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.

Labels: blogging, online community, progressive, SoapBlox, the uptake, warecorp, Zanby

[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.

Labels: collaboration, deliberation, democracy, design, dialogue, gov2.0, leadership, ncdd, ncddpdx, open government, oregon, portland, transparency, world cafe, Zanby

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.

Labels: books, deanna zandt, Facebook, Leif Utne, relationships, social media, trust, Twitter, Zanby

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.

Labels: #nn10, 1Sky, collaboration, community organizing, las vegas, mobile roots, netroots, the uptake, warecorp, Zanby

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!

Labels: Facebook, Zanby

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.

Labels: #ggrc09, Climate Network, collaboration, enterprise, Gaining Ground Summit, Leif Utne, October 2009, online communities, Resilient Cities, social media, software, Vancouver, Zanby

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.

Labels: #socialgood, 1Sky, Climate Network, Energy Action Coalition, Focus the Nation, Key Coalition, Mashable, Social Good Conference, Summer Rayne Oakes, Zanby