Wikileaks ≠ Transparency

As much as I hate using “gate” moniker, I want to discuss what is being called “Cablegate” because its ramifications for organizational life.

If you’ve been leaving beneath your bed for the last few weeks, you may not know that Cablegate refers to the release of thousands of secret State Department communications by Wikileaks. Here is good synopsis of the lead by Time Magazine.

Wikileaks first came onto the world’s radar screen by posting a video of American soldiers shooting Iraqi civilians. This is whistleblowing. The American military it appears had done a terrible thing and then covered it up. This is what journalists do, they uncover the bad things that companies and governments do and shed light on them. Daniel Ellsberg is one of the world’s most famous whistleblowers, having released the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times to reveal the lies that the US government was telling the public about their administration of the war in Vietnam.

Cablegate isn’t whistleblowing, it isn’t righting a wrong, unveiling unethical or immoral behavior. It is the theft of regular communications that makes it nearly impossible for the State Department to function.

One of the smartest people I know, well, actually one of the smartest people anywhere, Esther Dyson, discussed the downside of what she called “radical transparency” at Transparency Camp last year a double edged sword for organizational leaders. Beth Kanter reported Esther saying at the camp, “Esther Dyson said that transparency should be able the results and any deals, but there is a place for private discussion.   “We could all go around naked and look like angels, but in the real world that doesn’t happen.”  Transparency has its benefits, but so does privacy.  As Esther Dyson said, “There is a need for respect – of relationships, to get trust, and further understandings.   You can’t be fully transparent all the time because you need to give people a safe place to have the discussion without disrespecting others.”

And there is why I respectfully disagree with my friend and colleague, Micah Sifry, who wrote yesterday on his blog on TechPresident, “…there is a danger rising both to internet freedom and open government here, but that is not because of Wikileaks. It is because people who are threatened by more transparency want to stop this trend before it is completely uncontrollable.”

Leaks like Cablegate might be inevitable, however they are not honorable or constructive. Street crime might be inevitable but that doesn’t make it right. It also makes the word of transparency advocates, like Micah, much harder because it masks the true beauty and value of transparency which is to enable outsiders to get in and insiders to get out in order to make the work or product or law better. Transparency is not an academic exercise or window dressing for show, when done well and right, for instance in the ways that the Sunlight Foundation works, it makes the work better. Releasing every day cables of conversations within the State Department doesn’t make anything better, it just makes the work harder to do at all, much less do well.

The leakers, including Wikileaks, should be punished for it. How is any organization or government agency supposed to do business, to wrestle with complicated situations where the answers aren’t clear cut, in other words deal with the world as it is, if every conversation, every thought, every musing is going to be public.

The shame as Micah points out is that this kind of behavior provides cover for anti-transparency forces to have an excuse to become more opaque. They would would head in that direction anyway. News organizations should not have printed these leaks, it wasn’t news, it was a crime.

OK, folks, start disagreeing now!

Making Email Useful

Jake Brewer shared his great post about making email advocacy alerts interesting to and useful for the receivers.

He laments the low open rates of so many email advocacy alerts and the sameness of them. Here is his outline of a typical such email:

SUBJ: Something catchy/funny/intriguing/pun to get you to open the email

Here is the first line in which I try to surprise you or say something memorable so you’ll keep going down.

Now I back up that sentence with some facts, and tell you what’s happening out in the world that needs your action.

Link 1: http://DoThisActionRightNow.com

More information describing the problem, and why our action is going to help – maybe even solve – the problem. We really need to do this!

Link 2: http://PleaseActNow.com (going to the same place as link 1)

Something nice that sums it all up and puts things in context, as well as thanking you for your support.

Love,

Us

PS Here’s a link to something else I want you to see, knowing that the PS is one of the most clicked through parts of an email. http://WatchOurAwesomeVideo.com

Jake’s analysis of the need for future emails to have a clear three stage design – summarize the problem, offer an analysis and then an action. It is similar to what I heard during my latest Social Good podcast from Marc Sirkin of Autism Speaks and Kivi Leroux Miller.

The only addition I’d make to Jake’s anaysis is a point that Marc made on the podcast which is the need for organizations to be more explicit about asking potential constituents what information they want to receive. Casting a wide net and sending everyone the same information on the same channels is a waste of everyone’s time and energy. Asking supporters what they want to hear about, when and how, which offers the risk of potentially reducing the overall email list is awfully important. And listening to what they hate to say about your email alerts is equally important.

Free Agents and Government

In California’s primary elections last week voters took a bold step of wiping out over a century of practice and abolished party primaries. Proposition 14 received 54% of the popular vote. It creates open primaries for anyone of any party to enter. The top two winners go on to the November ballot.

Here is Governor Schwarzenneger’s victory lap about the passage of Proposition 14:

It is one of many signs of the demise of our political parties. Not the demise of the two party system and the rise of the long-awaited third party, but the demise of all political parties. And not just here in the United States but around the globe. As the results of a Gallup poll in 2009 highlighted, much as made of the shift in allegiance from Republicans to Democrats over the past ten years; however, what these data don’t often emphasize is that independents now make up a larger slice of the whole electorate pie than either party.

This is the rise of the political free agent. In our book, The Networked Nonprofit, Beth Kanter and I discuss the critical importance of free agent activists. These are individuals working outside of institutions who are facile with social media and passionate about their causes. Organizations need to work with them to achieve large-scale social change.

Although the ground has similar shifted in the political arena, far less attention has been paid to the affect on governance of free agents being elected. We’ve watched as more voters have become free agents, freed from party loyalty to vote across parties. Obama was supported by a significant percentage of Independents and Republicans. This lack of party loyalty has also been one cause of the backlash against incumbents and the volatility in the support of party leaders over the past few years.Voters who supported Obama specifically because of his stance on the Iraq war or health care may not be supportive when the curveballs of governance, like an oil spill he didn’t create and can’t stop, emerge. These free agent voters give and take away their support when and how they want to, now because a party or association like a union tell them to.

But, what about the free agent politicians who become lawmakers? If you thought government didn’t work and politicians were in the pocket of the highest bidder, how is that going to be any better when politicians are unleashed from even the appearance of party fealty?

A new construct of post partisan participation for citizens has to be created. The Sunlight Foundation is at the forefront of this movement. Mechanisms for holding lawmakers accountable to the public through transparent data is one need. And above all we need an educated citizenry fully engaged in public policy and able to use the social media toolkit to gather support or build opposition to policies.

Nonprofits and Transparency

Lucy Bernholz, in her usual smart and insightful way, has written a terrific post on philanthropy and transparency, Downsides of Transparency. She is riffing on an article that Larry Lessig wrote for the New Republic entitled, Against Transparency.

Lessig’s arguments are more provocative than right. There is, of course, nothing inherently bad with opening up the black hole of government and sharing data with the public. And the Sunlight Foundation, of which Lessig is oddly an adviser, has led the charge in making data available to the public to enable it to connect the dots of connections between contributions, lobbyists and legislation. Ellen Miller and Mike Klein, the co-founders of the Sunlight Foundation, make a terrific counter argument to Lessing writing, “we argue that more transparency in politics will enable a healthy dynamic of rising public attention and engagement in demanding more accountability from government.”

As one would imagine, there was considerable pushback against Lessig’s take around the web. You can see different opinions here, by Patrice McDermott a long-time advocate for government openness, and David Weinberger here, and in the incomparable way that only he can, Micah Sifry here.

I don’t buy Lessig’s argument that there is such as thing as too much transparency in government. But I do buy Lucy’s concern that requiring too much transparency of foundations may drive them into the dark, back rooms without any sunlight of donor advised funds. The difference is that government is public and foundations are private entities. Even with their enormous tax breaks, foundations are private entities that more than any other kind of  institution has very little incentive to make their operations and programs more open and transparent except out of a noble assumption that by doing so they will be more effective.

My area of interest is in nonprofit organizations, which I think in some ways are harder to get our hands around in regards to transparency (does everyone thing that their sector is the most important?)  because nonprofits aren’t public entities and aren’t as private as foundations. We’re somewhere in between. Esther Dyson was right when she said at Transparency Camp a few months ago, “You cannot be fully transparent all the time because you need to give people a safe place to have the discussion without disrespecting others.” And, of course, no one would want a social service agency to reveal the private files of their clients or a clinic to reveal their health records. So, where is the transparency middle ground for nonprofits?

We need to begin from one fundamental premise: Transparency is not a technology tool. It is aided by technology. At its core, a value that creates organizational norms. The default setting for too many nonprofit organizations, to date, has been to the closed, proprietary side of the dial. We need a new transparency default setting and err on the side of openness, or sunlight as Ellen would say!

Nonprofits need to begin to ask themselves questions about transparency to guide their work. These questions include:

1. Will sharing this information advance our mission of benefiting our community?

2. How can others build on our content and make it better?

3. Will revealing this information improve morale and make staff feel better informed and able to make decisions on their own?

4. Will sharing this information better connect us to our network and help us to build relationships that we need to be successful?

Nonprofits spend too much time worrying about things that could go wrong or how they might be able to create a new revenue stream with their content. Both conversations are time spent putting up big walls between organizations and their communities. Take the walls down, make transparency the default setting.

Listening = Leadership

I had two unusual visitors today here in my home office. Jordan and Chris, two FBI agents came calling, and yes, they were both wearing dark suits and ties, although I didn’t they were not wearing dark sunglasses.

They were conducting a background check on a former colleague of mine and came to ask a few questions. (And said it was fine to blog about conversation.)

One question was what leadership qualities my colleague had exhibited. My immediate answer was that he was a great listener. My new FBI friend stopped short. He said he had been doing these interviews for a while and had never heard that answer. Really, I said, that’s a shame because in my mind it is the most critical for effective leadership.

As Beth and I are writing our book the question of where to put listening has come up time and again. Basically, we want to put it everywhere because it affects everything that an organization does, can do, should do in concert with their ecosystems. Social media are unique tools in that amplify good listening and bad listening, as well. So, for instance, it is clear when an organization has their ear to the ground and is hearing what bloggers and Twitterers are saying about the organization, and joining the conversation. All of the staff at the Sunlight Foundation are really adept listeners.

But when an organization is being talked about and the organization or company isn’t listening it’s far more aggregious. Remember the angry mommy blogger storm about the tone dear Motrin ad about all of those crazy and tired moms with sore backs from lugging their babies around in slings?

Beth has written extensively and beautifully about the power of using social media tools for listening. We ought to expect that organizational leaders are adept and appreciative of the power of listening as an important, in my mind the most important, criteria to effectively lead their organizations in the Connected Age.

Nonprofits are Falling Behind Gov 2.0

A few days ago, I tweeted my friend Marty to ask him about an article he had mentioned a while back on how the Department of Defense uses network structures to combat terrorism. I thought this would be a great example to get the attention of nonprofity folks: “Look, even the Dept. of Defense is embracing network structures, so, why are you stuck in your hierarchies!”

Within minutes, I got a tweet back from — YES — the Department of Defense!  A very nice tweeter named ArmyNYC was doing a good job of listening on Twitter and responded immediately and offered help in finding the materials I was looking for. The twitterer was in real life a public affairs officer at the Army Public Affairs office in heart of Manhattan.

The revolution in how government works is in full force right now. We really are at a historic moment in time wherein all of the pie-in-the-sky that I and my fellow geeks speculated about last year in our anthology on next generation government in Rebooting America is happening. Now, chronicled every day by the brilliant folks at the Sunlight Foundation and TechPresident,is Gov 2.0 for transparency. Conversations are fully embraced and, hopefully, maybe, a growing, trusting relationship and conversation between constituents and public officials on blogs, websites and Twitter is happening. It certainly helps that we have the tech savviest administration in history using the internet as effectively to govern as they did to campaign.  Check out Recovery.gov and Serve.gov is you haven’t already.

And then I saw this post from Katya: Nonprofit websites even worse than government ones . . . Turns out a new research report by a market research firm called ForSee entitled Trends in Constituent Satisfaction
with Nonprofit Websites: Building Membership, Donations, and Loyalty through the Web Channel [Warning: very annoying and unnecessary amount of personal info needed to input before able to download the report!] reports that nonprofit websites score a mediocre 73 out of 100 on their quality scale, a point behind E-government sites!

I did a survey in 2007 for the Overbrook Foundation that found that only 25% of the human rights grantees in our sample had a blog that allowed for comments. And I’m not sure the results would be much different today even though nonprofits are joining online social networking sites at a torrid pace as the NTEN survey revealed this week.

Why are we so slow as a sector to embrace Web 2.0? It’s confounding, but here are a few guesses:

1.We are an extremely risk averse sector. Foundations and large donors are by nature risk averse, and this trickles down to grantees. Web 2.0 feels too open and trasnparent to feel safe.  See, look what happened to Domino’s Pizza, after all?

2. We are terrible listeners. Ongoing learning, whether it’s the serendipitous learning of listening to the blogosphere and Twittersphere about your cause and issues, or the more systemic learning of evaluation, are simply not valued in the sector. If they were, we would have more data on what’s effective and how much evaluation is funded and done. We don’t. Period. Feel free to disagree. You can find the one shining example of an org. that learns brilliant on an ongoing basis. Trot out Teach for America and City Year for the umpteenth time. OK, that’s two, only 699,000 to go!  If you’re not focused on listening to and learning from your constituents, then embracing social media that enables that becomes less important.  I’ve never listened before, they seem to say, so why start now?

3. The generational divide is so much more prevalent and harmful to the sector than the digital divide. The Boomers that run organizations from staff or board positions don’t get it. It’s what their kids do, not what grown-ups should have to do.  They just want to close their eyes and go back to their Rolodex’ and date books and wish the whole thing would go away.

Of course, I don’t agree with any of these reasons!  But they are my best guess as to why we’re  falling behind even the government in making the transition to the new world. We’re like print media, desperately clinging to the shores of the old world in the hopes that the storm will blow over.

More Exciting Twitter News

Several exciting Twitter developments over the past few days as clearly the power of micro-messages continues to sweep the globe.

On the oft-dreary newspaper front, The Guardian in London has taken the bold and necessary step to close down it’s printing presses and shift to reporting the news entirely by Tweets.  According to the Guardian:

A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper’s archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include “1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!”; “OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more”; and “JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?”

This is a very exciting development in the race to find a new publishing model for newspapers.  Hopefully the Knight Foundation and Atlantic Philanthropies are taking note and finding ways to encourage their newspaper project grantees to go all Atwitter as well.

In related Twitter news, the Sunlight Foundation, always strategically perched at the cutting edge of technology and governance, has announced a new campaign to require all future government bills to be 140 characters and posted on Twitter. The legislation will be posted 72 hours in advance to ensure that all Americans have enough time to read the entire Tweet prior to any vote.  In the announcement of the campaign, Ellen Miller, Sunlight’s co-founder said, “Our Twitter Legislation Campaign will ensure that special interests are kept out of legislation; or at least kept to 12 or fewer characters. Every American deserves the right to read the Tweet before legislators vote on them.”  Sunlight is also organizing a campaign in partnership with Demos: A Network of Ideas and Action to change the voting system to enable all Americans to vote by Twitter.

Stay twuned for more Twitter news!

• *Happy April Fools Day everyone — hopefully we haven’t lost our sense of humor with our wallets this year!**

Sunlight’s Twitter Lobby Campaign

The Sunlight Foundation, always pushing the envelope on using social media tools to influence policy making in Washington, announced yesterday the launch of an effort to use Twitter to lobby individual Congress people to vote for

In an email received yesterday, Ellen Miller, co-founder and executive director of Sunlight, wrote:

Currently there are 17 senators tweeting and we intend to get our supporters to @lobby them to seek their support for S. 482. We believe that this will be the first organized direct lobbying of members of Congress over Twitter.

For those of you who don’t speak Washington, S. 482 is a bill introduced in the Senate to require the electronic disclosure of Senate campaign finance reports.

Not everyone thought this campaign was a great idea.  Ethan Zuckerman wrote a blog post that said, in part:

I realized that the “ask” of the campaign was to send 17 identical tweets to the congresscritters who’ve adopted Twitter. This means that all my twitter followers get to see me nagging Congress – including the roughly half of them that don’t live in the US – with seventeen messages. And it means that Congressfolk start seeing what amounts to Twitter spam, and start dismissing it much as they learned to dismiss email.
So, has Twitter jumped the shark and just become another tool for spamming politicians and decision makers?  Or is it, could it, be something fundamentally different? What if the focus of the campaign was to ask (a nicer word than insist, but perhaps the reality in is somewhere in between) that the 17 tweeting Senators engage in a discussion on Twitter about how we can help them to get this bill passed.  Twitter has so far been used by elected officials as a one-way communication tool, they tweet about what’s on their mind, and we get to listen in. We could ask/insist that they use Twitter to engage in a two-way conversation about legislation. Would it be possible to get Senators to stop talking for a minute and start listening?  Pretty high bar, I know, but perhaps worth reaching for.

Keeping Us In the Dark on the Wall Street Bailout

Do you really trust Washington politicians to get this bailout right?  An enormously expensively, risky proposal comes flying up the Hill from the White House and Congress meekly agrees – sound familiar?  Show us the bill, says the Sunlight Foundation!

Of Course, Next Prez Needs to Listen to Ellen Miller

Wired Magazine confirmed what I already knew — the next President, whoever he is, needs to listen to Ellen Miller, the driving force behind the Sunlight Foundation (and 14 others)!  We know how social media are shaping this campaign, Ellen and her colleagues at Sunlight are leading the way on how it can also shape what we know about our government and how we can shape public policy with better information.