 2008

The Machinery of Hope

There was a really interesting article in Rolling Stones on the Obama campaign, The Machinery of Hope (thanks go to Valdis Krebs to pointing it out to me). It highlights some of what I have discussed before-- the creation (top down) by the Obama campaign of an architecture to enable bottom up mobilization. Some excerpts, but I strongly recommend reading the entire article:

Over the past year, the Obama campaign has quietly worked to integrate the online technologies that fueled the rise of Howard Dean —as well as social-networking and video tools that didn't even exist in 2004 — with the kind of neighbor-to-neighbor movement-building that Obama learned as a young organizer on the streets of Chicago.

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The meeting in San Marcos wasn't advertised in any traditional sense. Instead, the campaign posted the event on my.barackobama.com — its social-networking site affectionately known as "MyBo" — and e-mailed local residents who had donated to the campaign or surrendered their addresses as the price of admission to an Obama rally. And the volunteers who showed up won't be micromanaged…. They'll be able to call their own shots, from organizing local rallies to recruiting and training a crew of fellow Obama supporters to man their precincts on election day. To identify and mobilize Obama backers, they'll log on to the password-protected texasprecinctcaptains.com, download the phone numbers of targeted voters, make calls from their homes and upload the results to Austin headquarters. They'll also organize early-voting open houses — which will be publicized on MyBo — to boost turnout among core supporters. "Instead of hoping that your neighbors vote," Ukman tells them in an unintentional twist on the campaign's central theme, "you're going to take them to the polls."

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Hildebrand actually flipped the equation, using the physical crowds Obama could draw to his rallies to bolster the campaign's e-mail list. In February and March of 2007, just after Obama announced his candidacy, the campaign set up huge rallies in cities from Los Angeles to Austin to Cleveland. In return for a ticket, supporters were asked only to provide their e-mail, zip code and telephone number

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In Iowa, as many people under thirty caucused as did senior citizens. In every contest, the youth vote has at least doubled and often tripled previous records. Riemer is quick to point out that these successes aren't just the result of the campaign organizing young people but of young people organizing themselves.

Figueroa's goal is not to put supporters to work but to enable them to put themselves to work, without having to depend on the campaign for constant guidance. "We decided that we didn't want to train volunteers," he says. "We want to train organizers — folks who can fend for themselves."

To turn well-meaning students and nurses and social workers into self-sufficient organizers, the campaign has put nearly 7,000 supporters through an intensive, four-day seminar known as "Camp Obama."

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A strategy that leans so heavily on the grass roots is not without risk. In February, right-wing blogs had a field day when a Fox News affiliate ran footage of a volunteer office in Houston decorated with a Che Guevara flag.

Posted by David Lazer at 2:21 PM | Comments (1)

5 March 2008

Vendor Driven Theory

by Philip Mueller

VENDOR-DRIVEN Theory: a vendor's conception or mental scheme of something to be done, or of the method of doing it;

As we are moving into network society, we need to be aware of the phenomenon of vendor-driven theorizing and able to critically reflect vendor-driven theories.

- When we talk about theory, it makes sense to distinguish between theories observing the world and theories shaping the world. Let us call the first, explanatory theories (e.g. Newtonian Physics) and the second constitutive theories ( Liberal Democracy). Of course, most theories are hybrids (think Marxism, Liberalism, or Confucianism), but we can distinguish when hybrid theories observe or shape.

- I use the term vendor-driven theories to talk about situations in which a supposedly neutral software application or management approach introduces a substantive theory into a process. Think of enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and supply chain management in the business world in the 1990s as examples of how the software changed the theory of how business was done.

- ERP and CRM vendors, integrated solution providers, and consulting firms have recently discovered the public sector as the next market for existing software applications. ERP has been re-christened GRP, as in Government Resource Planning and CRM, CiRM, as in Citizen Relationship Management. Government officials and public administrators have been happy to take up the ideas pitched to them and are implementing.

- What is interesting is to ask of course, in how far the analogy between ERP and GRP and CRM and CiRM works and where it breaks down? We also have to ask in how far these vendor-driven theories carry transformative potential and if it corresponds with our ideas about how governance should be organized.

This posting is indebted to Alexander Schellong, Hasnain Bokhari, and Philipp Zimmermann. In discussions with them I developed an appreciation for the amazing/scary transformative power of vendor driven theorizing. I believe it is an important term to introduce into the debate, which I hereby do.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 12:30 AM | Comments (2)

4 March 2008

Commetrix a dynamic network visualization tool

While working at the CeBit, the world's largest IT related fair, I stumbled upon Commetrix, a dynamic network visualization tool, developed by researchers from TU Berlin. The software allows to import data from discussion groups, VoIP, eMail, blogs or social networking sites. Moreover, besides the usual functionality such as centrality, density or zoom, it allows for a timed-based observation of network growth and a parallel visualization of the content (e.g. emails). The latter somehow reminded me of tag clouds although in a much more sophisticated way. Matthias, the project manager, presented a demo of one of their case studies of an Enron email dataset to underline the potential of the tool. The software is only available in English. The possibilities and usabilities were pretty impressive. Though I it would be interesting to hear the opinion from an expert of software in that area. (Please comment)

Researchers who would be interested in getting a copy of the software or learning more about it should contact Matthias Trier. You should also be able to find some of their work presented at HICSS and Sunbelt online.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 11:52 AM | Comments (1)

3 March 2008

HBS online exhibition: The Human Relations Movement

The Harvard Business School library hosts a great online exhibition called "The Human Relations Movement" with explanations and pictures of the Hawthorne Effect.

Harvard researchers have studied the Hawthorne plant between 1924 and 1933 by observing how different changes in work-related variables effect performance.

The Hawthorne effect is described by Rothlisberger as:

"the phenomenon in which subjects in behavioral studies change their performance in response to being observed"

Posted by Ines Mergel at 9:26 AM | Comments (0)

The MKB Adoptie Project - Using Social Capital to help Adolescents Dealing with Multiple Problems

The following is an interesting case (MAP Project) of how a network is used as an alternative to the public service network to solve an issues of troubled teenagers in the Netherlands I stumbled upon during a conference on Innovations in Government.

Young people are frequently left behind in the bureaucratic public service systems. Among the disadvantaged, they are often the most difficult to help because they do not have the resources or experience to deal with the social service system. For example, a young woman (age 19), who has not completed a basic level of education due to family problems. Her family as a unit has a bad reputation among agencies. She has also a track record of being rejected by several welfare programs based on her behavior.

As a recipient of welfare, the benefits office wants her to work as a volunteer because her attitude makes her incompatible with the workplace. If she does not comply, her benefits will be stopped. Yet that money is a potential avenue for the young woman to get out of the family situation. Consequently, there is a disconnect between the two sides' needs. The benefits office will not allow this woman to work because of her attitude, but her attitude towards the public sector is so poor because she is not being allowed to pursue her own goals.

The program aims to allow people like the woman described access to the contacts and social networks they need to achieve their life-goals without shifting through bureaucracy. The Network Program for Adolescents Dealing with Multiple Problems attempts to bridge the gaps between young social service recipients and adult service providers. Its a highly personalized case oriented approach. Moreover, the program mobilizes social capital by putting the program participants (the teenagers in crisis) and adults (from different sectors in society) in meetings to expand the networks available to

Two moderators initiate the meetings and arrange training programs for the participants. For example the participants are asked to present themselves to the audience, find and how they would like to utilize their new contacts. The adults present, respond to the participants by asking questions, making suggestions, and offering information. Therefore, the established members in society offer their expertise for a short period, allowing disenfranchised participants to engage with adult networks and information in an informal ways. Both sides take each other serious. However, the program does not seek to establish a formal mentoring relationship. The primary goal of the program is to A. utilize social capital and B. build the latter for the participants by bypassing bureaucratic training programs to introduce them directly to the men and woman who can help them navigate the job market.

By training participants to identify their own solutions to their problems, th program facilitates a bottom-up approach to public service. Therefore, the program tries to activate self-expertise which also represents one of core values identified by the program. The program works outside regular government institutions to mobile the industrial and commercial job markets to assist young people in need, giving program beneficiaries access to private sector opportunities they might otherwise never find.

In general, the meetings cater three to five participants. The majority of participants attend only one meeting. To date, this project has served 71 young people in 15 meetings since April 2005. 60% of whom have subsequently returned to school or joined the labor market. 43 adults, the majority working in industry or commerce, and the others from the fields of public administration, education, health and politics have offered their advice. The program is funded through subsidies of various government subsidies of around EUR 140,000

The founders of the project (e.g. Clara Pels; Henny Werter) are enthusiastic as the MAP Project has been able to demonstrate the effectiveness of collaboration between organizations from different domains. Yet they also note that the programs informal nature is also its greatest weakness. Its very hard to truly measure the effects of the program.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 12:00 AM | Comments (1)