benrattray

There will be a lot of campaigns that will win on the site that I personally disagree with, and I accept that. When I started seeing this happen I wasn’t exactly excited about it, but I personally believe that the most important challenge we face is a lack of civic engagement and a belief that everyday people can’t make a difference, and that’s what I care most about. So I’m most concerned with our broad mission of empowerment and goal of increased civic participation.

The first hugely successful petition on the site was started by a woman in South Africa, Ndumie Funda, to stand against the horrible practice of corrective rape (where men will rape lesbian women in the attempt to ‘turn them straight’). It received more than 170,000 signatures, leading to a massive amount of press in South Africa and mobilization outside of Parliament, and after ignoring the issue entirely for decades, the government of South Africa responded by starting a national task force to investigate and stop the incidence of corrective rape.

I actually had the pleasure of talking with Ndumie via Skype during the campaign (this is when having a viral petition on the site was quite rare), so I developed a personal connection to the issue. When I found out about the victory, I was frankly stunned and pretty emotional. It was that experience that showed me more clearly than anything previously that new technology has truly shifted power – that even the seemingly least powerful people in the world could have immense impact.

This is a challenging issue that I’d actually be interested in Redditors’ responses to: how does an open platform simultaneously empower people to start their own petitions in their own voice and also empower people with the information they might want to decide whether to support it?

This is difficult because it’s not our place to insert ourselves into the causes our users care about. At the same time, I do understand the desire for people to find out more info about the campaigns they’re joining.

There are two things we’ve been working on to give people more information about the campaigns they might want to join: the first is to highlight endorsements on petitions from people or organizations (like EFF) that signers might trust, which would help validate the campaign. The second is simply encouraging petition creators (through tips on the site) to add as much information to their petitions as possible in order to preempt questions that others might have.

But this isn’t easy to solve and I’d be interested in anyone else’s thoughts on how we thread this needle.

When we started the site in 2007 we had so few campaigns we had little choice but to manually select which to feature to users, and when we did so we focused on those campaigns we thought were broadly appealing and which tended to avoid the pitched partisanship of much of American politics. As we’ve had a huge increase in new petitions created over the past few years, and as we’ve built a data science team that can help surface petitions that our users are most likely to want to take action on, we have moved away from making manual decisions about which campaigns users receive.

On the personal side of things, the consequence of this is that a lot of petitions are started and recommended to users using machine learning that I personally disagree with – sometimes quite strongly. But I’m not in a position to take a stance on these – ultimately our mission is to empower users to create the change they want to see, not to prescribe to them a particular set of issues I or our team cares about. And the aggregate impact of that empowerment – independent of the particulars of any specific campaigns that I might not support – is immensely positive. I wrote more about this in a blog a few months back; you can find it here. http://blog.change.org/post/72991345174/change-org-and-openness

When I was younger I cared about social issues, but it wasn’t a big part of my life. Instead, I was actually on a path toward becoming an investment banker. This all changed when I was a senior in college, when one of my younger brothers came out as gay. He told me that what was most difficult for him witnessing discrimination every day was seeing good people stand by and do nothing – people like me. This was a painful experience – it was the first time I think I felt truly ashamed. It was that experience turned me away from a future in finance and set me on a path toward wanting to empower others to stand up and speak out on the issues they care about.