Ending Activist Data Silos

As the years go by, more and more organizations are creating networking sites (either just plain directories, or schmancy social networking ones).

Unfortunately everyone is creating their own proprietary site. The data that they are collecting, whether they admit it or not, is effectively owned by them - as it has nowhere that it can easily go. Yes, these organizations are creating their very own Data Silo!

The problems of a data silo include
-Concentration of data in the hands of an elite. Users might be able to remove themselves from the site, but in general the site owners can do almost anything they want with their user base including choosing the campaigns they work on, choosing how they work on those campaigns, fundraising money, and otherwise shaping their actions by exerting the power of setting the agenda (ex. MoveOn asks its members to fund Democratic canidates, whereas it could be raising millions of dollars for United For Peace and Justice or other grassroots peace groups). Typically the owners of these sites aren't accountable or come from segmented organizations that do not represent the breadth of our social movements.

-Fragmentation of the data into many sites. Instead of having, for instance, a comprehensive groups directory or activist calendar - you get dozens of insufficient ones. The whole idea of a group directory or activist calendar may fail to take-off as it never reaches a critical mass of users. This is especially likely for activists as we have limited resources to fund these projects.

-Inaccessibility of the data. Outside of writing a bot to surf a site, gather all the pages, and scrape the data from them - the content is only available through the propreitary interface directly given on the site (as well as any rss feeds that they might provide) which may limit its potential.

-Increased errors. A single repository for data will make it easier to correct errors, and to maintain accuracy.

All of these problems can be solved by making your data available.

I don't know of another major activist site that makes data available as well as Campus Activism/Activism Network. Using SOAP web services, I've made available everything that I could - without risking people's privacy. This includes making available everything except user account information (username, password), and personal email addresses (to avoid spam).

The end of data silos will come when organizations join us in making their data publicly available. Once you are doing this, it is up to other organizations to import your information into their system. Then we should begin to see meta sites that include activist networking information from multiple systems. The ball is in the other sites' courts to end their data silos!