I am one of the Romanians who, in the first round of presidential elections, were given the chance to wait in line in the cold for three to four hours in Vienna, in order to be able to exercise their constitutional right to vote.

Below you will find a story about the online communities’ capability to organize, and about the power of technology, as well as several fresh conclusions.

I created the #NuPonta (Victor Ponta was the Social Democrat presidential candidate in 2014; nu = not, don’t) online community on Facebook, which totalled in the fortnight between the two rounds more than 12,500 fans, and reached over 1.2 million people, of which 10% got actively involved by commenting or sharing information. This Facebook page was based on the www.nuponta.ro community platform, which gathered 300 active supporters, volunteers or “recruiters” over the same two weeks.

In addition, the #NuPonta Challenge event on Facebook gathered over 45,000 participants by the day before the second round.

The objective that set everything in motion was very simple: counterbalancing the imminent fraud and “electoral tourism” (a practice through which voters are taken from one place to another to balance votes according to party interests – source: www.hotnews.ro) by getting everyone to convince at least 5 “lazy” acquaintances who had not voted in the first round:

“If we do not want this country to finally and forever collapse in a corrupted hell, the second round of presidential elections in 2014 must be ours! We must leave the online and call out all of our friends and relatives to vote! Their “electoral charity” cannot match the number of our lazy friends! Let’s convince them to join us in the second round!”

Below is the story I wrote 24 hours after having set up the platform; should anyone be interested, I will provide further details on all the community scoping and development techniques I employed, on gamification I used (thank you, Gabe Zichermann) and on some behavioral design theories (Mr. BJ Fogg should be proud here.)

The main conclusion of this online experiment is perfectly captured by the NuPonta post following Dragnea’s statement, who said they “would make an assessment in the upcoming days.” We said:

“Dear boy, we have already been making that assessment on a daily basis, and we are telling you that you were bested by technology! The community bested you. Facebook & Twitter bested you! Our graphs were saying we would win two days before the elections!”

The story of the first day of operations. The text below was written on November 4th, the day after I set up the NUPonta platform:

1. I decided to get the NuPonta.ro website up and running on Monday, November 3rd, the morning after the first round of elections. The social network newsfeed was flooded with lamentation, complaints – oh my, Ponta will win; oh dear, we are squandering this opportunity; oh dear, people didn’t come out to vote, and so on. A friend, who is probably still a student, wrote something in the lines of:

“We have two weeks to get organized and find concrete solutions for those who are voting outside their place of residence (especially in diaspora, but also in student campuses), and to convince those who do not want to vote just how important it is that they do. Afterwards, we can get back to our daily whining: everyone’s stealing, there’s nothing we can do to change this, we live in a … country etc. Come on!”

2. I, too, said “Come on!”

At 9:31 I was registering the NuPonta.ro domain at the RoTLD (Romanian Top Level Domain) with only one thing in mind: to trigger a movement through which the online would make the offline vote in the second round of elections.

3. At 9:58 I set up the NationBuilder platform for the NuPonta movement.

4. Nationbuilder is still in beta testing, but I really liked how they describe their mission:

“NationBuilder has a fundamental faith in the power of people, connected. Each of us has something we are uniquely meant to contribute to the world, but we cannot do it alone. We’re not meant to. Find what you love, find the other people who love it, too, and do it for the greatest cause you can imagine.”

And, by the way, it’s free for 14 days (right up to the elections), after which the monthly subscription starts at 19 USD.

5. At 12:44 I finished up the customization (between work duties) and I also launched the NuPonta.ro Facebook page.

6. At 13:58 I received a message on this new page, which said: “I am interested in getting involved in running the nuponta.ro website”, and so this was now a two-member team.

7. I set up a small boost on Facebook in order to direct people towards nuponta.ro. In 24 hours I spent 38 lei (about 8 Euro).

8. We then set up the first action, named “Call five people a day”, and posted it step by step, as a procedure.

9. At 17:02, a nationbuilder representative (Thank you, Maya) called me to ask if there was anything he could assist us with – he saw that things were coming along nicely, and wanted to help out.

10. At 17:32, the same representative sent me some links to a few tutorials which helped us customize and translate into Romanian almost all the functions, such as blog posts, event creation, and command panel control.

11. This morning (after the first day) this is what statistics show: we have 2082 likes on Facebook. On the nuponta.ro 98 active members were registered, all with valid email addresses, of which 26 were eager to volunteer.

12. A single volunteer wrote a blog entry. Please note that the platform allows all registered users to post any opinion on the blog and to organize any type of event (like, let’s get a beer in some pub, or in front of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs)

Conclusions after that first day:

- Although we prefer whining to getting involved (I don’t think this comes as a surprise), percentages are as follows: a 4.7% conversion for enrolment, and then 1% for getting actively involved in the movement, through blog posts.

- Many of those who made me set up this platform, due to the fierceness and high frequency of the comments through which they had been expressing their dissatisfaction, took a step back when they were urged to actually do something, such as letting us in on their experience with convincing others to come out to vote.

- In the hope that nobody will mind too much, here are some of the excuses I got: “yeah, I’m too depressed today”; “Hmmm, you mean I would handle the content?”; “wait up, I can’t access it at all, my Facebook application keeps crashing, weird”; “ok, I’ll see what it can do, I’ll check it out a little later”.

- Fortunately, I have a “positive” conclusion: we are a team of two, so I’m not the only fool who wants to make online people convince offline people to go out and vote.

I hope that the rate of conversion of whiners to doers will keep rising, I hope we will find more ways to try to convince those who didn’t vote the first time around to vote in the second round (about half of the voting population, so the potential is massive), I hope the team will have at least 1 or 2 more members posting information on the platform.

But I finally remembered the best excuse: “People will stay away from this kind of thing because it seems too well-organized. Whatever seems well-organized/branded/etc. is suspected to be funded by who knows who.”

Dear Romanians, all customizations have cost me a few hours of my life and about 90 euros, including the 50 euro tax for purchasing the domain.

We can put together a revolution without money from the Russians or the Americans, and what’s more important is that today we can do so without any casualties at Otopeni or Universitate, like in December 1989.

So we could!