The core feature of Shuru is the cause or campaign. Driven to the site by either an email or a text message, prospective activists are able to quickly, in under 3 minutes, understand, evaluate, and replicate the cause.

To allow understanding and evaluation of the cause, the cause author(s) must define several key areas:

  • Name – a short, and easy to understand name for the campaign.

  • Description – a longer description of the issue, including reasons to support or participate.

  • Resources – links to educational materials that allow those who are interested.

  • Next goal – a ‘tactical objective’ which is easy to understand, and can be achieved directly – i.e. pressure an elected representative to vote for a piece of legislation, or force a company to change hiring practices.

  • Actions – are explicitly linked to the ‘next goal’ and should contribute directly to achieving the goal. The only mandatory action is the ‘forward to friends’ [is this a good name??] action, which provides the ability for all causes to replicate virally. Actions are discussed in more detail here.


 In addition to these 5 ‘author defined’ areas, the cause page will display 3 system generated sections:

  •  Feedback and conversation – an area for vibrant discussion of the cause, including dissenting views and debate. Some of this content is automatically generated from the ‘plea’ that some users have written to introduce their viral emails and text messages to friends. A breif summary of the larger ‘cause conversation’ will be shown to allow quick review. Summary filtering will be determined by reputation points, allowing the most respected and influential, and coherent users to be seen first.

  • Participation statistics – an automated measure of the success of the cause; described in % of people who have taken action, and in absolute numbers who have taken action. The higher the percentage, the more universal the appeal for the cause.

  • Social network features – intelligent display of people close to you in both social network distance and geographic measures – i.e., cause participants who are friends of friends, or who live in the same neighborhood, will be displayed to address concerns of social proof.


These 8 sections are the only content listed on the cause display page, and must be designed to be easy to quickly review, sticking to the 3 minute goal. This page, and the sms/email notifications, represent the viral kernel. If they are designed correctly, the messages will propagate to millions.

 

Questions?