This month, the lights on Meet AmeriCorp—a directory and messaging service for AmeriCorps members that launched in 2006—has gone dark for the last time. With over 450 members and a long history of technical problems and blackouts, I’m relieved to pull the plug though a little sad that the 80,000+ AmeriCorps members who serve every year still have great difficulty connecting with eachother.

Meet AmeriCorps started as ServiceSpeak in 2005, which was my introduction to CivicSpace—Howard Dean’s presidential campaign-technology spinoff—and eventually led me to Drupal, the platform Meet AmeriCorps is built on (Drupal 4.7, to be exact). The design was minimal, but I spent many hours on enriching the experience for users—which still annoys me 5 years and 3 major Drupal releases later that Users are still 2nd class Drupal citizens when it comes to treating them like a fully-fledged content type. This meant repurposing a lot of specialty node fields and taxonomy code (like tag clouds) for users; and creating rich lists of users and fun stuff like geographic hierarchies (clicking through a weighted tag-cloud of States to see a weighted tag-cloud of Cities). Looking back, the code wasn’t pretty (and there were a few hacks to core [shudder]), but Meet AmeriCorps, for being 5 years old, still has more character and spunk than many modern Drupal-based websites.

Technology aside, Meet AmeriCorps scratched a lot of philosophical and ideological itches—from organizing to communication and technology—in a time when no one was sure if Facebook would stick (not to mention the advertising and personal data collection, either). Last year, when it was finally clear that Meet AmeriCorps should be sundowned, I penned this open letter about the project and the AmeriCorps ecosystem in general:

Since we launched this website, first as ServiceSpeak then Meet AmeriCorps, our goal has always been to connect AmeriCorps members and alumni. Networking members, within communities and across the country, enables them to learn from one another and bonds them in the shared experience of service. We believe this creates greater well-being in members, greater impact upon the communities they serve, and greater strength to national service as a whole.

5 years ago the technology needed to create a successful online community required both commitment and technical skills. Frustrated with the lack of investment by AmeriCorps and the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), we spent considerable time surveying, designing, building, launching, and incorporating feedback into Meet AmeriCorps. We were informed by our own experience as AmeriCorps members and motivated by our desire to better recognize the innate experience and ability of its corps members.

Today, anyone can create an online community without significant resources or technical skills. Online social media and social networking tools now require only passion and commitment to create thriving communities of practice. Many new communities have already been created by other AmeriCorps members who identified the same needs and opportunities we did so many years ago.

Unfortunately, AmeriCorps and CNCS still place little emphasis on connecting and networking their members. Official websites are created without community input, poorly designed, rarely communicated to members, unmoderated by knowledgeable staff, and frequently replaced with equivalently disengaged websites. Communication tools are designed for top-down announcements rather than bottom-up dialogue, and even then are used rarely to meaningfully inform members or recognize their abilities and impact.

We are glad that technology is now accessible enough for AmeriCorps members to connect themselves. We are disappointed that that AmeriCorps has not done more to lead, nurture, facilitate and inform these networks. With the energy of the Obama administration and its complementary focuses on both national service and empowering uses of technology, we hope that AmeriCorps and CNCS will better recognize the individual benefits and national impact a purposely and well-connected corps can have.

In community,
The Meet AmeriCorps Team

This afternoon I have been following the mis-framing of Chicago’s newly announced plan to release 10 years of… not crime statistics as has been reported, but… police incident reports. From the Boston Globe:

Chicago to publish crime stats online

CHICAGO—Long a city with a reputation for withholding information, Chicago now wants to make public every crime over the past 10 years – a highly unusual move among the nation’s major police departments.

Starting Wednesday, millions of crime statistics dating to 2001 will be posted online in a searchable database. It will be updated daily, providing fodder for residents to evaluate their own neighborhoods, academics to study crime and techie types to create websites or apps.

I’ll harp on that last sentence in which the “techie type’s” activities are described so rudderlessly: this data will fuel a hundred red and green heatmaps, but probably provide little opportunity for reflection on the true nature of this data—police incident reports—let alone the politics, policies and policing that generated this data in the first place. Just as an example, this is from a WBEZ story entitled “ The downside of hiring more cops in Chicago”:

But there are also costs with increasing the number of police on the street and those costs can be tough to measure. “The good intentions of actually creating the uniformed presence to lower the immediate problems of crime may have an unintended result when you’re looking further down the line,” according to George Gascon. He’s the district attorney for the city of San Francisco, and before that he was the chief of police. He says low-income, often minority communities, are flooded with police, and residents are over-criminalized. Lots of people are arrested, sometimes for small infractions.

Kids get criminal records, they’re cut off from educational and employment opportunities, and all of that ultimately makes the crime problems worse. “I’m not saying that we should look the other way to crime, to the contrary. What I’m saying is that the strategies that we used in the past have not worked well, and we need to evolve away from that. In many neighborhoods basically we have been at war with our people,” Gascon said.

An incident does not make an indictment, and an infraction need not be a crime, let alone a conviction; nor should we forget what goes unreported. And yet this dataset is being distributed and—this is the actual problem—represented by the media and (soon) a myriad of websites and apps as full-stop crime.

This is not a criticism of the police or the City of Chicago, who should be commended for being more transparent and making this information more readily available; this is a plea for the media and application makers to appropriately label this data and use it with an understanding of its limitations.

Ben Fry, on visualization future and data literacy looks toward the future:

“I think the real thing that’s going to change is that we’re going to start understanding that visualization isn’t this sort of monolithic thing… I like to look at it a lot like writing. You have novels and poetry and haikus. You know there’s lots of different types of writing and styles of writing — and I think the same thing happens in visualization… some things are tools for analysis and some things are purely for entertainment, and there’s not so much a spectrum that there is different ways of addressing it.

But this understanding and widespread “data literacy” is not here yet. It’s up to us so called techie types to exhibit “Data Leadership” and work to better interpret and explain the complexity and nuance of our analysis—the absence of which I’ve complained about before.

Data leadership is appropriately labeling data. Data leadership is presenting data with a recognition of its limitations. Data leadership is consideration for how your presentation of data may be interpreted and responsibility for the consequences.

Data leadership is ultimately a recognition of the broader context of human experience and how information is collected, analyzed and integrated into our lives and decision-making processes—both individually and socially. I realize that’s awfully heady for discussing glorified spreadsheets, but to riff off the old chestnut, you can’t manage what you misrepresented.

(Thanks Justin, Bec and David for drawing my attention to this.)

I seem to be quoting this all the time, so I may as well archive it here. From Malkia Cyril of the Center for Media Justice, authoring “Why GLAAD Doesn’t Represent Me”: a response to the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) coming out in support of an AT&T-T-Mobile merger:

Worldview. Why does AT&T have such power in civic organizations from the DC beltway to your hometown? Well it isn’t because these organizations are dumb, or simply because they are struggling for resources or ill-informed. No. These organizations are often run by brilliant leaders of integrity. Instead, I think it’s because many groups have internalized a worldview that prioritizes getting our piece of the American pie, rather than one that seeks to remake the pie into something we can not only eat, but create and control. In the context of decimated public and municipal infrastructure, and an economic environment where jobs are scarce- the promise of contracts, work, and money, coupled with the belief that wealth equals freedom, promises mean a lot. Even if history proves that when it comes to big industry, promises not guaranteed by regulation are made to be broken. As a movement for justice, part of our mandate is to shift beliefs and values about the role of corporations in our lives.

Photo from  awesome teacher @paulramsay who used PrintAndShare.org to  share his classroom’s DonorsChoose Project.

As a result of building PrintAndShare.org I am hyper-sensitive to the drawbacks of URLs—which is my service’s weakest link. I’m using bit.ly shortened URLs that unfortunately have an ambiguous mix of upper and lower-case letters; ambiguous both in terms of typeface (els and ones may look identical), but also that many people expect URLs to ignore case; for bit.ly that can be difference between reaching the specified DonorsChoose project page or… well… anything else on the internet which, statistically-speaking, I can say is something they definitely don’t wish to see.

Regardless, I’m disappointed that bit.ly doesn’t acknowledge the need for transcribable URLs. Below is a ticket, since closed, from their support forum (I’ve reformatted it):

From Chris Rabb’s Invisible Capital on business plan competitions.

As a former director of a nationally recognized urban business incubator, I know firsthand the opportunities they have to help their clients develop invisible capital as well as the challenges that incubators face. When I was the vice president of entrepreneurial programs at a nonprofit-based business assistance organization born out of an independent study conceived by Wharton MBA students, I was asked on occasion to be a judge for a business plan competition, a feature of the program mandated by its well-intentioned philanthropic funder.

The participants were all under twenty-five years old. Some were high school dropouts, while others had earned their GEDs. Some were attending or had received an associate’s degree fro the Community College of Philadelphia, and a few were students at the University of Pennsylvania or Drexel University.

Invariable, the winners of these business plan competitions were students from the more selective schools. Were they more entrepreneurially oriented than their counterparts? No. Were they harder working? No. Were they more business savvy? No. Were their ideas or business models more compelling than those of their less educated peers? Rarely. So why did students from elite schools always win these competitions? Two words: invisible capital.

The Penn and Drexel students were more adept at using technology. They could write better. They were better trained in conducting research. They were more confident speaking in front of audiences. Their projects were often connected to experiences they had working in other professional or educational environments, and their plans incorporated how they would secure funding, talent, or customers based on their various social networks. They had more human, cultural, and social capital, not to mention economic capital. It wasn’t even close.

The problem with these competitions, I soon realized, was they did not rate the viability of the business model but the ability of the contestant to advocate for her venture in clear, substantive, and compelling ways. While this is important, it was not supposed to be the purpose of the competition, which was to reward the person with the best business plan, one that (at least in theory) would be related to the most viable business model. However, the contests always turned into a virtual beauty contest, where beauty was defined by eloquence, clarity of thought, poise, presentation, and the use of language often associated with conventional intelligence (aka cultural capital). Eliza Doolittle [of “Pygmalion”, which Rabb references throughout this chapter] mimicked the patrician ladies, and in so doing, she was accepted as their peer regardless of her intellect, values, or skills. To them, Eliza’s most important tacit skill was her ability to assimilate.

The winners of these business competitions walked away with a nominal prize, big smiles, and their egos stroked. The losers left with serious mixed lessons. First, many undoubtedly thought that their business concepts and models were inferior to those of the winners, without any indication why that was the case (when in fact it rarely was). Second, they did not know how influential their lack of invisible capital was in diminishing their chances of excelling, largely because they didn’t even know that the were being judged (albeit unconsciously) on the amount of invisible capital they brought to the competition.

This August marks the completion of my 7th year in Boston, with the loose exceptions of the 1 month I commuted into Boston from Ashland, and the 1 year I commuted out of Boston to Lowell.

I was interviewed for NAMAC’s (National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture) Idea Exchange and the interview is now up on their website. The interview went great and I’m really appreciative of the opportunity to share our work at the Transmission Project with a wider audience. An excerpt:

NAMAC:_ August 2011 marks the end of The Transmission Project’s main initiative, The Digital Arts Service Corps. What do you think The Digital Arts Service Corps’s legacy will be?_

Sheldon: There are countless transformative projects and organizations that we’ve supported over the years, but I think the most enduring aspect of the Digital Arts Service Corps comes from maintaining a leadership pipeline into media arts and technology. For example, every conference I go to has at least one presenter who is an alumni of the Corps. And not just the number of people we’ve been able to bring into the field, but the diversity of individuals who might not otherwise have seen a role for themselves in the field. Many of our most successful members could never edit a video or build a web page, but they brought new perspectives and leadership qualities to organizations who could not have otherwise taken the risk to hire them. Unfortunately though, it’s this aspect of building a leadership pipeline that I see missing from other national service proposals – and yet I think the results of such a pipeline will have the most long-lasting benefits.

NAMAC: What’s next for The Transmission Project?

Sheldon: To be honest we’re still figuring that out. The past 18 months have taken all our energy to ensure that Corps members in the field were little impacted by the funding and oversight environment we’ve had at home: the non-renewal of our funding, a national fundraising tour, a federal audit (which was copacetic, BTW), and now our impending closure. Not to mention trying to get in front of the emerging foundation and governmental recommendations to create a corps just like ours…it’s been distracting, to say the least. We’re using our last month on the payroll to archive as much knowledge as possible to make sure we can play an active role should those foundation and governmental recommendations turn into action.

NAMAC: Do you have any advice for someone who wants to start a service corps to build capacity in the public media and technology field?

Sheldon: I’ve already touched on building a leadership pipeline – which means structuring roles and workplans to allow for leadership just as much as recruiting broadly in age, background, education and experience. In regards to outcomes, I’m really troubled by prescriptive “nonprofits need…” or “nonprofits suck at…” narratives that equate technical assistance with true capacity building. As if a dusting of “best practices” by volunteer trainers is all that stands between an organization and the realization of its mission. The Transmission Project takes a very active role in the RFP process: drawing upon our experience to help organizational applicants better define their projects and workplans over multiple feedback rounds – sometimes to the surprise of applicants not used to being Socratically engaged by a potential funder. We call the methodology “Honest Practice” and it means looking at project stakeholders, organizational structure, community context and the potential for overall success. One of the most interesting questions in the final evaluation we send to our grantees is “What was accomplished that wasn’t part of the original proposal?”. Because we’re granting something infinitely more valuable than money – a person – there is a wonderful opportunity to create unexpected, positive outcomes that just aren’t possible in a one-size-fits-all approach.

DonorsChoose announced the winners for their Hacking Education contest today and unfortunately Print & Share, the app I developed with my coworker Billy, didn’t win. The consolation prize is all of the positive feedback I’ve received from teachers who are using Print & Share:

Now this is probably just sour-grapes writing, but I am disappointed by the nature of the applications that won: most of them are based around automated referrals:

• a Wordpress plugin, and TwitterAPI app that use geographic location to suggest DonorsChoose projects,

• an email signature generator that suggests projects based on the projects’ funding needs

• a browser extension that suggests DonorsChoose projects when you search Amazon.com

The one winner I do like sends automated press-releases to local news outlets. The content of the release isn’t much to work with (though Print & Share shares that problem), but it could be an effective news peg for general school issues (not that “Local schools must turn to the internet because of waste/fraud/abuse” is the story I’d want to see run).

My criticism of those automated referral tools is that they all require an advocate to install the tool—but that advocate has little control over the projects they refer people to. In other words, these winners require someone to really care about DonorsChoose as a whole, not necessarily any specific project. Do those individuals exist, en masse? I’ve learned there is a big network of teachers who promote eachother’s DonorsChoose projects, but since they can’t specifically suggest a friend or colleague’s project, will they adopt the winning tools? It’s the sizzle of social networking without the (tofu-) steak .

The fact that these tools seem in search of an audience is what disappoints me most. As attributed to thinker Seth Godin by  Richard Millington: “Find products for your audience, not audiences for your products.” We built Print & Share as a tool for teachers to better promote their own projects—because teachers are the audience that cares most about their projects’ success– which is why the tweet I just received while writing this post cracks me up:

Advanced algorithms analyze your social graph to provide deep introspection through animal shapes and SEO-optimized pithy sayings. Once we close Series A we will be hiring unpaid interns; only serious inquiries, please.

Howard Fisher in the Transmission Project’s newly released report “ Back to the Source: How Collaboration Can Transform Online Engagement”:

In 2010, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation pioneered the use of open commenting on its Knight News Challenge. The Challenge aims to spur innovation around providing information to communities using digital, open-source technology. Anyone who has access to Knight’s website can apply, and last year applicants had the option of applying openly – that is, making their application available to be read, rated, and commented on by visitors to the website. By doing so, applicants might benefit from the public’s feedback. Between the time applicants posted their proposals and the December 1 deadline, they could change their proposals to reflect improvements based on others’ suggestions. Because Knight’s News Challenge drew experience from the crowd in the form of feedback, allowed users to rate projects, and comprised a funding contest, it exemplifies a hybrid model that includes elements of the crowdsourcing approaches Kanter terms wisdom, voting, and funding.

Recognizing the gap between foundations and the work of organizations, Knight director of Digital Media Grants John Bracken says that in crowdsourcing feedback, the foundation saw the opportunity to bring expertise from the field to its technology initiative. In an online Q&A, Bracken likewise says Knight was looking “to be surprised and see things we haven’t seen before.” He acknowledges, however, that he doesn’t think Knight executed its crowdsourcing effort well.

In Knight’s case, increased inclusiveness came into conflict with the structure of a funding contest. The Challenge’s website conveys mixed messages about how the public’s feedback influences the review and judging process. On one hand, the site stated as of June 6, 2011 (before winners were announced), “applicants who choose the public option will not receive preferential consideration. Likewise, those who choose the closed option will not be penalized.” On the other hand, the site elaborated, “the public rating and commenting is by no means the only parameter we use to choose the best projects. We give more weight to our panel of experts,” who gauge projects’ potential impact based on how well it fits into one of the predetermined categories “mobile,” “authenticity, “sustainability,” or “community.” The website implies that review panelists do give some weight to public comments even as it denies showing preference for open submissions. Lack of transparency and intentionality regarding the rating and commenting system limited the benefits Knight could reap from its use of crowdsourcing.

To its credit, Knight reflects on the complications of crowdsourcing feedback in the context of a funding competition. In particular, its FAQ about the section pointed to the bias of users: “We hope everyone is acting in good faith, but we understand that applicants can subjectively rate other entrants’ projects.” This implies users could leave negative feedback on their competitors’ projects in an attempt at subterfuge. Likewise, Knight addresses concerns about viewers stealing participants’ ideas:

It’s the trade-off for having the opportunity to use the wisdom of the crowd to improve your entry… Submitting an ‘open’ application means you are either confident enough in your own abilities and track record that you’ll be chosen to do the work even if others have similar ideas, or that you don’t really care who does the work as long as it gets done. Here Knight anticipates the central tension that crowdsourcing introduces to a contest. By sponsoring a funding challenge, Knight hopes to drive social innovation by encouraging healthy competition among innovators. However, opening up innovators’ ideas to public collaboration would seem to undermine the spirit of competition; even as Knight highlights how crowd wisdom can improve a project and make it a more competitive candidate, it instructs applicants to only include the crowd if they “don’t really care who does the work as long as it gets done.” In the end, Knight resolves this tension by subordinating the role of the crowd: getting public support is made optional rather than essential to the success of a project. True to its name, Knight’s initiative is a challenge first and foremost.

The challenges of resolving these tensions not only indicate that practical applications of crowdsourcing are still experimental, but also reiterate what experts like Geoff Livingston have said: “While the crowd craves freedom, it desperately needs structure. People need to be told how to participate and the rules of engagement. These rules have to be clear, empowering of the crowd, and directive in their end result.” Effective use of crowdsourcing requires a great deal of intentionality and structure. Knight provides plenty of guidance for applicants but not for commentators. Moreover, the crowd needs to be the hero. Its contributions would have to equal if not supersede in importance the ideas of innovators as the focus of the funding process. Indeed, Knight’s Challenge merely emphasizes what is already true about applying for funding – that it is a competitive undertaking.

The conflict between “collaboration” and “competition” really bothers me on a rhetorical level about these app contests. They use the evolutionary language of competitive innovation yet often rely on collegial cooperation and altruism (not to mention existing capacity) as the efforts required to participate may significantly outweigh the probability for prizes or benefits. The idea of “online” has become intrinsically tied to democratic participation (and other feel-goody stuff like collaboration) when—except when specifically designed for with much effort and forethought—it’s nothing of the sort.

On the other hand, while public collaboration may be difficult to organize, private collaboration between participating developers can be relatively easy yet awesome. Whether private collaboration is the result of physical closeness (such as at a weekend hackathon) or electronic (such as a listserv set up for participants and organizers), creating a space where participants can ask and answer questions, share ideas, gently boast about their progress and implicitly network can provide fulfilling benefits for participation than just the prize at the end. From my participation in the Boston Hackday Challenge (physical collaboration) and   DonorsChoose Hacking Education (listserv-based collaboration) winning a prize becomes more of the icing than the cake. Of course, these contests I’ve been involved with have also kept their bloviations about creating the “future of whatever” to a minimum, so maybe that has something to do with it too.

I could also go into how these contests may (briefly) fulfill many of the human and social needs that current technology careers lack, but that’s another blog post.

**Update: **My boss Belinda suggested I note that the Knight Foundation has previously funded DonorsChoose (she received a DonorsChoose GivingCard at a Knight conference).