Workshop: Activism and Education Using Social Networks

As well as providing ways to stay in touch with friends and make new connections, social networking technologies are increasingly important for activism and education. This interactive workshop will look at social networks and other innovative avenues such as blogs, wikis, mashups, and virtual worlds - as well as the role of more traditional online communication mechanisms like email and discussion forums. It will cover these technologies and their larger implications; techniques for engaging others while dealing with challenges such as trolling, flaming, and privacy invasion; and a nuts-and-bolts introduction to utilizing these tools.

The Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Workshop on Activism and Education Using Social Networks will run in parallel with the concurrent sessions on Thursday, May 22. To accommodate those will be attending -- or presenting at! -- other sessions for different parts of the day, we're organizing the bulk of the workshop as a series of independent modules, covering different skills, and best practices for educators and activists. We'll also cover success stories, brainstorm challenges faced by attendees, and construct groups for CFP attendees to stay in touch as well as profiles and groups for several organizations attending.

Confirmed modules include Facebook and Promoting books (and potential books) on social networks. Other potential topics include mashups, screencasting, getting your site found on Google, and effective use of social network sites like Ning, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, and SecondLife. We're using the Modules page on the wiki to help organize this; please check it out for the current status -- and if you've got suggestions, please add them, either on the wiki or as comments on this thread!

One of our goals for the workshop is to make it valuable both for in-person participants and the 99.99999% of the world that will not be at CFP on that day. If technology allows it, we will set up the room so that people can participate remotely. Even more importantly, we'll be collecting information on the wiki, and encouraging discussions on various blogs and social network sites.

In the spirit of which, a couple of questions to kick things off:

• what are some particularly good examples of educators and activists using social networks?
  
• what skills or techniques do you think are important -- and are there any good online references?

Other topics welcome, of course. And please forward this on to others you think might be interested!

Potential topic: Voces Contra La FARC

The anti-FARC protests on February 4 involved millions of people throughout Columbia and around the world ... and were organized in about one month, starting on Facebook. Oscar Morales Guevara's group Un Millon De Voces Contra La FARC (A Million Voices Against FARC) now has over 300,000 members; Felipe and Daniel Echeverri created a “Un Millon” Facebook application to supplement the effort.

CFP's been discussing the power of the internet to change the world for eighteen years, and this is one of the largest-scale examples yet. And in a situation where governments are considering regulation of social networks (see CDT's overview of pending US legislation), the implications for technology policy are huge.

This would be a great topic for a panel in its own right, or a segment in a panel on social networks, hacktivism, or the influence of Facebook. Jennifer Woodard Maderazo's Facebook Becomes Catalyst for Causes, Colombian FARC Protest gives some broader context.

Thoughts?

Potential session proposal: Facebook censorship and due process

For people who haven't submitted proposals for a CFP session before, the process can seem daunting: an intimidating-looking form complete with questions about your "qualifications" for organizing the session. It's tempting to just go with the simpler topic or activity or speaker proposals, and of course that's always an option. Still, there's a lot of value in thinking about an entire session; and so over the next few days I'll be giving a few examples -- both to demystify the process and to give some additional examples.

Please feel free to jump in with questions, suggestions, or other perspectives.

I'll start with something that several people have suggested would be a natural for CFP: combining looking at Facebook censorship with law professor Daniel Solove's Facebook Banishment and Due Process. This fits squarely into the conference's "social networking" topic area, and clearly has technology policy implications: what, if any, rights do people have to the information in their profiles -- and as Facebook becomes synomymous with communications for an entire generation, what if any responsibilities does the company have to allow political speech? On top of that, it's squarely in the technology/law/policy nexus that's CFP's home -- and ripped from today's headlines! So it seems like a definite possibility.

The form asks for a title and a 75-word description, easy enough; and then asks for the proposed format: panel? debate? something else? A panel is always a safe option: me on the censorship stuff, somebody from Facebook, Solove or somebody else for the overall legal context, somebody providing a first amendment viewpoint (from Chilling Effects, the ACLU, the First Amendment Center). The mix of different perspectives could be quite illuminating ...

But y'know, CFP always has a lot of panels, and it's worth looking for other possibilities. Suppose instead we had a moot-court-like format, with a group of people who have been banned by the automated filters appealing to a hypothetical Facebook-like social network for a change in policy. Expert witnesses could providing testimony; some of real people actually affected by this would have a chance to get their perspectives heard. Court TV-like commentary could supplement it, and a three-"judge" panel of social network experts could rule ... not that it would be binding on Facebook, or anybody else, but still a very interesting result -- and a lot more concrete than anything that would come out of the panel discussion.

At this point, this sounds a lot more intriguing to me. If I decide to go forward with it, the next steps involve thinking more about potential participants and contacting some of them -- and massaging the rough thoughts here into the 75-word overview. Before I do that, though, I wanted to see what others thought. A few questions:

• is this the kind of session you think would be interesting?
• thoughts between panel and other formats?
• other potential participants/twists?

Other ideas and suggestions welcome as well!

jon

PS: also posted on Facebook (1, 2) and on tribe.net