Yesterday we made a few changes to the site, and thought you’d like to learn a little more about the thinking that went behind them.

Profile

The profile now features an individual’s full voting history. Think of it as an auto-aggregating blog; a window into what a person is voting or saying on any given day.

Navigation

We’ve switched to a top-based navigation, which gives us quite a bit more room for content. The profile is the first of many pages that demonstrate the power of this new layout, and we look forward to introducing more features that take advantage of this added space in the very near future.

For our loyal users, we thank you for bearing with us during this rather tumultuous change. In the short term, there will be some frustration about where all the buttons and links have gone, but we’re firmly committed to the belief that the long term benefits greatly outweigh these temporary frustrations.

If you have any questions or feedback about the new layout, leave a comment. We’d love to hear your thoughts. Enjoy the new site!

I am going to talk about the overall vision driving essembly: empowering people to be heard and change their community, nation or world, with particular focus on one principle that drives the design of the site, grassroots organizing.The idea for essembly came out of my experience with grassroots organizing. Organizing is most basically the process of getting people who have a common goal together to affect change. When I first saw online social networking in the summer of 2003, while working on the presidential primaries, it hit me that the same principles that drove social networking online were fundamental to organizing on the ground. In designing essembly we have not tried to reinvent the wheel, but rather use the internet to make the traditional methods of organizing more efficient are more readily available to anyone.

The most fundamental tool of grassroots organizing is the house meeting. The first step is for a group of people with a common concern, or perhaps simply a common community, to get together at one of their homes and discuss their concerns. Once concerns and goals are identified, and leaders, or organizers, chosen for the group, the next goal is to recruit other potential supporters. This is done by tapping into the social networks of the existing supporters, by asking them to each have their own house meeting, inviting over people in their social network likely to be interested. The organizer attempts to lead discussion among the people at the meeting, and get them to contribute to and endorse the goals of the newly forming movement. He then trys to get some of the people at the house meeting to have their own meeting, and so on. The spreading of the movement if about using social networks to build a strong community united around a goal. The third step is for the newly formed group to take action.

Many of the most powerful examples of regular individuals having a powerful impact came from grassroots organizing and house meetings. Cesar Chavez organized one of the most powerless groups in America, largely latino farmworkers, and managed to secure union contracts for them. He did this by talking to and inspiring groups of farm workers gathered in shanty homes, and cultivating leaders from among the farm workers to organize their social networks. The modern Christian Conservative movement has also been built on house meetings. Parents all over the nation who were enraged by inappropriate textbooks and sex education managed to gain control of school boards and assure their values were represented in their community schools. Whatever the specific ideology or example, the democratic process has been at its most potent when individuals use the power of organizing to change America.
Essembly is designed to build upon the lessons of generations of organizing. Organizing requires that people connect in three basic ways:

1. Social connection
2. Geography
3. Ideology

The first two types of connection are mapped out by today’s social networks through the creation of profiles and friend connections. Resolves allow for the mapping of ideological connections for the first time in online social networking.

The process of organizing consists of three basic steps, which guides our thinking in the design of essembly:

• Step 1: Discuss ideas and through this discussion identify who believes what. This is accomplished through resolves and discussions.
• Step 2: Use social, geographic, and ideological connections to form into groups, or for existing groups to recruit new members.
• Step 3: Take action with these groups.

We fully admit that we are not there yet in allowing for organizing in these three steps. In order to make essembly the platform for discourse and change we want it to be, we need to make each of these steps work. While we would love them all to work asap, we have to start somewhere. We are going to approach these steps in the order listed above. We are doing this because we believe the steps build upon each other. You cannot do the third step of taking action without getting people into groups, and you can’t form into groups unless meaningful discussion is occurring.

Right now we are hard at work on the first step, discussion and identification of beliefs. Some of our goals are to make the profile a “window into your thoughts,” a sort of auto-generated blog that has the advantage of being connected through resolves to the community at large. We also are trying to make the homepage do a better job of giving users a sense of the “zeitgeist” (thanks to Micah Sifry for that) of the site as a whole, the member’s network, and the member’s groups. We also are going to work on the flow between resolves to make it easier to move between interesting resolves. We welcome ideas and feedback on these goals and how we implement them.

Hi everyone, this is Joe Green, founder of essembly. First of all, thanks to everyone who has been using the site and giving us lots of feedback. It has been invaluable in shaping what the site has become so far. We appreciate your bearing with us as some stuff does not work (though you will get to see one of the top error messages on the web, courtesy of Keith Rarick).

This blog, (which I admit is late in coming) is for us to keep all of you up to date on where we are headed, and for you to tell us what you think. To try to facilitate this conversation, we are asking people to use the discussions and internal resolves in the beta tester group to discuss issues in this blog and any other ideas. This blog will feature regular posts from me, other members of our team, and some fun guests.