Here’s what we’ve been reading lately about elections, governance, participatory culture, voting, and crowdsourcing.

Facebook takes a lot of heat these days, but I admire the inspiration behind it. In the letter accompanying their SEC registration, Mark Zuckerberg starts by saying, “Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.” I especially like this line: “There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future.” This is the inspiration behind our work here at Votenet.

In this week’s featured TED talk, Clay Shirky talks about the positive changes that result when a new medium, for example, books or the Internet, spurs the circulation of new ideas. He says new forms of arguing – trial by jury, voting, peer review, and collaborative tools – emerge along with new perspectives. By inviting participation (and these perspectives), organizations can become more transparent and leverage the knowledge of their members, employees, customers, and other stakeholders. The obstacle? Many organizations, like the government and the people running them, don’t want to give away any power or control.

After hearing Jamie Notter and Maddie Grant, authors of Humanize, speak at BlogWorld, Ashley Zeckman of Top Rank Online Marketing blog followed up with a few questions about engaging employees. Jamie said, “Companies are learning that they can tap into the power that exists in the periphery of their system by extending decision making authority and empowering people to take action and real ownership over their jobs.” That’s exactly what gets us excited about the power of technology to not only engage staff, but also members, students, and others.

If you’d like to create more awareness and excitement about your annual awards program, check out how the Society for News Design (SND) uses Storify to shares updates, videos and photos from three days (Day 1, Day 2, Day 3) of competition judging. We learned about them from Anita Ferrer at Associations Now who said, “The Society for News Design’s live-Storifying of its annual design competition brings transparency and a model to follow for associations.”

The SND blog put the judges in the spotlight as well. “We posed three questions to (the judges) — about design, about the competition, and about life in general.” That’s an awards program that people will talk about.

There’s more to board diversity than meets the eye, says Glenn Tecker at Associations Now. “Association boards are created in order for there to be sufficiently diverse perspectives (my emphasis) at the table for conversations about policy and strategy.” He says the nominating committee has two jobs – find members who have the appropriate skills sets and fill an existing gap in perspective.

Steve Drake provides eight elements for more meaningful board meetings. He says, “Board time is a nonrenewable resource…don’t waste it!” He also links to two other good articles about board meeting agendas.

Here’s a weekend activity for all you want-to-be astronomers. The SETI Institute, best known for its search for extraterrestrial intelligence, is holding an online contest to name two of Pluto’s recently discovered moons. They’re calling them P4 and P5 for now, but are counting on the public to select a better name. 

Looking for one more? Here’s what you missed this week on Voting 2.0:

• Waiting for the Call from the Vatican

Enjoy your weekend!

New Horizons spacecraft at Pluto – space flight simulator
(Photo by Bruce Irving – Flickr FlyingSinger)

In December, Facebook gave users the opportunity to vote for or against specific changes to its privacy policy. The proposed changes would affect how Facebook shares user data and whether users would be able to vote on future policy.

Less than one-tenth of one percent of Facebook’s one billion users voted. Of the people who did vote, 88% of them voted against the policy changes. But, for a vote to be binding, at least 30% of users had to vote. Consequently, Facebook implemented a new privacy policy and users lost their right to vote on future policy.

The turnout for Facebook’s vote could have been much higher if Facebook had implemented the best practices we recommend to organizations.

Tell voters why they should care.

People don’t vote because they don’t care enough or know enough about the issues at stake. Many users probably assume that whatever Facebook wants, Facebook gets, unless Congress or a court rules otherwise. Yet, they had a chance to affect Facebook policy if only enough of them had risen to the occasion.

Voter turnout increases when voters know why their vote matters. With enough marketing and communication, apathy turns into action.

Educate voters to dispel confusion.

Facebook missed an opportunity to clear up the confusion caused by a fake privacy notice spreading through users’ News Feeds. Many people fell for a hoax that instructed them to copy and paste a notice on their wall that supposedly would protect their updates and data from unauthorized copying. Facebook could have set users straight while using the incident as a way to promote the policy vote.

Stay away from December.

If only they asked us! December is not the month to run an election. It’s too difficult to compete for attention and a place on someone’s ‘to do’ list.

Lengthen the voting period.

The most effective election period is 15 to 24 days, according to the data in our forthcoming Votenet Index of Association and Non-Profit Voting and Election Trends. Facebook’s election period was seven days, not long enough for users to take notice and take action.

Communicate often to raise awareness.

Facebook sent only one email asking users to review the proposed changes and cast their vote. Was that enough? Apparently not because I missed it and many others did too. And how many people thought the email was spam?

Before and during the voting period, Facebook should have communicated with users more frequently and blatantly. Many people didn’t even know a vote was pending, or if they did, they didn’t sense any urgency to vote.

Facebook could have also promoted the vote in News Feed headers and Messages. Social sharing would have added an element of peer pressure.

Remove barriers to voting.

Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s Vice President of Communications, Public Policy and Marketing, said, “We made significant efforts to make voting easy and accessible – including translating the documents and voting application into several of the world’s most popular languages…”

That’s a commendable start, but they could have had a frictionless vote with more effective communication and easier access to the ballot, for example, allowing users to vote from their News Feed.

Because of its new policy Facebook will no longer ask users to vote on policy, instead it will gather feedback via likes and comments. Facebook can do better than that by giving users non-binding, advisory voting privileges. Organizations earn more loyalty and good will when members and users have a voice and a vote.

Today, we are proud to announce the latest release of “Election Impact” online voter registration system. With this release, Election Impact becomes the first white label social voter registration application that can be used by any organization, including unions, nonprofits, associations, candidates and corporations, to create their very own Timeline App and register voters directly from their own Facebook fan pages.

Other new social features added to Election Impact include the ability for users to post messages to their social media profiles and invite friends to register, and mobile compatibility that optimizes the registration process for Android and Apple iOS mobile devices.

We designed this latest update to Election Impact with one goal – to help organizations increase the number of registered voters supporting their cause and get more of them to the polls on Election Day. The most reliable and efficient way to increase voter turnout on Election Day is by holding a voter registration drive and now organizations can do this through Facebook. Election Impact 4.0’s other new features include:

Foreign Languages: Citizens can now register in all of the languages supported by the federal government: English, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Tagalog and Vietnamese.

Customization: Organizations can customize the look and feel of Election Impact to match their brand or coalition by incorporating multiple logos and additional fields to capture email addresses, phone numbers during the registration process.

API Toolkit: Election impact offers developers a fully documented API that allows for custom integration into other websites and applications.

Campaign Reports: Customizable online reports and charts detailing usage trends, referral traffic analysis, demographic information and profiles of registrants.

Mobile Compatibility: Any organization can register voters through their own website via smart phones or tablet computers running the Android or Apple iOS operating systems.