Open Resource Group: Commerce on a Mission
Diane Francis, New York City, February, 2007

I'm an American journalist, broadcaster and author who commutes between Toronto and New York City. I met Britt Blaser, a New York City-based entrepreneur, as a result of contacts I made in Fall 2005 while at Harvard University as a Shorenstein Fellow. We hit it off with the result that I have become involved on the advisory board of his company, Open Resource Group LLC. Other board members include web gurus Doc Searls and David Weinberger, authors of the ground-breaking Cluetrain Manifesto; media expert and notable, Jeff Jarvis and one of France's premiere high-tech entrepreneurs and political adviser, Loïc Le Meur.

In a nutshell, many of us believe that technology can and should be harnessed to democratize democracy. Our political system has become unduly complicated as it's been hijacked by vested interests such as political parties, apparatchiks, bureaucrats, fossilized unions, Wall Street, big business, big media, Madison Avenue and lobbyists pushing specialized causes. The result is unresponsive democracies, voter disillusion and the failure to find consensus.

Origins

Candy Lightner, the founder of MADD, or Mothers Against Drunken Driving, spent years creating an organization which has earned her cause global attention and brought about toughened attitudes and laws. Hers was a long and arduous journey to attract and build an organization with enough clout to matter.

Fortunately, individuals these days can use the Internet to greatly accelerate the creation of similar organizations. The first glimpse of rapid, on-line activism occurred in 2003 when a group of supporters for Presidential candidate Howard Dean created a unique Internet presence. Within weeks, they hoisted Mr. Dean to national prominence and ultimately raised $55 million and attracted 150,000 active web supporters and 650,000 participants. By contrast, the previous on-line fundraising record was only $2 million in 2000, reached by the John McCain campaign. Britt Blaser, a New York City-based entrepreneur, says, "I embedded myself at the Dean Campaign because there wasn't going to be a second first Internet Presidential primary."

Eventually, Mr. Dean's candidacy fizzled, but so have attempts to replicate, and enhance, the deployment of Internet activism or e-democracy.

So Mr. Blaser decided to build the missing functionality and is putting the finishing touches to a platform he has nicknamed "Dean Done Right". Officially, it's called "ORGware".

His team of technical experts are creating a system that can be used by causes, organizations or corporations which takes social networking and interactivity several steps further: participants not only meet virtually but can confer, gather consensus, assign tasks, raise money, forge commitments and organize themselves into study or action groups.

Most importantly, this platform is designed to be "grandparent friendly", or jargon-averse and technologically friction-free, to enable more people to take advantage of its power.

"The tools must be democratized first so that anyone can use them," he explained.

Obviously, his platform has political appeal, but it has also caught the attention of media companies, corporations, special interest groups, governments, non-profits and politicians.

An Early Adopter

Good Magazine was launched last year by Ben Goldhirsch as CEO and Max Schorr as Publisher. The publication is aimed at those concerned about global responsibility, environmental degradation, life style quality and income disparity. Its subscription model is unique and reflects its values: All proceeds from the $20 first-year subscriptions goes to one of Good Magazine's dozen affiliated charities.

"We want this platform to help us organize and promote projects, events and help readers connect. It's our online to the offline connection," said Mr. Schorr. "We're working on the platform right now, making little fixes. We see it as an experiment. We are blessed to have a community of people who are getting the magazine, and going through the website, who have a lot to contribute. I'm excited to give them tools to connect with each other and see where it goes."

For instance, one of the magazine's future projects, and charities, is the Millenium Promise, a non-governmental organization targeting African poverty which was started by Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs.

"Jeff Sachs developed this interesting model that, through progressive agriculture, seeds and fertilizer, African farmers can triple their productivity. To get the fertilizer and the seeds, farmers agree to give a portion of food to schools, hospitals and to provide medicines, bed nets and treatments for diseases," said Mr. Schorr.

"Two case studies have shown villages obtain a dramatic improvement with 300% crop yield increase and school and healthcare turned around. In two years, auditors said the villages had broken extreme poverty," he said. "It's remarkable and the idea is to scale this up. This has me the most excited about what our website can do."

Good Magazine hopes to encourage involvement by individuals and also to create money-raising events through its on-line presence.

"For instance, $1 will give you one stake in a village and you can buy more stakes. We need $300,000 per year, over five years, for each village. We are creating a community to help African villages. Each member of our community will have access to what's happening and individuals can start funding groups to insure these projects will be finished. We want to tell the story, recruit the stakeholders and let them recruit others," he said.

How Dean Will Be Done Right

Open Resource Group's web platform, dubbed "ORGware" by Mr. Blaser, will offer a far richer set of tools than were available to the Howard Dean campaign. He thinks this platform will enhance democratic participation by facilitating on-line conversations among users about politicians, politics or policies. This may involve everything from global issues to Presidential races or hyper-local political matters such as defeating approval to build a Wal-Mart, power generator or apartment tower in a congressional district or municipality. Or fixing a pothole.

"We are creating a tool so you can do something in the world, so you can organize and meet like-minded people. We'll help you start a movement," he said.

ORGware will be made available through government, corporate, organization or political websites. Each member gets a home page, a blog and an "about me" page. More importantly, anyone will be able to create instant groups: new "nodes" extending the community. Members can name their "nodes", describe their views and themselves, invite others and see who else arrives. Comments made on any blog post will be automatically posted as primary posts on the commenters' own blogs. They will be able to easily invite others into a new group in order to discuss, strategize or form action plans. All posts and comments will be rateable by all users so that only those that are popular or resonant will appear to newcomers on the site. This rating system will help eliminate clutter, irrational or unhelpful comments and modify the chronology-restricted architecture that litters traditional blogs or sites.

Mr. Blaser summarizes his platform's benefits: "Each user will be a commenter whose comments appear on their unanticipated new blog, so each will become a blogger, leveraging their own and other comments into original posts; each will be a publisher creating their own home page, or node, to attract others interested in the same issues or problems; each user will be a rater of every bit of content; each can be a group-former; or a project-generator or a letter/fax/petition generator."

ORGware provides the tools that are the stock-in-trade of organizers, political activists or project managers, said Mr. Blaser.

"Put another way, this will be like a series of well-designed magazine pages that people unaccustomed to the Web can click on and use. Each will be an immediate 'letter to the editor' that's permanently attached to the original article. We will provide a magazine page that's reserved for you so you're a columnist too," he said.

"And if you want to organize a group that wants to set up its own magazine we will help you do that too," he said. "We will help you create the 'Stop Wal-Mart Group for the 19th Congressional' site or section."

Users need only click "create group" or "invite my friends" to start organizing.

"There will be an invite icon that helps the user select from a list of all the people who've commented on any blog and on whose blog he or she has commented," said Mr. Blaser. "The user will cull or add to the list then click on 'send' for automatic e-mail invitations to be sent out. If the recipient is intrigued, she just clicks on the link, learns what's happening and may become part of the Fight-Wal-Mart Group or whatever."

Thus a new "group" or "node" is created and the "group" will then have its own anti-Wal-mart site, with its own home page that has information about its contributors and founders. Users will also have simplified action-item icons to help stage meetings or protests as well as to launch projects, tasks or new groups.

Another important feature of this platform is that groups can organize but still remain private, commenting among themselves until, if ever, they are ready to broadcast their views or implement action plans.

The point is that an ORGware group is self-starting and can be self-perpetuating, and evolve into other areas of interest. For instance, after an election, the ORGware users can can continue to use its tools to zero in on the politicians' performance in office or expand to unrelated issues, from local school board matters to global environmental causes.

"People will be able to keep consulting with one another and move onto other issues or campaigns, not just disappear at the end of an election or verdict, losing money and workers," he said.

The Current Vacuum

At an autumn conference in Washington D.C. of tech-aware political campaigners called "Roots Camp", the question posed was why the Dean spirit had not materialized into websites that could continuously enhance campaigns, spark debates and raise funds.

"One of the best-attended sessions was titled 'Why Technology Sucks' [subtext: 'why aren't we where we thought we'd be by now?']," said Mr. Blaser. "The reason is that campaign volunteers are few in number and have been limited to building what their uninformed campaigns ask for. Someone said we need a Manhattan Project. Even based on our location, ORGware is that Manhattan Project: the first instance of enterprise-grade development for the techno-political space, administered and used by non-technical people."

Political activist Micah Sifry is Executive Director of the Personal Democracy Forum and an Editor with the Sunlight Foundation which finances projects that further democracy and transparency. He believes that the failure to create a user-friendly platform is a large part of the problem. So is the lack of organization on the left, politically speaking.

"It's about the evolution of the political blogosphere. It has grown primarily on the left, not the right. Why? I think the answer is self-need. On the right, they already have a dense network of organizations and media institutions that bring people together. There's talk radio, Fox News and on the ground there's a lot of face-to-face interaction at the base of the pro-life, pro-gun and church interests," said Mr. Sifry.

"On the Democratic side that face-to-face has all been hollowed out. Unions are fading. A lot of liberal professional networks don't do anything political. And the Democratic party itself, starting in the 80s, became even more hollowed out, more attuned to big money and not to lots of little people. The same with liberal special interest groups. Except for the Sierra Club, none of these organizations even elects its leadership. People can join 'Common Cause', which is very successful with several hundred thousand members, but there are no activities involved," said Mr. Sifry.

There are many successful political sites but none offer all the tools that Orgware will offer.

"Progress Now in Colorado is a community platform for progressive activists and organizations," said Mr. Sifry. "The site is not all that different from Orgware's vision and is where anybody can create a blog, invite their friends, initiate a house party or a petition or a fundraising event and all the info is shared. That said, the site also required extensive on-the-ground organizing and significant investment to get it going. But now they have 75,000 individual users which is 5% of the voting population of the state."

Governance Applications

"ORGware could be useful for governments on a number of levels", said Phil Windley, a Brigham Young University professor and the former CIO for the State of Utah. He is on ORGware's advisory board.

"It's a needed community building service," he said. "We are all trying to find the best way to build community -- for products, ideas or actions -- that are integrated and easy to use."

For instance, municipalities utilizing an sees ORGware platform could "deputize" residents to organize, take action, share information and monitor problems as varied as potholes, broken water mains, excessive noise, health hazards or dangerous behavior.

Besides practical applications, ORGware could also enhance activism, policy-making and citizen education.

"What's really of value is bringing political tools to the masses," he said. "If you are fighting a local Wal-Mart and need 100 influencers in precincts, a legislative candidate with money can get to them if he or she raises enough funds. But if you try to organize against a Wal-mart, how do you get that data? How do you create yard signs, upload a graphic, ship and distribute materials to create a buzz in your community?"

Likewise, he sees ORGware as a handy way for politicians and policymakers to try out policy initiatives or get comments from interested parties. It could also be a way to help government officials tap public's help in fighting crime, health violations or by-law infractions.

"The biggest impediments to widespread usage of Internet sites are account numbers and passwords," said Mr. Windley. "When people are fired up about something, such as an issue or a candidate, they get there, but you lose the moderate voice when there's too much friction. And I want people to be able to participate and find out the various shades of an issue and get away from left-right, good-bad, black-white."

Media Applications

Mr. Sifry believes that the greatest growth opportunity for a platform like sees ORGware is to enable hyper-local journalism.

Now we're talking about my area of expertise, and Sifry's right.

Few local newspapers or television stations cover city hall or school board politics anymore, much less zoning or health board issues. This is due to budget cuts as the news "hole" or "time allotments" shrink, along with advertising revenues. This has grave ramifications for democracy and governance.

For instance, a California study in 2004 found that few, if any, local telecasts or local newspapers covered any of the state's dozens of Congressional races, candidates, issues or policies. The same problem exists everywhere. In New York, where many gigantic daily newspapers thrive, few cover the state government in Albany or city hall on a regular basis.

The same problem exists in democracies around the world. The mainstream media is under financial or political pressure to limit its coverage to mass-interest, selective or politically correct stories. Meanwhile, the blogosphere has failed to fill the journalistic vacuum. Blogs opinionate or riff off the mainstream media, providing little, if any, real reportage or enterprise journalism. This contributes to the vacuum of coverage in areas of greatest significance to citizens.
 
But Mr. Sifry sees ORGware's tools, if offered to the public on existing or new media websites, might provide an outlet and means for voters to report, monitor and discuss what is going on at legislatures, supreme courts, local courts, city halls, school boards or backrooms, all of which are virtually ignored by the mainstream media.

Industrial Applications

Building brands is what wealth creation and entrepreneurship are all about.

In the past, brand-building has been about "broadcasting": Advertisers beam out their messages by saturating the airwaves, billboards and newspapers. But this has to change.

Experienced ad man Dave Lubars, Chair and Chief Creative officer of BBDO New York, says that between 1985 and 2003 the number of TV stations soared from 15 to 200 in some regions; the number of magazines jumped by 50%; the bombardment of advertising messages went from 950 per day to 5,000 and the Internet is now in two out of three homes.
 
All of which means the message-makers, and their moneyed masters, are losing control as people switch and transparency reigns.

Ironically, an Internet-savvy platform such as ORGware can be just what the brand-builder ordered. It's an investment in accelerating word-of-mouth by helping customers create their own communities through product or corporate websites. It means that the brand itself is encouraging customers to meet, converse, compare notes and share information about service or usage.

But such a strategy intimidates many corporations and brands even though word-of-mouth brand building is their explicit purpose. It's intimidating because it involves some surrendering of control, and brings exposure to negative word-of-mouth. While damage-control freaks dislike this idea, it's absolutely necessary for companies to invite criticism and suggestions or complaints. Customer communities can become canaries in the mines or pre-emptive market research focus groups, if the right attitudes are adopted by corporations.

"We are talking about shared knowledge. Implementing a knowledge base tied to actionable items is critical to car companies, media comapnies and others," said Maurice Freeman, CEO of software developer Zaah. "This can be an Intranet of customers, but if properly implemented it can give a lot of data back to people who need it. The people at the bottom are the customers or users or voters. Governments are the same as big companies. Many people are disgruntled customers and companies like governments must understand how to defuse and benefit from this."

Advertisers can also greatly benefit from creating on-line customer communities because they form a virtual product and services information and marketing distribution system. This enables companies to cheaply and instantly offer their customers new products or services, information, bulletins, discounts, contests, related services, trade-in opportunities or accessories.

A further benefit is that ORGware tools can be used internally by corporations or entities to improve their communications, consensus-building and project roll-outs.

Metaphorically speaking, ORGware creates a real-time gigantic conference call among employees, suppliers or partners which are then rated in order to be organized into a power-point presentation representing consensus that can be monitored and responded to immediately.

Conclusion

ORGware is a platform whose time has come. Its tools can be used in a variety of ways by business, political activists, fundraisers and governments. It can help dis-intermediate the middle in all sectors, providing more responsive public and private sectors plus provide some muscle to the masses.

Although ORGware was originally conceived as a technical means to inspire citizens to become activists, it's evolved into a way for any organization to inspire action among its stakeholders - even if that action inspires customers to make a purchase.