Authority Figures

1
Authority Figures
Watched by 1 million people a night
News Corp has a market capitalization of
48,000,000,000
2
DailyKos.com

• Marcos Zuniga
• 100,000 a year revenue from advertisements
• Raised 600,000 in hard dollars so far this year
  for the democratic party

3
Blog Broken News

• Rathergate
• Exposed on web community FreeRepublic.com
• Propagated by blogs to mainstream news
• Trent Lott
• John Marshal of TalkingPointsMemo.com kept the
  story alive until mass media picked it up.
• John Stewart Skewers Crossfire
• Crossfire is watched by 865,000 people
• 1-5 million watched the segment over the internet
  
• Gannongate
• Kossaks (DailKos.com) investigated and broke the
  story.

4
The Dean Campaign

• 500,000 volunteers self organizing in every state
• Web real-estate spread over hundreds of mostly
  unofficial web-sites.
• Most of ideas and innovation on how to leverage
  the community came from the bottom up

What we did

• Turned an asterisk into a front runner
• Broke primary fundraising records with small
  dollar donations
• Created a lasting network of new activists

5
Where This Could be Going - South Korea

• 4X U.S. Broadband Penetration
• 2/5 most trafficked websites on the net with 1/5
  the population of U.S.

• Biggest Internet News Source in South Korea
• Almost all their news reporting comes from
  Citizen Reporters

President Roh - Hand Picked by OhMyNews
6
Story Time
7
DeanSpace

• Powered
• Over a hundred grassroots sites
• Official state web sites
• Main constituency sites

• Started as an all volunteer effort by a bunch of
  kids
• Created Free / Open Source Software based on the
  Drupal platform

8
Exiting DeanSpace

• Headaches
• Who would still want DeanSpace?
• How were we going to continue building it?
• Who was going to pay for it?

Silicon Valley to the rescue
9
CivicSpace The Organization

• Build technology as public sector infrastructure
• Leverage open source community and development to
  keep things cheap
• Engage for profit partners to service the
  platform to the market
• Save the world

10
CivicSpace the Community Organizing Platform

• Tools to organize communities
• Blogging / Community
• Member management
• Event organizing
• Spamming
• Donations / Commerce
• Content and data sharing
• Everything else

11
Music for America

• Organizes 5-15 political events a night at
  concerts across the country
• One year or organizing outreach at 2,132
  concerts attended by over 2 million people
• 40,000 members
• Full time staff of 7
• 700 spent on advertising (blog advertisements)
• All messaging and organizing done through their
  CivicSpace website

12
Supporting CivicSpace

• CivicSpace will be a self sustaining non profit
• Partner with Vendors
• Rails and Verticals
• CivicSpace Platform - Rails
• Market Verticals

• Example Market Verticals
• Campaigns
• Bands
• Churches
• Schools

13
CivicSpaceLabs.org

• 6 full time employees
• 150 organizations use CivicSpace
• 1.0 is still 5 months off
• Very active developer / user community
• Half a dozen CivicSpace vendors
• No ASP (TypePad) yet