Slow and Steady…

Since there has been a good deal of recent discussion about Z’s site redesign and their appeal for more participation, I am copying below the letter Michael Albert sent to sustainers on Monday, February 2nd, asking for them to contribute more to ZCom.

Dear Marcus Denton,

We want to ask your help. Not financial. Not even ideological. We want your energy and creativity!

We are trying to turn Z Communications into a diverse mechanism for internet networking. Thanks to a large circle of writers and activists we already have a steady flow of quality writing and multimedia about current events, analysis, vision, etc. We also have a large number of Sustainers, like yourself, signed up for our community and supporting our efforts with donations.

What we don’t have, yet, however is a mindset among our users that ZCom can be your online home, not only a source of news, analysis, and vision, but also a daily means for networking, planning, and interacting.

When that idea takes hold so that users like yourself become more active not only in consulting its content but in using and contributing to ZCom, then ripple effects will accelerate both the number and creativity of Writers and Sustainers.

Probably because they were earlier and wealthier in the endeavor, commercial operations like Facebook have long since achieved this high level user commitment including even for many people who treat these intellectually uninvolved, politically alienated, commercially compromised, profit seeking, corporate organizations as their online home - even while seeing ZCom as far more worthy operation to consult and support.

Please note, we are not suggesting that people should no longer mingle in venues where huge numbers of unaffiliated folks congregate. But we would like people to mingle and organize there in order to reach out, while you see ZCom as the place where you add to output, not just use it. In other words, we want to inspire you to have ZCom as your home not just for content, but also for networking, and to have Facebook or other social networking sites be places you visit while away from home, to reach out to new audiences.

What we want to achieve, is for our Writers and Sustainers, and even our free members and just users, to see ZCom as a place where you place your personality and ingenuity online to interact with your friends and particularly your potential activist allies. We want you to see ZCom’s features and content as yours to access, but also to enlarge and diversify, critique and enrich.

Over the last year we have made “technical strides” toward fulfilling this ambitious purpose for our users. We have added ZSpace, diverse friends facilities, forums (which we are soon going to redo and vastly simplify and improve), generalized commenting, blogs for Writers and Sustainers, uploading virtually any content to your pages, much more multimedia from you and us, group pages and intergroup planning and communications, and quite a bit more, as well.

We have also put up instructional videos to help people use the features. We have steadily simplified the interactive processes, most recently adding what we call QuickEdit, which makes user participation and updating of user content quite simple - to be simplified even further, and enriched further as well, shortly. We have even begun an online school, and we have much more coming.

Soon features for reviewing books and other content in our databases will be easier to use with your ensuing contributions more visible, plus greater ease in adding content to the databases and searching them, including registering tallies of preferences and easily seeing what others recommend.

Soon we will also add means to easily contact your friends, chat on line, message on line, and meet online, and in a few months, Writers and Sustainers will even be able to very easily adapt the ZNet top page and the top ZSpace page as well as your own personal ZSpace pages to appear for you, when you access them, however you like - leaving off content you don’t want to see there, and adding and featuring content you do want to regularly keep track of or want visitors to your personal page to see. We will also be adding means for people to get to know one another more easily and deeply and to work on mutual projects together, including job seeking and offering, and much more.

But all this will sadly be only a drain on funds and time - unless folks participate. Without you a growing features array will be just an empty shell of un-utilized options. Unless you take the infrastructure and run with it your way, it might as well not be there.

And in that light, we hope steadily more folks will see that with increased participation there will be much more growth and improvement, so that ZCom will become a better social networking platform, at least for serious and purposeful political engagement, than even the gargantuan Facebook and MySpace.

However, there is another obstacle we must overcome to succeed. Even after people realize that there is great potential in ZCom, they can doubt that that potential will be actualized, and can as a result decide to lay back - utilizing content, of course, and maybe putting up a brief bio and photo, but not engaging more actively than that. Indeed, most Sustainers and Writers, we think, have adopted just that sort of wait and see attitude already - to avoid investing time and energy in something that then doesn’t pan out.

Okay, caution can be a very prudent attitude, sometimes, we agree. But with the evidence of possibility accumulating, we think the time has come for many more Sustainers and Writers to say, “hey, this really is moving. These ZCom staff are not going to give up. It is possible to engage. In fact, the only obstacle to ZCom becoming a major social networking tool for activists is whether I and others like me make it happen - and I could myself benefit in the process. All I have to do is do a little blogging, enrich my ZSpace page with a bio and a picture, comment occasionally on other people’s posts, add some preferences I have, and maybe add some content I like too. I could perhaps try the forums, maybe even the school. I could get the people I want to interact with online to join me via ZCom, and perhaps create a group page, together - and beyond all that, if the ZCom staff then comes through as promised, there will be lots more options to benefit from.”

Now of course we very well know that there are many Sustainers who have already adopted that mindset. Many of you have already made good use of the blog system, of commenting, of uploading options, of the forums, and so on. And indeed, maybe that includes you Marcus Denton. But, in truth, even if it does include you, and even if it includes all your friends, still, as of now out of all our donating Sustainers and Writers only about twenty percent have put up even just a bio and a picture - much less participating beyond that.

As a result the Sustainers and Writers who are tending the garden of creative contribution that others are admiring, are doing it under staffed. Too few people are watering, much less planting, in our social network. As impressive as the blog system entries and accumulating comments and graphics and other user sections already are, and as inspiring as the ZSpace pages and diversity of backgrounds of Sustainers already are, they are only a fraction of what they could be - and they are still less than needed if everyone’s efforts are to synergistically multiply one another.

So that’s our pitch. That’s our hope.

We have worked hard and are now absolutely certain that we can have an engaged, growing, creative, activist, visionary, insightful and educative online social networking home for thousands, tens of thousands - if we all want to make it happen.

So what’s it going to be?

If, overall, users choose to passively consume the content we provide - that’s okay - it is certainly valuable and we will keep providing, keep expanding, keep doing what we can in that familiar manner. But if you decide to make ZCom a more engaged community site, with more diversely produced and displayed content, and with growing levels of mutual interactivity - that will be considerably more valuable!

The only hurdle to making it happen is our habits. The technical aspect is manageable. There is no legal or otherwise oppressive barrier blocking us from succeeding. Even the financial aspect is manageable. We can have a technically and socially more diverse and functional, financially sustainable social networking venue and put it to vastly better use, than anything the billion dollar commercial corporate world offers - if we only want it enough.

Do we?

We hope so,

Michael Albert

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 8th, 2009 at 10:11 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.