Politics, the environment, technology, activism. And stuff.
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 25th, 2006
Why would the CEO of an explicitly progressive political tech consulting firm out himself as a “supporter” of McCain? And then take a “leave of absence” from said firm? Odd. Disturbing. I don’t know what to make of this. There must be more going on here than meets the eye.
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 17th, 2006
The crew at Environmental Working Group have baked up a simple, clever interactive viral action campaign:http://www.ronaldmchummer.com It lets you make custom “Golden Arches” signs, like so: And you can vote on your favorites!And you can write a letter to McDonald’s asking them to stop giving away Hummers in their Happy Meals!Nicely done, EWG!
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 23rd, 2006
95 Theses of Geek Activism. Good stuff. (Hat tip to Alex at Worldchanging.)
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 15th, 2006
Mark Schmitt offers a realistic asssesment of the significance of bloggers in Ned Lamont’s thriving primary challenge to Joe-menutm Lieberman in Connecticut. Can we please put to rest the idea that Ned Lamont’s challenge to Senator Lieberman is a product of, or a wholly-owned subsidiary of, that thing called “the netroots.â€? (Without, in so doing, disparaging or minimizing [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 22nd, 2006
The basic functioning of the Internet is facing a pretty serious legislative threat from Congress, and there’s a new nonpartisan coalition forming to fight to protect “net neutrality,” which is one of the bedrock principles that has alllowed the Internet to become the free and open ecosystem that we want to see it remain. For a [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 12th, 2006
Technology doesn’t exist in a vaccuum. It is intimately connected to the real-world organizing you’re doing, and must inform it and be informed by it. You can’t organize unless you know who you’re trying to organize, who your targets are, and how you can influence them. We need better processes for thinking holistically about modern organizing [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 20th, 2006
… will well-meaning activists figure out that a half-megabyte PDF file is not the most effective format for an emailed event invitation? I’m just saying. Now for the constructive part: it’s better to send a highly compressed JPEG in the body of the message. And even better to send legible text and/or HTML.
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 13th, 2006
My pal, Web of Change diva and online fundraiser extraordinaire Madeleine Stanionis’ book is finally out! In it she shares all of the wisdom she’s accmulated helping big nonprofits raise millions of dollars online via timely, well-written and well-designed email appeals. I can’t wait to get my mitts on a copy — it’s sure to [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Dec 29th, 2005
As the Seattle PI reports, Washington State is about to launch its new, federally-mandated, statewide voter registration file. This is good news for grassroots activist groups who might want to “enhance” their membership databases with information from voter registration files in order to do a better job of encouraging their members to get [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 5th, 2005
Micah Sifry offers a lengthy post-mortem on the spectacularly unsuccessful “open-source” campaign of Andrew Rasiej for NYC Public Advocate. It’s a long article, but worth reading its entirety. Down near the bottom, two learnings jumped out at me as particularly important lessons for would-be cutting edge campaigners. Tech “community” a [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 28th, 2005
Former Groundspring employee Jeff Reifman offesr some insight on the Groundspring/Network for Good merger: While the merger with Network for Good seems to address the stability risk for Groundspring customers, Drummond of Tides emailed me today that “We are barely squeaking by, as you know, and the merger doesn’t change that.” This was in regards to [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 5th, 2005
If you’re trying to understand how blogs influence the mainstream media, here’s a case study that you can really wrap your brain around. My friend David “Goldy” Goldstein, who writes probably the best liberal blog in Washington state, broke a big piece of the post-Katrina story — how FEMA Director Mike Brown’s previous employement record was… [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 13th, 2005
Emily Thorson of EchoDitto offers some great pointers on why and how to write compelling emails, which are they key to driving online action. Real-life fact: email drives traffic and participations. Implications: Stop stressing about your website. Yes, it should have regularly updated content and look halfway professional. But it shouldn’t drive your strategy, it should be [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 5th, 2005
Ron Brownstein recently wrote a lengthy analysis of the significance of the liberal blogosphere (led by DailyKos and MoveOn) to the Democratic Party. It was just reposted in full on DailyKos, and it’s worth a read if you’re trying to figure out what to make of all this “netroots” stuff.
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 15th, 2005
Man, getting fired can be great for your creativity and productivity. At least that’s what I’m learning from my friend Jeff Reifman these days. Jeff’s been on creative streak lately, playing with a bunch of permutations at the fertile intersection of social networks, alternative media, progressive activism and emerging tech. His latest [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 15th, 2005
I’m pleased to report that Jeff Reifman has rescued ActionStudio from the train wreck created by Groundspring’s recent organizational turmoil. He’s relaunched his low-cost, high-featured online activism tool as eAdvocacy from ActionStudio. eAdvocacy is a great tool for doing online petitions and contact-your-decisionmaker elements. It offers a great blend of powerful features at a bargain-basement price [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 13th, 2005
The use of cellphone text messaging (aka SMS, for short messsage service) in activism contexts has already been well documented by Howard Rheingold, among many others. But most of the celebrated examples have been drawn from the contexts of international national-elections and associated mass protests: the recent elections in Spain, the Phillippines, Korea, [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 13th, 2005
People For the American Way are preparing a massive text-messaging action alert to be launched in the event that Bill Frist pulls the trigger on the Senate’s “nuclear option.” By giving us your cell phone number, we will text message you as soon as Senate Republicans trigger the “nuclear option.” Embedded in that text [...]
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