essembly

I've been thinking a lot lately about the use of social networking for political organizing. An entire panel at this year's Personal Democracy Conference was devoted to the subject. Essembly has been hailed as "the political friendster." The GOP is experimenting with their own social software on their website, and there are rumors that Democrats are working to build their own social networking platform as well.

It's clearly a hot topic, but so far the solutions I've seen rub me the wrong way.

The problem seems to be this: The attraction of social networking politics (for me, at least) is that it offers an opportunity to expand the sphere of continued political participation outside of the election cycle, and beyond a core group of highly politicized people. Yet by creating new social networking sites from scratch, many of the solutions I see today don't go beyond core outreach or establish siloed communities of like-minded folks.

If the question is "how can social networking give a particular party a tactical advantage?" then some some these solutions make sense (albeit in a limited way). If the question is "how can social networking make our democracy more participatory," (which I think it should be) then the answer isn't to rip-off MySpace and build a brand new social networking tool from scratch (Why would you try to create a community from whole-cloth when the communities you want to reach already exist?). The answer is that we should figure out how to integrate political organizing into already existing social networking communities.

Right now, I don't see many people doing that - at least not successfully. The closest example I could find to a best practice w/r/t social networking and politicswas Russ Feingold's My Space profile (link through the picture above). It's interactive, its clearly updated, and with over 4,000 friends, whoever is running it is clearly trying to maximize the network effects that a good My Space profile can generate.

But as I mentioned, some of these other social networking sites - while probably not capable of the great, sweaping structural change that I'd like to see in our politics, do offer some great tactical advantages and lessons to be learned. There is clearly a lot to explore here.

So that's what this is all about. I'm signing up for as many of these sites as I can - and Future Majority will be creating accounts - on MySpace, Flickr, Odeo, YouTube, Essembly, etc. I'll be writing regularly about what I see as the strengths, weaknesses, and best uses of some of these technologies - mostly in the context of organizing Millenials for progressive political purposes.

Read my spot observations on some of these strategies/websites after the jump.