Empowering the Next Generation of Leaders — Glenn Otis Brown visits Glitch
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Anil Dash: Hi. I’m Anil Dash with the Glitch team here a Fog Creek. We are here today with our esteemed guest Glenn Otis Brown of the Obama Foundation. Welcome, Glenn.
Glenn Otis Brown: Thank you, Anil.
Anil Dash: Thanks for being here. So you are the Chief Digital Officer of the Obama Foundation. I think most of us have heard of the guy that the foundation is named after. Can you tell me a little bit about what the Obama Foundation does?
Glenn Otis Brown: Sure. The Obama Foundation’s mission is to inspire and empower, and connect next generation of citizens, next generation of leaders. That basically takes the form of two main projects. One is, the Obama Presidential Centre …
Anil Dash: This is a big library in Chicago?
Glenn Otis Brown: It is a big project…
Anil Dash: Okay. Much bigger than a library.
Glenn Otis Brown: The library-ness of it is one component.
Anil Dash: Okay.
Glenn Otis Brown: Most former presidents have some sort of Presidential Library. This project, the Obama Presidential Center in the south side of Chicago in Jackson Park for Chicagoan’s out there, will have some element of a museum-ness and library-ness to it. But it really is a global headquarters for a leadership training programme for future citizens and leaders. That’s the other piece of the project. We’ve got our home stadium, our home base, which is going to be the Obama Presidential Center, and then there will be … And there already are, some first steps in building toward a global, national, and local network of training programmes that get people to be more active citizens. Whatever their level of experience.
Anil Dash: Within the foundation, where you talk about people becoming more active citizens. Who are the people that are doing that? Is that an ordinary teenager? Is that somebody who is a leader in business? Who do you imagine serving that way?
Glenn Otis Brown: It’s a pretty wide audience. Our digital team, we really think about our… The main organizing principle about what we’re thinking about inside the foundation as understanding the audience, and going out and figuring out where they are. Delivering all the stuff to them. Explaining the building. Explaining the training programmes. Getting their feedback. Obviously the Internet is very good at that.
Anil Dash: Right.
Glenn Otis Brown: Those audiences are numerous. First, there’s the core audience that’s in Chicago. That is of all different age ranges. Starting with the south side, but then greater Chicago, who we want to help design what the function of the building and the grounds are going to be. What features that are going to be there on site. A basketball court. Or barbecue grills, and that sort of things.
Anil Dash: That one wasn’t so much of a stretch.
Glenn Otis Brown: That one’s not a huge stretch, but we definitely have gotten feedback on a lot of aspects of what that building’s gonna be like as part of the larger community. And then also, nationally and internationally. I think for a snapshot of what the audience looks like, though we ultimately want to reach everybody in the world, you could take a look at some of the people we gathered for the first Obama Foundation summit in Chicago in the Fall of 2017. We had a mix of up and coming leaders from overseas. Up and coming leaders from Chicago. People who had stood up or started their own social entrepreneurship programmes, or NGOs from around the United States. Rural and urban.
Really, anyone who wants to grow in their ability to engage with civil problems, civil society. Some focus on, particularly on fellowship programmes and some of our training programmes on up and coming young leaders.
Anil Dash: That’s really interesting. I think about… I got a chance to go to the Foundation Summit, and the conversation we had on the panel I was on, was about some of the concerns about misinformation and social media. A lot of concerns that many people have in the digital world right now. I’m curious, within your domain, since you’re Chief Digital Officer, this is your purvey, are the things like social media presence of the Foundation, things like that, under there?
Glenn Otis Brown: They are there.
Anil Dash: And then you also think about platforms? How are you reckoning with that trust issue? It seems like a very high priority for the former President. He brought it up on the David Letterman interview that he did. It seems like it’s very present.
Glenn Otis Brown: It is. We definitely have that top of mind, all the time. The various challenges that people have identified with the current Internet landscapes, social media landscape, whatever you want to call it. And the junk that comes with the good stuff about the current state of tech. I like to think of it as pollution that accompanies the industry of social media.
Anil Dash: I like that.
Glenn Otis Brown: And what can we do to counter it, or counter balance it, or manage it, or turn it back. The first place, especially because it’s a young organization, is just the fundamentals of ourselves having a positive presence online. We’re on all the different platforms. We’re publishing stuff that we think sets an example for how we want people to talk online. A lot of it is about shining a light on other people and what they’re doing.
Anil Dash: Modelling good behavior.
Glenn Otis Brown: Yeah. We try and do that. That’s table stakes. That should be table stakes.
Anil Dash: That’s really interesting. We look at that too, with what we do with Glitch… It shouldn’t be a contentious thing to have a community where people code, but there are places online where they’ll yell at you about that. We can model, okay, we’re gonna try and be decent to each other and kind to each other, and generous. Maybe something good will come of it.
Glenn Otis Brown: Right. Exactly. And a lot of it has to do with just paying attention to also what’s happening in general, and then pointing out communities where people are discussing things civilly and are themselves a model. And then there’s, when we get up some speed and we hire up and we make more partnerships with different subject matter experts, there’s definitely a potential role for the Foundation to convene conversations with the big platforms or with the larger developer community on, “What can we do to make this better?”
Anil Dash: Does that mean you’re going to build a platform of your own?
Glenn Otis Brown: Wouldn’t rule it out. But that’s not currently a priority. So, we have, in a way, a platform of our own in that we have a website, we have obama.org. The same way the White House has whitehouse.gov. At the same time, we understand that we need a network of partners and we need to be on the platforms where people are. I would say that we would want to maintain enough flexibility to have our own platform of some sort. Once we figure out what’s the use-case that we can actually serve, that no-one else is serving.
Anil Dash: That’s interesting.
Glenn Otis Brown: We don’t want to do it just to do it.
Anil Dash: Right. I think that idea of, we want to figure out the use-case, touches on one of the things we think of with… Our audience is digital creators, coders, programmers, and there was an era where people said, “Oh, there’s a problem in society. I’m gonna sprinkle some apple on it and that’ll fix it.” Or, “Sprinkle some code on it.” Turns out that’s not the issue. The issue is do you understand the problem real well, it becomes necessary to bring technology to bear for solving the problem, but it’s a tool in the tool belt, not the reason that it exists.
Glenn Otis Brown: Right.
Anil Dash: I’m curious if you think about, as you train these new leaders, and these people are working on a new issue, it could be something very small. I want to clean up the park in my neighborhood. How do you envision helping somebody bringing technology to bear on that problem?
Glenn Otis Brown: I think one of the strong suits of the Obama Foundation is and will continue to be the ability to shine a light on things that are working out in the world. If you think about, without even us starting to code, which we do have ambitions to do. But, without us actually building anything, we could get a lot of mileage for a lot of people out of simply shining a light on things that are working well today. Say we get advice from you all, we have a technical advisory group that says, “Here are the 10 best apps or platforms to go on if you’re a young organizer or activist, or up and coming leader.” Simply, the mere act of the Foundation holding those out and saying, “Here’s a good beginners tool kit” would go a long way.
Anil Dash: That’s really interesting because there’s an optimism to that, which is almost presuming somebody out there is already trying to do the work. They might need more attention. They might need more resource. They might need more support. Somebody always cares about the issue. Somebody’s always working on it and if you can connect them with the like-minded people, there’s some potential there.
Glenn Otis Brown: I think that’s definitely true. And we spent a lot of the last year, like I said, using the Internet to listen and using events to listen. And one of the main things we heard from what gets called “civic tech land” is over and over and over again, different organizations, large and small. Civic Hall here in New York. Various projects out of universities around the world, actually, is don’t reinvent the wheel. We’re working on this. Help us connect to other people who are working on this. Help us get the word out. Please don’t come in and try and start from scratch.
Anil Dash: It’s so funny because that is part of coding culture. Open source culture. I’m going to reuse this, I’m going to remix this. I’m gonna put this to good use and I don’t need to write it from scratch.
Glenn Otis Brown: RTFM.
Anil Dash: Yeah. That’s the less kind words. It’s interesting to me because you also have a deep background in understanding remix culture and intellectual property. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that? Lessons you’ve learned there.
Glenn Otis Brown: Sure. In a former life, I was a copyright and privacy information law lawyer. I worked at Creative Commons in its first three years. Creative Commons is a nonprofit that helps people, as you know quite well, share the creative works that they make on terms that they want others to use it with. It allows you to stamp a work, a photograph, or a song, our course material with freedoms that invite people to reuse it, so that it’s not all rights reserved, please clear all the following rights before using this. It actually invited uses under a some rights reserved copyright. Wikipedia is under Creative Commons licence. There are billions of photos on Flickr under Creative Commons licences. Lots of other examples.
I worked there as Executive Director, and oversaw the first rollout of the Creative Commons licences, and one of the things that’s really interesting about it, and an interesting compare and contrast to what the Obama Foundation’s doing now, totally different fields, is what I see in common is that’s … The ambition is to give people a way to participate in a problem that seems vague and global, and hard to get a grasp on. The copyright around 2000 was very ominously … There were two camps. It was you’re an anarchist and a pirate, or no, you’re a total control freak lock-down.
Anil Dash: And it was looming on the horizon. They knew there was going to be a battle coming.
Glenn Otis Brown: You knew there was a battle coming and the vocabulary around it was unsophisticated, and there wasn’t a real obvious place to participate and what Creative Commons licences did was to say, “You two are a copyright owner. Anybody who creates anything is a copyright owner. It’s up to you to lay out what you want to be done with your creative works with this following do-it-yourself kit.” And totally, very different field, a lot of what the foundation wants to do is say, “Yeah. Okay. You’re concerned about the world. Alright. We would love to provide you a tool kit or have our friends provide you a tool kit so that you can make a difference in your own backyard.”
Anil Dash: But there’s a common thread, which is you can reuse the creative energies of others and build on it, and amplify it as opposed to starting from scratch.
Glenn Otis Brown: Right.
**Anil Dash: **Start energy is really a lot more effort than the continuing and amplifying energy. It’s interesting too, because recently on Glitch, we built tools where basically, with a click, you can add an open source licence to your project, or you can add a code of conduct around how you want the community to behave. We did those really early in the development of the community based on this idea of obviously, reuse and remix is part of the platform. But also declarations of intentionality. I want to be able to say what I want people to use this for and I want to express the fact that this is something people can share. It seems like these are all on a thread, this open source culture, the Creative Commons culture, creative culture broadly, and then what sounds like the beginnings of a future activism, which is much more about being networked and learning from each other.
Glenn Otis Brown: Yeah. I think that’s right. And another thing they all have in common, is there’s some element… There’s a balance between free wheel and sharing and collaboration. An ethos. You can’t really have the free wheel and collaboration unless you have that intentionality that says, “Here’s some basic norms and guidelines we want to follow on this.”
To your point about a new activism that is networked and shares learnings, you’ll often hear the President describe this as his advances and Mrs. Obama’s advances in activism and in policy and in governance, were always built on previous lessons.
Anil Dash: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Glenn Otis Brown: They will go out of their way to make clear that they didn’t come up with the stuff on their own, that this was inspired by and built upon decades of the ones who’d come before.
Anil Dash: Right. There’s no community organizing without community.
Glenn Otis Brown: Right. Yeah. That’s a good way to put it.
Anil Dash: I think we’re gonna shift gears a little bit. We’re gonna have Jenn Schiffer our Community Engineer on Glitch, work with you on building out a very simple way for people to build a tool for their friends to sign up and volunteer with them and collaborate on solving projects in their communities. And the hope is, one, we have a little tool to build together that’s really interesting and useful, that will be open source. And remixable. But, also, it’s a starting point for people to be able to start to think about how they can apply those kinds of tools to their own problems.
Glenn Otis Brown: Awesome. Thanks.
Jenn Schiffer: Hi, Glenn. I’m Jenn.
Glenn Otis Brown: Hello.
Jenn Schiffer: I’m a Community Engineer on glitch.com, and after your conversation with Anil, I wanted to show you how we can build an example app based on one of the examples Anil had mentioned: clean up your local park.
Glenn Otis Brown: Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Jenn Schiffer: I think that there are a lot of people who want to do good stuff like cleaning up their local neighborhood, joining in activism, and they feel like they don’t know the tech to be able to do that. With Glitch, we’re trying to lower that barrier.
Glenn Otis Brown: Great.
Jenn Schiffer: I think the most powerful collection of knowledge that somebody can have is a mailing list of the people that can possibly help them. I wanted to build an example app where someone has a mailing list but they need a website to get it out there so they can collect more names of people that want to help them. If you go to glitch.com, and you search mailing list, there is a project example, mailchimp-starter. MailChimp is a service for creating a mailing list, and you can look up the set up for it. I’ve documented how to do so. You can view the source of it …
Glenn Otis Brown: I would first get a mail … I’m gonna walk through it because I’m actually not … I’m fake technical. I’m not actually technical so I might be a good sample set for this. First have a MailChimp account, go sign up for that, then come here, and follow these instructions to be able to customize it.
Jenn Schiffer: Yeah.
Glenn Otis Brown: Okay.
Jenn Schiffer: Or if you haven’t used MailChimp before, I do have links and documentation on how to go to MailChimp.
Glenn Otis Brown: Okay. Got it.
Jenn Schiffer: And create a list. For now, I actually have created a list on MailChimp, where you can … There’s no subscribers, which is sad, and I want to get this mailing list out there. MailChimp does allow you to generate embeddable sign up forms, but you need a place to embed that form. As per the set up directions in the app, I tell you how to go to the embedded forms section, and there’s a part where they give you a bunch of code, that you don’t have to update yourself. But, you do have to copy and paste it somewhere.
Glenn Otis Brown: Okay.
Jenn Schiffer: In this app, this is an app that I had created, but I’m not logged in right now. I’m just another user who wants to use it to create their own site for this. If I edit this document, a remix is made so I get my own actual copy.
Glenn Otis Brown: Okay.
Jenn Schiffer: In the set up directions, it says to update index.html to include your personal content, and it gives you a line where to edit your code. I’m going to look at index.html.
Glenn Otis Brown: Okay.
Jenn Schiffer: There’s a lot of HTML. There’s a lot of stuff going on here. I added comments here that say, “This is where you put your MailChimp form.” This is the code that looks like it was given to me from the MailChimp page. I’m going to highlight that and delete it.
Now, that project was my own, but now that I’ve updated it as a not logged-in user, if you had done this, you would’ve gotten your own copy. There’s a name that’s generated. You can change it to be whatever you want it to be.
**Glenn Otis Brown: **That’s a saved folder of stuff that I’ve created?
Jenn Schiffer: Yes. Exactly. And then if you click show live, you see that you have a live page here. But, you don’t have the form, so that code that MailChimp had given us, we just copy and paste it …
Glenn Otis Brown: In the place where you say, to copy and paste it?
Jenn Schiffer: Exactly.
Glenn Otis Brown: Okay. And now do we need to edit this stuff to make it personalized or anything?
Jenn Schiffer: No. No. The form, you can save it as it is, and if we show live it auto-deploys it. You don’t have to learn how to get this online. You don’t have to get hosting. We do all that for you, for free. In a matter of minutes, you have your own page with your own form, that’s connected to your mailing list. If you wanted to update this, if your mission is to not help clear up your local park, but to start a chapter of a local meet up or organization, you can update the index.html content to do that.
Glenn Otis Brown: Okay.
Jenn Schiffer: For example, if your help us clear up a local park … I don’t want to say that, you can go to this code and you can find where it says that.
Glenn Otis Brown: If I wanted to put help us clean up Jackson Park.
Jenn Schiffer: You can put it in.
Glenn Otis Brown: Not that it needs clean up, but this is a hypothetical.
Jenn Schiffer: There you go. It’s automatically updated.
Glenn Otis Brown: Cool. I like the salmon color, and it matches the Glitch logo well. Is there a way to customize this to where I can make it …
Jenn Schiffer: For sure. In the readme file, which has all the directions for how to use this app, I do say, if you don’t like the color, sizes, or other visual elements, you can update styles.css. CSS is cascading style sheets. It’s a language for setting rules for how the page should look. This is where all the colors and sizes are. In the readme file I explain that if you want to update the colors, sizes, you can go to the styles.css file, which is here on the sidebar, underneath index.html, and CSS is cascading style sheets.
It’s a way to set rules for how the page looks. When you look at the index.html and you decided that you wanted to change the color of that, or in your example, the form. You don’t want that salmon color. We can look in the styles.css file, and we see there’s a selector for form.
Glenn Otis Brown: Got it.
Jenn Schiffer: This is probably where we want to change the color. Here we have it set …
Glenn Otis Brown: Coral.
Jenn Schiffer: The background at coral. You can pick a different color. The color values in CSS can be color names, there’s a set collection of HTML names. Coral happens to be one. And then also there are hex values, and RGB, or red, green, blue values.
Glenn Otis Brown: Got it. Okay. I would look up the code for that? Or look up what the standardized names are?
Jenn Schiffer: Yeah.
Glenn Otis Brown: Okay.
Jenn Schiffer: Let’s look for our color. This is the most important part honestly, of getting your page out there. Is personalizing, making it right.
Glenn Otis Brown: How about light green, there? That looks good.
Jenn Schiffer: Light green.
Glenn Otis Brown: Yeah.
Jenn Schiffer: Let’s type in light green.
Glenn Otis Brown: That’s close to the green we use at the Obama Foundation, among many others.
Jenn Schiffer: Light green. There you go.
Glenn Otis Brown: Nice. Cool.
Jenn Schiffer: Much better.
**Glenn Otis Brown: **That’s very quick.
Jenn Schiffer: Yeah. In a matter of minutes you have this embeddable form, people will be able to add to your mailing list. The great thing about using a mailing list, as opposed to collecting info on a whole bunch of different platforms, is that it’s one location, and also services like MailChimp allow you to export your contacts. You don’t have to worry about the service going away. Email has been around for a really long time, and much to the chagrin of many, it will probably be around for a lot more. Mailing lists are great way to get started in local activism.
Glenn Otis Brown: Got it.