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Day Traders and Campaign Plans

March 5, 2010 - 4:33pm — Marty
Creation of political will and policy change are an outcome. Changes in political will and policy are not irreversible. It seems increasingly like they are reverse by courts, new politicians and switching party control that long-term shifts will be increasingly elusive if we stay on our current path. The key challenges to fostering long-term change which protect policy gains and multiply the power of political will are. A. Generating deep cultural interest in the issues, problems and solutions. B. Distributing ownership of the effort to fix the problem. Short term policy activities that do not secure long-term solutions are not a solution for fixing deep systemic problems. Passing lots of policy that is far beyond where the culture is ready go begs for backlash, the reversal of political gains and waste organizing effort and resources. Focusing on shifting culture and distributing ownership of the effort to create change secures sustainable gains. Here are three examples.... 1. Gay marriage = Culture has shifted. Political will and policy are tumbling now to align with the culture. In the past gains have been easily rolled back in political and policy context while culture has grown more mature and accepting. 2. Climate Change =...

Do You Care about Communicating with Each Other?

February 17, 2010 - 10:33pm — Marty
I was asking the twitterverse about the use of online tools (yammer) and adoption rates and Howard Rheingold flipped back this nugget. Latest: RT @hrheingold: "Success depends on ppl involved care about communicating w/ each other" great metric for network building too. via twitter.com I am inspired to think about lots of the work of network building and creating advocacy networks. Is it possible to nudge people to care about each other? What does that mean? Communicating involves exchanges and listening. It involves connection and sharing of ideas and information. If you are building a network how do you make it easy to make people "care about communicating with each other"? To varying degrees, face to face, meetings, community spaces, get people involved because they lower the "care" threshold among people that might not normally care to communicate with each other. If it takes little effort then I only need to care a little to communicate. If it takes lots of effort to communicate, then I need to care lots. Do emails, twitter, facebook, status updates etc create "care"? Do they lower the threshold so much that they are so easy to use that people that don't normally communicate start...

What information do you like to pick up before starting an online organizing project?

February 3, 2010 - 10:02pm — Marty
I started to think about all the campaign meetings and discussions I have been in over the years. Groups are great and they share lots of data including proposals, plans, budgets, etc. However, I am usually very hungry to sit down with the campaign team to talk about the vision and where things are going. What am I looking for during these meetings? Why does most the literature and information in proposals not give online organizers enough to chew on? What do I really want before I can sit down and develop the best advocacy network strategy for a group or client? These are not in order. Here is a list of things I like to get my head around before I get into thinking about the online strategy. Most of these are obvious but some are driven by what makes a network function. What is the campaign trying to do? What is success? How do the policy team/ campaign team think it will be done? Who is the target audience? Who are the influencers that the online strategy must engage to succeed? What services would be most valuable to them in their own work? Where are the turf wars...

by not having "contol" of brand maybe we become better brands rather than better at spin.

January 29, 2010 - 6:58pm — Marty
This is an interesting. I like the riff on transparency and the clash that transparency will inspire us to be better as reviewers, readers and brands. This transparency vs. control and history and trends vs. spin is interesting. Echo Creator Khris Loux on the Ties That Bind the Real-Time Web from ReadWriteWeb on Vimeo.

Individuals Cannot Avoid Jumping to Conclusions

January 19, 2010 - 7:44pm — Marty
Here is a good article unpacking the fallout of group think. It is also a nice set of questions for any campaign planning and campaign strategists. The original article is about CIA and failures of intelligence. Our allies often get what we ask for but not what we want. My sense is that the failure of many of our investments and strategies is because we don’t do enough of the following…. 1. Challenge Authority. Challenge Tradition. 2. Probe the Assumptions 3. Look for Indicators. What details could change your mind? 4. Brainstorm the likely responses from opponents. Here is the section from the original article that hit me… What our intelligence system really needs is ways to avoid becoming trapped by the natural tendency to leap to conclusions and stick with them. This is true in other fields as well, which is why so much of professional and scientific training is designed to reduce the errors made by fallible people using weak information. If individuals cannot avoid jumping to conclusions, there are ways for organizations to make up for this. They can systematically solicit the views of people with different perspectives, for example, or use devil’s advocates who will challenge...

Because of You Google Maps Show Live Traffic Reports for Back Roads

January 15, 2010 - 10:47pm — Marty
The thinking behind the Google Map service is the way every allied organizer should be thinking. Once you are not stuck at the ground level, we need strategists to step back and look at the 30,000 how can we make this happen. The basic concept behind the way they build information on the map is exactly the way distributed advocacy and social change movements MUST be organizing. How do movements build up the capacity to enable collaboration with “almost zero effort” on the part of the organizers and groups? What transactions of everyone else in the movement you work in would be most relevant to your work? What are the traffic jams of social change? The people with cell phone are collaborating. They benefit from the collaboration. They have accepted the bargain of giving back peeks into data about them in order to see the big picture. When you choose to enable Google Maps with My Location, your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you're moving. When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can...

Human Nature Doesn't Change: Human Behavior Does.

January 14, 2010 - 3:23am — Marty
This is a good presentation. Great line and introduction to the shifts in technology producing changes in behavior. The goal of human nature is hard wired in people. Somewhere in our bipedal mammalian evolution, we picked up socializing and connecting with each other as a species characteristic. The real evolution of the internet is not about the content, marketing, philanthropy, product placement, etc. etc. The core of the network is connecting people to learn and share with each other, to collaborate, to evolve and to be. Our survival in the ecosystem is dependent on communication and collaboration, it always has been and now it is just scaling with the people on the planet. People increasingly turn online to find people who know, people to care, and people to accompany them while they are experiencing life. Those connections are evolving human behavior to a scale and tempo that is not comfortable for many. What if people do get more value and reward from 5000 friendsters than 5 close friends? What if "fame" online is as self-rewarding as fame offline? The buzz about the collapse of social fabric is wrong. The "wisdom of the crowd", "wisdom of the market" suggests that people...

Data Driven Campaigns

November 11, 2009 - 2:50am — Marty
Data at work in a defined context. Our movements need to really connect and track data and contribute to community and allies understanding of the data. Time from 7:30 to 8:40 is amazing on the evolution of data enhancements and traffic mapping of engagement with the voters. Important ideas in any organizing context... combined data creates new insights and "synthetic" data based on hard data. By collecting data and sharing the data, it is possible to create new actionable data pools. Carefully targeting allows movements to find new niches and audiences. Careful targeting requires data sharing. Syndicating data access can help drive new levels of power to all that have access to that data. Access to data is scalable. This is a great presentation on the power of data. We need to continue to step up the tools and techniques that are available to allies working together on issues.

I'd rather have people grow out of our products, as long as more people are growing into them

November 6, 2009 - 2:19am — Marty
We keep our products simple. I'd rather have people grow out of our products, as long as more people are growing into them. http://ow.ly/zIGI The Way I Work: Jason Fried of 37Signals Man. Wow… that is a line that should be burned into every social movement. Jason is talking about products at 37 Signals but I would love to see that approach taken by our justice, environmental and other progressive movement organizers. How many would pass? What % of our users do we graduate? Serve the new people well and you grow. If you want to grow a movement build it to serve the newbie not the old baby boomer that wants you to add increased science policy review language onto some obscure wetland legislation. (press feed from ascribe)?

Collaboration Anti-Culture

November 5, 2009 - 8:15pm — Marty
Here is a great riff on culture and collaboration that resonates with me. It fits with the seven elements of a healthy network and begs the question…. can you manage “culture”? Yes. It is possible to establish and set the culture of a group. There are 3 ways to build culture in an organization or network. 1. Leadership- Leadership in culture is very different from leadership in an executive sense. There are leaders that serve others. Leaders that direct and drive. And leaders that focus on process and infrastructure. There are very few people that realize they are controlled or follow culture but most of us are sheep grazing on pastures of culture. The culture sets the terms of acceptability (you know the day you square danced or moon walked). Leadership in a culture is not being a boss but leading in vision or service. Leadership is also exerted by those that see the culture and shape it by weaving parts of it together or drive wedges in the cracks. 2. Language – A culture can not emerge without commonalities. Common vision, common stories and common language. Words, pictures, music, stories that unify and define “who is in” and “who...

Twitter Cofounder Jack Dorsey On Using Twitter For Social Change

November 5, 2009 - 2:59pm — Marty
This is in line with the training work we have been doing on twitter for activists. The power of Twitter comes from 3 sources for activists. The ability to instantly connect people who don’t know each other but care about an issue, event or action. (#hashtags) The ability to set up a group of trusted people and connect them even if they are not in front of computer but not tight enough to share cell phone numbers with each other. (lobby days, coordinating action etc.) The ability to scale up your listening, broaden your radar and listen to people you don’t normally get to listen to so regularly. (Micah Sifry is one of the smartest and well connected activist … who does he follow? Follow them directly.http://twitter.com/Mlsif/following) and now his lists…http://twitter.com/Mlsif/techpolitics Jack Dorsey nails it… Good Huffington Post Interview… Impact: How can people use Twitter more effectively for social change? JD: I think the biggest thing is supporting each individual update more, getting away from [Twitter] being a social network and focusing on individual tweets, so that you can create a whole movement from that. Right now we have the hashtag, which was invented by our users, but it's still...

Be a Producer! Networking the Arts and Project Development

November 4, 2009 - 9:28pm — Marty
Here is a cool example of the networked culture connecting art supporters and artists. This is in the same stream of thinking behind innocentive, kiva, extrondinaries, 99designs, daylo, spot.us bounty county, etc. I like the design and the concept. They also seem to have jumped on some great projects from the launch. Screen clipping taken: 11/4/2009, 4:23 PM

Flu Trends Shows The Early Spike of H1N1

November 3, 2009 - 7:26pm — Marty
Google can monitor health-seeking behaviour in the form of queries to online search engines, which are submitted by millions of users around the world each day. " we can accurately estimate the current level of weekly influenza activity in each region of the United States". The question is does the early spike mean that America "is Done" with the flu or are we going to see a Feb-Mar spike that is 2 or 3 times greater than the current levels.

Indictment of Online Strategies: The Man in the Mirror Doesn't Trust You Either.

November 2, 2009 - 3:48pm — Marty
This should be a wake up call for lots of online strategies that are not transparent, don't communicate results and just use online work to build a base of donating click monkeys. People are not happy with the distrust shown to them online. This study mentioned in Philanthropy of 587 PEOPLE WHO USE NEW MEDIA ... has nothing to do with the failure of the platform but of the philosophy and world view of those who run organizations. The online strategy and communications behind the use of the online tools doesn't typically engage, empower and listen. There is a high degree of distrust of online supporters by organizers and organizations. Somehow the open and welcome culture of organizing "if they show up at a meeting engage them and work with them" has not translated into online organizing space. Old guard leaders don't trust their own instincts or methods used to filter "good supporters and bad supporters" in the online space and therefore they distrust all online supports and only offer them limited engagement, information or resources. Often people are left feeling "not trusted, disconnected, left behind and like "ATMs" because that is the true way "serious organizers" often feel toward...

John Kao: Innovation Nation meets Nonprofit Networks

October 29, 2009 - 8:03pm — Marty
I really thought this was a good presentation on innovation process and practice. I like how it resonates on personal experience level and how it bumps up against the network design issues and the paradoxes of building network power and performance to create intentional change. First, the discussion fits well with the type of work I do with partners. It is interesting to see John focus on the conceptual clarity and need to ask and queue up the right questions. Partners often balk at the really important part of the work that is focused on syncing up the network vision and our efforts with the current contexts and realities that are buffering and shaping the context. Second, this presentation bumps into the system and process questions at the network level. What systems do we have in place that actually DESTROY innovation at scale across groups and in an issue and advocacy network ? How can networks innovate? How can networks be supported in innovation process? I find it interesting that John limits this conversation and thinking (national or organizational level) to centralized planners and individual examples. John provides the right process (everyone knows the process, set of practices that work...

Engagement without Joining - Youth Vision

October 28, 2009 - 1:49pm — Marty
It is tragic that we don't have intentional efforts to drive power, leadership, budgets and responsibility into the hands and power of tested, smart and emerging young leaders. They are interested in engagement without joining. Why do most of the models for engagement include "joining and membership" vs action, output and results of conversation. The youth are not interested in joining becoming member movement's that have delivered the current world to their door. They are interested in power freedom justice global perspectives engagement and voice Energy Action Coalition continues to pump new ideas and insights into the drive and trends they see on the ground with young diverse and mobilized base. There is good insight into the language, channels and rhythms of youth leadership that are very important to heed.

Facebook as a Financial Platform?

October 23, 2009 - 5:16pm — Marty
There are big changes going on at facebook that will reshape the ways nonprofits will be able to use and leverage the platform. The biggest of these changes is the launch of some “gift” tools for your social network. These changes seem little at first “who cares if you can buy a song for a friend” but anyone that watched ITunes, Skype, Amazon and online donations scale up realizes that getting people to cough up credit card for credits is the biggest hurdle in ultimately freeing people from money. The more that facebook users get used to buying little bits of things online, using their credits, and making transactions online the easier it will be to help them convert facebook relationships into channels for sending money to your charity and campaign. I expect online donations to charities and groups with “pages” will grow proportionally with the amount of total exchanges on facebook. So seeing them add features like the new “buy a song” for a friend will be a big boost to those of us that look to facebook as a space for organizing relationships with people that use if like the way traditional users focused on their inbox. While...

Sean Parker: Twitter/Facebook Will Soon Dominate The Web Not Google.

October 23, 2009 - 5:01pm — Marty
This resonates with Clay Shirky, Beth Kanter and a bunch of riffs here on network-centric advocacy. Connecting people is taking over as the major service of the web. Newspapers provided information. Advocacy groups exist to connect people to each other. Connecting people with more than just text is the big leap. Connect people with voice, video and images. Connecting people to work, laugh, collaborate and create change is the golden opportunity of the next 10 years. Parker believes we’re shifting from the first phase of the Internet, which was dominated by what he calls “information services” These are companies like Google and Yahoo. But next up to dominate the web will be the “network services” like Facebook and Twitter, he believes. To be clear, he thinks Google will stay huge and relevant, but it’s dominance will go down because collecting data is less valuable than connecting people, he said. He went on to talk a bit about the social networking space, which is significant because he helped found Facebook. Sean Parker: Twitter/Facebook Will Soon Dominate The Web — Not Google.

Benkler Channel: Remove the Planner without removing the capacity to plan.

October 13, 2009 - 7:07pm — Marty
Benkler is amazing. He says things that most of us spend time trying to argue. Complexity and Reach make planning impossible. (BOOM) It always has been but now it is more clear and more important to accept (BOOM). (min 20+...he is on fire) This is a really rich talk with important nods to the role of motivated people, fairness and group identity in these network models. I see his work as much less related to workplace economics and more related to advocacy and social planning. I still see the reflection of the seven elements of network functionality in his work. I really like the idea that common language and negotiating "fairness" in the network are linked. "Life is to complex to settle on the simple model". He is going after the economic tracking and design model for assessing output capacity and deviation without a centralized planner. Congratulations! The rest of us should be working on this in climate change work, agriculture policy, health reform, and the rest of the progressive agenda.
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