Introducing DemDash Actions

Today, we're releasing an alpha version of DemDash Actions. We've created a few so far, including one on breaking up the banks, one that came from a speaker at the most recent TEDMED regarding a bill to create a federal Department of Peace, one on the controversial White House deficit commission, one on ending the Bush tax cuts, and one on chemical safety. You can see these on your homepage dashboard on the right hand side if you're logged in, and notifications as citizens sign them will appear in the timeline.

An obvious question is why the world needs yet another actions tool, and we agree, there are a number of fine solutions out there. However, we still see a gap for something that's lightweight, simple, multi-group aware, and flexible in what kind of organization you can target. Not to mention for a solution that only takes one click! It drives us a little crazy that a decade into the 21st Century, it's still more difficult to provide basic democratic feedback than it is to order a book from Amazon.

DemDash Actions are certainly lightweight. In fact, all they do right now is count users and groups. But as Willie Brown puts it, learning to count is the first rule of politics. They're quick to set up and can target any of our group types, from individual representatives to caucuses to party organizations to commercial entities. So the next time Congress does something to drive you crazy, think of us, but also think of us the next time a big company does something evil. DemDash Actions are, at their heart, a general tool for applying democratic pressure to any organization or process.

There are three other benefits that we think are worth mentioning, one that's built in to the current design, and two that are coming soon:

First, DemDash Actions are user-focused. They're not solely for list building. We love both partisan and nonpartisan organizations and we want them to succeed beyond their wildest dreams. However, the sheer volume of organizations out there clamoring for resources has resulted in a kind of tragedy of the commons, where the commons is the aggregate attention span of the citizenry. If you've ever hesitated before sending a group money or signing up for their email list because of the deluge of requests for attention and money you know it will trigger, then you're familiar with this problem. We hope that by building a channel for the great work these groups do, we can increase (hopefully greatly) the number of people they reach, and that by gently managing the data flow between groups and individuals we can both lower the cost of participation and better manage the attention commons. In a sense, DemDash is a bit like a VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) tool for democracy.

Second, better reporting. While we don't have the reporting available publicly just yet, since we know what political districts our users reside in (which we have to do to build out the Civic Profile page), we'll be able to build reports based on any districts that signees and groups are in. So if an office that's being targeted to wants to see just the signees that are voters in their district, they'll be able to, whether that district is a county or city district or a congressional district. We strongly believe that any elected representative should consider themselves responsible for listening to any citizen who cares enough to provide input on any decision they're making, but we understand that they need to know where that input is coming from. So as well as making it easier for citizens, we're making it easier for the offices of our elected representatives (and their long-suffering staff) as well.

Third, better feedback and results tracking. Think of all the actions you've signed: what ever happened with them? Too often, these things get lost in the shrouds of time. They aren't live yet, but we're already working on better tools for targeted groups to respond with, as well as tools for tracking the history of issues.

Sometimes we describe DemDash as an "organizing platform," although this description isn't very helpful unless you have a working definition of what "organizing" constitutes. We see organizing as the process of persuading someone to deepen their level of commitment to the democratic process. So the future of Actions will be all about augmenting any kind of democratic participation that anyone takes, from making a contribution to reaching out to a neighbor to creating a piece of art to marching or engaging in any kind of direct action. This is often called the "ladder of engagement." In reality sometimes it's more of a zig-zag than a ladder, but whatever people's paths to engagement are, we want to give them a way to both broadcast and remember their hard work. This is at the core of the design for DemDash; in fact it was the first thing I wrote down in the design of this version of the system that crystallized in 2008, shown in the image at the right.

While Actions are live on the site now, we don't quite yet have the tool for creating them up yet. That will be coming soon. In the meantime if you have any idea for a quick action or group and you'd like to promote it, or if you have general ideas how these should work, don't hesitate to get in touch via email at feedback at demdash dot us, or through the feedback link inside the site.

Thanks for your interest, and we're looking forward to taking action to expanding participatory democracy with you!

DemDash for Campaigns

As of today, we're launching some features in DemDash that will make it easier for supporters of a campaign or group sign up easily and share their support. You could do this before, but we hadn't quite ironed out the usability flow. It's still not perfect, but it is much easier: it only takes four clicks to get to the shareable page now.

The value of DemDash for end-users is (we think) pretty clear. If you're an activist, DemDash is a force multiplier: it's the easiest, clearest and fastest way to let your social network know about the candidates and propositions you believe in. And for ordinary voters, it's a way to find out what's going to be on the ballot, who represents you currently and to connect with groups and friends who you trust. But these new changes are a big improvement for making DemDash valuable for campaigns, too.

There are lots of reasons we think campaigns will want to put a link to their DemDash profiles on their sites and include it in their email blasts. Mainly it comes down to one simple thing. DemDash is a tool that empowers campaign supporters to generate not just impressions, but the highest-quality, most effective impressions can get: those based on social ties.

We realize this approach is not a fit with every campaign - there are still plenty of campaigns out there that don't see empowering their supporters as a helpful tactic. But the best campaigns are decided on big issues. They draw a clear different direction for the country, state or locality that you want to represent. This is why we're working so hard to build a channel for campaigns that is sociable, effective and polite.

We have a lot more features in mind that are going to make this even more helpful for campaigns in future cycles, but you can get started using it to generate social impressions now. If you'd like to try it out for a campaign you're working with, there is a little setup we need to do in the database first for now. So let us know either on twitter or via email at feedback at demdash dot us. We're looking forward to working with you and to building a stronger democracy!

Buttons!

Presenting a smattering of DemDash buttons, for your site promotion pleasure and enjoyment...




















You can see one in action on my personal blog. For now you'll need to know a little web-speak HTML to use these, but we'll be working on making them easier. If there's somewhere you'd like to see them available, let us know.

Welcome to DemDash!

Welcome to Democracy Dashboard, a new organizing platform from Simple Revolutions being built by three founders, Dan Ancona (that's me), my wife Jen Ancona and our good friend James Home, with a whole lot of help from tech startup coach and consultant Marcy Swenson of Startup Happiness.

The original concept for DemDash came from the experiences Jen and I have had as political activists and organizers, working with hundreds of campaigns and organizations over the past decade. I wrote up the first rough outline for the site in 2005 and created a series of wireframes and prototypes over the next few years. In early 2008 a workable vision started to come together, and Jen came up with the name one day in the car. Then in December of 2009, while flying back to join Jen in DC for her work on the Obama transition, I sketched out the basic functions of the site we have today and started building it django. A few months after that, James came up with the brilliant brand and logo and started in on the design language and site implementation.

We've chosen to focus on three basic and interconnected problems with global democracy in general, and American democracy in particular:

• There is no one reliable place to find and share basic political information.
  
• The feedback loop between our institutions and citizens hasn't scaled and is badly broken.
  
• There is no easy, inexpensive, sociable and polite way for campaigns and organizations to reach individual voters.
  

We believe that every citizen on this planet deserves basic, accessible and easy to understand information about their political system, as well as access to an easy, effective way to provide and aggregate feedback to the institutions that are so ingrained in our lives. We intend to provide those services and we're not going to rest until we get it done - or someone else does. And that's a possibility: there's been an explosion of interest in this and related problem spaces. We're excited about what the teams at pro.act.ly, StumpWise, OpenCongress, Visible Vote, Votizen, PopVox, CircleVoting and others are coming up with and can't wait to see how all the coalescing creative energy plays out. And this deluge of projects is certainly more evidence of Steven Johnson & Kevin Kelly's work on simultaneous invention and where ideas come from.

We've picked some brutally difficult problems to solve and have audacious goals. But we've already taken some small but solid steps towards tackling them. The current design is a start on addressing the first problem, and when we launch the first version of our multi-group actions tool (coming very soon), we'll be taking a step towards addressing the second problem. And everything we've built so far is laying the foundation for addressing problem number three.

The big question is, why do we think DemDash is valuable? Startups are a lot of work and have an astronomically tiny chance of success. Why are we bothering?

First of course, we think we've got a good shot at solving those three problems, tough as they are. But beyond that, we think American democracy is part way through the beginning of a fundamental change, and developing new tools is a chance to both accelerate that process and shape the direction of the outcome.

One of the main points of connection that ordinary citizens have with the democratic system is through electoral and issue-based campaigns. But for various reasons, campaigns of all sizes have become reliant on broadcast model tactics like direct mail and television ads. This media and communications environment has given rise to a top-down, centralized campaign culture that's been easily dominated by insiders, big money and corporate interests.

But over the past few years, it's been increasingly possible to imagine a more participatory, responsive, networked and bottom-up political culture - a culture that's planted in neighborhoods and the open spaces of the internet rather than the expensive and tightly controlled channels on television. We've even seen a few concrete examples: Bush and Dean in 2004, countless smaller campaigns, and the Obama 2008 campaign in particular, have all tried various experiments in decentralization and broad participation. This shift was described convincingly by Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi in his post-campaign book The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

But for small campaigns - and even more so, for individual voters - all this is still far too difficult. Voting rates in the US remain abysmal according to almost any measure. By one such measure - voting rate in lower house elections, 1960-1995 - we're 36th out of 38 industrialized democratic countries.

Based on our experience as activists one of the main gaps is access to basic information, and campaigns expend enormous efforts to close this gap. The American democratic system is complicated; not unreasonably so, since it matches the complexity of our economy and infrastructure. But so far this system has lacked a clear and user-friendly front-end.

One of the many things that's unfinished in the American democratic experiment is the decay of what has been called 'the glue that holds together the fabric of civil society': the local party groups and civic organizations that once had very large reach. These groups are still out there. In fact there are hundreds of thousands of them, as well documented in Paul Hawken's book, Blessed Unrest. They are numerous but often small and have lacked cultural impact and visibility, another problem we hope an open platform for collaboration like DemDash can address. It will be a sign we're back on the right track when the latest actions of local party organizations and environmental and social justice groups - and the metrics they monitor - are as common a topic as sports scores, and the tools we have for finding these out are just as advanced.

Re-weaving the fabric of American and global civic society is clearly a grand challenge - perhaps the key defining challenge of this generation. New tools are only part of the story. But if we can play even a small role in augmenting or accelerating this change, we will have succeeded. One of our highest hopes for DemDash is that it will strengthen the hands of these small groups and give them more of the time, attention, resources and love that they deserve.

We've gotten a lot of feedback on this so far, so a quick note about privacy: the system right now is quite open. We've done this deliberately. While we're a small team and testing out our ideas and finding what works, we don't want to make the appearance of promises of privacy that we don't ourselves have confidence in. For users who are more inclined to be activists, this is great, since this is what you're looking for anyway. But if you're looking for more of a research tool, all we can say is stay tuned: we have a bunch of great features in mind for this and will keep you updated on the progress we make towards building rock-solid security into the foundation of the product.

A quick preview of coming attractions: first, we've got some user experience and gradual engagement improvements in the pipeline that didn't make it into the first alpha. We have a pretty good excuse: we released the first alpha to the public on Friday May 28th - and that evening, Jen went into labor! So our son Marco (seen here in O'Hare airport, on a business trip with his mama) and DemDash are just about the same age. Next will be an update to the underlying California geodata, and next we're going to start bringing in news and data feeds to make DemDash more of a site you'll want to visit every day. Then we're looking at integrating some national data - and perhaps even international, as we've now had interest from folks in Canada, Mexico and Australia who would love to see DemDash working there.

DemDash itself and the political data it is built on is nonpartisan. Some of the DemDash founders are more partisan than others, but we all believe in two things: the importance of a tool for democracy that provides space for all political persuasions, and the necessity of partisanship on its most basic level, which is simply the banding together of like-minded citizens to take collective action and create positive change. This is the foundation of democracy. There's a Margaret Mead quote, the one about small groups of thoughtful people changing the world. With DemDash we hope to provide a new platform for this very old tradition - as well as the change that will result from very large groups of thoughtful people.

Thanks for your interest. We can't build the participatory future of democracy without you, so we hope you'll join us.