Transcript

Reinventing Local Democracy in the Digital Age

January 12, 2012

Download the original attachment

0:00:0

MICAH SIFRY: Hi everybody, this is Micah Sifry, Personal Democracy Media and you are listening to the latest in the on-going series of Personal Democracy Plus conference calls that we do here regularly with movers in the field of political technology, civic engagement, online media, you name it.

And this week we’re looking forward to talking with Conor White-Sullivan who has the distinction, which will be hard for him to lose of having been the youngest speaker ever grace the stage of Personal Democracy Forum, that was actually two years ago, was it not?

CONOR WHITE-SULLIVAN: Two and a half years ago, yeah.

MICAH SIFRY: Yeah, when he was just finishing up his undergraduate studies and running a really interesting project called Localaucracy which we’re going to be talking about a bit on this call. He has already burned through achievement by selling Localaucracy to AOL and The Huffington Post, which is where he is working now doing editorial technology and product development around community engagement, and I’m really looking forward to talking with Conor who has, and continues to be at the cutting edge of thinking and working on the problem of how you do community engagement in an age where we are all networked and where there are new possibilities to connect people online and offline and so we’re going to come at it from several different angles.

And I promised Conor that we’re not going to get into trade secrets of what’s being cooked up at The Huffington Post but we can get him to pull the curtain back a little bit and share with us some of what he’s thinking about and learning.

So, without any further adieu, welcome Conor and it would be great if maybe you quickly gave us a little bit of your history and why you started Localaucracy, what was your goal? What did you learn from it? How are you applying the lessons learned to your new work in terms of online and online community engagement, whether it’s Huffington Post or other big sites that have big, digital footprints, what we can learn from all that.

Take it away!

CONOR WHITE-SULLIVAN: Sure, so the way – I guess the way I’ll start the story is in 2008 I had been studying anthropology and I’d been really interested in how technology changes culture. When you look back to the Stone Age to agriculture to the Industrial Revolution, every time we’ve had major changes in technology and especially changes in communication, it led to some pretty significant cultural and political changes that followed.

So, I was really interested in and I’d started sort of studying and researching how the internet could be having an impact in culture and was getting really interested in some of the theoretical stuff that was getting written. I was really interested in (sounds like: Yoka Bankler) and all the stuff that (inaudible) and all the other sort of people that are in the PDF circle’s were interested in.

And then I remember I was up late in the library one night and a friend of mine, I had been studying Arabic and a friend of mine was from Saudi, Arabia. And he showed me a website that – or he showed me a Facebook page that had launched a few days before and it was actually the – I saw that the April 6 movement as it was – like just as it was going into 2008 with the first strikes that happened, coordinated by Facebook and text messaging.

And so I started to think that you know, as the web took this power of the people connected this sort of new infrastructure which started to be used to change politics and so I decided that was the area that I really wanted to work in.

At the same time, the Barack Obama movement was sort of – like especially for people in college – it was sort of sweeping across the country. I ended up going to down to help out the primaries and when the summer came along, I’d actually been -- before that I’d done like grass roots marketing for a natural beverage company before and then I’d been a construction worker, but I decided I wanted to get into organizing.

So, the first thing that I could do that was remotely in that space because I had no experience was actually going door to door as a campaign server, working for an environmental organization that was trying to pass state legislature, pass some climate change legislature and carbon tax --

0:05:10

--legislature through the Massachusetts State Senate. But as I was going door to door in this sort of industrialized, industrial-minded organization where we were knocking on doors, asking for petition signatures and donations, I was running – so that we could pay lobbyists and pay ad ops writers – I was running into people who just because it was Cambridge and Boston and – I mean, you couldn’t really throw a rock without hitting a PhD student of some kind.

So, I was finding people that actually had really specific domain knowledge and also had personal life stories that were really relevant, but they weren’t being connected with their legislators and they weren’t being connected with their neighbors. And to me that felt like an incredibly missed opportunity.

So, I was actually only there for probably a month-and-a-half or so before I got an opportunity because I was doing okay as a canvasser goes, and because I had done some other – I’d organized a lot of my friends when I was doing the marketing things for that beverage group, I had a little bit of experience in terms of starting new things. So, they were opening an office with another related organization to help register low income and minority voters in Virginia, which was going to be a swing state.

So, I packed up my stuff, I moved down to Virginia and along with two others I opened that voter registration office there. And spent the rest of summer sort of going into low income and minority communities and registering voters and hiring canvassing staff and finding out – you know, I got a bunch of local businesses to let us use their property to canvass on and worked a little bit with churches to try and get their membership registered.

And that was also a great experience, but that ended up coming back because I wanted to do more stuff that was directly online. And so when I came back, I was still in college but the campaign for Sensible Marijuana Policy in – the Community for Central Marijuana Policy in Massachusetts was getting going on a campaign to de-criminalize marijuana en masse so I ended up getting a position there as the Western Mass Field Coordinator, sort of coordinating campus representatives and other folks across 13 districts in Western Mass where I was using a lot of online and some off line stuff.

And we use Facebook a lot in terms of trying to coordinate our membership and bring new people in and we built some pretty big Facebook groups but the sort of feeling I got out of that was that you know, the Facebook page was basically a digital lapel pin, you know? Or a digital pin, it was – you could have a million strong for Barack Obama but you know, you’ve got a million strong for cheese pizza, it wasn’t really anything that you could use as a qualified pool for organizing and it wasn’t something you could really use to pressure anyone.

But it was just a good way for the idea to spread about (inaudible), it was a good way for people to sort of have conversations with their friends, and there was plenty of value to is, but it wasn’t super useful as an organizing tool when we were trying to find point people, when we were trying to find all sorts of other stuff.

So, I started to get the idea of what would happen if you could – the other thing that happened while I was down South, I was also – after I – while I was in Virginia, I was actually staying on (sounds like: couch surfing), I was – there’s a network of 2 million people how have said, you know various other people who have had been sort of validated for reputation by other community members on that site can crash on my couch.

So, I had had a real like – my life had actually been directly impacted by this de-centralized network that had a trust system in it, so I was really interested in how that could be used and I was interested in how could we build a new sort of political infrastructure where you could get the best ideas from people. Because I had met a lot of people who had very different ideas than I did on – you know, on how we should govern and how various policies should be adopted in their communities.

And my sense was in these sort of times when we’ve got exponential change happening, especially from a tech sector and especially if you look at how the work force is changing and also other things. I saw big difficulties in the education system, big difficulties in the energy system, you know if we’re going to – when we end up hitting peak oil, which will happen at some point, how are we going to make these massive changes?

And to me I felt like people needed to feel like they were empowered and they were a part of the human change, working their community. It wasn’t just about a top / down change coming.

So, while I enjoyed the Obama movement, I felt like a lot of people were sort of putting their hopes in if we just elect on person who actually changes things, and I really didn’t feel like that was the case. I felt like if we were actually going to change anything about our society, we needed to really have people in power at the most local level where they could have real influence, and so I started to think about how that could happen online.

And then the whole – I’m kind of – tell me if I’m going too long or –

MICAH SIFRY: No, no – yeah, that’s Localaucracy –

CONOR WHITE-SULLIVAN: -- yeah, so basically that brought me to Localaucracy. And so Localaurcracy was then – it was the idea that I had talked up through that, or cooked up. And then I actually competed in a bunch of – I joined the UMass Entrepreneurship Initiative. I had originally not known that I was going to start a company with it, I was just – felt like I needed to find software engineers. I hadn’t actually been a sort of software engineer guy, and so I was going to the Entrepreneurship Initiative to try to find those sort of people and I found pretty quickly that you can’t just find engineers for your product, you have to really earn them because you can see their code but they can’t really see what your skill set is or why you should be the sort of person who they want to work with or for.

So, I had to find a way to get validated and ended up winning a few business plan competitions and a few things and so we started the company with $10,000 that I won through those competitions. And after that, I also got into a few other folks who had some – a lot of great tech experience. Actually after I won that prize, one of the first things I ever spent it on was my ticket to PDF, that was actually the first thing I spent that prize money on was I went out to PDF in 2009 and that’s where I met Jim Gillian who runs 3-DNA and he was running White House 2 at the time and I met a bunch of other great folks.

Jim actually was the guy who – him and a few other folks I knew back from Amherst were the ones who screened my potential tech co-founders. So, actually PDF sort of was right there at the beginning of Localaucracy in terms of that community.

And then Erin and I – my co-found, Erin Soles, we ended up building the company. Scott Hefferman from Meet Up had randomly – I don’t know how he saw it but he randomly saw a five-minute ignite talk I gave that fall before we launched and he invited me to come speak at the New York Tech Meet Up, and then that’s where I met Andrew and that’s how I ended up – and we launched then and we launched our first thing which is a platform that we confirm that registered voters using real names were on the site from that community. And they could say what the issues were people could vote for and against them and rank the best reasons.

Our goal was – it was sort of a two-sided petition that we could use to 1) help people who didn’t know too much about the issue really learn about the issue quickly and see it from sort of a free and balanced perspective; and then also because there were real people in that town they could sort of influence, much more directly, their elected representatives.

And so started with one town, you know, kept growing it out and you know, most of the issues that ended up happening were issues around schools, issues around roads and property taxes and as we grew it we found that you know, we needed a way to pay the bills and so we actually started working with news organizations because we found that political – you know, people who were elected weren’t really interested in paying anyone to make their lives more difficult by like aggregating this sort of constant comment. But new organizations are really interested in that because we were getting some really great participation from people and some really high-quality comments that people hadn’t seen before because on this site, what people said actually could have a real influence in what happened in their towns. So, people felt really engaged and put a lot of thought into it.

MICAH SIFRY: (Overlapping remarks) Yeah, I mean, we’ve covered Localaucracy in the past, I think it’s useful if maybe you could drill down a little bit further on what was the – I guess Amherst was probably the most robust iteration of your first one.

So, how many people got involved? What did you need to do to get folks involved? Any sense that at some point it took off on its own or started to have a life of its own? What was the – give us the best case scenario if you will of how it worked.

CONOR WHITE-SULLIVAN: So, the key thing for us was users had to feel like what they were participating in was going to have some level of impact in their community and really matter. And so the truth is for a hyper-local initiative, especially a hyper-local political initiative. We didn’t have any – sort of at the time – there was no, you know, Occupy Wall Street, no sort of mass media push that said people should get involved in a way that’s not the normal political system.

0:15:05

So, our user base was – we were expanding a lot further beyond the people who were normally going to town meetings, but at the same time these were communities where maybe 5,000 people were voting in local elections. And you know, we’d have 100 to 300 people participating in these debates and a few thousand people coming in and watching them regularly. So, these were not huge in terms of numbers ever just because of the area that we were interested in.

MICAH SIFRY: Yeah, but the town – how many – like what percentage of the local adult population are we talking about?

CONOR WHITE-SULLIVAN: So, what we had was sort of implied penetration which is out of the number of people who live in that town, we would compare (inaudible) and we would compare our registered users to it. And so when you’re looking at that – you want to compare it also to the people who make the effort to turn out to vote.

So, in a town we’re like – where 5,000 people vote in the election, we’d regularly be getting you know, like 8,000; 10,000 people looking at the site and we would get like 300 people participating actively. That to us was a pretty good penetration because we were getting more than the normal entry list to vote would be coming out and checking out these local issues.

And more than the five to 10 people who would come and speak publicly would weigh in. So eventually we wound up working on – and this is sort of what we were working on when we ended up being acquired – was more broad based sort of community-building solutions and more broad based ways of generating high-quality user engagement, that we started licensing the newspapers. So, those were the things – you know, at the end of the day the town common thing eventually sort of became kind of like the passion project that we kept running because we felt it was specifically important, but the core aspects of our business were actually trying to appeal to much larger – like much larger communities and doing something that was a little bit less specified.

Because we found that at that time there weren’t as many people who cared about their local community and you can’t really convince people to care unless you’ve got some larger movement or some larger arm. We were just providing a tool for them to participate and you have to kind of count on what people wanted to do. And we were able to make it easy enough that more people – you know, there’s always something special on the internet between how much time and how much energy people are willing to commit and what their motivation is.

And so we were able to lower the amount of time and energy it took to have a meaningful impact in that town, but we also have to try and like raise the motivation which is – you know, we would find ways to make sure that you know, through their interaction they’d end up – you know, some things that we did to end up building community fast or – like we’d only launch in towns when a certain number of people had signed up in advance. And then we would have a weekly email that would be shot out with the issue of the week and as users participated that would guarantee that they’d be able to bring back that larger community.

So, there were a few things that we’ve worked on, but the – you know, as we were building the site up, it was really – I think one of our main challenges in fact was for that aspect of the business, you know we had to deal with what people’s actual motivations were for local engagement.

MICAH SIFRY: So, are you saying, Conor that actually getting people to engage online at the very local level is – was, in your experience with Localaucracy, much harder than it appears? That you didn’t have sustained engagement? I think that’s what I’m sort of hearing in between the lines here –

CONOR WHITE-SULLIVAN: Yeah.

MICAH SIFRY: -- so can you –

CONOR WHITE-SULLIVAN: The key is we did have sustained engagement but actually we found that the issues that were getting sustained engagement weren’t happening every single day, right? So, actually we had really high engagement in these local issues when there were local issues that actually engaged people.

I think the sustained – the question is also do you go beyond the people who already care? So, there is a core group of people – like we had a lot of involvement from parents and from property – like people who paid their taxes and people who voted. Breaking that barrier from the people who already care enough that they’re reading the local news – and this is also why we started like selling software to newspapers and building there was because we found that you know, our audiences are the same audience that is reading the newspapers on a regular basis because they’re already somewhat informed and have a desire to be engaged.

I guess our original thought was you would get more people engaged that had ever been engaged before, but I think the reason we ended up working with media organization is because you tell folks a story and that makes people want to engaged and then you give them an avenue for engagement. It wasn’t actually just enough for us to provide an avenue for engagement, we have to provide a reason for them to want to. It kind of works well in a narrative sense, which is the reason why we ended up working with newspapers and news organizations.

0:20:0

MICAH SIFRY: Just stay on this for one more second; you know, the closest comparison I can think of to you know, what you were doing with Localaucracy is the folks at the Front Porch Forum who you know, grew out of initially the need for some newcomers to a neighborhood in Burlington to connect with their neighbors.

And what they did was more email list you know, than web based and it was also really, really local. I mean you know, each one of those forums are 150 neighbors who are really clustered around a common block or a few streets, whereas here you were doing a whole town.

And the truth is that you know, I may really, really care about stuck within a two block radius of where I live, but if there’s you know a problem with the ball field on the other side of town that I don’t really go to all that often, it’s still in my town but I may not really have a reason to engage around that thing as much.

And so it’s almost as if there’s like a prime number here, you know and it’s 150 because it’s the Dunbar number that you know, where you can really get sustained conversation among real neighbors. And then when you get up to sort of a town level, even if it’s just 5,000 people, you know, you are actually now dealing with a more select group of people who – they’re sort of hard core folks who are really civically engaged and then the others who kind of drop in and out when there’s some hot issue that’s roiling the town.

Is that like sort of – and some ways Localaucracy was working that second level?

CONOR WHITE-SULLIVAN: That may be – that could be along those lines. I think the other question is – so for instance I know Michael Woods Lewis really well and if you ask him the sort of things he said that – (overlapping remarks), right? The things that do well on Front Porch Forum are things like missing cat, you know? Are things like, you know, I lost Fluffy or like who’s got a radiator repairman recommendation, you know?

And those are sort of things that I think are incredibly important because they help people live their lives. The thing that we were sort of pushing that may not have been right at the time for this, and this is one of the reason why had pivoted the business model, you know we started pivoting the business model soon after I spoke at PDF. So, it was actually more than a year before we sold it, we started this transition, the company.

But the original sort of sense was you know, we’re focusing on people who are trying to make - -who feel empowered and want to make their community a better place and want to think about important issues from a very local perspective. And so we – what we found was that you can make something that’s really engaging for them, you need to do certain things to make sure you reach the critical mass so that it’s really relevant to them. And you know, that was things like – we actually wound up getting really into email and doing a lot of work around how do we make sure we bring – we make sure everyone’s attention is focused at the right time? And we did a lot of stuff around design to make sure that it was easy for users to find the information that they needed and you know, very light weight for them to engage.

But you also have to deal with always that sense of, okay, how do we get people to feel empowered like it’s worth it for them to think about doing that? And you know, in some of these cases where you’ve got sort of the – you know, we found that the communities that were doing well were the communities where they actually had a relatively responsive government where they felt like they were being listened to. And you know, you have to get a lot more users there before you start to get the protest vote aspect of things.

In general, the easiest way for us to get a lot of adoption was we started to have the site getting used by school committee members, by members of town meeting, by you know, in (inaudible) we had the like the select board using it, which is sort of like in most towns, they don’t have a mayors, they have like sort of town council things.

And those were the issues that ended up getting a lot of engagement and then – you know, that’s also around the time that we started expanding into like the more news business aspect of things.

0:24:53

MICAH SIFRY: Okay, so bring us up to the present now. So, you’re at Huffington Post, you’ve been there now several months –

CONOR WHITE-SULLIVAN: Yeah, so I’ll give the intermediate between while we were building these town commons. So, we started building the software for basically you know, news organizations to start managing their communities to start to work on user attention, to start to work on elevating the level of their common stuff. And a lot of this stuff was sort of like a little bit more behind the scenes as we were developing it out.

But as we were building this and I spent a lot of time sort of – that was around the time we won the Pointer Prize in Entrepreneurial Journalism. We ended up raising investment from the Knight Foundation and they were our first sort of – we were one of the first for-profit companies that they put a serious investment in. And you know, which is only like $150,000 is our investment from them, but it was still sizeable for us at the time.

And then as we started growing out, we ended up getting approached by another media organization without being acquired. And we had actually had a – made contact with AOL pre-Huffington Post acquisition and so it was actually through AOL channels that I ended up meeting Arianna. But basically, yeah, as we had been selling to newspapers that the interesting thing was as we were doing (inaudible) emails, we were doing things around users like subscribing to different topics and users recruiting one another to answer questions and all sorts of other things which we started with moving the Localaucracy platform sort of into something a little different.

We – you know, they had been asking us, can you make us more like Huffington Post? Right, like those were the sorts of things they were interested in was building some high quality – you know, making it valuable to users so they could have high-quality user engagement. And also think about the like the (inaudible) community.

So, it was interesting. When we got the offer to acquire Huffington Post that was one of the core things that brought us here as opposed to somewhere else was that we had already been looking at that and saw that that was the place where they were doing innovation on the internet. It was a news organization that had been sort of focused on the internet from its very get-go and we weren’t having to deal with a print culture that was then transitioning over and didn’t really understand the internet as well. They’ already sort of fully backed digital.

So, that was the reason we ended up when we made our decision to come here. So, that brought it a little bit more into the present point where now I’m leading a small tech team, I’m the Director of Editorial Technology and we’re building up sort of similar things that we’d been doing in the later days but working how we can build new tools that will work across editorial, work across the community to make those communities denser and then also things we can do on the commenting section that can help sort of elevate a high value comments and --

MICAH SIFRY: Right. So community is not a word I usually use when I talk about the Huffington Post. And so let’s take a moment.

I know we’re close to the half way point and I do want to open things up soon for people to ask questions but I’m going to take a few minutes to just drill down on this with you.

So, community to me is a word that’s thrown around a lot to describe online engagement and it’s often a really hollow concept.

CONOR WHITE-SULLIVAN: Yeah, I agree.

MICAH SIFRY: And so to me an online community is very different than an organization that has an email list that it communicates to, a one-way direction. A community is much more of a lattice of connections, some of which are one-to-one and a lot of which are one-to-many. And most of great examples of online community are sites like Wikipedia which has a very dense network of volunteer editors who have built up a whole community of (inaudible) to the point where they have a daily newspaper about what they publish about what’s going on inside Wikipedia.

(Inaudible) another example of a site that has a really robust community and sub-communities. I mean there are pages on Daily Coast that never make the front page but it’s the people who are members of the site once a week getting together to talk about gardening or getting together to talk about being single and / or people who are going through a grieving process and want to support each other because they’re dealing with bereavement.

Those all exist inside Daily Coast and they’re part of why that place grows because people are actually touching each other and making real connections, Reddit and all the sub-Reddits on Reddit.

0:30:00

When I think of Huffington Post, I mostly think of this amazing front page that drives huge amount of traffic to specific posts that featured bloggers write for the site as well as other things that the editors think are important or interesting and a lot of really smart search optimization topics that are hot in the news right now are often also going to be very well covered by Huffington Post.

And then I see lots of posts that get comments but it’s hard to say that there’s community there. So tell me why – how would you describe the community that’s there? What are we missing? Maybe I’m missing part of the picture.

CONOR WHITE-SULLIVAN: Well actually you have a relatively accurate – you’re somewhat accurate in regards to the way things are right now. I think there are a lot of smaller communities that are getting developed that aren’t necessarily the whole Huffington Post community.

MICAH SIFRY: Give me an example of one.

CONOR WHITE-SULLIVAN: So, for instance we try to make an effort to help bloggers bring in an audience of their own so users can subscribe to various bloggers and when users connect their Facebook or their Twitter account, it will actually send them an email alert whenever someone that they following Facebook or Twitter or their friends with on Facebook post a blog out. So, those are some of the things that we work on right now – or those are things that already existed as we came in – to help those – like those bloggers even when they’re not landing on the front page, as they attract fans and followers, they also have – they’ve got people who can keep on coming back to their article of their blog and we can give them not just a megaphone when they speak out to the whole Huffington Post audience, but as people get really interested in what you know, for instance like I get emails all the time when Larry Lessig posts, right, and when Greg Newmark post. Like those are two of the bloggers that I follow that post probably most regularly.

So, that’s one example of how we try to build like these denser communities around individual bloggers. But I think you’re also right in that you know, we recognize that there’s a long way to go to have the super dense networks, right?

The Huffington Post is – we have some super active commenter who get to know one another and you know, you’ll actually see them going back and forth in the comment section. And sometimes they’ll take comment threads offline or they’ll sort of – they’ll be replying to one another and it will be somewhat off topic but it’s them sort of building up their community. And that’s where most prolific commenter – so that I consider to be a little bit of a different community.

But we also have bloggers who blog back and forth to one another, so I think that’s something that you can find those dense communities (inaudible) but then there are also things that you can build that can make that more accessible for people who aren’t super regulars coming in all the time. And that’s what we try to do as users connect their Facebook, as users connect their Twitter and as they take – make use of the use of (inaudible) that they really care about.

But in general we’ve worked on tech things that will make that more obvious to users because there are things – you know, the Huffington Post has been really good at launching new features really quickly and iterating on them sort of constantly.

And so I think one of the reasons why they wanted to acquire us, too was because of the way we’ve thought about community. You know, from that super dense level where we needed those communities – for those to be successful because there was a relatively limited audience in those for us to be successful. And then we needed those people to be like super connected. And we needed to like create really great tools for them to bring new people in and for them to keep one another engaged.

And so that’s some of the stuff that we’ve been working on is how to make you know, the enormous commenting community we have which can definitely be overwhelming and can definitely be – comments can get lost in that but at the same time we do things like you know – if you look at our pundit boxes; or you look at all the super user and the comment badges that users can earn, there are ways that people become a little bit more or at least regulars who are consistently posting interesting comments can end up sort of feeling like they’re part of a denser community than the looser networks.

But I think you’re – I think in general you hit some of our key strengths pretty well, right? Like this has been a site that has an incredible reach and that’s one of the reasons why people want to blog for us. And you know, we’ve done our best to build some tools that will help those bloggers grow their own audience and also keep that audience together. But there are always things you can do better and that’s (overlapping comments).

MICAH SIFRY: I’m going to open things up now for people who are listening. If you have a question or a comment that you would like to bring to the conversation, just hit *6 on your phone and I will try and pull you in. We’ll give folks a second if anybody wants to do that.

0:35:15

I want you to think about something, Connor – oh, okay, we have a question here in the queue, hang on one second.

PARTICIPANT 1: Hi, sounds like (inaudible) thank you Connor, a pleasure to meet you and –

MICAH SIFRY: Just tell use your name and –

PARTICIPANT 1: -- sure, my name is John Paris. I head up a mobile and tablet strategy for (inaudible) and just joined Personal Democracy and Media recently because of this whole area of digital democracy and especially relating to local issues very much interests me. I’m actually a former journalist before I got into IT.

So, I just want to kind of bore you with a product related question. I’m just very curious whether on the Huffington Post product roadmap will be integrating some elements of Localaucracy to – I’m mangling it – into (overlapping remarks) –

CONOR WHITE-SULLIVAN: -- difficulty of the name that makes it (inaudible) to remember that is actually the nice corollary (overlapping remarks) four times when I heard it, so –

PARTICIPANT 1: -- just curious if on your product road map will be some integration into Huffington Post, some iPhone, iPad apps, etc.

CONOR WHITE SULLIVAN: Sure, so the short answer I guess is to some extent, yes; I mean I can’t talk to you specifically on the things that we’ve launched for 2012 or we have in the pipe for 2012 for obvious reasons.

But we take – you know, we’re taking mobile and tablet really seriously so I think whenever things are put in the roadmap we’re thinking about how we can do those for mobile and do those for tablet. And we’ve also been thinking, you know, myself and our engineering team as we came in, we sort of – I think it’s important to realize that there are very, very big differences between you know local communities and a huge broadcast audience and the communities that you can build around that, around topic areas and around that news.

So, we’re very intentional about that, about not sort of taking things that we do at Localaucracy you know, as that community platform wholesale or even the things we did for local newspapers wholesale. So, you know, we definitely spent a lot of time with the editorial team, we spent a lot of time with the existing sort of community moderation team and people we know who are commenter really well and know our bloggers really well. And in sort of optimizing what the ideal products are to roll out. Plus it’s a different programming language so we have to rebuild (inaudible) (overlapping remarks).

PARTICIPANT 1: (Overlapping remarks) mobile technology might enable you to leverage ideal location.

CONOR WHITE-SULLIVAN: Definitely.

PARTICIPANT 1: And server up the appropriate content. Very, very interesting, thanks for answer.

MICAH SIFRY: Thank you, and thanks for that question. If anyone else has a question, feel free to hit *6, I’ll help you in.

Connor, I was going to ask you if you can give us an example of a blogger on Huffington Post who you think has done some smart things in terms of developing a real online community given that they seem to be the real hubs for that kind of engagement.

Because there’s no question that the social side of the site is very rich if you’re a person who has taken the time to play with those tools, you’ve definitely game-ified a lot of those aspects of engagement with the (inaudible) showing people their stats and so on.

So, you know, the positive reinforcement is there but you know if you go back to my examples of Wikipedia or Daily Coast or Reddit, one reason why online communities work, seems to me when it does work, is it isn’t just that you know, the site has been designed well to, you know, reward positive behavior.

It’s also got people have a common goal of some kind, right? So, what’s the common goal around news? You know, what can you imagine – what are you seeing in terms of understanding sort of where the hot spots are on the Huffington Post?

Can you shed some light on that?

0:39:54

CONOR SULLIVAN-WHITE: There’s two kinds of communities that can form, right? There’s the community that is the sub-set of your friends that is caring about the same sort of things, the people that you already know in real life. And then there’s the larger – there’s the folks that really care about the same thing and are drawn for the same reasons and those are the communities that are served well together by content.

And so you know, I think you can clearly see like on the politics / political, right, like the folks who have been there for a while and who have their politics’ bloggers and also the politics’ reporters that they follow. You’ll see commenters who comment on the same sort of things and the same other commenters – it’s easier to see because it’s like such high scale (inaudible) on the back end.

But then, you know, I can only think of the bloggers that I follow, but I think one of the interesting things is –

MICAH SIFRY: Well, let’s take Larry Lessig is a good example. Do you think he – I mean he may not even be aware of all the possibilities –

CONOR SULLIVAN-WHITE: The bell and whistles and all those things. (Overlapping remarks) you know, what I have found is the value proposition of bloggers a lot of times is that it gives them a way – especially the bloggers who read the comments because not all bloggers will spend time in their comment section, some bloggers do.

And bloggers who do – the reason that they sort of value it is because one is because they can build their own sort of loyal group, but especially when what they are posting is reaching a much larger audience than the audience that they would normally draw in with posting on their own blog or they’re posting on a specialty sort of sites blog – they’re able to get feedback on what I guess a more broad population thinks about their idea and how articulate they’re being and how much their message is resonating with I’d say a more – like a more open sample of Americans, right?

For example, if I post something on a PDF blog, like on (inaudible) president or if I get something featured there, there’s a lot of value to me for that because I’m really interested in the audience that’s on Tech President, right? And I know that’s a group of people who really know and care about the same sort of things I know I care about.

And also you get that on our sub-verticals and our blogger page. You can start to like build those communities – we’ve been building those communities up and so you can get the same thing if you’re posting regularly on Tech or (overlapping remarks) but at the same time we can also say that if this thing gets put on a main page, you’re also going to have the ability to see how that idea is resonating with (overlapping remarks).

MICAH SIFRY: There’s no question that everyone understands I think that there’s enormous value to being featured in the same way that getting on the CBS Evening News still has enormous value, though you reach a different audience, obviously.

But I guess the challenge here and I really (inaudible) sort of off this community, right because the community is when people – you know, there’s some people knowing each other, some sense of having a common - -you know, something in common, right?

And right now I’m – we haven’t quite gotten to where that is where you think it’s really alive and kicking and where people are supporting each other in some way and so is this a we’re just looking in the wrong place? Or is this a matter of design and features that need to be worked on some more?

I mean, is there community, for argument’s sake, around Arianna Huffington on the site? One would think that given her prominence – and she often champions causes, right? So, I mean is that where we should be looking for a model of what’s possible?

My sense is that it’s like you have a tremendous pile of raw material to work with here. And so you must have some sense of where already you’ve got coals glowing on the fire that you want to pour more fuel on.

CONOR WHITE-SULLIVAN: Yes, so I think Arianna’s a great example. I mean we have – there are a few people like I know who blog and those are I guess the people I guess I pay more attention to when I’m looking at the communities that we want to sort of foster and develop.

You know, there are key bloggers I think that happen on the religion section, on the women’s section, on the impact section especially. But those are places where community has sort of become a little bit more (inaudible) fostered.

I think you’re right that you know, there are probably things you can do to develop communities more richly. I think the first thing is just making sure people have a feeling of space and have a feeling that –

0:45:05

-- you know, there are folks there that resonate with them. One of the things on our social news like – we actually have a whole online community within the communities so we have a whole system of like friends and followers that gets – you know, the thing I want to be clear on this like there’s a – there are communities that get built by the users who have full knowledge of all the functionality of our site. And those communities grow.

And then there’s also like the support – like the audience that still hasn’t been totally tacked all the way through. So, I think there’s a lot of room for growth, but I think we also have – you can look at networks and you can see there are plenty of people who have you know, hundreds of other friends on the site just because they have favorited their comments or you know, they have done other things.

And those are the features that are rolling out in this year. A lot of our stuff has been focused on Facebook and Twitter and (inaudible) but I think a lot of the stuff that we have in the pipeline is rolling out and you know, Queue 1 and Queue 2. They’re actually really focused on helping surface that to more users because some of our users really take advantage of the friends and favoriting that you can do in the comment section or just like being able to see what other friends have read your news article, like the same articles because I think there’s like some communities that happen because we reach such a large audience, they’re like these other things that can happen that you don’t necessarily see on the site.

Like if I read an article – we actually had a -- you know, our whole social news feed – it’s about a year old now but like when users connect to Facebook, they can see what other Huffington Post users connected to Facebook have read. So, that’s one way people find out what their friends are reading and that gives them a common language to talk about whatever the issues are that they’re resonating with each of them.

So, that’s one aspect of community that’s not the same as the Daily Coast community with people they don’t know. And for that we really count on the functionality that we have that isn’t really tied to Facebook, which is our Favorite (inaudible) which is users like being able to subscribe to those bloggers, but we’re also doing a lot of other stuff.

MICAH SIFRY: Right. I’m going to pause again if somebody who’s listening wants to jump in with a question, feel free to hit *6 on your phone and we will pull you in.

Here we go, we have a question from Washington, DC, judging from your phone number, go ahead.

PARTICIPANT 2: Hi, this is Albert. I do a lot of freelance writing and doing a lot with community organizations. I was wondering if you guys could talk a little bit about – we’re talking a lot about community. I wanted to know if there was anything between some kind of issue specific communities and specifically, how the local communities or those organized around political issues as opposed to kind of social issues or you know a writer or anything like that.

MICAH SIFRY: You mean on the Huffington Post site?

PARTICIPANT 2: Right. And are you approaching or is there a difference? Do you – obviously each community has their unique identity, does one approach though – you know, someone – a community around (inaudible) than perhaps one around who’s following entertainment or you know or sports or anything else.

CONOR WHITE-SULLIVAN: Absolutely. So you have to – I mean there are commonalities between them, right? But I think – people identify with communities because it’s a part of their personal identity, right? So, when people feel really, really drawn to being part of a larger group, there’s some value that’s happening for their (inaudible) that and maybe that’s because it’s the identification with the idea or it’s an identification with the other people that are (inaudible) with that idea that gives them a sense of self against a sort of like purpose in the world.

I think you’ll see – and so I think you’ll definitely see more passion and more activity and more fervency around political communities, the former on that, but I think the other sort of communities that can happen on more sort of lifestyle things, that’s more people who are like – if you see people like – I don’t – great example from (inaudible) community side, but like sharing recipes and things like that. That’s probably less important in their identify but it might be a fun aspect of what they do.

Like, so for instance parenting communities are pretty active, right because they’re all identifying with one another because they’re going through a similar struggle. I guess that’s in some ways similar to the political fervency that happens around communities.

Right now you know, we don’t do too many specific changes when we’re talking about the different communities that we’re focused on building. We try and build – like when we build new (inaudible) basically based off of what we see as editorial needs. And so we have editors that really care about their specific communities so we’ll get requests that come in from religion and parenting and from other verticals and we’ll work on what can we build there? And we’ll also try and see what can we build there that (inaudible) to them and what can we build there that can be extrapolated across the rest of the site and into other verticals.

I don’t know if that answered your question at all, but –

MICAH SIFRY: I was going to ask about real time, to what degree you’re watching those sort of ad hoc communities that form around live events and whether you think there is some opportunities there? Do you think anybody is doing anything interesting in that space?

CONOR WHITE-SULLIVAN: So, in the – like who’s doing interesting things around building community around live events?

Well, that – to me, I think the live events themselves actually – this is going to be a terrible answer for you and I’m not going to help you out much at all, but I think live events are the place – I think there’s a really important component to communities that are in person. And if you have a live event, like you’ve already achieved something by bringing people together in person. Like key aspect, how do you keep them together after that event is done?

MICAH SIFRY: No, let me give you an example of what I mean. I don’t mean the community of 50,000 people all attending a U2 concert. What I mean is State of the Union speech is going to happen in three weeks and 10 million of us are going have our laptops open while we’re watching it live and you know, you see TV programs now trying to get people to announce that I’m watching some crime show, come chat with me about it while I do that.

So, that’s what I mean by live events, not in-person events.

CONOR WHITE-SULLIVAN: Yeah, so who have I seen building (overlapping remarks). Yeah, I mean I think there’s obviously interesting opportunities for Twitter – the question is like a lot of those are like – like a lot of the interactions that happen when those are hugely at scale become very fleeting, right?

So, like I do think you see the people who watch Twitter streams like (inaudible) conferences, right? Like following one another and there’s some interesting things that can happen there around (inaudible) and aggregation.

You know, like I know I’m interested in live stream and u-stream and this sort of interaction that can be (inaudible) commenting on live videos, you know and – but I think there’s like – I don’t know that that’s been broken open and I don’t have personally any huge thoughts on those immediate events besides like the audience – besides the audience that’s already on line that’s you know, looking at a common piece of content and the general comment is you around building community – the people who are brought together as a like-minded audience and keeping them engaged with one another.

So, I think there are – there are general (inaudible) but I probably haven’t had a lot of thoughts around live stream or around like the live events as much.

MICAH SIFRY: (Overlapping remarks) opportunity for Huf Post given the size of its daily audience. You have to surmise that when that audience is also paying attention to some breaking news or just common political ritual right, like watching the election returns on a primary night that you know, there’s a possible opportunity to strengthen community there.

Any last thoughts not on Huffington Post but elsewhere?

CONOR WHITE-SULLIVAN: Yeah, I mean, I would say there are a few places where I’ve been like really from a community perspective I’ve been like – I’ve been generally interested, like right? I’ve been interested in Cora, that’s like one of the places you know that’s probably biased for me, right because I’ve always been interested in, you know, real names and users ranking ideas and things like that.

But I’ve seen some really good contributions there. What time is it? But yeah, so I’ve been interested in that, I’ve been interested in – that’s probably outside of – I mean I’ve been interested in obviously been paying attention to the media organizations have been doing and how they’ve been approaching it.

I think I still think in terms of like online community we’re pretty far up there and – but obviously we’ve got to keep an eye on what everybody else is doing. But yeah, that’s sort of (overlapping remarks).

MICAH SIFRY: We’re going to be keeping an eye on what you’re doing, too. I appreciate this chance to get under the hood with you a bit and – not to just hear your own story but also begin to get some of the flavor of what you’re wrestling with now at Huffington Post.

Thank you.