The agenda to use social web 2.0 media tools to promote civil society is in full force, and now in full debate. It accompanies the larger debate about revolutions, politics, governance and social media, exemplified by Malcolm Gladwell’s recent article on Revolutions and Social Media and my my recent response, as printed in the New Yorker two weeks ago. As always with new media technologies,the skeptics have come out – disputing the ability for technologies to work across borders, in local contexts, with much emphasis placed on their unintended, dystopic consequences. Yet I believe that tools and programs launched by governments agencies such as the Department of State can show effectiveness, if they focus on building technologies and approaches that are lightweight, flexible, and involve a low barrier of entry for participation.

The eDiplomacy office within the Department of State (e-Diplomacy Office), led by Richard Boly, and Secretary of State’s Office of Innovation has recently launched its Civil Society 2.0 program, intended to support the local, grassroots work being done by non-governmental organizations worldwide who are doing the work of generating a ‘civil society’, and supporting democratic possibilities that resonate with American diplomatic interests. The Civil Society 2.0 project focuses on linking carefully selected NGOs, developing tools for NGO use, and providing resources that NGOs can use to their benefit. Civil Society can sometimes be a confusing term that we loosely play with, so the detailed  Wikipedia entry may be useful to look at. The project has been discussed by Fast Company here and is focused on familiarizing selected NGOs with important new media crowdsourcing and disaster preparedness tools, and linking these NGOs with technologists and tool builders.

An  i-Revolution post reponded to Daniel Drezner’s (law professor at Tufts’ Fletcher School) critique of this program. Drezner focuses his argument on the possibility of ‘information cascades’, relatively spontaneous, viral waves of protests that can occur in reaction to a defined event, such as an election. He points out that both liberalizing grassroots organizations as well as bureaucratic states can benefit from new media technologies, and that in open societies, civil society movements are more empowered via the internet versus in more repressive regimes, ostensibly where the Dept. of State is focusing as well. In authoritarian states, by stemming the flow of information, the state can maintain its control though lose the economic benefits it may gain from lowered transaction costs, all part of the ‘information revolution’. In contrast, by opening up its information networks, the state may promote the types of strong and weak-tied organizing activities that could impact its ability to maintain authoritarian power.

The point that Drezner emphasizes, however, is with internet technologies, illiberal, potentially anti-Ameican agendas and groups may be mistakenly promoted by Civil Society 2.0. That is, the resources and networks the initiative fosters can promote agendas by groups that hold aspirations and values counter to the American diplomatic interests. Other bloggers, such as Nancy Scola have weighed in with their support of Drezner’s position, arguing that the vast variety of organizations and agendas in the world is too complex to be effectively impacted by an initiative such as Civil Society 2.0.

Scola (and implicitly Drezner) are advancing an argument that is common today – that social media technologies often generate unanticipated effects, and that the cultural populations they engage have different practices and realities that diverge from what the creators of Civil Society 2.0 are designing for. I have made similar arguments in my writing, arguing that tools forced upon diverse cultures and communities for passive consumption and information access usually fail to sustain in those environments. Instead, I have noted that either one needs to develop tools that are locally cognizant (resonating with local, fluid ontologies), or that the tools need to be built around human relationships and a design that is open, lightweight, and flexible enough to allow them to be used in unanticipated manners. One talk I gave on this general topic can be found here. Yet to throw out the baby out with the bathwater in this project is unfair. This project seems to give explicit language to engaging NGOs in active forms of use of technologies that worked in many environments (such as Ushahidi, and some mobile banking platforms), and also by being built around human relationships and focused design strategies (in terms of linking technologists with NGOs), the process for creating locally, contextually-cognizant technologies is increased.

This countering of the easy dismissal of new media’s potential parallels my response to to Gladwell’s criticism of social media’s power in impacting grassroots movement (blog post). In this post, I argued that one indeed needs to look at the context of the networks formed around the technology access to see whether the initiative empowers an authoritarian state, a pro-Western grassroots agenda, or another grassroots movement that holds its own potentially subversive agenda. The study I conducted, with Anthropologist Adam Fish, was based in Kyrgyzstan where we uncovered that localized technology access and use in the hands of carefully chosen partners (in this case bloggers who were more aligned with American interests) did refine strong ties, through the creation of strategies, mission statements, and strategies for outreach. This may not have directly caused the recent Kyrgyz change in government, but was certainly a tool in the hands of some involved in the movement.

What is the implication of all this for Civil Society 2.0? Clearly, the project and its specific components need to be analyzed in the field environments and over-time, but Scola’s conclusion that its future is a roll of the dice seems ungrounded from the specifics of Drezner’s critique. The internet is generative and associative of a variety of different forms of networked publics, some of which may resonate with American interests. Yet, the question with this inititative, is how effective is it at : (1) vetting and selecting the appropriate organizations, (2) how lightweight, flexible, and easily usable are the tools that are designed/generated, (3) how ‘culturally aware/appropriate’ are these tools, and (4) how well do the tools enable for organization and planning to occur either within and between the organizations it works with. It seems clear that the more bureaucratically impositional the project gets the more likely it will be to be culturally mismatched with the environments in which the organizations operate. If this initiative can function in a lightweight manner with low-overhead and visibility and start with a few small pilot studies in low-risk environments, then possibility for it to circumvent these problems increases. Perhaps the goal may be then to create simple linkages between organizations, quietly arm them with resources they request, and in the spirit of Ushahidi observe the interventions’ effects over time, with a sense of what the correct data is to be measured.