The New Power Review
Series one, episode one
Hello and welcome to the first edition of The New Power Review.
This fortnightly newsletter will highlight the signal in the noise around ‘new power’ — a term coined in this short article from Heimans and Timms. From global technology platforms to local co-operative services, we’ll be asking: What is new power? Who has it? How can it be harnessed, channeled or created for the public good? What power is emerging in our communities and in new civic spaces? Where are the growing organisations that channel new power? What new challenges does such power create? How are our public institutions responding?
We’ll be looking for cutting edge examples of peer-to-peer organising, co-creation and platform cooperatives — the upsides and downsides — all through the lens of an ultimate aim of more equal political power. We’ll especially be highlighting new roles or opportunities within organisations approaching social change or public services with new power thinking.
Throughout, we’ll want to learn about new projects and consider this topic together — reply with your thoughts, and pass this email on.
If you missed the launch discussion last night, you can catch up via YouTube. (YouTube, now two billion users strong, is itself a beautiful example of old power (venture capitalists) capturing a new power idea (‘now everyone can broadcast themselves!’). What might have been had YouTube been owned by its ‘creators’ and viewers?) It’s worth watching the full discussion, but if you’re short on time, skip to Jeremy Heimans’ recap of ‘what is new power’ at five minutes in.
In this first edition of The New Power Review: we highlight the 20th birthday of one of the standout global examples of new power; we glimpse the future of labour organising in response to Deliveroo (and wonder about the lack of cycle delivery coops); we ask after your data science skills; we spot an unexpected old power institution wading into open source; and we look at some of the responses to the negative effects of new power.
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📖 Wikipedia, the largest collaborative writing project in history, is looking for a new CEO. Twenty years old this year, Wikipedia has become one of the world’s top sources of information, written and rewritten by 280,000 editors per month. You can actually check out all the data on views and edits via this tool. Wikipedia represents both a poster child for crowdsourcing and an exemplar of the challenges faced in this kind of co-created product. Wikipedia has shown that ‘the internet’ could take on something as serious and high-brow as Encyclopedia Britannica, and win. In 2005, a study in Nature found that Wikipedia — then just four years old — was as accurate as Britannica, at least in terms of science articles. Britannica objected, but in 2010 printed its last book, and in 2012 opened up to user contributions... at least according to Wikipedia. Its parent company, The Wikimedia Foundation, is now recruiting for a new CEO. The job ad speaks to the challenges that crowdsourcing faces generally: the top two priorities for the incoming boss are inclusivity and diversity of the volunteer community, and the behaviour of users including ‘building software to support community governance’... Whomever they hire will have an important worldwide responsibility to show how best to channel the new power of their contributors.
🥡 Deliveroo, now valued at £10bn, is facing a new form of digital collective action from its riders. The Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB), a new union leading some of the response to the gig economy, and the Bureau Local, the locally focused wing of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, are partnering to crowdsource data on wages paid by the company, mobilising to help force transparency and encourage a fairer approach. This kind of collective action — organised online, where many people input, at whatever time suits them, is the ‘new power’ here. If you order from Deliveroo, ask your rider to upload their invoices! Deliveroo recently partnered with The Cooperative Group to offer superfast delivery from their local shops. The cooperative model of co-ownership is about as new power as it gets — and demonstrates that the concept of horizontal, shared power is more than a recent tech-related fad. The partnership might seem like an opportunity missed for the Coop, which must have considered the development of a cooperative cycle delivery group, run by and for the riders and customers. Deliveroo’s scale probably helped tip the balance in their favour, so while there are experiments in cooperative cycle delivery underway in several cities — with tech support provided by a global CoopCycle platform — it’s important to ask how more cooperative solutions could match the speed and scale of venture-funded organisations, if we’re going to share the new wealth that such power creates.
🦄 It’s said that one of the reasons that these startup ‘unicorns’ — young tech companies with a value of over $1bn — are so valuable, is not because of their projected profits (Uber and Deliveroo are yet to be profitable), but because of the data they collect. And data is power. (There are even debates about what kind of metaphor for its power is most suitable.) So how are your data science skills? How can we make sure everyone has access to the power that holding data brings? DataKind is a worldwide network of thousands of data scientists who volunteer their skills to help good organisations build their own abilities to gather, use or visualise data. As they put it: ‘most social change organizations don’t have the budget or staff to take full advantage of this data revolution and most data scientists don't realize just how valuable their skills can be.’ The UK chapter of DataKind is recruiting for a team coordinator to support their mission to ensure organisations that pursue social change are ‘making full, responsible use of data science to increase their impact.’ Somewhat related: this thread on why if you want to change things in government, you’ll need good databases.
🕵️♀️ On the ‘data is power’ theme, here’s an interesting new power role in a very old power institution: Lead Analyst and Deputy Head of Open Source at the Foreign Office. As the FCDO puts it, ‘the UK Government is increasingly reliant on our ability to analyse large amounts of open source data in order to shape policy decisions’. In this case, the decisions in question are about disinformation campaigns in Eastern Europe. And the Foreign Office isn’t the only institution analysing vast amounts of data in the disinformation space. Perhaps the mandarins were inspired by Bellingcat, the open source investigation organisation. Bellingcat uses tools like flight-tracking, Google Earth and research across social media, to achieve spectacular discoveries, such as the unmasking of the Salisbury poisoners and those responsible for the downing of flight MH17. Their full playbook, should you want to become an open source investigator, is online here.
🤬 While we’re on disinformation, it’s not the only problem created by the new power of horizontal or peer-to-peer social media platforms. Where Facebook et al were once talked of as the new global public square — the agora through which we’d have enlightened conversations across borders — instead, social media has a serious problem with hate speech. Hate speech is not an easy thing to define — we’ll revisit this problem in future newsletters. Civil society has begun to respond, and one of the leading organisations in this space is the Center for Countering Digital Hate, currently recruiting three roles. Their work involves ‘exposing individuals and networks behind online hate and misinformation; introducing costs for those seeking to spread hate and misinformation; and providing public advice to stop their spread online.’ One of their projects, to stop the funding of fake news, mobilises new power in the form of a coordinated group of online volunteers who publicly ‘call out’ companies whose adverts appear on fake news websites.
⚓️ Questions about data, its power, who harnesses it, who owns it, whether there are limits on its use, are major policy questions of our time. Which is why it’s probably a good thing that there is now a new public body, the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation to investigate these questions. It’s currently recruiting a new board. The Centre is ‘tasked by the Government...to develop the right governance regime for data-driven technologies’. While it seems a step in the right direction, the state of thinking about data in the UK Government isn’t terribly clear at the moment, as this remarkable sea shanty (a meme borrowed from TikTok users — it doesn’t get much more new power than this folks) explains. Follow the link from the shanty to the full edition of the useful Data Bytes series on the use of data in government.
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Thanks for reading, more soon. We’re all ears 👂for feedback, questions or examples of new power. Just reply to this email.
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