Social networking for social movements

hi folks,

I make websites as a job and currently I'm working with riseup.net collective (not as member, but independent contractor, meh) to program social network software for anarchists, organizers and activists. It's called crabgrass (the bane of suburban lawns and the true grassroots). I write the code (in Ruby on Rails, javascript, erb html and sass if you care), which is deployed by other people to create social networks. We call crabgrass a 'social organizing platform'

Riseups own network can be found at we.riseup.net

We have about 4000-5000 users on the network and many groups. But don't have good data how active people are on our network and how it is used.

I would greatly appreciate if the clever communists of libcom took the time to check out this website and to criticize it. Create an account, find some groups, be the first to create a group for your organization and play around with the different types of pages. Officially we're still in 'alpha' stage, so have a heart if you find a glitch (and PM it to me)

The main idea is you have users, who join groups. Anyone can create a group. Several groups can combine themselves into a network. Each user can create Pages, a page can be an image upload, a wiki, a survey, a gallery, a discussion page (like a very simple forum thread), a page where other users can vote on a question, an event calendar (work in progress), etc. Each page is attached to either a user, a group or a network and has a list of groups, users and networks which are allowed to see it or modify it. Each user has a personal page a bit like facebook.

Like any software, this is tailored for a particular use and our hope is that it can be useful for workplace and social organizing. There are many political assumptions in how we coded this software, starting with security and anonymity as prime concerns and ending with several types opinion poll pages, one of which is inspired by the consensus process. It's called 'approval vote'. There, any participants can create any number of proposals and other participants can check each proposals as 'good', 'ok', 'bad', 'no'. It works nicely because you can see peoples names next to each choice for each proposal and can see a good layout of what people think. Another type of opinion poll is a 'ranked vote', where people sort the proposals in order of preference. This would take a long time to tabulate in a real life meeting, but on crabgrass a poll could be created for a couple of days and people can respond whenever they have time.

The 'ranked vote' tool is pretty useful for deciding on meeting times (crabgrass developers have used internally), but that only needs to be done once in a long while and for most people it might just be easier to call on the phone (especially since many don't have/don't like the internet). Bigger decisions need to be made in real meetings anyway. We have tools for uploading files and images, which I found useful for sharing files with other people who don't even need to know anything about crabgrass. Our most popular type of page is the wiki, which is highly developed and pretty full featured.

The large reason I'm writing post is because I have never used these tools except for organizing the development of crabgrass itself. But I haven't been involved in class-struggle anarchist movement that long either. So the input from people who have done it is very value.

Some days I wonder if this software can ever be useful in a way that we hope, but I agree with the broad idea that technology has been helpful for people to organize against capital, while capital has used technology to organize workers and society for itself at the same time. So we must use technology and we must tailor it for our own needs of self-organizations as workers. So as a technology worker I want to make technology that strengthens us, but without being a part of broad struggle I am acting like as an activist who likes to 'create means of self empowerment' for those people other there. This is very unsatisfying, but I'm just a programmer writing code and don't have such a great idea other than to participate in groups I think have the right idea (like Copwatch or IWW here in the West Coast USA) and see how they manage their communications and technology. I'd like to hear your ideas about this as well.

Finally, I haven't been involved with this project for very long (only several months), but I know that historically it comes from the same anti-globalization current that gave birth to indymedia. The idea was that people who declare themselves to be against capitalism and struggle to that end (I'm being intentionally broad), should create their own digital media infrastructure. A sound idea in my mind, but here criticism is welcome too.

sorry this is bit long, I hope people take the time to read and respond. I'm not sure if I should post this in organise or theory forums, because I'm interested in both, but foremost I want to know if people can use this for their organizing.