Welcome to Wikiturfing
You want to make something big happen. You have no money, no backers, just some time, a web connection, and a lot of patience. This site will explain how to make big things happen using just the power of communication and organisation. Social architecture is the broader skill of helping people organise themselves in effective networks. Wikiturfing is doing this using the Internet.
How big is big?
<NO>OOXML is a great example of a wikiturf. 65,000 signatures, and a whole community rallied around a burning issue. One of my earlier experiments, CAPSoff, was a big smash in the media but without a real enemy to focus on (see 'Mission and enemy') the campaign did not create a community.
How much does it cost?
My goal when building the wikiturfing technique was to make it free. But that's idealistic. In fact you need to spend a little money, for example Euro 15 per year for a domain name, and a lot of time if your campaign takes off. The good thing is that you can start wikiturf campaigns very cheaply, so you can afford to start many, and abandon those that don't fly.
Essential tools
A wikiturfer is only as good as his/her tools. These are the essential tools I've learned to use and love for wikiturfing:
- Gandi for domain registration and management.
- Wikidot for free web site creation and hosting.
- Gmail for free email access.
Gandi
Gandi is a cheap, reliable, pragmatic domain registrar. Learn to use it, move all your domain names there, and you won't regret it. I use Gandi's pre-pay feature so I can order new domain names very easily. I also use Gandi to manage the DNS for all my domains, which usually means pointing them to Wikidot.com.
Wikidot
Wikidot is a "next generation" wiki service. You can use it to create more or less any kind of web site, mixing petitions, forums, news, comments, articles, in any way you like. It takes a day or two to learn fully, costs nothing, and gives you very good page ranking (Google results). I have twenty or thirty 150-odd Wikidot sites. Actually when I discovered Wikidot in 2006 I found it so useful I became an investor in the business, and today am CEO of the company.
A lot of the fun of a wikidot site, for wikiturfing, is that you can mix blog-style stories with petitions, articles, and other kinds of functionalit. It looks like a website, not a wiki.
Many eyes make every problem shallow
You can't hope to do impossible things by yourself. Alone we are very ineffective. You need a lot of people to get involved and help. You need the best people, who know about the issues and who can campaign accurately against hostile vested interests. And the more people the better - many hands make the work easier.
The animal instinct
Campaigners, especially if they are highly educated, often over-intellectualise issues. This is not useful except for writing papers. When it comes to attracting, motivating, and keeping people involved in a campaign, you have to appeal to their animal instinct. This is what drives us, the intellect is what lets us justify it afterwards. Hate, ambition, fear, but above all, anger, are what drive ordinary people to do extraordinary things. Reason drives us to make compromises.
Embrace the chaos
The key notion of "wiki" is that people will, together, bring order out of chaos. A well-organised individual will often try to impose order by making extensive structures. This is counter-productive. People will, together, make better structures than any one individual. It takes longer and the lack of control may be disconcerting, but such collective structures get properly used and survive longer.
Delegate everything
The worst enemy of a wikiturf campaign is a competent individual who wants to do everything. Not only will this "founder" eventually burn-out and take the campaign with him, he will prevent others from taking part, by preferring order over collaboration. A wise wikiturf founder delegates as rapidly as possible, so that many people share ownership. He/she explains and documents systematically so that people can jump in when they want to.
Define good rules
As founder of a wikiturf campaign, you have a main task, which is to refine a good rule book. When people work together they need clear rules that explain how to resolve conflict, how to name things, how to work together. Do not write rules for fun; write them only when you have a specific problem to solve. Your first rule should be a rule for making rules.
Promote merit
A thriving wikiturf promotes its best people and relegates the idiots to marginal roles. Make sure your organisation, if it grows, has several levels of power, and define clear rules for promotion and demotion. Anyone good should be able to rise rapidly. You can never have too many good brains at the top.
Share alike
It is a classic threat to volunteer efforts: people cheat. Typically, people take the work done by volunteers, then repackage it and make money from it. The volunteers feel trapped - they want people to use their work, but at the same time they feel exploited. The best solution is a set of rules that make it very clear that people are expect to "share alike", and that set sanctions for those who do not.
Be aggressive
It's a tested fact that positve or "nice" campaigns do not work. If you want to get results, you need to get your hands dirty. This will offend some people. They will accuse you of hyperbole or of cheap publicity tricks. You can be aggressive and polite at the same time. Nonetheless, without a serious kick, a campaign has no strength and won't fly.
Define the enemy
Campaigns that don't focus their wrath on clear groups are going to fail. Calling for positive change is a failed strategy. Focussing on groups who actively work for negative change, or to keep the status quo, is more successful. Identify the groups, people, firms who oppose you, name and shame, and use the power of the wiki to document them.
Hijack the process
Change is almost always a political process. You need to learn, understand, and use the process. This means recruiting people who already know it, or finding people willing to invest in learning it. Most processes are kept secretive by vested interests, but are in fact accessible to those willing to learn. Any campaign that depends on a political process needs to identify, document, and come to know those processes intimately.
Find friends
One rule of politics is that every group or individual has enemies. Find those enemies, and bring them on board. They will often help you for opportunistic reasons, even if they do not agree with your fundamental views. Do not let such friends buy into your campaign.
You need to define a clear, challenging, and simple mission that is going to get people out of bed in the morning. And you need to define a clear enemy, a person, business, or organisation.
Goals
A wikiturf needs a large pool of supporters. These are people who have expressed some interest in the issue, who are perhaps willing to lend a hand. Supporters give you a mandate, and a constituency to work with.
Petition
The best and simplest way to collect supporters is via an online petition. Petitions are non-controversial and don't demand a lot from people. Your wikiturf campaign should have a petition as a prominent feature. The petition must be clear, simple, and clearly state that those who sign it are expressing their support for your campaign.
Publicity
Your petition is your main press tool at the start. Use blogs, onlike news/comment sites, and so on, to get the news around. Get people to put the petition in their email footers. Make a nice logo and banner that people can put on their sites. Use traffic analysis to see how many people visit the petition.
Data collection
The petition needs to collect:
- The supporter's name and surname.
- Their language and country.
- Their email address.
- Their comments.
That is enough to create a useful database of supporters to which you can send targetted emails, later in the process.
Respect privacy
You need to make it clear in the petition that data collected may be used for the purposes of the campaign, and that by signing the petition people agree to be informed of significant news with respect to the campaign.
You may, optionally, provide people an option to opt out of receiving news. If you do this, then you can automatically add people to news lists for their country, for example.
The emotional bond
People will only contribute to a campaign when they feel emotionally involved. A successful campaign is one that people can identify closely with, and one they can get involved with. Your message, your petition and website, must be aimed at potential activists and supporters, not at government or business (unless these constitute your recruiting pool).
The feeling of ownership
One of the hardest challenges is to allow newcomers to a campaign to create their space, and own it. When you construct your campaign, think of constructing tools rather than results. When you build a web site, make sure it solves the problems of organisation, not the problems of the campaign itself. The people you get to join your workgroups will build the campaign itself.
Sliding scale of engagement
While you hope that people will help or lead large parts of work, you can't say this - it will scare off potential activists who have not yet make enough of an emotional bond to the campaign. You need to develop some simple entry points, such as:
- Sign a petition to become a supporter.
- Translate a petition into other languages.
- Joining a mailing list.
- Commenting on news and articles.
- Submitting news or articles.
So much of your initial website is aimed just at giving potential activists a sandbox in which to play.
Welcoming committee
Most people, joining a new organisation, are willing to help but don't know how or where to start. Your website must explain this in simple terms, provide examples, stories, templates, and so on. It's probably a good idea to use mailing lists to welcome and help new activists.
Common mistakes
Since wikiturfing is still more of an art than a science, people make mistakes when putting together an organisation. Some of the typical ones are:
- Not delegating. A highly competent activist puts together a whole campaign, runs it, and then burns out, leaving an empty hole. The wiser activists plan to make themselves redundant as soon as possible.
- Over-investing. Most campaigns don't fly. So, start cheap and be ready to discard or heavily change direction if the response does not happen.
- Under-planning. If your campaign does bite, you need a clear idea of where to go. This should be your 'mission statement'.
- Over-structuring. Like wikis, wikiturf campaigns don't need a whole lot of structure to start with. Only make the structure you need to get the organisation off the ground and running, and let the rest happen naturally. This comes back to ownership.
- Confused ethics. Can one break a confidentiality agreement to leak important documents? How about making press about a politician's conflicts of interests? Nice campaigners are not very effective. Remember that ethics is about fairness, and putting the interests of society above those of privileged minorities.
The need for authority
Groups need rules so that people can trust each other abstractly. When we trust the rules, we don't need to learn to trust every individual. But rules are only as good as the people who wrote them, and the authority that enforces them.
A good campaign starts by defining some ground rules, and some authority. It enforces the rules without pity, but also fixes them if they prove to be unfair or imcomplete.
Promotion of merit
Meritocracies are groups where the best people have a louder voice, more votes, overall more influence. This is just common sense - someone with lots of experience and proven success should have more to say than someone who is just starting, no matter how brilliant.
A large part of being a sensible authority is to find and promote the best people, quickly and without being unfair. The fact that campaigns are structured as meritocracies needs to be explained up front, as part of the ground rules.
Projects belong to people
Projects belong to the people who make them, not the authority that governs them. That is, a project team must always be free to move their work to a different authority if they find their current 'home' over-bureaucratic, or repressive in any way. Organizations also belong to people. Projects do not belong to organizations.
Authority serves, does not command
The authority always has to answer to the people who actually do the work. In a way, authority is just a delegated group voice - it is clumsy to ask everyone to vote on every issue, unless one is a very small group.
So part of our ground rules must include how authority is chosen, and how it answers to the group.
