Full Circle Associates

Grass roots campaigning as Elective Sociality (or Maffesoli meets “social software’)
Reflections from the BBC iCan project
Stokes Jones, Lodestar
Was research director at Sapient in London

I’m a freak! Pleased to be following Kris.

We look for the political in the wrong paces, on the wrong pages of the newspaper… Those decision-making areas which had been protected by “the political” in industrial capitalism. (longer quote from Ulrich Beck, The Re-invention of Politics)

I thought this was what the iCan project was all about. This notion of sub politics, which seems more aspirational, … the history of displacement from Beck to Michel

This paper tells two stories: project and personal
Relates experiences emerging from the ethnographic research during the participative development phase of the BBC iCan website
How theory is actually lived

Understanding Grassroots Campaigning

Pre-history
Record low turnout in 2001 British General Election
Found political apathy was widespread (surprise)
Remembered the fuel tax protests of 2000 – truckers and farmers jammed the road and besieged. major reserves of gasoline.

Maybe politics was not gone, just below the radar

Create a website as a listening post for the BBC and enable people’s participation in democracy. Make a difference in civic life. A guide to navigating democracy. Out of two thoughts: “I don’t know where to start” and “ I don’t know how to do it.” Should be biased towards local. Biased towards action.

So they set out to do some research – how do campaigns get started, what kind of people are campaigners, what do they need at various steps of their campaigns.

At this point a lot of tacit theory informs the research. What kind of politics we were studding. Root findings. Axis of politics (government admin), (moved too fast through his image). National Electoral Politics, Grass Roots Politics, National Campaign Groups and the mystery area.

Discounting national electoral politics. Their objects: Issues, activism, movements, policy, social change, shifts in consciousness.

Grass Roots Politics: parties, elections, offices, bargaining, services.

Middle space: local focus, local participation, grass roots campaigns. Objects: situations, events, landscapes local issues, complaints, debates.

Campaigning for or against something. Some of the campaigns changed their valence. Against second homes, for affordable housing.

Methodology
In depth in-context interviews and campaign office tours
Gathering oral histories of specific campaigns
Co-creating timelines of campaign activities and events
Creating visual experience models of the campaign process to aid iCan’s design and service development.

Learned
Process model for grass roots campaigning
Activist profiles
Campaign process timelines
Segmentation model

Now can compare different campaigns systematically. Some campaigns were classic protest. Lots of actions. Some had lots of planning and very little action. Quick vs. slow trigger.

The campaigners quickly understood that the NIMBY strategy was not successful and they quickly changed strategies, leverage points and campaign focus.

The campaign process model: justification for the research. Experience model pioneered by Rick Robinson at E-Lab. Used as foundation of design process. Find areas that iCan could support.

Revealed how intricate the campaigning process is: discovering, deciding, planning, acting. All travel through these stages. Model represents the idea in a visual descriptive forms. Model shows linear and iterative stages, decision points, etc. Planning and acting is represented as a continuum. Providing pressure à new name for protests.

After model was delivered, with the detail and granularity expecting. Then the iCan came back with the iCan system conceptual model. What is the journey between being a passive and an active user? A nugget that reveals the client’s logic. They decided iCan would be the journey. To activate people. The process would be through a number of new media tools. Steps of the transformation: online campaign journal or blog, keeping campaign calendar, filing a brief and interacting with others around the issue. Benchmarked to a similar process – Dr. Seuss – from plain bellies to star bellies. You know what happens.

Conflict: concept testing. Via the process model, we discovered campaigns were made out of unsung moments. The times that don’t involve demonstrating. When the strategizing happens. You decide the next person to call. All those other stages. On one hand there are a lot of things going on that weren’t strictly campaigning tasks. The unsung moments had caused the site concept to get deeper and more complex. Support these moments. A place to save things. Do private messaging within the site. A campaign blogging/calendar tool for other campaigners. Via the process model, they assumed a type correspondence between the campaign stages and the site. A new bias towards comprehensiveness on top of bias towards local and action. We designed a prototype site based on these assumptions.

Test site: 5 campaigners from previous research and 5 of a new group called sympathizers. A lot of campaigners weren’t interested in help, but sympathizers might. Tested through questions, three user journey paper prototyped. Way to ambitious. Too many flags waving. Too many priorities. Campaigners thought it made campaigning look more difficult than it actually was. Only 1 of 5 sympathizers felt the website would encourage them to start a campaign if they were thinking about it.

“I think this site would generate constant RTFM errors.” (Read the F*** Manual) A case of user-centered design gone ary. Delivered opposite of what users wanted. Just because the campaigning process was intricate did not mean we needed to mirror that intricacy in the design.

I.e. polling = “self referential bollocks” The things intended to be political were not popular. The site felt like the BBC reinvented the phone network and now we had to phone the iCan way. The bias towards action were rejected by users. “Its not like delivering the ingredient for a cake and it’s unfair to promise people up front that they will make a difference.” “I’m going to start a campaign today and poof, it happens. Not realistic.

Teleological bias of the site needed to be cranked down a few notches.

The most popular features: search/browse, how to’s, case studies, find people, issue page, initiatives. These were different than BBCs desire not to be a content-centric site and be cool new social software. Campaigners wanted how tos.

Reversal: Meta-Theme
The target was interested in a website about campaigning not a site to ask on it. If we constantly listened to the zeitgeist of social software we’d go against what the campaigners wanted. Users did not want to conduct campaigns online, wanted to work on their own pace, etc. They did not want a hub, didn’t want to save things online, invite in friends. The rating feature common on many social software sites brought indignation. False activity rating. Campaign success = # of messages left on iCan. Designers thought what happened on site would be isomorphic to what happening in real world, but that was not what users thought. They rejected the idea.

The concept of one stop shop was overwhelming for the customer. The temptation to up sell is built into the design logic. Bias towards getting people what we want them to do. Same dynamic, same bias in non profit world.

Even with research, they provided the rationale for the predisposition, especially through the project model, with it’s complexity suggesting a complex site. Did not focus enough on context. Have to reinterpret the data.

Then rediscovered Michele. Experiencing the other, Michel Maffesoli. Experiencing the other is the basis of community. A key attraction of different social groups is simply being together. The focus of interest was less important. This resonated with the prototype results. Explained why campaigners wanted to keep their campaigns in their community. They were getting more than the campaign results from campaigning. Maffesoli’s examples are around music festivals and sports clubs; leisure. But saw the same logic in the campaigning groups.

Syntony (mutual turning in relationships). Describes the…. (missed)

Sue and Dionne were fighting together, every night, “I don’t know what we’re going to do when this is done – Sue. I guess we’ll find some other campaign that needs us – Dionne. Points to the non functional, non purposive elements of campaigning. If you tried to schematize this into a series of processes to be automated, you would lose a good portion of the campaigners. Motivation – key issue is sustaining, keeping them going. The charismatic experience of the campaign creates the sense of mutual obligation to endure.

Climax
Phone mast (cell tower) story… won.

Throwback to the past? Idyllic? Campaigns only from traditional, cohesive communities. Lisa had not known her neighbors before, but after more talking in the streets. Seen people act in new ways. Constitutive of community rather than flowing from it. Society can’t be understood by any old rational mechanism. Informed by encounters, situations and experiences.

Elective sociality – groups are formed by linked series of attraction and repulsion shared sentiments, affective warmth, overlapping roles, group allegiance, deeply felt based leaning to “communalized action.”

Object – centered sociality
Many campaigns are about the categorization, management or acceptance of rejection of concrete objects in the human landscape.
More an extension of sociality. Argue it is not a form of politics. Reaching up. Protecting some aspect of one’s life. Not about gaining or holding power. Within grasp, doesn’t require becoming a different person.

I never desired to start a group or be part of a movement. I just see things around where I live that need sorting out and I try to sort them out – Leo

Very little ideological talk.

Resolution:
Varieties of the social – traditional community and community of interest. Site was aimed at the conditions within the community of interest, missed the voluntary, affect based, proximate, localized.

ICan: the campaigner as individual

Community: the campaigner as a person is dependent on others, accepts a social contract

The protocols supported the individual point of view, not community. Moved from a charismatic experience to a form online. Imposing a template that was too individual and too specifically political. Campaigning is an emergent behavior. Not one person. In many cases two people started on the same day and met each other. Many grass roots campaign cannot say who their leader is. The things iCan wanted to do, help people meet each other, would probably already have happened in the community.

BBC got fixated with their biases because they felt it was the most innovative part of the campaign. Understand that. Move to a radically simplified design. Campaigners had their own websites, but they were used for publicity, not for campaign management. Simple bulletin board activity, not cooperative work practices.

Categories: EPIC2005