Patrick Meier

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Digital Activism Survey Results

15 July 2009 in Educating, From the Field, Networking, Projects by Kate | Comments

Colleagues Mary Joyce, Timo Zaeck and myself have just released the findings of a study on Digital Activism around the world through DigiActive’s Research@DigiActive (R@D).

To download the full report click here (in .pdf format):

Abstract:

Our goal in creating this survey was to collect the first international demographic data on the new group we call “digital activists”: people who use digital technology as part of grassroots campaigns for social and political change.

From late mid-February to mid-April of 2009, DigiActive collected 122 responses through an open online form, followed by three rounds of qualitative and quantitative analysis.  Despite the challenges of researching the world’s digital activists we felt a need to record – in some rough way – this evolving demographic.  Our original data set is available for download above and we welcome comments below through survey@digiactive.org.

Key Findings:

Economics Digital activists, particularly in developing countries, are much more likely than the population at large to pay a monthly subscription fee to have Internet at home, to be able to afford a high-speed connection, and to work in a white-collar job where Internet is also available. In short, digital activists are likely to be prosperous.

Access Intensity of use, rather than simple access, is critical as to whether or not a person is a digital activist. This high use is only possible for people with the ability to pay for it. The Internet may be democratizing, but its effects are felt most strongly in the global middle class.

Causes Across regions, “rights” emerged as the most popular cause, with 21 different types identified by respondents.

Broadcast The plurality of respondents (37%) believe digital technology’s greatest value for activism is one-way communication. What makes social media useful for digital activism may not be its interactivity but rather the fact that these technologies collapse the barrier to broadcast.

Mobiles Respondents with more features on their mobile phone – such as Internet, video, and GPS – are more likely to use their phones for activism. This is another indicator of the importance of financial resources for digital activists, both quantitatively, in terms of greater technology access, and qualitatively, in terms of better (mobile) hardware.

Platforms Social networks are the most common “gateway drug” into digital activism.

Skills Findings on technology and advocacy skills acquisition challenge the assumption that those who have a facility with technology are more likely to become digital activists and gives encouragement to programs that seek to teach technology skills to traditional activists.

Age Older activists in the respondent group are most likely to use digital technology to increase the efficiency of offline activities, such as training and evidence collection, and less likely to participate in activities which have gained popularity because of the availability of online tools, such as posting original content on web sites.

The purpose of Research@DigiActive (R@D) is to produce applied, thought-provoking, actionable research at the cutting edge of Digital Activism. It seeks to highlight and disseminate studies in the new academic field of digital activism by publishing short papers by promising scholars. To submit a paper or get more information, please contact our Director of Applied Research, Patrick Meier, at Patrick AT Digiactive.org.

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Inauguration 2.0

18 January 2009 in From the Field by Kate | Comments

Aside from the general excitement and emotion surrounding Tuesday inauguration, there are a lot of cool things happening online.

Firstly, my colleague Patrick pointed me towards a neat initiative put together by a friend of his, Andrew Turner, called the Inauguration Report 2009.  A collaboration between NPR, CBS News, American University and volunteers, it lists and maps reports from around the world, and you can participate by using various mobile applications, SMS messaging or using Twitter tag #inaug09 or #dctrips09.

A few more initiatives:

Streaming the inauguration events through Ustream.

Current announced it teamed up with Twitter by “adding your real-time Twitter messages (“tweets”) over our live broadcast of Barack Obama’s Inauguration.”

CNN and Facebook are providing live streaming, along with status updates and friend status feeds.

Hulu is (and has been) spotlighting a variety of streaming opportunities here.

The Citizen Media Law Project offers a full guide to documenting the 2009 Presidential Inauguration.

Do you have anything to add?

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Random Thoughts: RSS Feeds and Book Introductions

3 November 2008 in Random Thoughts by Kate | Comments

I have two lingering thoughts I wanted to throw out there, sort of random.  One is a call-to-action, one is a thought/question for everyone.

RSS Feeds and Biased Information

I was having lunch with Patrick Meier and Lokman Tsui about two weeks ago, and Lokman was talking about his dissertation topic at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.  He’s focusing, generally speaking, on the impact of citizen journalism on global news production (Lokman, correct me or expand here!).

It’s funny I decided to post what was probably the the least interesting part of our talk, but it’s applicable to the way I run my life every day, and the way I think a lot of you run yours.

We were talking about how some technological advances, and the routines that come from them, have actually increased the bias of some media outlets.  Who you call on for information, what channels you push content through, what you have access to.  I chimed in with RSS feeds.

RSS feeds presumably make our lives easier for information consumption.  That’s the idea at least.  The other thing it does is almost guarantee you’re reading information from the same places, every day.  In making it quick, you make it narrow.

I realized this a while back, so I make it a conscious effort to “clean out” my RSS feed (ideally) every week… might not happen every week, but at least I think about it.  The other thing I do is add new sources to my RSS feed on a regular basis.

So there’s a constant influx of new information, and a purging of what I’ve deemed useless at that point.  Some sources stay around consistently, some I’ve previously trashed come back, whatever.  I don’t have any guidelines except that I want information from a varying number of places to guarantee I don’t rely on just a few.

[UPDATE (Monday night): Apparently, David Griner went through the same process on Friday, which I'm realizing now because he (has consistently) made my RSS feed cut]

So, do you “manage” your RSS feed effectively?

Book Introductions: What’s the point?

I just got my copy of David Meerman Scott’s new book The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly (you can buy it here), which I’m excited to read [More on the book as I get further into it].

I started out with the Introduction.

Here’s the deal.  I don’t read introductions as a general rule.  I’ve only read the intros to books written by people I know and have a relationship with (David falls under this category).  I skim the table of contents, maybe skim the intros quickly, but really, I just dive into the first chapter.  I’ve always done this.

I know, I know.  First rule of putting together a piece of communication is tell me what you’re about to teach me, teach me, the tell me what you just taught me (I’ve written and taught how to write enough pieces that this is engrained in my head).  But in general, intros bore me.

Does this make me impatient?  Am I missing something big?

David’s intro was nice enough, I think I took away something from it because I know him (intros get you into the head of the author? I don’t know).  But I think I would have gotten the point starting to read (no offense David! It’s not YOUR intro, it’s just how I feel about them overall).

So tell me, AM I missing something?  What do YOU get out of book introductions?  Should I start reading them more?  What makes a good introduction or a bad one?

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Documenting Kenya’s Elections using Crisis Mapping Techniques

23 October 2008 in Projects by Kate | Comments

What are citizen journalists’ roles in documenting conflict and are those roles becoming more important?

Led by Patrick Meier, a Doctoral Research Fellow at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, I’m happy to report that we’ve just completed the first of (hopefully) several case studies that attempt to answer this question more concretely.

Supported by Humanity United, the project seeks to explore the changing role and impact of information communication technology in crisis early warning and humanitarian response.  The eventual goal is to identify ways in which citizen journalists and new communications tools can work more effectively in crisis situations.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBiCK-ybYpw[/youtube]

Patrick did a really good job of writing up the methodology at his blog, so I’m going to leave wheel inventing up to him.

The exciting thing for me was to see the way in which new media tools were being used by citizen journalists, specifically how much more effective they seemed to be in disseminating on-the-ground, real-time information than the mainstream media was.  The effects of efforts like Ushahidi also contain incredibly valuable information for future research.

Our preliminary findings:

  • Mainstream media reported actual death count before citizen journalists; however, on many accounts, mainstream media did not report on incidents leading to actual deaths, i.e., early warning signs;
  • Citizen journalist reports and Ushahidi reports did not overlap geographically with mainstream media reports;
  • Citizen journalists tended to report as soon as violence started, well before mainstream media;
  • The number of comments on citizen journalist blogs increased during the 30-day period, or during particular periods of violence;
  • The comment section was also used as a medium for real-time updating;
  • Many citizen journalist bloggers used real-time updates sent to them via SMS, primarily from rural areas;
  • Citizen journalism reports declined after the launch of Ushahidi;
  • Ushahidi reports document an important number of violent events not reported by the mainstream media and citizen journalists;
  • Contrary to news media and citizen journalist reports, Ushahidi data always had specific location information;
  • Ushahidi reports also covered a wider geographical area than both mainstream news and citizen journalist bloggers.

For further information on our project’s methodology and sources, please see this short powerpoint presentation (pdf) which we have also uploaded on Slideshare. For more on crisis mapping, please see this page.

Some follow up questions that we identified as being interesting off-shoots of this project are:

  1. What was the role of SMS messaging in the overall information chain?  How does it differ across the country (rural vs urban) and what are some of the most effective ways that this medium was (or could be) used?
  2. What was the role of blogs in mainstream media information gathering?  Were they a resource?  What about Human Rights organizations?  If so, is there anything we can learn about how to make that information more effective in terms of crisis response?
  3. Can efforts such as Ushahidi be replicated in other areas, or have there been similar efforts?

We hope to refine the process as we move forward, and with that being said, we’d love feedback as possible on both methodology and analysis, as well as the visualization.  We’re looking to clean the whole package up moving forward, so this would be very helpful.

Our next case study will be Georgia.  Please contact me if you’re interested in joining the team.

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