PJNet

Zack Rosen and Neil Drumm, two college dropouts (so what else is new), are bringing the organizing power of Americans for Dean to nonprofits everywhere with their new CivicSpace Labs. Find out more and how to become a CivicSpace Labs beta tester in this exclusive Leonard Witt IM Interview with Rosen.

Zack Rosen

Leonard Witt: Hi Zack, thanks for agreeing to this IM Interview. There are three areas I want to get to today. One is your connection to Americans for Dean, your ideas for CivicSpace Labs, and finally your credentials. So I’ll give you the choice on which area you would like to start.

Zack Rosen: Let’s start with Americans for Dean

Witt: Okay, tell me a little about what Americans for Dean actually was about.

Rosen: Sure. About a year ago I was home from school (University of Illinois) for the summer and started thinking about what I could do to help out in the coming election cycle. I was in the middle of reading a bunch of books on Social Network Theory / Society and Technology (Smart Mobs, Linked, Emergence, etc.) and had been hearing about all the interesting things the Dean campaign was doing on the net. I start doing a bit of research on his candidacy and could tell pretty quickly that most of my free time from the point on would be spent working to try to get him elected.

So I got involved with my local Dean organizing group (Pittsburgh for Dean) and started thinking about what kinds of web toolkits we would need to organize. And realized that every other Dean group was in the same boat. So I started an open source group called “Hack4Dean” – the idea was pretty straight forward: we would start working on putting together a web application toolset that any Dean group could use to organize their constituency. But the twist was we wanted to build the toolsets in a way that would allow them to connect to each other, and from that create a network of interoperating web communities – each serving their constituency, and linking with each other, and the “official” campaign.

We started to work pretty quickly. And I ended up moving up to Burlington to work full time at the end of August. We changed the name of the project around then to “DeanSpace“. The software ended up powering about a hundred dean group websites including our state sites, and the majority of our main constituency sites i.e. Asian Americans for Dean, Seniors for Dean, etc.

Sorry that was a bit long winded.

Witt: I know your uncle Jay Rosen. The long-winded stuff might be hereditary.

Rosen: haha

Witt: Jay, at one point, wrote you were so enthusiastic about the campaign and Dean that you had an erection of the heart. So what happened when it was apparent he was not going to win?

Rosen: Well, to be honest – I wasn’t too upset. The entire campaign was extremely surreal, it felt almost too good and too early to be true.

Witt: You were just 20 then right? So what did you do next?

Rosen: Well, one of my friends Josh Koenig (early contributor to DeanSpace) was working for an organization called Music for America. I came

out to visit him and look into perhaps working for the organization. It was being run by a bunch people my age who came right out of the Dean campaign.

Witt: What its reason for being?

Rosen: They do voter registration and organization around the music scene. They are much like “Rock the Vote” but with small shows instead of big ones, and a website instead of MTV.

Witt: So you were still politically active?

Rosen: Yeah, I still wanted to help out all I could in the cycle. But couldn’t see myself being very useful working directly for the Kerry campaign.

Witt: Why not?

Rosen: They are not in a position to be supportive to projects like the ones I’m most interested in pursuing.

Witt: Which are?

Rosen: DeanSpace, basically. I wanted to continue work on the project. I was convinced the application could be very useful to many grassroots organizing groups, and wanted to find a way to continue development on it. I ended up pitching it to Andy Rappaport when I came out to visit Josh, and he decided to support the project. So I got to call up my friend and lead developer on DeanSpace – Neil Drumm, who promptly dropped out of school and moved out here to San Francisco to create “CivicSpace Labs” with me.

Witt: So two college dropouts are out to change the world. How will it happen?

Rosen: We are working hard on the first release of our software.

Witt: What will it do?

Rosen: It is built on top of the Drupal content management system / web application framework. It will do most, if not all, of the things grassroots organizing groups need it to do (we hope).

Witt: Remember part of your audience here are journalists. So keep it simple.

Rosen: It will run your website: let you blog, upload files, collaboratively edit documents, create polls, create picture galleries. It will let users sign up and collect their contact information. It has a pretty robust contact management system, mass mailing tool, and event management tool much like Meetup.

Witt: But remember the cynic is going to say it didn’t work for Dean why will it work for a lowly grassroots organization.

Rosen: Oh, but it did work for Dean even if he lost Iowa. We built the largest grassroots campaign in history, broke all the fundraising records, and took an asterisk of a candidate to front runner position. And we did it by organizing using tools far cruder than the ones we are working on today at CivicSpace Labs.

Witt: Okay, why not walk us through an example of how some civic-minded organization might use the CivicSpace Labs, from the beginning to actually making something worthwhile happen.

Rosen: Ok, we will have a service set up that will cost less than $50 a month. It will run a lot like a blogging service. Users can sign up and configure their site all through a website. When set up the site will let you do many things, from blogging, to mass mailing, to organizing events, to fundraising. And will also let you connect your site with any other like-minded community – by sharing content, users, and events. The software is very participatory. It is very easy to get volunteers involved running, editing, writing, and publish on the site. They debate issues, brainstorm ideas, and organize concerts / events all through their website. …Your group can get your ideas and information out there – and it is easy and fun to get others involved with what you are doing, and you can see measurable success: i.e., raising money, organzing great events, expanding your constituency.

Witt: You must have real organizations in mind, when you think of this working. Can you name a couple?

Rosen: Sure: couple of the best showcases are sites like: Music for America and I DO . Music for America I explained earlier. They use their site to showcase their activities, and coordinate their volunteers, and get their volunteers interacting with each other and the organization. They have a very substantial, ongoing, and in depth dialogue with their constituents: politically minded youth who are active in the music scene. They debate issues, brainstorm ideas, and organize concerts / events all through their website

Witt: So you think it will be big, so does Rappaport . How much did he invest?

Rosen: Pitifully little

Witt: How much is pitifully little?

Rosen: Investment so far is probably less than $30,000.

Witt: If the idea is big, why so little funding?

Rosen: Because we don’t need much overhead to get the work done. The toolset is built on top of an existing open source application – and we can get a lot of help out of the Drupal community. The system does not cost much to build. When all is said and done, the software will cost less than $100,000 to create.

Witt: Is it applicable to businesses as well as nonprofits?

Rosen: I think the political organizing practices are well ahead of business practices at this point – and expect that only to increase in the near future.

Witt: Could you elaborate on that a little?

Rosen: Blogging in the workplace has only just now been tried / considered seriously. Bottom up / emergent leadership and organizing is almost never tried / practiced.

Witt: So it seems for CivicSpace Labs to work, you are not talking about staid nonprofits, but movements where people have a passion. No passion, no CivicSpace Lab. Am I right?

Rosen: Well, I think in general that is correct. But that doesn’t mean you need a “Dean like” movement for CivicSpace to be useful. Anyone looking to get ideas out on the web and organize around them could fine CivicSpace very useful.

Witt: So when will it be available?

Rosen: We will have a version out for testing within a week or two. The actual launch is a few weeks to a month a way.

Witt: Who gets to test it?

Rosen: Just about anyone who has the technical resources to install and set it up

Witt: Ah, what’s that mean? I thought it was easy to use.

Rosen: The real “product” will be easy to use.

Rosen: If anyone is interested in testing it they can send us an email: testing@civicspacelabs.org. But right now the testing will initially be limited to those who can install the software themselves.

Witt: Excellent, anything we left out?

Rosen: I don’t think so.

Witt: Great I am looking forward to using CivicSpace Labs. By the way, what do your parents think about you dropping out of college?

Rosen: Well, they are pretty excited. My father is also a college dropout – and a serial entrepreneur. I’m planning on going back to school though. I do want to complete my degree.

Witt: Great, thanks again. Keep us informed as things develop.

Rosen: Sure thing.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 4th, 2004 at 9:44 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.