Act.ly: A New Tool for Public Pressure

Published June 25, 2009 @ 07:53AM PT

A petition supporting British abolition in the early 19th century (source)

Online petitions are a pretty mixed medium for creating tangible change. Occasionally they provide a vehicle to carry people's frustration in a clear and aggregate enough way to see some impact, such as a petition started by our Human Trafficking blogger Amanda that led to Diners Club International terminating their relationship with a mail order bride service. More often than not, however, petitions are well-intentioned but in the end, ineffective gestures.

It surprised me today when I found myself excited about Act.ly, a new service that uses Twitter to disseminate petitions. Basically the way it works is that you identify a target (just a Twitter user account), type what you want them to do (or not do) and then every time anyone retweets the message, they've signed the petition. An extremely simple, friendly, and intuitive site keeps track of all this, and even if and when the target of the petition responds.

There are a few things that I think make this promising:

Clear Target: Focusing on a specific target seems likely to increase the efficacy of petitions, particularly because most Twitter handles one would target are actively maintained accounts.

Clarity of Request: While the 140 character limit doesn't force clarity, it forces brevity. For those who really care about their petitions, those two things are probably two sides of the same coin.

Ease of Dissemination: It is dead simple for people to retweet a message they agree with.

Public Pressure: All of this happens in public, and because of the way Twitter notifies a user when they're being talked about, it's an ongoing din of people complaining about something.

I can already think of dozens of uses for this and I'm thrilled to see it live. Great work.

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Author

Nathaniel is the founding Director of the Center for Global Engagement at Northwestern University, which works annually with hundreds of students in dozens of countries around the world through curricular programs and student project incubation.