Zanby blog

Zanby goes open-source

2011-05-13T15:31:00.005-05:00

Big news! We announced today at the Open Gov West conference that we're taking Zanby open source. The announcement reads:

As of May 13, 2011, we are releasing the code for our community software platform, the Zanby Enterprise Group Family System, under a GPLv3 license. We are also launching a community to encourage software developers to collaborate with us to evolve and improve the Zanby codebase. We hope you will join us.

Zanby’s business approach, products, and strategy for change are built on the belief that collaboration is a market imperative. As our global problems and opportunities expand in scope to include almost anyone on the planet, the need to collaborate effectively locally and globally, across geography, culture, and organizational and societal boundaries will become ever more urgent. We urgently need to collaborate better and we need to get better at the technology and scale of collaboration.

Read the full announcement

Equity & Opportunity on Citizens' Minds in King County

2011-04-22T12:39:00.000-05:00

How do you feel about the state of equity and economic opportunity in King County? What do those terms mean to you? And what, if anything, should county government do to help address disparities -- along ethnic and economic lines, as well as between urban and rural areas? That's the topic of discussion in the latest round of Countywide Community Forums launched this week in King County, Washington.

Twice a year, this innovative citizen-engagement program invites the public to weigh in on a topic the King County government is wrestling with. At CCF's Zanby-powered website, anyone who lives or works in King County can register as a volunteer Citizen Councilor, watch a brief video overview of the current topic, discuss the topic in a face-to-face meeting or online forum, and take a survey to register your opinion. Survey results are then compiled and presented to county leaders to help them make better decisions about how to shape policy and use the county's scarce resources more effectively.

Bombing in Belarus

2011-04-12T15:13:00.000-05:00

By now you have probably heard that a bomb exploded yesterday on the Metro in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, on Monday, April 11, killing 12 and injuring 200.

We wanted to let you know that the Zanby/Warecorp engineering staff and their families are all OK. This event happened several miles away from our offices, and our operations were not disrupted.

Our thoughts go out to those who were caught in this incident.

For the latest news on this unfolding event, see Wikipedia's article "2011 Minsk Metro bombing."

Videos from the Coworking Unconference

2011-04-05T14:18:00.004-05:00

On March 10, 2011, Chris and Leif were in Austin, Texas, where Global Contribution, Zanby and The UpTake sponsored the livestream of the first-ever U.S. Coworking Unconference, an inspiring gathering of entrepreneurs and community organizers who are reinventing the way we work. Thanks to Anna Thomas and the LooseCubes crew for organizing such a great gathering.

Here are archived videos of some of the sessions. Unfortunately, there was a problem with the archiving of the livestream, and we didn't get everything on tape. These are all the sessions we were able to retrieve and upload from tape. To embed them on your own blog, just click "Share" at the bottom right of the video player to copy the embed code.

Keynote: Coworking And The Future of Everything (16:22)
Tony Bacigalupo, cofounder of New Work City

Watch live streaming video from theuptake2 at livestream.com

Note: Our tape ran out about a minute before the end of Tony's talk. He's planning to record a dramatic reenactment of his grand finale, which we'll post here and on the Livestream channel.

Breakout: Space Owner Success Stories, Or... Things I Wish I Knew
Moderated by Susan Evans of Office Nomads and Andy Stoll

Part 1 (42:50)

Part 2 (12:47)

Closing Panel: George Jetson is My Coworker - The Roles of Coworking Beyond Tomorrow
Alex Hillman (mod), Julian Nachtigal, Angel Kwiatkowski, Jacob Sayles, Neal Gorenflo, Steve King

Part 1 (34:43)

Part 2 (12:35)

Again, all these videos are all embeddable, should you want to post them to your own blogs. Just click "Share" at bottom right on any of the above video players.

Welcome SoapBlox to the family

2011-02-15T15:44:00.000-06:00

Zanby has a new sibling! A few weeks ago, our sister company Warecorp acquired SoapBlox, a blogging platform and thriving community of storytellers, activists, and citizen journalists.
SoapBlox is a blog platform built to enable online community participation. Not only does it do what Wordpress and Blogger do, but a SoapBlox blog allows community members to easily publish their own content.

Especially popular among political bloggers, SoapBlox powers nearly 150 influential sites like Pam's House Blend, Burnt Orange Report, Minnesota Campaign Report, and the official blogs of many state Democratic parties and progressive organizations. Here's the complete list of SoapBlox sites.

As CEO Chris Dykstra explained on the SoapBlox blog:

We took over hosting and system administration duties from Paul a little over two years ago. Our work with it grew to the point purchasing the platform seemed like a logical extension of our work. We couldn't be happier to about the development. It is especially important to us that we keep this community of content creators up and running...

Warecorp, along with its sister organizations, Zanby and The UpTake, works to build more connected, more informed, more sustainable communities. In that regard, SoapBlox is joining an extended family of 80 employees and over 1,000 volunteers with an amazing array of stories to be told.

We'd like to extend a warm welcome to the latest addition to our family.

Happy Valentine's Day from Zanby

2011-02-14T20:16:00.000-06:00

Happy Valentine's Day to all of our clients and friends! Thank you for all that you do to build community in service of sustainability, transparency, human rights, personal integrity, civic engagement, tax fairness, shared prosperity, and more.

We ran across this cool NASA photo of a heart-shaped gas cloud today on Discover's Bad Astronomy blog:

This image is of a region called W5, part of a bigger complex of gas and dust shining 6000 light years away in the constellation of Cassiopeia. The resemblance to a Valentine is remarkable!

What you're actually seeing here is an enormous star-forming factory 150 light years across. Deep in its (haha) heart massive, hot, and bright stars are being born. When they switch on for the first time, they blast out a flood of ultraviolet light as well as a fierce wind of subatomic particles. These eat away at the cloud from the inside-out, forming an enormous cavity. It's the edges of this cavity that form the cosmic valentine.

We're especially fond of cosmic imagery like this because nothing illustrates nature's habit of forming groups (and groups of groups) better than galaxies -- which are groups of star systems, which are groups of planets and asteroids, which are groups of... you get the picture. We look forward to continuing to work with you building the infrastructure to support movements for a greener, kinder, more prosperous world.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Harvard-Smithsonian CfA

Countywide Community Forums Gets Shoutout from Tim O'Reilly

2011-02-01T04:22:00.002-06:00

Zanby client Countywide Community Forums of King County, an innovative citizen engagement program in Seattle, has been getting national attention lately. Most recently, technosage Tim O'Reilly, the man who coined the terms "Web 2.0" and "Gov 2.0", gave CCF this glowing shoutout on the blog of his latest project, Civic Commons, an important new directory of tools and resources for open government. O'Reilly thanks CCF for generously handing over the "civiccommons.org" and ".net" domains, then goes on to describe the program:

Countywide Community Forums is actually an interesting Gov 2.0 effort itself. They provide civic engagement forums and surveys designed to give elected officials an accurate picture of what their constituents are thinking; equally importantly, the forums are a place for those constituents to discuss issues with each other. The forums are designed to enable diffuse opinion to coalesce into something coherent — a kind of smoothing factor for representative democracy. We’ve seen other tools that do this (think IdeaScale); the innovative touch here is that it’s both online and in-person, and is specifically designed for citizen engagement with elected officials. CCF even provides videos to help people learn how to facilitate in-person events more productively.

This is all happening in a pretty big venue: King County is the 14th-largest county in the United States, home to the city of Seattle (the county seat), but extending well beyond the city, into rural areas. CCF is part of a public-private partnership with the county government, under the 2007 “The Easy Citizen Involvement Initiative”, with the forums and surveys used to give the county government feedback about budget priorities (and getting a fair amount of notice for it: see some of these other articles about CCF, in particular this September 2010 Seattle Times Op-Ed).

What O'Reilly doesn't mention is that the technology powering the CCF website is Zanby. To be more precise, the site, which the Zanby team built last summer, uses a combination of technologies, integrated via APIs, to deliver a rich set of tools for measuring the opinions of citizens on tough issues facing the King County government. The stack of technologies powering the site includes:

Zanby: The heart of the CCF program is an online community powered by Zanby's unique group-management platform, with message boards and a calendar of off-line events, hosted by Zanby on a SaaS basis. When a "forum round" is open, anyone who lives or works in King County can register as a volunteer "citizen councilor" and join an online discussion or browse a map and calendar of in-person meetings in cafes, libraries and living rooms across the county. A 15-minute video produced by CCF staff gives an overview of the current topic. After the discussion, participants fill out a survey, online or on paper. Survey results are then tabulated and delivered as a report to the County Auditor and Council.
Wordpress: CCF staff use a Wordpress CMS to post information promoting the program and links to news stories relevant to the current discussion topic. A custom module allows a single-signon between the Wordpress site and the Zanby community.
VoterVoice: During registration, a user's home or work address is authenticated via the VoterVoice API to ensure they live or work in King County.
Salsa CRM: The Zanby user database is synced with CCF's constituent DB via the Salsa API.
SurveyGizmo: After discussing the topic of the current forum round, users can take an online survey via SurveyGizmo. Responses are anonymized, but SurveyGizmo tells Salsa when a user has completed the survey, to prevent multiple responses.
Forum Foundation: Raw data from SurveyGizmo and paper surveys from in-person meetings are fed into the Forum Foundation's "Opinionnaire(R)" analysis software, which CCF staff use to generate the final report to the county government.

We're thrilled to see the CCF program get this much-deserved attention, and from no less a figure than the intellectual father of the open government movement.

Gov2.0 Meets D&D: Reflections on the Cascadia Conference on Dialogue and Deliberation (Part II)

2010-11-19T01:58:00.002-06:00

[Note: Cross-posted from leifutne.com.]

Here are a few more observations I took away from NCDD 2010 Portland: The Cascadia Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation last weekend. You can read my earlier post about this excellent event here.

Gov2.0 meets D&D
There seems a be a convergence underway between the open government or "Gov 2.0" movement and the dialogue and deliberation (or D&D) community. The Gov 2.0 crowd is largely focused on opening up government datasets in the interest of transparency and civic innovation. It's largely driven by government techies and open-source geeks keen on exposing data to the public so that citizens can create apps that improve, augment, or streamline government services and make government more responsive and accountable. For example, see efforts like Open311, Portland's CivicApps project, the Vancouver Open Data Catalogue, the Open Gov West conferences, and Code for America.

Meanwhile, the D&D community has long focused on spreading better offline face-to-face interaction, through innovative social "technologies" like the World Cafe, Open Space, Future Search, Wisdom Councils, Study Circles, and Conversation Cafes. These are all structured dialogue or deliberation processes that are designed to better harness the collective intelligence of groups -- for better learning, discovery, planning, and decision-making. And maybe it's a generational thing (most D&D practitioners are not Net Natives), but until recently I've always sensed a general distrust of online communication technologies and strong preference for offline dialogue among most of my friends in the D&D community.

There are, of course, some notable exceptions that have long embraced technology, like AmericaSpeaks, MetroQuest, and the many online forums run by E-Democracy.org. Governments experimenting with online public consultation is not new. And there is a significant community of online facilitators that has been steadily growing for over a decade. But recent advances in deliberative software and the exponential growth of social media has changed the game, seeding the ground for much wider adoption of online public engagement strategies.

At the NCDD conference, I was excited to see a surge of interest in experimentation with new technologies for online outreach and citizen engagement, especially among government officials. I believe this is driven by several factors:

Growth of Social Media: As citizens get used to interacting with businesses and nonprofits through social utilities like Facebook and Twitter, they're expecting to be able to interact with government officials and institutions via the same channels. Institutions are adopting enterprise social networking and collaboration tools internally, too. It only makes sense that those institutions would begin to engage the public via similar tools.
Eroding Trust in Government: Public trust and confidence in government is at record lows. Conventional methods of public engagement -- public hearings, surveys, citizen advisory panels, public notices in newspapers -- are boring and ineffective, and may well spur more apathy than engagement. As state and local government budgets grow leaner by the day, officials are desperate for new approaches that could help them do more with less.
Gov 2.0: The open gov meme is spreading fast by word-of-mouth in government circles. Public officials are seeing successful experiments with open data and the range of new technologies for collaboration and civic dialogue that are emerging. And many of them are eager to get in the game.
Deliberative Software: Recent advances in online dialogue and deliberation technologies mean governments have more and better tools to choose from in crafting their public engagement strategies.

The Importance of Inclusion
The need for fostering "equitable dialogue" was a strong undercurrent at the conference. In the World Cafe dialogue on Friday evening, one participant asked, "Is public engagement considered a leisure activity? For whom?" To which another replied that, unfortunately, Maslow was right -- the people who would benefit most from getting more engaged are also the most likely to consider civic activities leisure, especially when they are struggling to feed their families. Several participants pointed out that the crowd at the conference was overwhelmingly white and over 40. One of the facilitators kicked himself publicly when he realized that, despite holding the conference at a university, no notices were posted on campus inviting students to attend.

It was also pointed out that we need to be careful not to let our fascination with new technologies blind us to their shortcomings. The digital divide is still very real. That means we need to pay attention to accessibility, and keep legacy modes of engagement in place -- i.e. face-to-face hearings and community meetings, phone surveys, etc. -- so that nobody is left out. Because for democracy to truly work, everybody needs a seat at the table.

Reflections on the Cascadia Conference on Dialogue and Deliberation (Part I)

2010-11-19T01:46:00.001-06:00

[Note: Cross-posted from leifutne.com.]

SUNDAY, 11/14 -- As I write this, I'm rocketing down the rails on the Amtrak from Portland to Seattle, headed home after the Cascadia Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation. This inspiring confab was the last of 5 regional gatherings held around the country this fall by the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD), a nonprofit that promotes the use of innovative social processes for better discovery, learning, and decision-making, in settings from neighborhood groups to corporate boardrooms, nonprofits to universities to legislative bodies. It was hosted by Portland's Office of Neighborhood Involvement and Concordia University.

The theme of the conference was "public engagement" -- which was broken down into three broad topics:

Quality Public Engagement: What is quality public engagement and how do we educate others about it so it becomes broadly adopted?
Online Engagement: How can online technology enhance public engagement?
Collaborations that Work: How can we strengthen connections between public administrators, engagement practitioners and the public?

Kudos to NCDD's Sandy Heierbacher and the entire organizing team (especially crack facilitators Walt Roberts and Tod Sloan) for putting together a fantastic event that left me enlightened and inspired. It was the perfect antidote to the toxic partisanship of the recent election season.

A Few Highlights
My head is still spinning from the rich stew of ideas, models, processes and projects presented at the event, to say nothing of the amazing people. Herewith, a few highlights:

1. The People
The best thing about this gathering was the people. (I love hanging out with facilitators and social process geeks.) The attendees, about 180 in all, consisted of a mix of professional facilitators, academics, community organizers, techies, consultants, corporate and philanthropic leaders, and government officials. It was great to spend time with old friends and co-conspirators like Joseph McCormick, Susan Partnow, Howard Silverman, John Spady, Peggy Holman, Jim Rough, and one of my personal heroes, Tom Atlee. To finally meet folks long I've admired, like DeAnna Martin and Sandy Heierbacher. And to make tons of new connections with inspiring people who are in the trenches daily endeavoring to make democracy work.

2. The Process
Most conferences (and I attend a lot) are sorely lacking in one respect: interactivity. They don't build in enough opportunities for dialogue -- between audience and presenters, or, more importantly, between participants. The old, didactic model of experts at the front of the room dropping knowledge on the audience followed by a short Q&A period misses so many opportunities for participants to interact in creative, generative ways that spark new connections, deepen the conversation and harness the wisdom of everyone in the room. This conference, by contrast, was beautifully designed and facilitated for maximum dialogue potential.

The conference kicked off on Friday evening with a World Cafe dialogue, facilitated by Walt Roberts, on the state of public engagement. About 50 of us spent two hours shuffling from table to table every 15-20 minutes as we moved through a series of questions about the state of public engagement and ways to improve it. Between each round, we passed the mic around the room as people shared insights that had come up at their tables, and a team of graphic facilitators recorded our thoughts with markers on large paper murals with images and keywords culled from the report-backs. This was a great way to quickly meet a bunch of new people, generate a wide range of ideas and insights, and set a conversational, collaborative tone for the rest of the conference.

The main event took place Saturday from 9-5, with all 180 participants in attendance. The morning consisted of three plenary presentations of innovative dialogue-driven public engagement projects from Washington and Oregon (more on the projects below). After each presentation, rather than going straight to Q&A, the audience members turned to each other in groups of four to discuss what we had just heard. The mic was then passed around for people to share their observations and insights, or ask questions of the presenters.

The afternoon breakout sessions were organized using Open Space, a self-organizing process where anyone in the room can offer a session on any topic. Some two dozen sessions were offered -- ranging from brainstorming sessions on upcoming public engagement projects to technology demos, conversations on race, gender, and privilege to envisioning a sustainable future for suburbs. John Spady and I presented together a demonstration of the web platform my company, Zanby, built for the Countywide Community Forums (more on that below).

After the breakouts we reconvened for a final wrap-up session where, again, the mic was passed around the room so that anyone could offer insights or reflections. In keeping with the goal of maximizing interaction, the last thing facilitator Walt Roberts did before closing was to invite everyone to look around the room and find someone you've been meaning to connect with but haven't yet had the chance.

I wish conference planners everywhere would take a few pages from NCDD's book and design many more opportunities for dialogue and interactivity into their events.

3. The Projects
The three projects featured in the morning plenaries were all noteworthy.

City of Portland Office of Neighborhood Involvement (ONI): Several ONI staff presented about the variety of ways the city is institutionalizing public involvement in decision-making processes throughout the city government. Afifa Ahmed-Shafi, ONI's Public Involvement Best Practices Coordinator, described the Public Involvement Principles [PDF] adopted last August by the city council. According to the ONI website, "[The] principles include partnership, early involvement, building relationships and community capacity, inclusiveness and equity, good quality process design and implementation, transparency, and accountability." The city council also adopted a requirement that every measure submitted at council be accompanied by a "public involvement report" documenting how citizens were consulted in developing the proposal. ONI is currently conducting a baseline assessment of public involvement across all city offices, and is looking at other experiments such as participatory budgeting.

Oregon Citizens' Initiative Review: Established by the Oregon legislature in 2008, this reform institutionalized a citizen jury-style process for evaluating the pros and cons of statewide ballot measures. "24 Oregon voters are selected at random, and then demographically balanced to fairly represent a cross-section of the entire state electorate. This panel participates in balanced hearings where campaign advocates and policy experts present the arguments and facts about the measure." After several days of testimony, the panelists decide how they would vote on the measures and write pro and con statements. The statements and vote totals are included in the official state voter's guide.

Countywide Community Forums (CCF): [Full Disclosure: CCF is a Zanby client.] In 2007 Dick Spady, founder of Dick's Drive-In Restaurants, proposed a ballot initiative to establish a periodic public consultation process for King County government. After supporters gathered 80,000 signatures the county council adopted the measure before it had a chance to go to a public vote. Since then, every 4-6 months, the County Executive or the CCF board picks a topic and declares a new forum round. Past topics have included public safety, customer service, and county budget priorities. For a period of 4-6 weeks, the public (anyone who lives or works in King County) is invited to become registered "citizen councilors" and host or attend a meeting in their neighborhood where they watch a brief overview video about the topic, discuss the issues, and take an opinion survey. Alternatively, citizen councilors can watch the video, discuss, and take the survey entirely online at the CCF website. The website, which is powered by Zanby's online community platform, also features a map and calendar of face-to-face meetings, as well as online groups for staff and volunteers to collaborate and manage the program. When a forum round is over, the survey responses are tabulated and presented in a report to the County Auditor, County Council, and the public. The most recent forum round, which took place earlier this fall, focused on "county budget priorities" and resulted in 766 surveys submitted.

I also learned about several other cool initiatives at the conference:

Marine Map - A web-based decision support tool for multi-stakeholder marine spatial planning, developed by EcoTrust. With some cool GIS technology, participants in a live workshop setting or online can draw a circle on a map to propose a protected area and get an immediate analysis of the impacts on habitat, fish populations, and economic impacts on nearby ports and fishing fleets. Check out this video.
A Pattern Language for Social Process (no link) - A physical card deck being developed by a woman named Tree that is meant to aide with creative problem-solving in community and organizational settings. I'm still trying to get my hands on a copy of the deck.
Ideas4Oregon - After this idea-generation contest drew 542 submissions for creative ways to address social problems, the Meyer Memorial Trust, Oregon's largest community foundation, is working on plans to build a platform for better connecting the state's social sector.
Family Support Network - Has a newly redesigned website that helps community activists to map assets (such as skills or equipment) at the neighborhood level and trains "community weavers" who help neighbors match needs and assets in times of crisis, increasing community resilience.

In my next post, I'll share some further observations on the ideas and issues that came up in the discussions at the Portland conference.

Zanby Featured in New Book: Share This! How You Will Change the World With Social Networking

2010-09-14T17:29:00.003-05:00

Our good friend, co-conspirator, social media maven, and all-round diva of awesomeness Deanna Zandt has a new book out. And it mentions Zanby! Share This! How You Will Change the World With Social Networking (Berrett-Koehler) is chock-full of anecdotes and case studies drawn from her own life as a social activist, artist, and media maker. Deanna illustrates the many ways social media improves our relationships and enables new forms of political and social expression that are changing the world for the better.

One of those anecdotes recounts how Deanna and I met up in Brooklyn two years ago. (And it gives a nice plug for Zanby.) We barely knew each other before that, having met in passing at a conference. But, thanks mainly to Twitter and Facebook, we were able to connect, build trust, and grow a friendship with a depth and speed that would have been virtually impossible just a few short years earlier, considering that she lives in Brooklyn, I live in Seattle, and we see each other once a year, if we're lucky.

Here, with Deanna's permission, is an excerpt from pages 41-43 of Share This! where she tells our story:

Your Life Makes History

Now that relationships and trust influence how we receive and manage digital information, we're becoming more connected, and thus we have the capacity to be more empathetic. That trust-created empathy will lead us away from the isolation and resulting apathy that we've experienced as a culture, arising from the 20th century's focus on mass communications and market demographics.

Here's a story about how building trust through social networks has worked for me. A couple of years ago, I spoke at a conference in northern California. After my song and dance, Leif Utne, the vice president of community development for the software company Zanby, came up to introduce himself. He was working on a project that he wanted to get my employer, Jim Hightower, involved with. We exchanged contact info and became Facebook friends; later we started following each other on Twitter.

About a year and a half later, Leif messaged me to say that he was coming to Brooklyn for a visit and wanted to know if I'd like to get coffee. Sure! Of course! When we sat down a few days later, I asked him how the baby was--he and his wife had spent a long time adopting a baby from Guatemala, and Leif had even lived there for ten months. He lit up and showed me recent photos, and then asked how my dog, Izzy, was adjusting to life in Brooklyn. I had adopted her from a rescue organization, and we laughed at how the processes for adopting dogs and children were eerily similar.

Leif asked if he could show me a new online service that he'd taken a job with, one that would give groups a way to connect their memberships. Absolutely, I said. We did a run-through, and he talked about some of his company's successes. I started thinking of clients who could really use something like this tool and offered to put him in touch with them.

My online friendship with Leif is significant for several reasons. Social media enabled a kind of "identity authentication" between us. I was aware of Leif's family's work with the Utne Reader before I met him, but being connected via social media gave me insight into some of his values and interests. And vice versa. More important, though, it allowed us to collect seemingly unrelated fragments of information about one another over time, and to create a wide-angled picture of the other person with those fragments. Technology writer Clive Thompson calls this phenomenon "ambient awareness" of the people around us.

It doesn't impact my life at all to know that Leif is heading to the airport, and he probably doesn't care that I spent an extra 30 minutes with my dog in the park this morning. But over time, we are able to see a portrait of one another's lives take shape and feel connected. While Leif's trip to the airport doesn't affect my daily life, if he misses his plane, I feel bad for him. There's the empathy, simply by being aware of another person's "mundane" activities. Our portraits of one another facilitated an in-person conversation that otherwise would have been stilted and awkward:

"So, you, uh, have kids?"

"No, you?"

"Yeah, one. A little boy."

"Uh-huh."

Instead, we were able to tap into what we care about pretty quickly, and the landing into the "business" end of the meeting was much smoother.

Admittedly, experimenting with what it means to share different parts of our lives can sometimes be uncomfortable. Chip Conley, the CEO of a family of boutique hotels in northern California called Joie de Vivre, offers a case in point. In 2009, he wrote about the fallout from photos he posted to Facebook from his latest Burning Man trip. Some workers were surprised to see Conley in a tutu and a sarong. The complicated part wasn't that he didn't want them online, or that his investors or board members didn't want them online; it was that some employees struggled with seeing their fearless leader show a carefree side of himself that didn't "fit" with the standard work environment. We're all still determining what we each individually consider acceptable amounts of information, as well as what we'll tolerate organizationally and culturally.

Thanks to the alienating effect of mass communications, our ability to converse directly with one another, and to engage with the larger culture in a meaningful way, has withered. While no one has figured out a precise formula for what amount or mix of sharing creates empathy, presenting real pictures of real lives indisputably frees us from our pigeonholes. Social networks give us the opportunity to reengage with one another.

Order Share This! at your favorite bookstore, or online at Amazon, Powell’s, Barnes & Noble, or Indiebound.

Zanby is Heading to Netroots Nation 2010

2010-07-09T00:34:00.001-05:00

Zanby is heading to Las Vegas for Netroots Nation 2010, July 22-25 at the Rio. We'll have a big presence in the exhibit hall this year where we're sharing a block of booths with our friends and partners at Warecorp, Mobile Roots, and The UpTake. Stop by and see what we've got in store.

Zanby will be showing off the latest version of our unique community organizing platform, including client sites like Rework the World and The UpTake.

Warecorp is a full-service web design, development and hosting provider. Among its many social change-oriented clients, Warecorp hosts Soapblox, the blogging platform that powers many of the Netroots' most important haunts, like Open Left and Pam's House Blend, and does custom Drupal development for organizations like 1Sky and 350.org.

Mobile Roots is the engine behind the Margaret for Governor app, a multiplatform mobile organizing app recently launched by the campaign of MN state rep Margaret Anderson Kelliher.

The UpTake, the award-winning video citizen journalism outfit (and Zanby client) that live-streamed gavel-to-gavel coverage of last year's Al Franken/Norm Coleman election recount process, will have a video interview booth where anyone who visits will walk away with a video on whatever they want to talk about. Just tell them the topic and they will interview you and email you your video, including embed code so you can use the video on whatever website you desire. We're calling it 'virtual schwag" and we hope you enjoy it more than the wacky pen from the next booth.

So if you're going to Netroots, drop by and see what this powerful combo of online community, web development, mobile organizing, and video services can do for your org or campaign. Oh, and look out for our soon-to-be-released mobile app, launching in the next few days.

Facebook Integration and Zanby

2010-04-28T10:22:00.004-05:00

As Leif hinted at in a previous post, we have been working very hard at integrating the Zanby platform with Facebook. With this integration, you can log in using your Facebook credentials, use your Facebook friends lists for invitations, and post updates / activities to your wall.

While our licensed clients have been using this functionality for several months now, we are introducing it to the free site on Thursday, April 29. As always, we'd love to hear your feedback!

The development team is busy working on our next major release, stay tuned for more!

The City as Community-Building Platform

2010-04-28T07:04:00.001-05:00

I recently helped facilitate Open Gov West, a two-day conference on "Gov 2.0" organized by my friend Sarah Schacht, executive director of Knowledge As Power. Over 200 open government advocates and practitioners came to Seattle City Hall from across the Pacific Northwest and Western Canada, plus a few from farther afield.

Day 1 was a traditional conference, with programmed panels, a keynote speaker, and "work sessions" where attendees came up with recommendations for action in the areas of open government policy; data and document standards; funding; and working with non-traditional partners. Day 2 was an unconference, where anyone could offer a session on any topic.

At a discussion session on Day 2 titled "The Architecture of Gov't 2.0," Vancouver-based facilitator and web strategist Gordon Ross posed a provocative question: "What would the city website of your dreams do?"

The City Website of My Dreams
I've been pondering that question for a long time. Here's what I wish I had said in that session:

------------------
The city website of my dreams would not only let me find relevant information, process transactions, lodge complaints, and communicate with elected officials. It would help me connect with my neighbors.

When I move into a new neighborhood, I wish I could go to the city's website and join a group for my block (or a collection of several blocks) -- complete with discussions, event calendar, photos, videos, and listings of relevant city services, businesses, nonprofits, neighborhood associations, and so forth. That way I could plug in and get to know my neighborhood (and my neighbors) quicker than ever. I could browse archived discussions to see what issues have been on my neighbors' minds, peruse photos and videos from recent block parties and festivals, and check the calendar for upcoming events. And if I moved to a new neighborhood, I could just quit the online group for my old neighborhood and join my new one, taking my profile, friends, and history with me.

Such a platform would give me and my neighbors a powerful tool to self-organize -- everything from potlucks to crime-watch patrols, yard sales, childcare swaps, street cleanups and community meetings about city policies of interest to the neighborhood. We could organize car-, bike-, and tool-sharing coops. It would give us a quick way to share alerts about burglaries or fires.

And it would give the city a powerful way of targeting communications to specific blocks. Need to clear the street because of a snow emergency, tree-trimming, or a broken water main? Just send a message to that block's listserve and word will spread fast. Add an SMS gateway to send text messages to residents' mobile phones and word will spread even faster. Connect it all to a CRM database and an Open 311 system and you've got a powerful tool set for citizens to engage with the city not just as individuals, but as groups, as neighborhoods, as communities.
------------------

That's the grand vision the old community organizer in me has for what a city website could do for citizen engagement.

Pieces of this vision already exist, mostly organized ad hoc on private platforms like Facebook, Google Groups, Ning, and all manner of blogs and email lists. There are a few organized, larger-scale examples. E-Democracy.org hosts email discussion lists for 25+ communities across the US, UK and New Zealand. Frankfurt Gestalten ("Create Frankfurt"), is a Drupal-based project inspired by the great pothole apps FixMyStreet (UK) and SeeClickFix (US), but with a greater emphasis on groups organizing around neighborhood initiatives proposed by users. The Dutch foundation Web in de Wijk ("Web in the Neighborhoods") provides a toolkit for residents to create their own neighborhood websites. The explosion of hyperlocal news blogs -- like WestSeattleBlog and MyBallard in Seattle -- has proven that there's a hunger for online spaces that support offline neighborhood-level community-building.

Of all the sites I've seen, Neighbors for Neighbors comes closest to the vision I describe above. This Boston-based nonprofit has built Ning networks for all 18 neighborhoods across the city, stitched together as a citywide network under an umbrella Wordpress blog. City staff, neighborhood activists, landlords, business owners, police, and residents of all stripes are active on the site, using it to organize everything from potlucks to pickup soccer games to public meetings about saving neighborhood libraries.

But I have yet to see such a network of self-organizing hyper-local community groups fully integrated with a city's website.

Zanby's Groups-of-Groups Approach
I'd love to build a system like this on the Zanby platform. Our unique groups-of-groups architecture enables the clustering of local groups into "group families" around any criteria -- like geography, of course, but also other affinities that might unite certain block groups to others in different parts of the city, like proximity to schools, libraries, parks, transit lines, waterfronts, commercial zones, etc. Those groups could easily network and collaborate with other groups across the city with shared interests by joining group families organized around those interests. This architecture allows groups to network with other groups.

Imagine, for example, that a block in Boston lies within earshot of a freeway, borders a river, has a transit stop on it and is home to many Spanish speakers. In addition to belonging to one of those 18 geographic neighborhood group families, my block could join families for, say, all the blocks across the city that lie along the same light-rail line, or along Boston Harbor and the Charles River, or along highways, or with similar demographics. Those groups might share certain interests and concerns with each other that don't map to the geographic neighborhood lines.

Meanwhile, a group a few blocks away might not be so concerned about freeway noise or transit safety. But it has a community garden and a retirement home on it. That group might join group families organized around elderly issues and community gardens. The host of a Highway Neighbors group family could create events, discussions, documents, etc. that are easily shared with all of the groups in the family.

The key concept here is that group families allow groups to network and collaborate with other groups.

It's also fairly easy to integrate third-party tools and data into a Zanby community, using APIs, RSS feeds and embeddable objects. So each block group and neighborhood group family could serve as a social media dashboard displaying discussions, events, documents, etc. generated by Zanby, side-by-side with feeds of info from city databases, video streams of public meetings, live chats with residents and city officials, etc.

The Other 'L' Word: Liability
Legal experts have raised concerns about liability when the government hosts open forums for civic dialogue. Government lawyers get nervous about being sued for censorship if, for example, an employee deletes a profane or racist comment on a city blog or message board. And if they don't moderate such comments, they could be sued for facilitating hate speech. Similar liability concerns were common a decade ago in the private sector, mainly in the media industry, as newspaper and magazine publishers struggled with whether to add blogs, reader comments, and forums on their websites. Those issues have largely been sorted out.

Fortunately, while the public sector may be a few years behind in sorting out these issues, it appears to be catching up fast. In the past year, 24 federal agencies, and many city and state governments, have used IdeaScale and similar apps to create open forums for sourcing ideas from the public. The website of the New York State Senate, a model of open government, now hosts blogs for every senator, including public comments, and allows the public to post comments on bills. The White House also recently published new guidelines for federal employees on how to use social media to engage the public.

Helping Communities Help Themselves
Just like social media is reshaping whole industries by slashing the transaction costs of engagement, it holds tremendous potential to reshape government -- or more importantly, the relationship between citizens and government. There was much talk at the Open Gov West conference about how governments at all levels can use social media and online communities to engage citizens in dialogue, to leverage their knowledge, skills, passions, and willingness to volunteer their time and energy to solve public problems and improve their communities.

But as Doug Schuler, of the Public Sphere Project, argued, "We shouldn't be talking about how government can leverage citizens. We should be talking about how citizens can leverage the government." After all, the government is there to serve the people, not the other way around, right?

Yes, and to that end the government should be a vehicle for helping people help themselves -- not just as individuals, but as communities, providing the social space for civic spirit to grow. I believe that putting tools in the hands of citizens to self-organize and build community -- through the government website -- is one powerful way to do that. Vibrant civic life requires infrastructure. I hope that one day it's considered as normal, and vital, for city governments to provide such community infrastructure online as it is to build and maintain parks and town squares offline.

VIDEO: Leif Utne on Building Online Communities with Zanby at 2009 Resilient Cities Conference

2010-02-25T14:31:00.006-06:00

Leif Utne, VP of Community Development, talks about Zanby's approach to building online communities at the Gaining Ground Summit on Resilient Cities last October in Vancouver, BC. Watch more videos from this conference or check out this year's gathering, Eco-Logical: The power of green cities to shape the future.

VIDEO: Summer Rayne Oakes plugs Zanby + Climate Networks Platform at Mashable SocialGood Conference

2010-02-22T14:00:00.003-06:00

Climate Change Movement and Innovative Technologies for Organizing Online and Off from SRmanitou on Vimeo.

Model and environmental activist Summer Rayne Oakes presented last August at Mashable's Social Good conference. Her topic: how the youth climate movement is using innovative technology to support both online and offline grassroots organizing. And much of her talk focuses on the Zanby-powered Climate Network, a shared organizing platform for the climate movement.

What's New at Zanby

2010-02-17T16:01:00.013-06:00

2010 is off to a great start here at Zanby. More and more companies and organizations are learning how our unique online community solutions profoundly reduce the time, pain, and expense of connecting all parts of an organization, or coalition of organizations, to each other, and to the wider social web.

Here's a look at what's new in our world.

New Website
Our company site, Zanby.com, was recently relaunched with a wealth of new info about our software products and technology services, including case studies showing how some of our current clients are using Zanby's unique groups-of-groups architecture to manage organizations large and small, By allowing you to deliver collaboration tools to groups of people, then cluster them into "group families" (groups of groups), Zanby breaks down the silos that separate chapters, regions, departments, brands, and partners, both internally and externally, so you can seamlessly manage all of your content, communications, and activities across the entire enterprise.

New Platform
On January 30 we upgraded the free Zanby groups at free.zanby.com to R3.1 of our platform. Zanby 3.1, our current product release, is a major improvement from Zanby 2.0. It includes a much cleaner user interface than before with a wider layout and new navigation, a new search engine, and 500+ bugfixes.

For our commercial clients, 3.1 provides the ability to host multiple branded satellite communities on the same Zanby Enterprise license, custom branding via CSS, internationalization, and significantly reduces the implementation time for new communities. We can now go from signature to go-live in just 2-3 weeks.

In the coming days, look for a further upgrade to Zanby 3.2, which includes Facebook Connect integration!

New Projects

Rework the World: On June 2-5, 2010, 2000 entrepreneurs, opinion leaders, local and global leaders in politics, civil society and business will gather at the 5th Global YES Summit in Leksand, Sweden. They will drive and develop the new ventures that can build a more sustainable and inclusive tomorrow and "Rework the World." A joint project of the Tallberg Foundation and YES Inc., the organizers are using Zanby to network attendees around 100 sustainable development projects to be featured at the conference -- before, during, and after the event -- and to share content from the conference with the social web via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. Check it out at http://www.reworktheworld.org

Climate Networks: This shared platform connects the grassroots members of four national activist groups working to address global climate change -- 1Sky.org, Energy Action Coalition, Focus the Nation, and CO2NSEQUENCE -- creating unprecedented opportunities for cross-promotion and coordination of national advocacy campaigns across the movement. We recently upgraded the Climate Networks platform to Zanby 3.2, which incorporates FacebookConnect. This enables users to invite their Facebook friends to join and attend events managed on any of the Zanby-powered Climate Networks sites. READ MORE

Center for Courage & Renewal: Since 1997, this Seattle-based organization has helped foster personal and professional renewal through retreats that offer the time and space to reflect on life and work. The Center chose Zanby to power its national network of retreat facilitators and attendees. Launching soon...

Better World Club: America's only earth-friendly auto club chose Zanby to power the community section of its soon-to-be-revamped website. Look for an announcement soon...

Let's Collaborate!
If you have an online community project that might be a good fit for Zanby, or just want to learn more about what Zanby can do for you, please contact us.

http://free.zanby.com upgrade complete

2010-01-30T19:35:00.003-06:00

Hey, everyone -- We have completed the upgrade of the free.zanby.com site to Zanby R 3.1! 3.1 is our current product release, and provides many cool features for our commercial and non-profit clients. For our free site users, the biggest changes are:

new navigation
500+ bugfixes
new search engine

For our commercial clients, 3.1 provides:

multiple branded satellites
custom branding via CSS
internationalization
fast time from signature to go-live

Free site upgrade this weekend

2010-01-26T21:27:00.004-06:00

We are about to upgrade the free site to our release 3.1 of the Zanby product, and wanted to let you know what to expect.

What to expect:

Late Friday, we will send out a reminder notice to all group hosts that we are starting the upgrade.
We will be disabling free.zanby.com early Saturday morning to begin the migration process.
free.zanby.com groups, members, and event reminders will not be available during the migration.
Our testing shows that this migration will take approximately 12 hours.
After the migration is complete, we will send you a followup message.

After the upgrade:

free.zanby.com will still have all of the same great features you expect: Groups, Discussions, Events, and so on
the navigation (how to find stuff) has been significantly improved
over 500 bugfixes and enhancements (Yes, we do listen to your feedback!)

So much to say. So little time.

2009-11-04T17:00:00.006-06:00

Whew! [tap tap tap] Can you hear me in the back? It's been far too long since we've updated this blog. The Zanby crew has just been too busy developing our platform and building some kickass, worldchanging online communities. It's time to come up for air, dust this thing off and share what we've been up to.

Watch this space in the coming days and weeks for updates on where we're at and what we've done over the past year and a half. We've got major upgrades to the Zanby Enterprise Group Family System to tell you about, new team members to introduce, and some wicked cool client projects to announce and case studies to share.

So stay tuned...

Live!

2008-05-16T12:42:00.004-05:00

The new Zanby is live! at http://www.zanby.com

Thanks to all who participated in the sneak preview and gave us great feedback.

Your old accounts, groups, photos, and so on have all been migrated to the new Zanby. You can log in using your old username and password.

As always, let us know if you have any questions.

Sneak peek available, production in a few days

2008-05-01T19:34:00.002-05:00

As you can see from the post below, the next release of Zanby provides outstanding new tools for organizing your group. If you can't wait until the release goes out to everyone, send me an email at zee@zanby.com, and we'll get you a sneak peek password. Be sure to let me know if you are a current Zanby user.

All New Zanby

2008-04-28T13:23:00.024-05:00

Announcing the all new Zanby! We have a new look and tons of new features. We even have a new mascot named Zee:

When you first go to the new Zanby, check out the tour links on the home page, they will give you a quick overview of the features.

Account Details
Ok, so that’s the new look, what about the services what’s changed?

Zanby is now organized into three levels of service, Individual, Group and Group Families (Patent Pending). It is always free to create an individual account on Zanby.com and it is always free to start and manage as many basic groups as you want. Users can pay to upgrade group host accounts to include premium services if they wish. Group Families are a paid service.

FREE

Individual Accounts
Basic Group Host Account

PAID

Premium Group Host Account
Group Families (patent pending)
Professional Group Families
Organic Group Families

Each level comes with a set of functionality that operates within that level, and also across all of the other levels.

What’s New
The design team has paid careful attention to the needs of our users gathered over the last two years of development. Below are high-level summaries of the different kinds of Zanby services.

Individual Accounts
At the individual level users will enjoy a rich, social media experience similar to Facebook or My Space. Individuals can use a very wide array of features common to social media applications to communicate, connect and create. Zanby's drag and drop template editor allows individual members to create a custom profile and adjust the content and look and feel to their taste. It is also easy to make friends, upload photos and documents, create lists, manage personal events, and track participation in discussions. Individual members can join as many groups as they wish and start as many free groups as the wish. Individuals may distribute their content to any level of Zanby at anytime by simply sharing it with a group or group family or friend.

Free Group Host Accounts
At the basic group level (one group host and one set of individual members), members can take advantage of an unparalleled suite of free organizational tools to manage their group activities.

Group Hosts can display group content through a drag and drop template editor, appoint co-hosts, adjust privileges and membership rules, manage documents, photos and lists. Communication in groups and group families are always managed through Zanby Discussion Server® which enables groups to create and manage custom email lists.

Zanby Discussion Server is very similar in functionality to Yahoo Groups or Google Groups, except that on Zanby users can segment group discussions into as many different discussions as they wish, the discussions can be moderated much like a regular message board, and they can be merged at a later date with other groups and group family discussions. The free group level also includes a very robust events management system.

Premium Group Host Account
A Premium Group Host Account is directed towards larger groups, groups with a higher level of administrative activity, groups that need to be conscious of their brand, or groups that want to expand into several groups but maintain their organizational structure. Premium Group Host accounts have four important additional features:

Premium Groups can adjust their look and feel of their home page with the Theme Editor.
Premium Groups can publish the group home page out to another website. This feature works much like Blogger. Groups adjust the look and feel and content of the Home Page, set the publication settings and publish.
Create and manage Committees with Zanby Committees. Create a sub-group of your group, set a range of visibility and administrative settings, assign members and chairs. Zanby creates a Discussion with a committee email account, a committee document folder and a committee roster to be used in creating committee events.
Premium Groups can join group families. That is, they can merge with other groups while maintaining their original structure, to form larger organizations.

A Premium Group Host Account costs $13.00/month and applies to the host, not just the group. One Premium Group Host Account affects all of the account-holder's groups. There is no limit to the number of members that can join a group.

Zanby Group Families (Patent Pending)
Zanby Group Families are what make Zanby so different from other social media applications. At it's most basic level, a group family is a group in which the members are other groups, not people. This idea gives chapter-based associations, international businesses, or just groups that want to join together to achieve common goals the ability to share content and activities with great ease.

Zanby Group Families are a paid service. There is a one-time start-up fee of $90.00 then a monthly maintenance fee that scales up or down depending on how many individuals are in the entire family.

When a group family is formed, all of the normal premium group tools are formed with it. However, all content from the member groups can be aggregated at the family level, from where it can be organized to suit the enterprise. This makes it incredibly easy to maintain an enterprise calendar, discussions, photos, lists, etc.

Additionally, the owners of a Zanby Group Family can create as many hierarchies of their groups as they need to represent the organization. For example, you might want to organize the family by Geography and you might want to organize your groups by function or brand or interest. That is completely possible with Zanby Hierarchy Designer.

Two kinds of group family – Organic and Professional
An Organic Group Family is owned by the member groups. Each group pays a monthly fee that is based on the total number of individual members in the family, then apportioned according to the number of individuals in the group.

A Professional Group Family is owned by one organization or individual. The owner of the family pays all monthly costs for the family. The owner of a professional group family may create groups within the family. Also, the owner of a professional group family can allow basic groups to join.

Zanby 2.0 Coming Soon

2008-03-21T15:11:00.003-05:00

It has been quite a while since there has been publicly visible activity here at Zanby. We have been quietly investing the last 18 months in developing the next generation of enterprise social networking applications. Stay tuned -- we are just days away....

Example: using the xml feed

2007-02-22T16:00:00.000-06:00

Recently one of our groups asked for more information on how to take an xml feed and turn it into html for their site. What follows is a quick tutorial on what really happens when you "take an xml feed" onto your site, and how to get something running quickly.

Here is a simple process diagram that shows what is happening:

As you can see, the browser request gets to your server, where you need to run some kind of script. For sake of discussion, let us assume you can run Perl as a CGI script on your machine. (The process is the same regardless of if you are using bash, or if you are using PHP, or if you are using ASP.NET.)

This script has two assignments -- first, get the XML from Zanby. Second, transform it into something that you want to send back to the browser.

In Perl, the first part, getting the XML from Zanby, is easy -- there is a wonderful package called LWP::Simple that handles all of the issues of getting information from a remote web server.

The second part, transforming the XML into something to send to the browser, can be as easy or as complex as you want to make it. The easiest approach is to use XSLT to transform your XML into HTML.

So, our complete perl script is pretty simple:


#!/usr/bin/perl

# example of taking Zanby xml feed and wrapping it into html

# Note we are using the "XML::XSLT" package, which also requires 
# the XML::DOM, LWP::Simpla, and XML::Parser packages
#
# Assuming you have a relatively clean / modern / complete perl 
# installation, you can do "cpan XML::XSLT".

# This is not meant to be complete, good, or otherwise wholesome 
# clean-thinking code -- steal at your own risk :-)


use LWP::Simple;
use XML::XSLT;


# get the xml feed

my $xmlstring = get 'http://zanby.com/feed/rrr/groups/?sw=dfl&links&format=4';


# run the xml thru our xsl transform

my $xslfile = "zanby2dfl.xsl";
my $parser = XML::XSLT->new ($xslfile);
my $result = $parser->serve (Source => $xmlstring,
                                          xml_declaration => 0,
                                          http_headers => 0);

# set up appropriate http headers and return

my $length = length ($result);
print "Content-Type: text/html\nContent-Length: $length\n\n$result";

Now, for the XSLT that transforms the Zanby XML into something useful:


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

<xsl:template match="/">
  <html>
  <body>
    <h2>DFL Links</h2>
    <table border="1">
    <tr bgcolor="#7f7fff">
      <th align="left">District</th>
      <th align="left">Link</th>
    </tr>
    <xsl:for-each select="groups/MN/group">
    <xsl:sort select="name"/>
    <tr>
      <td><xsl:value-of select="name"/></td>
      <td><a>
        <xsl:attribute name="href">
          <xsl:value-of select="summary"/>
        </xsl:attribute>
        <xsl:value-of select="name"/> 
      </a></td>
    </tr>
    </xsl:for-each>
    </table>
  </body>
  </html>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

Here is an example: the DFL Links XML feed turned into HTML using the code above.

Richardson Groups in Washington Whispers

2007-01-12T20:06:00.000-06:00

As Washington Whispers notes, America for Richardson has come to Zanby.

The Netroots for Richardson has their first national meeting day on February 6.

I can't wait to find out how it goes.

Richardson recently made some great progress in Darfur, negotiating a 60-day cease fire between warring parties. That's impressive progress in an intractable conflict. Diplomacy like that will be welcome indeed in the coming years.

Zanby Search techniques

2007-01-12T20:01:00.000-06:00

Zanby has a couple of large families of groups, now. From Cafe Press groups (website), to the DFL Links to America for Richardson groups (website), Zanby is supporting a really wide variety of interests and people.

Some of you have written and asked how you can structure a search query from zanby to direct users to a specific set of search results. Try this:

http://zanby.com/groupsearch?search_words=yourkeyword&yourkeyword

Where yourkeyword = your group's special tag or keyword. For example, the DFL Links uses

http://zanby.com/groupsearch?search_words=dfl&links

to direct users to the right set of search results.

The 32 Richardson Groups uses

http://zanby.com/groupsearch?search_words=richardson.

If you want to add more search words, you can just enter more & search words.

OR..you can access the XML feed:

The request looks like:

http://zanby.com/feed/rrr/groups/?sw=searchkeyword&format=4

Where "searchkeyword" is the tag / groupname / etc. that you want to search for. The result is a simple XML file that provides the name of the group, the host, next event info, the location of the group (city / state/ zipcode), the group description, how many members there are in the group, and a link to the group page.

The groups are sorted by region.

Here are some sample feeds:

Bill Richardson Groups

Cafe Press

Cafe Press

Happy organizing...

Release Notes to Zanby Beta 1.3

2006-11-13T11:30:00.000-06:00

Introduction

We are pleased to announce the release of Zanby beta 1.3 at http://www.zanby.com. This release represents a continuing evolution of Zanby as a community and as a software application. Zanby is a new brand and still very much in flux. This is the first of several releases in which we begin to nudge the brand towards its final state.

The second area we addressed is the search algorithms and the search results interface. It should be much easier and faster to locate groups. The results should be more accurate and the sort functions much more reliable. Also, we heard users when they said they wanted to locate groups much more quickly. We added the groups search field and a browse by group category index to the home page.

Perhaps most noticeably, users can now search for and locate all Zanby content without registering for the site. All group content that is flagged as “public” is visible to the browsing public. All events are visible as well.

Below is a summary of enhancements made in this release.

What’s new

General

The anonymous site has been replaced with full Zanby content and group experience. Users can now browse all public content without registering.
Optimized formal search rules have been introduced to both Group and Member search. The results for all searches on Zanby will be substantially more accurate.
Errors in search result sort behavior have been eliminated. It is now possible to navigate from the beginning of a result to the end after applying multiple sort functions.
We have fixed the cookie setting function that caused users to have to login every time they visited the site.

User Interface

The space used for global navigation has been reduced
Higher-contrast section headers have been introduced
Navigational categories are color-coded.
Both the Group and Member search utilities have been streamlined
The search results display has been redesigned for usability
A group locator has been added to the homepage
Browse groups by category has been added to the homepage
All buttons have been standardized.
Tab navigation on lower levels has been standardized.
The Search ort functions have been re-designed.

Group Forums

Group members can now post active links to the message boards.
The thread posting order on the message boards has been reversed. Now, the most recent threads will appear at the top of the index of threads.

Thank you for using Zanby. Please contact us at feedback@zanby.com with any comments and suggestions. We look forward to continuing to serve you.

Release Notes to Zanby Beta 1.2

2006-08-25T01:20:00.000-05:00

Introduction

Zanby beta release 1.2 improves and stabilizes core functionality, particularly around time consistency and event publication. Additionally, functionality was added that will enhance the ability of group hosts to communicate group events to the public at large.

Below is a summary of enhancements made in this release.

What’s new
General

We added two additional categories of groups at users’ request: “Other” and “Family and Children.”
We eliminated a VERY annoying bug that caused a circular registration workflow in Safari on the Mac.
A "Join Group" button was added to group summary pages to provide an easy way for people to join.

Events

Group hosts may now choose to make all, some or no event public. If a host publishes a public event, unregistered users may navigate to the event detail through the unregistered version of Zanby.
It is now possible for invited guests to RSVP to a Zanby event without logging in or registering with Zanby. Guests are issues a unique URL with the invitation, which serves as the event and guest identifier. When a guest clicks on the URL they are directed to an event page, where they may RSVP and participate in pre-event preparations.
Events now retain guest list information. If an event expires, the organizer may now “recycle” the event by changing the date and sending it out again.
The reminder system has been upgraded to ensure consistency and accuracy.
If the host cancels an event, cancellation notices will now be sent to the guest list.
Zanby’s calendar has been upgraded to ensure consistency and accuracy when translating event times to different timezones, and to account for daylight savings times where appropriate.
Events can now be deleted from personal calendars
Users can now contact event organizers directly through the “Contact Event Organizer” link on event summaries and detail pages.

Thank you for using Zanby. Please contact us at feedback@zanby.com with any comments and suggestions. We look forward to continuing to serve you as we develop the tool and the community.

Sincerely,

The Zanby Development Team

And the new name is...

2006-06-02T01:54:00.000-05:00

I am pumped to have the new name chosen and the proverbial "light at the end of the tunnel" in plain site. I like the new name and like the new look. I also genuinely feel that the Zanby fits our maturing application better and more broadly than G---eroo. So onward and upward! Anyway, leading brand experts say Zanby is Zan-tastic.

This afternoon, we released the following message to our readers:

Dear G---eroo member:

G---eroo will be changing its name to Zanby.

For the last nine months we have been attempting to resolve a
trademark dispute with Gather incorporated. Though we strongly feel
that we are not in conflict with their name, pursuing this issue to
completion in the courts is a very costly proposition. We feel the
Gatheroo community is better served by our directing our time, energy
and money towards building a better application, and frankly, a better
world, rather than fighting with some other company in the courts. We
have, therefore, made the difficult decision to change our name.

Next week, G---eroo.com will become Zanby.com.

Zanby continues to be focused on providing the best tools for managing
your community activities. Every challenge is an opportunity to grow.
This is no different. We hope we have chosen our new name with an eye
towards describing a vital, growing community of people who are
connected with each other online and in real life. We also wanted to
come up with something as fun and catchy as G---eroo. All things
considered, we think Zanby fits the bill.

What's a zanby? As far as we know, Zanby is a made up word that means
"A website that supports self organizing." Our attorneys think Zanby
is a good, clean name. Chris's 13-year old son thinks it's
"zan-tastic." That was the real kicker.Thanks so much for using
Gatheroo - soon to be Zanby.

All our best,

Chris, Mike, Lee, Laura and the G---eroo (Zanby)
development team

Name Game

2006-04-19T15:34:00.000-05:00

Breaking news...

For many reasons, large and small, Zanby has begun the process of choosing a new domain name. We will be phasing out the use of G----roo. Service to our groups and support to our customers will not be affected. In fact, our committment to the activist community is stronger than ever. We will communicate our plans as soon as a decision is made.

Stay tuned for details...

Alpha 1.6

2006-04-12T03:15:00.000-05:00

We released Alpha 1.6 this week. It has a number of important upgrades.

The highlights:

Group Email is now fully functional.
Group Hosts now have the option of inviting all the members of their groups at once
Invitations can be sent from the group email address or the user's personal account.
Meta data is automatically generated out of group descriptions and tags placed on group pages.
Time zones are standardized and behavior was made consistent for all events and event display. This is going to be really important when we introduce the Events section
An "Expired Events" queue was added to the calendar. Any event that is past will automatically be moved into the expired events queue, where it will be deactivated. From there, users can edit the event to make it live again or it can be deleted.

Development will speed up in the next few months as we have added developers to the crew. The application and the community will twist into focus and we will move to beta. As always, email questions to feedback@zanby.com.

Gather and MPR feed attorneys

2006-03-29T17:05:00.000-06:00

Last summer, having spent the last 4 months working like crazy to design a website and a business model that would justify our existence to our investors and ourselves, we were slapped with the first Cease and Desist letter from our friends at Gather.com. Gather.com is owned by Minnesota Public Radio (MPR). We replied to the letter. They sent another one. After each one we thought, “Can they actually be serious about this?”

Yes indeed, they are serious. They have a team of fancy lawyers, a big bank account and really, really want to spend their investor's money on silly lawsuits. For us this is a collosal waste of time and money. Even though it is an unwelcome distraction -- In no way does it affect our commitment to the activist community.

Zanby is Politics Online Hot Site of the Day

2006-02-26T01:48:00.000-06:00

Politics Online has given Zanby the innovator's nod by making it a Hot Site of the Day.

It's a nice write up. I have to say that I would add something to the political spin:

Zanby is free.

Zanby at New Organizing Institute

2006-02-26T01:40:00.000-06:00

I spent the weekend in Washington DC presenting Zanby at Zack Exley's New Organizing Institute. Ben Shaffer, President of one of Zanby's partners, Media Mezcla, invited me to participate. Media Mezcla makes a nice application called Campaign Engine. It's aimed at medium to small campaigns and non profits who need a lot of functionality for a reasonable price. I like Campaign Engine...It's quick, simple and powerful. We are working on an API so that campaigns and organizations can more fully support organic groups through Zanby.

The New Organizing Institute is a very interesting concept. There are roughly 50 people here from all over the country studying online organizing. The group is split into teams of 7-10, each running a demo campaign for a ficticional candidate. Each night the teams have a series of assignments which they must complete in order to advance to the next stage in the campaign. Tonight's task was to get the campaign website up and running.

Each team was assigned a technology vendor with the idea that they had been hired by the campaign to create the candidate's web presence. All the vendors volunteered to come out and ran the gamut in size, complexity and cost of solution. Get Active, Democracy in Action, NGP and an independent named Aldon Hynes, who is helping George Stefano mount a challenge to Joe Lieberman in Connecticut, all attended.

For me it was a great opportunity to explore the idea of organic groups as a campaign strategy. Zanby, and services like it for that matter, fall under the broad category of "casting a wide net." I believe the small group is a fundamental building block of grassroots organizing. One host and one set of members can emerge from something as simple as a conversation over a fence. That small neighborhood group can connect with other groups, who then can connect with the organization.

As soon as people discover they have a shared agenda, the likelyhood of coordinated action is dramatically increased. In broad strokes, this is how interest-driven communities are created. Providing volunteers and activists with the ability to self-organize around the agenda they share with a candidate simply makes sense. Giving organizations the ability to reach those people by, for example, the ability to upload and distribute documents based on region or create and publish events to group calendars simply makes sense. At the same time, campaigns can gain some reporting capabilities on what is happening in group families and creates a nice outreach channel for very little impact on time and resources.

Here we go...

2006-02-07T05:15:00.000-06:00

We have completed our first month alpha.

We have learned much. We still have a long way to go, but in general this is a really exciting time for all of us at Gatheroo. We have 55 groups from 13 states.

From the DFL Links to the Orange County Goths we welcome you all. Tell your friends and be sure to let us know what we can do to help your groups grow and succeed.

I am in the process of scoping out phase II of our development, which will take us into beta. We will continue to flesh out the features in Groups and Members. We will definitely develop host email and install email based discussion groups. Additionally, we are working on a few of the "nice-to-haves," which are the elemenets in a site that really create community. One of the most interesting things about Gatheroo, is the content that people create and share - lists, photos, documents, events, profiles. I want to create much more accessible indexes to allow people to browse content and find areas of shared interest more easily.

Some of our future development will be driven by the season - campaign season that is. One of our business goals is to be able to fuel the organic growth of grassroots organizations by allowing them to easily create hierarchical, connected, networks of groups. We call these group families. That development is being driven by some customers, which will keep all the groovy free stuff free. With any luck, you should see one or two group families appear soon. (If you want to form a group family let us know and we will honor you with a PowerPoint.)

Zanby gets better...

2006-01-29T21:32:00.000-06:00

We released Zanby Alpha 1.3 and 1.4 over the weekend.

Here are the highlights:

It is a lot easier to register
Your profile and Account Settings now make it possible to keep your age, groups and gender, private.
Lists are much easier to manage and view.
Canadians can now register
Hosts can remove and approve members in the group workspace/members section
Hosts can now fully moderate the group discussion boards
Many of the "Join Group" and "Start Group" interfaces have been simplified
The event calendar is functional, including RSVP, event invitations, publication of events to your personal calendar and attendance details.

TIP for hosts: I recommend exploring the group privileges section. Hosts can give privileges to members of their groups. If you want people to be able to post messages on your group message board, or upload photos, documents, or lists, the you must give them permission first.

We have taken the approach that it would be better to not make assumptions about what hosts want to do with their groups - So at the moment, all privileges are defaulted to "off." If the host wants to distribute privileges to the wider group, they must do so. What are your thoughts on that? When you create a public group is your assumption that all who join it may post messages, upload documents and photos, etc., or do you prefer to control that yourselves?

Thanks again for your interest, energy and continuing patience while we finish our work...

ps. if you need help with anything on Zanby... please email us at feedback@Zanby.com.

Alpha Alpha

2006-01-19T04:19:00.000-06:00

Gatheroo Alpha 1.2 is up. I think we have arrived at a great suite of opening tools. Don't forget to read the release notes.

A long wait...

2006-01-04T03:03:00.000-06:00

Happy New Year everybody! It has been brought to my attention with varying degrees of humor (ahem), that our website still says that you can stop paying for online organizing tools in fall of 2005...and it's 2006.

Something doesn't compute there, does it? Sorry about that. We missed our deadline by six weeks or so. I made the call to take the approach that it is better to delay on behalf of quality than it is to rush to market with something that doesn't meet our standards.

Not to worry, though. All evidence to the contrary, we have been heads down for the last several months developing our first release. We will be in a public alpha stage by Jan. 20, one week before we will be featured in Twin Cities Business Monthly.

We introduced the application to a select set of 20 group hosts in Minnesota tonight. I don't know if any of you out there have ever developed software or not, but usually when a new application meets real users some degree of chaos ensues :). Tonight was no different. It was informative and gratifying to watch users create and manage groups. I was excited to learn that the users were very, very positive about the strength of the application.

We will be continuing to conduct user tests over the next two weeks. After that, if you have registered a group with Gatheroo, we will load your information into the system and contact you. If you have not registered a group or as an individual, you will be able to do that on the site.

Thank you so much for your patience. I can't wait to get it out to you, get your feedback, and start helping you build stronger, better communities through groups.

Making it Easy

2005-11-06T22:09:00.000-06:00

Gatheroo celebrated the first World Usability Day on Thursday November 3, 2005 by releasing four screens to its development team, the Member Homepage, Member Profile, Group Profile and Upload List to Group pages. We have been working hard to create not only an extraordinary set of features but a user experience that is unequaled by any other site like Zanby.

One of our guiding principles is that the individual member is the core of any group or social interaction. We are making it easy to join a group, start one or just interact with friends for the digirati and grandmas in Peoria. You can get a sneak peak by signing up at Zanby.com

alpha birthday near

2005-10-27T18:10:00.000-05:00

Hi folks. I just got back from a two week stint working with the Zanbyteam. Lo and behold, we are inching towards the release of our early alpha in late November. We will continue to release upgrades to alpha through spring and summer of 2006. We should be out of Beta by June and July.

For all of you early group registrants, a special prize awaits you...

Though the vision of Zanby has gradually expanded, we are tightly focused on serving the community of groups that is the application's inspiration. We hope to get lots of feedback from you all.

Here's what to expect in November: Members will have the ability to create a "Standard Individual Account" and a "Standard Host Account." Both of these accounts are free and always will be free. In the coming months, members will have the ability to choose a series of premium accounts that enable advanced group management
features. Individuals members (who do not have to be members of groups) can upgrade their accounts to take advantage of other functionality.

We will start by fleshing out what we hope is a level of free membership comparable to, or better than, any tool currently available. Features will include:

Group Formation
- Join a group online
- Browse groups by category, by name, or by tag
- Start a group online
- Group recommendation based on tag

Group Management
- Manage membership: Who can join the group?
- Manage admin levels: Who can upload and edit photos, polls, member listings, documents, tags, lists, events, venues

Group Information
- Create and manage a Group Profile
- upload and edit photos
- Create polls
- Manage member listings
- Upload, tag, categorize documents
- Manage tags
- Create group lists
- Manage events (Calendar)
- Select Venues

Group Communication
- Create and manage a group email discussion list (like Yahoo groups)
- Contact the Host anonymously
- Set privacy controls

Zanby will focus more on individuals, too. We believe
individuals are the backbone of groups and will infuse our community
with richer, more diverse activity if we give them the ability to engage
before joining. So a comparable set of functionality will be available
to individual members.

Individual Information
- Create and Manage an Individual Profile
- Upload and manage profile photos
- Upload and manage photo albums
- Manage a friends list
- Upload, tag, categorize documents
- Manage tags
- Create lists
- Manage events (Calendar)

Member Communications
- Send emails to other members anonymously
- Manage a Gatheroo inbox
- Manage sent items

Friends
In the Zanby world, a friends list is a private group in which the
individual is a host. So members can do all the things a group can do
with their friends list, but related to the personal world.
- Send invitations
- Manage a calendar
- Swap events from public to private
- Share documents and photos
- create group email lists

Lists
- Lists on Zanby are a little different as well. The Zanbyo list maker is a unique software application. Members can create one of several list types - music, book, event, Pay It Forward (a list of ways members and groups are willing to volunteer), and stuff (miscellaneous). Each list provides the ability for members to identify artists, tie them to events and to eachother, comment on and tag each list item, make new lists out of any series of list items, and publish their lists to blogs.

There are other features we will develop as we mature. The upgrade paths, in particular, will prove very interesting indeed. For now, though, November's launch is looking spiffy.

the power of open source

2005-09-12T21:43:00.000-05:00

If you can't tell by now, I'm the resident geek amongst the founders. Tonight's post is aimed squarely at the CFO's of the world.

If you have ever doubted the cost efficencies of open source, consider this: the combination of system software (OS, DBMS, app server) and sufficent hardware to run that software at our expected user load costs less than $10K (not including the application itself, of course...) 6 years ago, an equivalent system cost well over $450,000.

6 years ago, I set up a server farm with roughly the same capabilites as the Gatheroo server farm for a client. At the time, we had to use proprietary load balancing systems and mid-sized Sun and Dell hardware for the database and application servers. The pair of high availability load balancers alone cost over $30,000, and took three techs 4 days and 6 services calls to implement. The servers ran Solaris and WindowsNT. The databases were Oracle ($$ -- it's a damn good DBMS, I've used it in many high performance computing systems -- but it ain't cheap), and the application servers were a customized Java environment (more $$, all licenses). Each server+system license stack cost over $125K each.

Zanby is done with used and new hardware, running open source services. The Zanby high availability load balancers were put together from used 1u Dell servers (ebay!), running the free (beer) + Free (libre) UltraMonkey tools (LVS, heartbeat). Cost for the load balancers: $600 plus 1 tech for 3 days. Lab tests suggest we're going to get **at least** as good thruput from the system as the equivalent proprietary system.

By the way, I priced out the equivalent system in the proprietary world today: to get the same performance, we'd still need to spend over $15K **plus** pay an annual license fee to get to continue to use the system after the first year. And no, they're not any easier to install or operate.

The Zanby applicaiton servers are optimized dual-cpu AMD boxes, running a LAMP stack. Total cost per server: less than $2k.

Venue Flexibility

2005-08-29T18:43:00.000-05:00

Last Saturday I doorknocked with my city council person and afterward we headed to my patio for a few cold ones. It was great! These kinds of sessions really help me cement relationships as well as get the kind of insights I would never get elsewhere. It was just me and Sandy, a few Schell's, a clear afternoon and a picnic table. We talked about a number of things - like about how to incorporate the young and restless, while making sure that wisdom travels with passion.

Just before she parted I brought up Zanby and our local DFL meetups. In October our DFL Senate District (which supports DFL Meetups here in southeast Minneapolis) will begin a new "Focus on the Precinct" program. Our precinct is actually a ways from our meetup venue. So she was puzzled why we would would showcase our precinct, but hold the meetup in the usual spot. She convinced me that we need venue flexibility - not just in the way we build Zanby to let members easily browse and select meeting places, but in the way we present the idea of the "venue". We'll select a location that's convenient to our precinct focus.

But in Zanby, we'll be defining a venue very broadly. It is simply a place where people gather (hence our name). It can be under a shade tree or at a coffee shop. And it can be one place one meeting and another place some other time. In fact, we'll be pursuing two other venue concepts - the virutal venue, where the meetings can be held online with a conference ware, and the instant venue, or the MOB equivalent of meetup. So three cheers for Sandy and the usefulness of having another's perspective on our Zanby design!

hardware part 1

2005-08-29T13:14:00.000-05:00

The servers have been spec'd and the parts ordered, the firewall / load balancer gear is here, and so today is Cable Making Day! (yeah, I know. Ugh.)

Mike's tips for making good cables --

1) don't skimp on the crimper. I learned this many years ago back at Actors Theatre of Louisville, and have been reminded over and over in the intervening years -- your cables are only as good as your connectors, and your connectors are only as good as your crimp. The secret to a good crimp is a **good** crimping tool. (Sorry, no radio shack el-cheapos here) Go for mass, go for heft.

2) no caffiene. You need a steady hand when dealing with tiny wires and small spaces over and over. Yes, I know this is a tough one (it's why we don't let Chris anywhere near the hardware). As soon as you're done, fire up the espresso!

3) good light. I didn't think my eyes were getting that bad, until I started building 25 cables....

4) be consistent. There are industry standard color patterns (white-green / green / white-orange / blue / white-blue / orange / white-brown / brown -- anybody remember if this is the "A" pattern or the "B" pattern?). Even if you don't follow the industry standard patterns, pick a pattern and use it in everything you do. That way, when someone runs a sawzall thru your cable (don't ask...) you can repair without having to repull...

Group Profiles in my dreams

2005-08-24T01:37:00.000-05:00

I've been living in storyboard land recently. I am the lead information architect on Gatheroo. That means I am designing all of its navigation and workflows - the user experience, really.

Though we are focusing tightly on what we believe to be our primary audience - people in groups - we want to weave a sense of fun through Gatheroo in a way not unlike Myspace, only with a vastly superior UI. That is, users will be able to talk to eachother via private messages, message boards, comments and list entries, upload photos, keep a friends list and of course, tag everything on the site.

The more I think of the term "online community" the more I believe it should incorporate tools for people to contact eachother directly, like Myspace, while providing ways to manage public and private calendars, events and ways to confer on venue selection. Yahoo is attempting to do this via the incorporation of Yahoo 360, Flickr, and Yahoo Groups, but for my money, it is still difficult to love the user experience there. It just isn't easy to meet people online, and then meet them in person. Or meet people offline, and then use the tool to organize and expand the group.

I am seeing plenty of sites that tackle a piece of the puzzle - the amazon funded, 43 Things and its sister site 43 Places, Linked In, Dinner Buzz, and of course Delicious, but none of them really take a stab at connecting the users through a powerul set of shared tools. Enter Gatheroo. We hope are attempting to cultivate the best features of all of the above and then some...while building in some fun. Hmmmm....

It's easily the most challenging IA work I have done. When we reach our projected beta release in mid-november, I hope you will be pleased with what we have come up with. In the meantime, all user requirements are welcome.

Tech issue: MySQL clusters versus replication

2005-08-13T09:37:00.000-05:00

I'm in the process of designing the server farm, and am looking for MySQL High Availability experience. Traditionally, I have run the database engine on a big, mostly-hot-swappable box (read: expensive) and backed everything up periodically. This is fine when your application's usage periods allow slow / downtime (e.g. most SAP installations -- companies aren't doing a lot of transactional business at 4AM on a Sunday...)

I'm debating using MySQL Clustering this time around. The primary advantage I see is it's built for high availability. The disadvantages are two: 1:memory requirements for the data store side (2x database size plus overhead spread across the total number of data store machines); and 2: no support of blobs yet (at least as of the 4.x series, I haven't seen if they've added blobs to v5) -- update -- I see blobs are now supported -- at least, out on the development branch... RTFM....

Anyone out there running MySQL Clustering who would be willing to chat for a few minutes? Email me at my firstname at gatheroo.com or just reply here.

a9 is cool

2005-08-10T03:01:00.000-05:00

I gotta say - I do like the interface on A9. Be sure to play with the check boxes when you search.

I am not sure it works on dial up, but it's pretty sweet on broadband.

Tags: gatheroo, search

A rock concert, a play, a tour - anywhere where people gather

2005-08-10T02:21:00.000-05:00

I was talking via my friend and co-blogger Chuck Olsen, who runs a really cool site called MNSpeak with Rex. MNSpeak is a massive blog and event/blog aggregator. Zanby promises to be one of the world's finest works of organizational and social software based on the principles of folksonomy.

Though the impetus for Zanby was political, that is we wanted to provide a free platform for grassroots organizing, the outcome is much larger. There is probably a lot of room to provide the ability to schedule, tag, list, and form online and online affiliations in a community like MNSpeak or City Pages for that matter, which took note of Zanby yesterday.

Barring the day we actually plug an RSS feed directly into our brains, managing our ever expanding circles of community through filters like Zanby will be as common as sending an email is today.

Zanby at Web of Change

2005-08-05T03:29:00.000-05:00

I am attending the 2005 Web Of Change Conference. One of the reasons we are creating Zanby is to faciliate the speed with which movements are created and become effective. It will be interesting to spend a few days hearing how other technology leaders see technology working in this process.

discourse and the quality of democracy

2005-07-28T20:46:00.000-05:00

I just wanted to add a comment to Chris' question about where Zanby fits into the edemocracy spectrum. I believe that strong social interaction outside the specifics of overtly political events is incredibly important to maintaining a robust democracy.

Former state Senator Roger Moe was on the local public radio station today. One of the questions he discussed was if the reporting of politics as a "sports event", with a mandatory winner and a mandatory looser, was contributing to the decline of the ability of our elected officials to actually achieve workable solutions.

He pointed out that over the last 20 years, there has been a marked decline in the "socialization" events that are avaliable to our representatives. By "socialization" events, he didn't mean partisan mixers, or lobying opportunities. He meant opportunities for all representatives to begin to meet and learn about each other's backgrounds, opinions, ways of thinking, and so on.

His basic point is that the more opportunities we have to actually sit down face to face with people and learn about them, the more likely we are to be able to find a working solution with them. This socialization comes from repeated, individual contact: whether hashing out some knotty problem or simply discussing the weather or what the first job was they had. To my way of thinking, the social interactions are probably the most valuable ways to learn and grow.

Of course, there are plenty of wing-nuts and whack-jobs where one personal contact is one contact too many. But most of the time, you can learn something new by sitting down and chatting with someone else.

Without this contact, the person across the table is easily reduced to cliches, to simple sound bytes. In our low-contact, high media environment, it becomes easy to provide these sound bytes, easy to pre-bias one group against another. Without social contact, these biases quickly become perceived truth, a barrier around which the individual rarely looks. These barriers become the foundation of a profound distrust of everything "Them". The higher these barriers, the harder it is to come together to find solutions to our truly difficult problems. If we don't trust the other side, we can't effectively work with them.

The more people actually meet and work with and understand their neighbors, the less power soundbytes and cliches will have. This is why I think Zanby has such value as a true democracy-supporting and sustaining tool. We are facilitating formal and informal gatherings of people with interests ranging from vintage baseball to bettering their local school district. What makes systems like Gatheroo so interesting and valuable is that they are able to bring people together across much larger "neighborhoods" -- the group of vintage baseball fans may discover another group across the country, and gather with them.

e-Democracy and Zanby

2005-07-27T16:36:00.000-05:00

I attended a global e-Democracy Conference this week at the Humphrey Institute in Minneapolis. I attended to inform folks about the depth and breadth of Zanby, to talk with visionaries in the e-Democracy and e-Gov fields, and to explore other avenues of technology activism. It was produced by Steven Clift, the founder of e-democracy.org.

I am not sure where Zanby fits in the scope of deliberative technologies. A few of the panelists and participants felt that e-democracy was very narrowly focused on facilitating decision making processes. In other words, if citizens could use the Internet, or a phone, or a billboard, or anything that is e-enabled to shape governmmental decisions then it qualifies as e-democracy. Yet many of the presentations were about the delivery of Government services and community building software.

As we create and empower communities of interest AND function - I believe we will empower participation. It may be best described as the a kind of back to the future effect. We were once bound by and vested in our communities. Now our communnities are significantly larger and more complex. By using technology as a complexity-filter, we can manage our lifestyles in a way that allows us to take advantage of the many things our rich, global, wired community offers...while keeping our sanity.

This morning we met with MN Secratary of State, Mary Kiffemeyer, who demoed the state of Minnesota's electoral tabulating tools. Though I have often disagreed with Madame Secretary's ideology and the way she has carried out her duties, I salute her on the implementation of these technologies. It's impressive, and unique in the country.

We also heard presentations from the City of St. Paul, which is running some very nice newsletter campaigns, and a killer presentation from Andrew Haig of MPR who has created a Budget Balancer. That's right-- create your own state budget and email it to your reps.

Friend and co-blogger, Chuck Olsen might have some video of the conference up later at MN Stories.

Zanby welcomes the Kossacks

2005-07-19T03:31:00.000-05:00

Kos posted about the creation of Zanby on late Monday night. He duly notes that we will likely not be alone in our endeavor. However, we are in a unique position to build a vision. Gatheroo is in the fortunate postion of being created by an outstanding software development company and informed by one of the premier MeetUp organizers in the country. We also have a great partner in CivicSpace.

It's interesting to note that the blurb about Zanby happened in the context of another discussion about whether or not vendors - particularly technology vendors - should be partisan.

The founders of Zanby are probably split on that. About half of us, me included, are almost full time activists for the Democrats here in Minnesota. Sometimes we walk a fine line between keeping food on the table and doing the world some good. The other half are motivated either by the potential profit or the fact that we are making one of the coolest pieces of software out there. I am overjoyed to be working at the nexus of all three.

While our motives in starting Zanby are squarely in the change-the-world camp, we have to make a profit or we won't be around very long. We don't have to make much of one, but we have to make one. That is the point of practicing enlightened capitalism. It is possible to provide goods and services that make the world a better place and generate enough profit to sustain the business and its employees.

In so doing, it is not possible to avoid providing goods and services to people who do not agree with my political views. It is not possible and it should not be possible. People of all political stripes will be welcome on Zanby, provided they don't advocate hate crimes. That being said, our target market is the progressive community. I don't expect to be buying ads on Town Hall anytime soon. You won't ever see a press release celebrating Zanby's new contract with the GOP. But the site itself will be open to all. That's the spirt of free enterprise and the spirit of open source.

High Ideals ... And A Great Name! An 'Ivory Tower' Explanation of Zanby

2005-07-15T21:21:00.000-05:00

Zanby is a high ideal given life by some good old-fashioned hard work, a strong dose of social conscience, and some fantastic team-based creativity. It's difficult to beat that combination! I tend to look at these kinds of developments from an ivory tower, so let me spill a high altitude excuse for what we made. The new American dream is like the two sides of a coin. On one is a growing need for everyday entrepreneurialism coupled with information technologies that maximize one's reach. And this now goes for the union member as well as the CEO. It's a new world and we need to take every advantage of it.

BUT that's not all there is. There's a flip side. Strong communities, social conscience, participation and dialogue can be the complimentary side of that dream. Technology and community should be mutually supportive, quality of life and innovation a partnership. Otherwise we'll find ourselves in a world worse than 1984 (the book, that is). We really have to make 'this' work.

In this sense, Zanby is our signature try at creating a small part of that kind of world. We packed some hard earned lessons about building businesses, developing technology, and nurturing participatory communities into an online meeting and community management service. Robert Putnam in his book "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community" decries the loss of our traditional community institutions. "We sign fewer petitions, belong to fewer organizations that meet, know our neighbors less, meet with friends less frequently, and even socialize with our families less often. We're even bowling alone". Bowling leagues and moose lodges once served a much broader purpose than just practicing strikes and spares or sharpening your card game. They were gatherings at which the affairs of the community were discussed and plans made, where close personal networks developed, which later were put to use in one’s professional and political life. That fifties world has passed. We look back nostalgically and wonder why, with all the technological advantages we have today, we can't do better than our parents and grandparents at this seemingly simple social task. Zanby’s answer is that we must, and in fact, we can do it better â€“ at the speed of light!

During the last political season technology played its greatest role yet in bringing people together for a common purpose. Regular folks of all stripes were meeting in homes and coffee shops to discuss politics, to search for others like themselves, and to find a way to become involved. It was a promising example of the American model of democracy. We rediscovered community. Technology played the starring role. Meetings were organized online. Four or five would gather at a cafe here, fifty at a community center there. The catalyst for their coming together was online meeting organization technology, not an existing set of social relationships. Paradoxically, it was the new birthing the old. Community blossomed out of a search for others with common concerns and the tools to find them.

The technologies responsible for the rebirth have been of many varieties, from the ubiquitous listserv to email groups to common online calendars. Several companies sprang up specifically to facilitate the online arrangement of interest affinity meetings. Word spread about how to do it, coming first from groups with a political focus and moving to those interested in simple pleasures like collecting antiques or reading poetry. A spark was touched that increasingly married technology with community building. The successes drew the attention of both entrepreneurs and activists, leading them to both praise the paradigm as well as critique tools currently available for building and managing these communities.

What we felt was that there clearly is a better mousetrap and a critical mass of talent and vision to make it. And, if we were going to realize our dream of building community as rapidly as possible, we would have to give it away. Tough constraints. But we did it. The real purpose of Gatheroo is to go beyond simply organizing a meeting to building sustainable interest driven communities. Our design lessons come from the way we, as humans, have always built and managed gatherings of the likeminded. Three aspects of that natural dynamic inform what we believe are the keys to our success: favorable joining economics, sustainability, and capture of a critical mass clientele.

The Facts of Life

If we are active in a community, it's because we have a passionate interest, a desire for the company of others, or because we feel compelled to right a wrong. Pez dispensers brought Ebay into existence; social and economic disparities stimulated the emergence of political parties. We act on these issues by seeking out others and, in so doing, discover that we are not the only ones with that need, and that the need can be addressed more successfully by joining with those of similar interests. That's the demand side of the equation; why we act.

Why we do not act is another issue, however. Traditional, non-technological means of seeking and joining suffers from a relatively low rate of contact and sometimes high costs of entering into and managing group relationships. Regardless of passion, how would I know, for instance, that there were quite a number of Shitzu lovers in my town just by walking my dog in the park every other day? And even if I did, how much precious time and effort would I have to devote to getting us together? Would I take the time to collect addresses and write each a letter? Those were the costs a generation ago. And it brought the tradeoffs into clear relief: the higher the obstacles to building community the greater had to be the passion to create them. Our perspective suggests that if you lower these costs to the break out point, the possibilities fuel a sense of empowerment that also helps build additional passion (read, demand). A virtuous cycle of community building is the result.

But groups, as do companies, require a bit more than just contact and communication if they are to be sustainable. We were keenly aware of this and decided to confront two sustainability issues head on. The first is about revenue or 'the business model'; the second is about 'efficacious' participation or 'the community model'. The business model is important for the obvious reason. No Revenue, no Zanby. We realized this approach would have to be that of a business - can sustain itself without revenue. Hardware and software, salaries and vendors have to be paid with real money not goodwill. On the other hand, our concern with the vital role a low entry cost (of becoming a member and leading a group) plays in fostering a self-sustaining community, required us to adopt a policy that 'membership would forever be free'. Our business model addresses these requirements via ad revenue that pays the bills. Yep, we'll have ads. But you'll know what purpose they serve: yours!

Recent cost increases for online meeting organizing services have caused many large categories of users of these services to search for alternatives. For the very community-building reasons stated above, they are searching for higher value at lower cost. What they have expressed to us is a need for 'community management' services above and beyond the services offered by online meeting organizing services. We know this because several of us are the political activists and interest group leaders who have been using these kinds of facilities and growing communities all along. We are the 'subject matter experts', who know what these kinds of communities need and want. We attend them, lead the groups, and listen to the suggestions. We live the proverbial focus group in real time. Fortunately, we are also talented developers of relevant technology and grasp the connection between an expressed need and its technical implementation. This ability to build directly from the expressed needs of subject matter experts is the cornerstone of our 'the community model'. It ensures that every individual's participation is efficacious, that she does not confront an endless menagerie of obstacles to making her community work. Needed tools (e.g., file storage, job aids, etc.) are built in or added (economically) based on immediate feedback.

So, that's why I'm here. Join us and let's make the world we want tomorrow, today! Please drop by our site, http://Zanby.com and take a look at the features. We'll be up and running soon, so stay tuned and give us lots of feedback!

Sitemap review

2005-07-14T12:09:00.000-05:00

We just did a sitemap review of phase I this morning. Zanby is going to be a seriously kick-ass site!

One of the many things we are making sure of is that Zanby is going to be a lot easier to use than Meetup. Fortunately, several members of the team have a lot of experience developing easy to use, very powerful web applications.