Tuesday morning will see the second meeting of those interested in establishing a Social Web Task Force for the City of New Haven. I’ve written a little bit about this in #swct Social Media and Civic Involvement Redux and Embracing the Untaskforce, Social Media and Civic Involvement - #swct. Andre Yap wrote about this in The New Haven Project: 100 Common Visions in 100 Days and Brandon Jackson has written about this in New Haven 2.0. Now, we need to start fleshing out what this really means.

To some, this seems like a brave new idea. To me, it seems like a continuation of e-democracy work that has been done since the mid-nineties at sites like e-democracy.org. On an e-democracy mailing list the other day, I received an email about CityCamp.

CityCamp is an "unconference" focused on innovation for municipal governments and community organizations. As an unconference, content for CityCamp is not programmed for a passive audience of participants. Instead, content is created and organized by participants and coordinated by facilitators and participants are expected to play an active role in sessions...

The first CityCamp was held in Chicago, Illinois, 23-24 January, 2010. CityCamp is inspired by Transparency Camp and Gov 2.0 Camp.

(For more information on GovCamp, check out my posts about Gov 2.0 Camp in Boston last March: #gov20ne pregame and New Government Meets New Media.)

Yet CityCamps, Gov 2.0 Camps and related camps are often just for a day or two. Some interesting ideas and projects may spin off of them, but they are not ongoing efforts that make significant use of the social web to bring in people who are not already interested. This, I believe, is where the Social Web Task Force can innovate. How do we create a perpetual virtual CityCamp?

It seems like there are two parts to this. One is the technology. Barcamps, which include CityCamp, Gov 2.0 Camp and so many other gatherings, often use Wiki’s for their organizing, in particular, PBWikis. It works very well for geeks and people who get online collaboration. It may be that a Wiki, either using PBWiki, or a hosted MediaWiki would be a good backbone for the Social Web Task Force.

Often barcamps have their own websites frequently, they use Wordpress for ease of use and attractive designs. Sometimes they use Drupal or other platforms that are better suited to collaboration but lose some of the ease of use or attractive designs as a trade-off. This includes the ability of members to form their own groups and to allow wiki style collaboration within these groups.

Ning has also long been a favorite of people working on collaborative groups. Unfortunately, Ning is proprietary and has been going through difficulties as they attempt to find a revenue model that works. Elgg is an open source competitor to Ning, but I do not know of anyone using Elgg for barcamp related sites. (If people know of examples, please let me know, I’m very interested in seeing them.)

This leads us to the other part of establishing a perpetual virtual CityCamp; community building. This includes reaching out to people that are already online using sites like Facebook or Twitter. It includes reaching out to organizations that already have established online presences, the way existing non-profit, advocacy or government organizations already have. It also includes reaching out to people that are not already using social media or already aware of various organizations’ existing websites. In addition, this needs to be an ongoing effort.

So, how might a perpetual virtual CityCamp work? In a typical barcamp, participants arrive. The way barcamps work is explained. There is an initial session where ideas are presented, and then the time and place for different sessions based on these ideas are posted and people head off to the sessions.

For a perpetual barcamp, there needs to be a constant introduction to how barcamps work for new people as they come along. The introduction could be a simple, fairly static page.

The sessions need to be ongoing, and not just an hour in some breakout room. There needs to be the ability to continuously create new sessions. In many ways, this could be handled by a website that enables new groups to be created, such as with Drupal or Elgg.

The question becomes, as more and more ideas get floated, how do newcomers find the sessions that are most interesting to them. Brandon suggested having some sort of voting mechanism. However, voting mechanisms are faulty in several ways.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that too often online, people vote, and don’t get involved. What is necessary to make a perpetual virtual CityCamp work is a doacracy mentality. Votes don’t matter, actions do.

On top of that, voting will tell new people what most of the people who bother to vote are interested in. It doesn’t help people find what they are interested in. To a certain extent, this could be handled if people saw vote totals based on how their friends are voting instead of how everyone is voting, and if there was a time decay on the voting. A vote three years ago by someone with diametrically opposed interests is of little value. A problem with this is that a newcomer often won’t have friends whose votes they trust.

Related to this is the issue of moderation. To the extent that moderation keeps out spam, it is necessary. However, relying on what moderators think is most important has the same problem as relying on what the population as a whole thinks is most important. Instead, it needs to be made easy for visitors to find what they think is important.

One final issue which Brandon brings up is how centralized a site needs to be. At a barcamp, there is the central location where people gather to determine which sessions are interesting. Important discussions take place in this central location. However, most of the barcamp takes place in breakout rooms away from the central room. In a virtual barcamp, these breakout rooms might more logically be in completely different virtual spaces. People may want to use an existing website belonging to a non-profit organization or a government website. This should be encouraged, while at the same time, providing the means for people to create their own virtual space as part of the perpetual virtual CityCamp website.

In addition, for any session I am working with, I would want to have as many outreach options as possible, including Twitter, Facebook, as well as other more specific tools, such as SeeClickFix or Intelliblast. A good perpetual virtual CityCamp website should be a hub that people connect to and pass through, yet it should not try to be a be all and end all.

It will be interesting to see what comes out of the New Haven Social Web Task Force meeting on Tuesday morning. If you have ideas to share, please let me know, and if you’re interested and in New Haven, please consider coming to City Hall at 9:30.