SolidarityRank - A Pro-Sharing and Trust System to Encourage Progressive Movement Building

I think some kind of SolidarityRank system should exist that could be comparable to Google's PageRank, but based on activist/progressive values and used to encourage people and organizations to democratically create and share activist content.

In some ways it might differ from Google PageRank, particularly if you buy into the arguments that PageRank is much less important than it was 2 years ago (and knowing that Google uses 100+ factors in determining search engine rankings). But, I'm a geeky webmaster, and PageRank is the closest parallel I have.

SolidarityRank could also be compared to giving kindergarten kids stickers to motivate them: it works!

SolidarityRank could be viewed as points that you'd acquire by doing movement-building activities, and you could spend them on promoting your organization or individual cause. Thus you could keep your points for yourself or donate them to one or several organizations. Or you could just acquire lots of SolidarityRank and everyone would know what a nice person/group you are =)

Getting Points
-Adding a person, group, event, resource (file) to the distributed network of activist contacts (e.g. Activism Network or something similar)
-Updating a person, group, event, resource (or suggesting an update).
-Donating money or time. Perhaps focussing on donations to the infrastructure of the SolidarityRank system (though ideally to other movement-building institutions, such as trainings or the collaborative development of materials).
-Language translation of a material.
-Conversion of a material into a different format (PDF, Word Document, Text) to make it more accessible to different users.
-More points would be awarded for production of a material according to a Creative Commons license that lets it be distributed and modified for free.
-Getting two or more organizations to work together.
-Participation in a progressive campaign. Ex. writing an update on your group's participation in a campaign.
-Off-line participation (???). Event attendance. Participation in a conference call. (This is tricky because the primary goal of SolidarityRank is to encourage online participation, however in many cases off-line participation is more effective.)
-Moderating the SolidarityRank system. Or acting as a mentor/facilitator to get people involved in it.
-Getting other people to do any of the above (think: pyramid scheme).
-Getting an organization to adopt a systemic Creative Commons license that applies to all or most of their materials.
-Getting an organization to implement other pro-sharing policies (e.g. first get them to release it on their website, second get them to syndicate it, and ultimately get them to syndicate it following a common standard and be published under a creative commons license).
-Participating in an Action Alert (see my system for Democratic Action Alerts).
-You'd get more points depending on how popular your shared content is.

Spending Points
In general, you'd buy priority. So that activists could choose how much email traffic they wanted to get (by issue, network, campaign, geography, etc) and if you wanted your message to reach them AND use the network's database - then you'd have to spend points. Spammers would get penalized and lose SolidarityRank.
-Buying an action alert.
-Special emailings that emphasize an event or campaign of your organization.
-Giving your event, resource, or organization a special priority rating in the distributed content system. A website that displays the upcoming events could choose to use this priority system by listing high-priority events first, or in a special color or font.
-Using your points to encourage someone to create content. For instance, you could put a call out for someone to write a leaflet on a certain issue, or to organize a conference. Other people could donate points to the cause - and whoever helps write the material or organize the conference could get the points.




Losing Points
-Spammers, or semi-spammy groups or people would lose points based on feedback from system participants. Eg if people think an appeal was spammy (off-topic, offensive, not progressive, or sent outside the framework of the SolidarityRank system using spammy-tactics) then they could vote to penalize the responsible party.
-Anti-democratic and sectarian practices could be penalized (though it might make more sense just to reward pro-democracy and pro-cooperation ones).
-Inactivity could lead to a loss of points. If an organization or person is inactive, then they are effectively less and less in solidarity and should have their points reduced. For instance, you might want to delete 10% of unused points every year. So the SolidarityRank would be measured over a ten-year period. Or you could have various SolidarityRank values for different time periods (the 1 year, 3 year, 5 year, 10 year, and lifetime values) which would promote longterm solidarity (a good thing).

Possible SolidarityRank Problems
One needs to be careful to avoid turning it into a popularity contest where the organization with the most members wins. The problem with so-called "merit-based" systems (ex. one vote per download or viewing of a piece of content) is that they will favor the replication of power structures. In this case, activist organizations with the most resources could benefit the most from SolidarityRank. Some kind of positive factor for content from groups that are typically underrepresented on the Internet could alleviate this, as could outreach.

Another problem is figuring out how valuable things are in relation to each other. For instance, how many points should you get for adding a person (yourself) versus adding a group, versus uploading a file?

Determining ownership. This might get contentious, as owning a profile could prove powerful if that organization has acquired a lot of SolidarityRank. How do you ensure that the person who has the email address it the legitimate contact? On another issue, how do you distinguish between someone who created a file or organized an event - and someone who just added it to the network?


Solidarity Rank - The Toolbar
Putting this in a browser toolbar would be super amazing!


The Long Run
Ultimately you could have an activist-ranked Internet. You could do this using Firefox extension: Lijit (or a variant of it). It gets tricky if you try to get too political as you could have a LiberalRank and a RadicalRank with different values. You might also want to rank groups based on race, gender, class, sexual orientation or other constituencies or their stand on certain issues. Lijit is a possible model for doing this.