Eli just got the first season of The West Wing on DVD, which we’re watching with Molly’s folks down here in Olympia. With the series in its final post-debate-episode flameout, I had forgotten just how damn good the first season was. Damn, it’s good. It’s all about the dialogue.
Have a great Thanksgiving, y’all.
Only 153,534 shopping minutes until Christmas.
I’m thrilled to see that the Plone Team has taken the wraps off the long-rumoured Planet Plone aggregator, which is aggregating contents from about 10 (and growing!) blogs about Plone, including this one… and The Plone Blog, where I’ll be shifting the bulk of my Plone-related blogging.
This is part of a concerted push to get Plone community members to start blogging more.
My colleague Steve Andersen, who started at ONE/Northwest back in July as our Database Program Manager, has been blogging about the process he’s used to evaluate database/CRM platforms and to make the decision to focus our consulting practice on the Salesforce.com platform.
Well worth a read. I was a part of the decisionmaking process, and I still learned a ton from reading Steve’s writeups.
Alan Runyan, co-founder of Plone and I have just soft-launched The Plone Blog, which is, as its name implies, a blog about Plone.
It’s a (very) modest effort to provide some more accessible and easy-to-digest coverage of the Plone community, which ranges from grassroots nonprofit users like ONE/Northwest to large corporations and governments of all sizes.
Check it out. We’ll have a logo soon.
Continuing its march to world domination ™, Google has launched Google Analytics, a free webstats service. Interesting.
It’s one of those classically gray-and-rainy Seattle early winter afternoons. A day where the sky and the water and the land snuggle up right close until there’s no point in trying to tell them apart. A salmon spawning day — I saw the coho wriggling their way back up Piper’s Creek this morning. I consider how on the one hand I can feel my motivation ebbing like the tide, even as I marvel at the sheer orneriness of life fighting its way upstream against all odds.
Peter Montague of Rachel’s Democracy and Health weekly gives us an in-depth overview and summary of a new scientific report that
…makes a compelling case that many industrial chemicals contribute to many kinds of cancers. But where this report really shines is in its clear call for prevention. In all, there are relatively few products or substances associated with cancer. Everything doesn’t cause cancer, and many of the things that do could be shunned and phased out. In principle, a great deal of prevention is possible.
Ok, I’ve thought a bit about Amazon ‘s Mechanical Turk service. It’s a platform for folks to write computer programs that need small amounts of work from human beings as part of their input. You supply some cash. Amazon supplies the people. The people supply the thinking. Very, very clever.
Marty and Brian are very, very excited. There are some neat things that one could do with this — like building a media contact database, or transcribing audio and video recordings.
But as I read the initial wave of blog posts about the Mechnical Turk, I notice a distinct scarcity of interesting ideas for how to actually apply peer production to organizing and/or advocacy problems. The skeptic in me can’t help but wonder: how many organizing and advocacy problems are really out there that can be solved by small bits of labor from many unskilled people in front of their computers?
I’d like to see more ideas about important problems that could be solved with this approach. I just can’t think of many. Maybe I’m just blocked. Or maybe there’s less to be excited about here than we might wish to think. Or maybe it’s 12:45 AM and I should just go to bed.
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 fiction? Another one of the unconventional premises of our campaign was the idea that young, “wired” individuals who work and play in the new technology economy would rally to support one of their own, a candidate who “gets it” — that is, who demonstrably understands the power and potential of networks and transparency in politics. Indeed, we started with lots of support and good will from key Internet organizers from the Dean, Clark, Kerry and Kucinich 2004 presidential campaigns along with “A-list” technology opinion-shapers like Doc Searls and David Weinberger….
But the fabled tech community turned out to be mostly a fable when it came to actually embracing Andrew’s campaign and setting aside time to spread its message. Yes, about 100 local and national bloggers linked to the campaign. But few made an extended commitment to pitch in. To give one telling example, when I asked a core group of about 30 tech supporters to help us “kick the tires” on our WeFixNYC.com site by sending in a picture of a pothole before we announced the project to the public, at most 3 or 4 responded.
I chalk up our difficulty in mobilizing techies to several factors: 1) the number-two office in NYC is just not of great interest to techies, no matter how innovative the campaign tactics or message; 2) techies are predominantly political independents, or libertarians, and thus hard to mobilize in a Democratic primary context; 3) techies are focused on work, making money, and, for all their complaining about politics, a relatively immature political grouping (compared, to say, Old Media moguls in Hollywood). And unlike some cities where political bloggers play an important role in local affairs (take Portland, Oregon), in New York there is no hive of vibrant conversation about local politics….
Viral campaigns are hard to do in a low attention environment. We made several attempts at engaging our supporters and interested visitors to our website in a conversation that we hoped they would help spread. First, and throughout the campaign, we asked people to share their ideas for how to make New York City a better place. As email messages came in through our online suggestion box, we picked out the interesting ones and wrote back to the senders, thanking them for their ideas and asking for their permission to post them on our blog. Then I wrote up a blog post, adding some comments in the voice of the campaign, and urging others to join in. At one or two points in the campaign, we e-mailed our whole list asking them to help develop a list of “21 ideas for 21st century NYC” But we got very few responses. Yes, a few of the people who we listened to in this manner became campaign supporters, making a contribution or offering to volunteer. But not enough to become a self-sustaining hub of activity. (Overall, we got about 160 comments on a total of 150 blog posts between April and September, a sign of little community involvement.)
Likewise, we envisioned our videoblog as having a viral potential, especially the humorous “Where is Betsy?” posts that we did, attempting to track the current Public Advocate and demonstrate how inaccessible she is to the public she is supposed to serve. But again, apart from some decent press coverage, this “meme” didn’t spread. Since every one of our “techie” gimmicks also functioned as a press hook, the time we spent coming up with them was not wasted. But our larger hope that these would help spread our message and build our grass-roots base was for nought. Again, the general lack of public interest in the Public Advocate’s office deadened these possibilities.
It took us a long time to implement a “tell-a-friend” feature on our website that we thought would have viral potential. We wanted a way for strong supporters to not only forward a simple message to their friends, but for them to also be able to track their friends’ responses and to see their own impact on growing our network…. We deployed this tool late in the campaign, and about fifty people (a little over 1% of our list at that point) used it to invite additional people to join.
Update: My friend Gregory Heller, NYC activitst techie, also has some good thoughts about the Rasiej campaign from a much closer vantage point.