I almost didn’t vote today. As the founder of a website that helps people focus on doing what matters, casting a vote in Illinois (where the election won’t be close and my vote won’t matter) is arguably hypocritical. Had I spent an hour this morning working on The Point instead of voting, it would have done infinitely more good (some vs. none = infinite).

But when I started compiling my argument against voting for the purpose of this post, I realized:

• My argument applies to me and exactly no one else.
• I still think everyone else should vote - indeed, I need them to so I can shirk.
• There is nothing I actually want to change about the way voting is marketed as a civic duty - even though it’s effectively the most meaningless way for an individual to participate in public life and no one deserves a sense of satisfaction for doing it, it still must be done.
• I don’t actually have anything worth saying about not voting.

So that was that - post abandoned, I would abstain from voting in silence.

But after reading an article by Freakonomics author Steven Levitt about the irrationality of voting, I was convinced, ironically, that I should vote.

Levitt explains that many economists consider voting pointless to the point of being a social stigma.

Why would an economist be embarrassed to be seen at the voting booth? Because voting exacts a cost - in time, effort, lost productivity - with no discernible payoff except perhaps some vague sense of having done your “civic duty.” As the economist Patricia Funk wrote in a recent paper, “A rational individual should abstain from voting.”

But rational economics is based on the assumption that all parties act rationally. If Funk is using rationality to declare that I shouldn’t vote, then it follows no one else votes either. If no one votes, however, my vote will make a difference, so I should vote. But since everyone is rational, they just all came to that conclusion, so once again everyone is voting… and I shouldn’t vote. But everyone else realized that too… and on and on.

Voting is a particularly interesting collective action puzzle - because it’s designed to be anonymous and uncoordinated, everyone has the exact same cost/benefit (setting aside issues of difficulty getting to the polls, self-satisfaction, etc.). In other words, the rational answer to the question of whether to vote should be the same for everyone in the country.

I think the problem with Funk’s statement stems from a poor definition of what constitutes rational decision making (I’m way out of my league here, but this is a blog so you knew that already). Let me offer two ways of defining a “rational” decision:

• Decisions that produce the greatest personal payoff are in my best interest (Funk Rationality)
• It is in my best interest to behave in a way that I need everyone else to behave (Golden Rule Rationality)

I’m not articulating the essence of the distinction perfectly, so I’ll try and illustrate it through the example of voting. If the decision whether to vote is made without considering how other people should behave who are faced with that exact same decision, you get caught in the cycle described above. But if I approach the question of “should I vote?” from the perspective that every single person has to make the exact same decision and thus the conclusion needs to be the same, the answer is, rationally, “yes.” Just because economists understand the free rider problem doesn’t give them permission to perpetuate it.

So that’s a long-winded way of saying something you already know - vote, even though it doesn’t matter.

-Filed in Ideas, The Point

Rather than go through the excruciatingly drawn-out process of obscuring message with prose, I’ve decided to simply post my outline.

Introduction

• We consider The Point’s flexibility to be one of it’s greatest strengths
  • Change the day of the Super Bowl, fund a musical, or make election day a holiday
  • To really influence the status quo, The Point needs to attract more than self-identifying activists
• But flexibility is also a liability
  • Browse today’s popular campaigns you’ll find a lot more that doesn’t interest you than does
  • There’s the risk of finding content that clashes with your ideology, which could alienate you from the site as a whole
  • No, not “you” as in you - I mean, everyone else!

About Channels

• Channels divide campaigns into topics of interest.
  • Provide a more focused, rewarding browsing experience.
  • Election 2008, Social Experiments, Fund an Artist, Consumer Rights
• You can follow any channel to be notified when new campaigns are gaining some traction

Profound ending

• Falsely attribute one of the following quotes to Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • “Channels, had I knowneth thee, I’d have not besmitten my folly”
  • Check to see if it’s actually “knownedeth”
  • “Tally, on the hill! T’was it campaign channels?”

-Filed in The Point

We’re excited to announce our newest site section: Community.

Community is a one-stop-shop for you to keep up on what people are saying and doing on The Point.   The goals for Community are to help you find people to connect and collaborate with, and to inspire you by highlighting success and recognizing people who are doing great things at The Point.  Community includes the latest discussion, top contributors, new members, success stories and more.

There are lots of useful features wrapped up in Community, with more to come.  We hope you like it - stop by and let us know what you think or give your suggestions on how we can make it even better.

Here are the highlights:

Discussion

Keep up on the discussion going on within campaigns at The Point, start your own conversation by posting your campaign idea to the Brainstorm forum, or join the General Discussion.

You’ll always see the latest posts in all forums right on the main Community page, and be able to dive in with a click.

We also gather all discussion happening within all campaigns into a single view called Campaign Discussion, where you can see what people are saying elsewhere all around The Point.

Find People

You can do a quick search to find people you want to connect with on The Point.  We’ll be expanding this in the future to help you find people by geographic location, your address book entries and more.

Success Stories

From time to time, we’ll be featuring people who are having success with The Point, and we’ll talk about what made their campaigns tick.  We think this will help you find ways to make your campaigns more successful, or inspire you to start a new campaign.

Each time you visit the Community page, you’ll see a randomly-chosen Success Story.  You can click to see another, or click-through ‘Read More‘ to see a mini case study.

New Faces

You’ll see the newest members of The Point on the Community page.  We only show new members with profile pics, though.  Generally speaking, we find that people are more successful when they have a visual identity online - even if it’s a picture of your dog with a party hat - so we’ll be favoring people with a profile pic when we feature members around The Point.

Top Contributors

We like to give recognition for a job well done.  Here we’re showing people who are having the biggest impact on The Point.  We use a scoring system that gives points for creating successful campaigns, joining campaigns, and recruiting others to join campaigns, and contributing to discussion.  The Top Contributors leader board is just a start - we’ll be adding more ways to recognize our members’ great work in upcoming releases.

Successful Organizers

People who have run successful campaigns are given some time in the spotlight here.  Like Success Stories, we randomly choose a group to show each time you visit Community.

The Point Blogs

Finally, at the bottom of the Community page, you’ll find the most recent posts from here on our blog.

-Filed in News, The Point

Jeffrey Zeldman has an idea.

Just as they once united to stamp out cigarette advertising, radio and TV stations and advertisers must get together and agree that false statements in political advertisements will not be tolerated. If you run a political ad that proves to be a lie, your network will pay a steep fine, and the advertiser will pay an even steeper one.

He prefaces his idea with this:

So here’s my idea. One that could actually work, if America’s networks remember they are Americans first, revenue seekers second. (emphasis mine)

That’s a big “if,” Jeffrey! But the good news is, I don’t think it’s a necessary one. It is we as consumers who grant these networks the right to exist by watching them. If we want them to stop running untruthful ads, we should coordinate our influence as consumers to create an incentive for them to stop.

What if we all promise to watch all election coverage from the first network that pledges to turn away ads that FactCheck rates as dishonest?

If someone starts this campaign on The Point, I’ll join it in a heartbeat.

-Filed in Ideas, The Point

Next Monday, I’ll be speaking about activism and The Point at the Chicago New Media Summit. CNMS is billing itself as “Chicago’s TED,” which I guess means I have to wear a t-shirt and use swear words. Anyway, I’m thrilled to be part of an event that’s highlighting so much of the exciting work happening in here in Chicago. I’m especially looking forward to (in chronological order) Jason Fried(37 Signals), Ross Kimbarovsky & Mike Samson(CrowdSPRING), and Bumper Carroll(Second City), whose voice-over work is featured in our introductory animatics.

Here’s what I’ll be talking about:

The Internet has a proven ability to shift the balance of power between individuals and organizations. But for online activism to reach its full potential, we need to do more than port offline tactics to the Web. We must step back, revisit the challenges of collective action, and consider what the Web offers that can help overcome them. Andrew Mason explores what the world could look like in five years with tools like The Point.

It’s sure to be a stimulating couple of days - register here.

-Filed in News, The Point

Background: An extremely anticipated computer game called Spore shipped this week, albeit with a copy protection scheme (called “DRM”) that ideologically chafed many techies.

Now that Spore is released, how are gamers fighting back? By obliterating Spore’s all-important Amazon rating with an onslaught of 1-star reviews.

This is an wonderful case study in online collective action (I don’t know how it emerged, let me know if you do). I’m fascinated to see where it goes. If 1,000 consumers can influence a seemingly inevitable smash like Spore, imagine what they could do to a product preceded by a more fragile reputation?

Most companies would rather please their customers than endure a beating like this, and The Point is the perfect way to provide that option. For example, this could have been an ultimatum campaign on The Point: “Spore should loosen their DRM restrictions or else we will leave 1-star reviews on Amazon if 1,000 people join.” Few products can afford to choose the thousand 1-stars.

While one can imagine this tactic being repeated to address other consumer grievances, I fear popularity could reduce its efficacy. Reviews are still fundamentally a PR tactic, not a direct economic incentive to change. And so, as the novelty of the approach fades, so may its potency. Additionally, businesses could adapt to block this tactic, perhaps by pressuring Amazon to regulate reviews.

Don’t get me wrong - I think this is great and can’t wait to see what happens. But sustainable, predictable, repeatable tactics for influencing change must create a rational economic incentive by leveraging the consumer’s power to buy (or not to buy).

-Filed in Case Studies, Ideas, The Point

Over the past few months, we’ve been beavering away on the 1.0 version of The Point, making campaigns more flexible, improving the visual design, boosting performance, and a whole host of other improvements.

Now that we’ve delivered our 1.0 and are on a more steady schedule of delivering new features and improvements, we’ll be announcing what we’re up to here on the blog.  We’re just getting started - we have a lot of great stuff in the works!

Our aim is to release improvements to the site every week, some big, some small. Here are some highlights of what we’ve delivered in the past few weeks:

Embeddable Campaign Widget

Anyone can now embed a widget into their blog or website that allows people to join a campaign directly from there.  Today, the widget can be used for campaigns that aren’t raising money, but this week we’ll be delivering an update to allow people to join fundraisers as well.

Related Campaigns

We now show you a list of related campaigns in the left sidebar of the main campaign page, helping you find other campaigns that you might be interested in checking out.  Relationships are based on similarities among campaigns such as the same organizer, a high number of the same members or tags, etc.

Follow Campaign Discussion

You can now follow a topic or the entire discussion within a campaign.  If you turn on ‘Follow’ for a topic, you’ll get an email for all new posts to that topic.  If you turn on ‘Follow’ for the campaign discussion, you’ll get an email for any new topic that’s created or any new post.  You can turn ‘Follow’ off at any time with a single click, or from a link in any of the email that you get.

If you’re the organizer of a campaign, you’ll automatically be set up to ‘Follow’ the discussion as a convenience.

Invite People to a Campaign from your Email Address Book

The campaign invitation page now has an option to send invites to anyone in your Yahoo!, GMail, Outlook, AOL or Plaxo address book.  We never ever see nor save any of your email account information.

-Filed in News, The Point

When I help people create campaigns on The Point, the first question I ask is, “what’s blocking a solution?” In other words, who or what is stopping the problem from going away? The answer to this question is critical to determining the best approach. I divide blocks into two categories.

Block Type #1: Them (people and organizations)

At times, it’s in someone’s best interest for a problem to persist. Companies often consider it in their best interest to skimp on employee benefits, for example. It’s in the best interest of my upstairs neighbor to practice the piano at 11pm.

Campaigns on The Point are modeled specifically to break blocks like this, by manufacturing the tipping point that makes it in the block’s best interest to get out of the way. In the above example, consumers might organize a boycott against a company that only begins once enough people join (the tipping point) such that the loss of them as customers will cost more than offering benefits to their employees. Or they might offer a carrot instead of a stick, by creating a campaign pledging business to a company that provides exceptional benefits.

Block Type #2: Us (you, me, and everybody)

Certain problems are solved by getting people educated. To reduce the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, for example, we need to be aware of their existence and understand how to prevent them.

While the Web has a proven potential to quickly and cheaply spread information, often those most affected by these problems aren’t online. And I don’t know about you, but when I’m online, I’d way rather be reading about video games than STDs.

So I suggest finding a way to turn an “us” block into “them.” Identify an organization that can help increase awareness, and target a campaign at whatever is blocking them from doing so.

Why I bring this up

While these block categories aren’t a strict dichotomy, thinking about your problem this way helps determine the best tools for solving your problem. And more importantly, it moves us beyond blunt “catch-all” tools like petitions or letter writing campaigns, the potency of which are often at the mercy of PR.

Identify your block, and you’ll find many ways to leverage the power of individuals above and beyond raising a stink.

-Filed in Tactics, The Point

I apologize for the heavy-handedness with the exclamation points, but I am excited to announce that after a rather substantial vacation (in Portland, Ontario), I’m back to blogging.

And do expect a snazzy new update for next week. Make Something Happen will have some exciting and surprising new content for you to chew on.

Any ideas about what it might be, my friends?

I am very excited to bring it to your attention.

-Filed in The Point

It’s been a long time coming, but I’ve finally taken a stab at writing a manifesto for The Point. What follows is a summary to the ideas that underlie our platform. Some, I imagine, are hopelessly abstract to those who haven’t spent the past year obsessively pondering them. I’ll do my best to elaborate on these ideas in future (and more frequent) posts.

Manifesto

The Point is much more than technology - it’s a new way of thinking about group action. While it’s important to us to accommodate trivial or absurd situations, what inspires us is The Point’s potential to fundamentally change the way that individuals and organizations interact.

Our beliefs include the following:

People will do what matters.

People want a way to make a difference, but feel powerless to solve the problems that can’t be solved alone. Inaction stems from a pragmatic judgment that participating doesn’t matter. Not apathy. If we think there are too few people to achieve a goal, we don’t bother. If we think there are too many, we don’t bother. But if the conditions exist for individual participation to be meaningful, we will take action.

It should be easier to care less.

We don’t care how much you care. Our job is to create tools that make it easy and fun to engage at whatever level you want and still make a difference.

Every problem has a tipping point.

Every problem has a tipping point of public frustration that will force a solution. If enough people want a problem to be solved and they have a way to find one another and coordinate action, they will solve it.

Amplifying the old tactics of change is not the answer.

A petition with a zillion signatures is impressive. For now. But as symbols of discontent, petitions derive their value from the fact that they take time to sign. As they become easier to sign, they become equally less powerful. As we grow used to the magnitude of petition and letter-writing campaigns, these tools will become no more useful than when they were handled offline.

The Web offers something more, but we must take a step back before we can move forward. We must correct our tactics to address the underlying problems of collective action and create rational incentives for change. We must break the path dependency on strategies that rely on press attention, and instead develop an approach that channels our collective will into a power that forces change.

A rule is only a rule if we let it be.

If enough people disagree with something, they have the safety in numbers to overwhelm authority. All they need is a tool to safely coordinate their behavior.

We love cute cats.

We believe that the most effective tools of change are neutral, and useful for stuff that has nothing to do with making the world a better place. Or as Ethan Zuckerman puts it, “sufficiently useful read/write platforms will attract both [cute cats] and activists.”

Stop waiting.

If man and the Internet were conceived at the same time, would we choose to pursue change through signing petitions, or writing letters to our elected officials imploring them to pass legislation? Probably not as much. The Web enables like-minded groups to channel their influence into something more powerful, targeted, and efficient. We can now solve our shared problems directly by creating rational incentives for change.

-Filed in The Point