I’m going to be taking some personal leave to deal with some family medical stuff over the next few weeks. While I won’t be totally cut off from the world, expect a much-lower-than-average stream of tidbits until early/mid July.
The good news is that I’ll be in New York City for the next couple of weeks, and I’m looking forward to the opportunity to catch up with my East Coast friends and colleagues. And need I even mention how much I am looking forward to a slice of real pizza?
See you soon.
Remember how a bit earlier in the campaign cycle the media got all caught up with the idea that maybe this was the year of “turning out the base?” Well, now at least the NYT is waking up to the idea that
Posted in Uncategorized
|
Tagged Politics
|
Leave a reply
So the first trailer for “Farenheit 9/11″ is out. Go watch it. Then let’s think about to maximize the impact of what looks to be an astoundingly powerful indictment of George Bush. I’ll be there on opening night. But let’s be real: only the faithful will go see in theatres. A few more will see it if somone organizes house parties around it. But if you really want to tap this film’s power to persuade the undecided and alienated, you gotta put it right into the hands of the people who won’t motivate to see it on their own. So… I wonder — seriously — how much it would cost to bulk mail DVDs of Farenheit 9/11 to targeted voters in swing states about a week before election day. Maybe a buck or two each? If AOL can afford to do it, then maybe we should think about it. I can’t imagine a more effective political persuasion piece. Hell, the earned media alone would probably be worth it. What else can we think of to maximize the reach & impact of this film? Jeff Reifman asks Is it time for Washington’s Progressives to MoveOn?, and calls for the creation of a “centralized progressive organization that can help support and connect our grass roots community efforts.” I completely agree that state and local-scale progressive movements need a more cohesive public face to cut through the noise and better mobilize the majority of Americans who share our values. And I also agree with Jeff’s observation that the “MoveOn” model is not without its flaws — an awkward connection to “real-world” organizing, and its lack of a coherent issue strategy. Here are the things I think that MoveOn DOES do well that should be emulated: Passionate, articulate, personal writing about important issues that builds a real connection between the MoveOn organizers and their members. Ability and willingness to be nimble, and react to breaking events as they happen, rather than working off a predefined agenda no matter what else is happening in the world. Developing strong feedback loops from members and listening closely. Issues are framed in terms of values rather than policy. Here are some aspects of the MoveOn model that need to be altered or improved to work at a state-wide scale: MoveOn is based on leveraging saturation news coverage of national issues — war in Iraq, Presidential campaigns, same-sex marriage, etc. It’s harder to get that kind of earned media around state & local issues on a consistent basis. MoveOn is still a totally centralized operation — no real decision-making power is placed in the hands of members. Listening is good, but decentralizing power is better. Perhaps a chapter-based model would be more powerful/flexible. Even though MoveOn listens pretty well, it’s still a broadcast model where only the MoveOn staff is really allowed to “speak” to the membership. Not all high-visibility issues are truly important, and not all important issues are high-visibility. Need to find better ways of partnering with existing progressive organizations that aren’t perceived as competition. This is an issue that I’d be really interested in exploring more. Seattle, my home, is a pretty good food town. But everybody says San Francisco blows it away. Based on my sample size of one, this is definitely true. Last night I had the pleasure of dining with Ruby Sinreich and Josh Livni at Greens, the famous vegetarian restaurant started by Deborah Madison of Greens Cookbook fame. (Or, “St. Deborah” as she is known in my house.) Everything about the meal was outstanding — food, service, view. As Josh said, “Now I know how to make a red pepper. No, wait, I mean now I know what a red pepper tastes like when it’s perfectly prepared.” Stuffing it with excellent goat cheese helps. OrangePolitics is a blog about local politics in Durham, NC by Ruby Sinreich. Given the lousy coverage of progressive local issues in the mainstream media, I think that there is a tremendous need for a lot more of this type of writing. The key is to find the right people who do it. The folks have to be: A rare mix indeed. But these are the people we have to find — and more importantly, the progressive movement needs to find a way to direct resources towards these people. My second panel session of this eclectic conference. This panel features Ruby Sinreich from Planned Parenthood, Sally Green from Human Rights Campaign, Jason Lefkowiz of Oceana, Becky Bond from Working Assets and Don Means from Meetup.com I’m hoping these folks, all working on big-money national campaigns, will share some ideas that can “trickle-down” to smaller scale groups. Bill Pease of GetActive introduced. Framing: tried to bring together field organizers from a variety of successful online organizing campaigns.
Continue reading My first live report from Planetwork 2004. I’m sitting here in the “Future of Environmentalism” panel discussion, featuring Alex Steffen, Gideon Rosenblatt, and Chris Davis. Markos Zuniga was supposed to attend as wel. Here are some stream-of-conciousness notes.
Continue reading This is what patriotism looks like. It’s also what Molly’s dad looks like. Yup, that’s my partner’s dad, Thad Curtz, almost getting arrested for carrying a protest sign into a pro-PATRIOT Act rally in Olympia yesterday. Here’s what the front page of the Olympian had to say: Olympia police, on instructions from the Bush-Cheney ’04 campaign, eventually were asked to remove a white-haired college professor, Thad Curtz, from the news conference site because Curtz carried a sign the Bush-Cheney aides didn’t like, said Mark Higbee, manager of the Best Western. “We asked (police to intervene) for the Bush-Cheney people. They didn’t want the sign in there,” Higbee said. “They said they wanted him to go.” One side of Curtz’s sign declared: “No lawyers. No hearings. No warrants. Is not patriotism.” The other side invited donations to the campaign of Democrat John Kerry. Bush-Cheney’s state campaign aides, who were on the scene to organize the campaign event, refused to comment publicly, referring calls to campaign headquarters in Virginia. Art McGee drew my attention to Environmental Online Communication, a new book from Dr. Arno Scharl, Professor of Information Systems at University of Western Australia Business School. The Internet and wireless communication networks are transforming the way society handles the explosive growth and dwindling half-life of environmentally relevant information. How can we leverage new technologies to advocate sustainability and the protection of natural ecosystems? This book presents an interdisciplinary investigation of this question, combining theoretical foundations of environmental online communication with pioneering conceptual work and case studies of successful information systems. Environmental Online Communication addresses the transition to a knowledge-based economy, sheds light on hidden assumptions and misconceptions about environmental issues, and suggests priorities for research and policy development. This volume analyses communicative strategies and processes from four interrelated perspectives: Whenever a climber dies, it’s always a tragedy. But “headline hyperventilation” like this leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It cheapens the tragedy and blows it out of proportion at the same time. Bev “Black Box Voting” Harris has a great column on Howard Dean’s website in which she reframes the controversy over e-voting as an Democracy For America”>auditing issue rather than a software issue. Many people are frustrated by the e-voting issue. But we have been trying to debate an auditing problem by discussing computer programming issues. Some software will have more security holes and other bugs than other software, and corporations have too many reasons to try and bias the vote. But we will never be able to build a bug-free system that is not subject to miscounts, whether intentional or accidental. Even with publicly-owned, open-source software, we must audit every election to ensure that our computerized vote-counters totaled the votes correctly. Counting votes is just bookkeeping. When you frame the debate that way, most objections to voter verified paper ballots simply go away. I’m an NPR junkie. I admit it. I pine for Ray Suarez — damn you Jim Lehrer for wooing him over to PBS! But I digress. Magpie over at Pacific Views takes note of an excellent article by Lori Robinson in American Journalism Review about the emergence of NPR as a major media outlet, and the growing pains the organization is facing in the wake of its new-found prominence. Well worth reading for all you fellow NPR junkies out there. OK, I’m going to digress again. Ray Suarez was like the best talk show host ever. Talk of the Nation just hasn’t been the same without him. Not only was he able to moderate a discussion of just about anything, he consistently asked questions that showed that he actually understood the topic being discussed — something few talk radio hosts can really do. But what really put Ray over the top in my book was his incredibly subtle but persistent way of putting “bad guys” on the spot. He often had reprsentatives of the “forces of darkness” on TOTN, and he always treated them very politely. But neither did he let them get away with much — he would ask them hard questions and then not let them get away with not answering. Again, a skill that most journalists seem to have forgotten. Sigh. I’m headed off this weekend to PlaNetwork 2004, a gathering of enviro-techie-politico types. I’ll be part of a panel on Top Down vs Bottom Up Organizing alongside Bill Pease, Brad deGraf, Marty Kearns, and Zephyr Teachout. Some people spend Memorial Day weekend barbequeing dead animals. Others spend it honoring those who’ve sacrificed their lives in wars. I, on the other hand, spent Memorial Day weekend… installing a new bath fan. “The whole weekend?” I hear you asking. Pretty much. I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that doing anything to a tiny house built in 1939 takes about three times longer than it ought to, even if you know what you’re doing. Which I don’t. This was the first time that I actually used duct tape for it’s intended purpose, i.e. sealing ducts. Interestingly, you have to buy a special kind of heavy-duty duct tape if you actually want to use it on a duct. The good news is that our new bath fan is quiet and powerful. The bad news is that we have a second one still in the box, for the downstairs bathroom. Guess that will have to wait until 4th of July. This now concludes probably the most boring blog entry ever. Please, tell me that you did something more exciting this weekend. Our friends at Conservation Voters of BC are offering to send BC Legislators to dinner and a screening of “The Day After Tomorrow” in order to raise their awareness of climate change. Now this is interesting. James Lovelock, the British scientist — and Green — who formulated the Gaia hypothesis is arguing that climate change has become such an urgent threat to civilization that we need to immediately adopt nuclear power. A few choice tidbits: With six billion [people on Earth], and growing, few options remain; we can not continue drawing energy from fossil fuels and there is no chance that the renewables, wind, tide and water power can provide enough energy and in time. If we had 50 years or more we might make these our main sources. But we do not have 50 years; the Earth is already so disabled by the insidious poison of greenhouse gases that even if we stop all fossil fuel burning immediately, the consequences of what we have already done will last for 1,000 years. We have no time to experiment with visionary energy sources; civilisation is in imminent danger and has to use nuclear – the one safe, available, energy source – now or suffer the pain soon to be inflicted by our outraged planet. Opposition to nuclear energy is based on irrational fear fed by Hollywood-style fiction, the Green lobbies and the media. These fears are unjustified, and nuclear energy from its start in 1952 has proved to be the safest of all energy sources. We must stop fretting over the minute statistical risks of cancer from chemicals or radiation. Nearly one third of us will die of cancer anyway, mainly because we breathe air laden with that all pervasive carcinogen, oxygen. If we fail to concentrate our minds on the real danger, which is global warming, we may die even sooner, as did more than 20,000 unfortunates from overheating in Europe last summer. This will surely send a shock wave through the climate change/clean energy community. I agree with Lovelock that there is little but our fear of nuclear power preventing us from going down the “hard” energy path. However, I’m not sure whether I agree whether that fear is well-placed. Lovelock convieniently leaves out any discussion of the real problem with nuclear energy– the waste, which we can’t store and we can’t treat. Lovelock’s call for nuclear power makes it even more critically important for advocates of a “soft” energy path to put forth a credible, realistic plan for meeting our energy needs with non-nuclear, climate-friendly fuels. This is a massive undertaking, but if it can’t be done, I’m afraid that the Lovelocks of the world will band together with the nuclear industry to ram reactors down our throats. And the “usual (Green) suspects” need to make sure that their voices are not the ones crying out for renewables. The call for clean energy has to come from individuals and organizations that do not have a long track record of protesting nuclear power and cannot be easily dismissed as fear-mongers. Alan Durning makes an apt comparison between the environmental movement and the movements to end slavery and the British Empire. Each of these movements was organized on an unarguable moral principle–freedom, democracy, equality–by a corps of people, initially few, who would not rest until the world conformed to that principle. As their movements grew to the thousands and millions of followers, the impossible became the inevitable. Our cause is no less compelling: to reconcile ourselves with our planetary home and thereby secure the future. Its moral power is no less rooted in ethical and religious teachings. And our numbers are already swelling into the tens of millions worldwide. The political currents sweeping the continent may sometimes obscure the fact, but we are living through (indeed, are bringing about) the transformation of another impossibility–an environmentally sound economy–into an inevitability. It is important to remember that our movement is powerful to the extent that it is rooted in long-term optimism. We need to clearly and consistently articulate that sense of hope in everything we do. Now that MovableType 3.0 is out — with its ridiculously priced licensing, I’m giving serious thought to moving my blog (and ONE/Northwest’s blogs generally) over to WordPress. WordPress is a fully open-source blogging tool based on MySQL and PHP. It is pretty much feature-competitive with MovableType, and has a very rapidly growing community of users — including some very high-profile “defectors” from MT. For a compelling statement of the reasons to make this switch, see Mark Pilgrim’s post “Freedom 0.” Alex Steffen argues that the term “social entrepreneur” has lost its meaning. This is a rant I wish I had written. With some good followup discussion.Ideas for making the most of Farenheit 9/11
Time for a state-scale MoveOn-like organization?
Greens, and I’m not talking politics
The need for more local political blogs
Planetwork: Online Organizing – best practices from the frontline
Planetwork: Future of Environmentalism
Thad Curtz, a real patriot
New book: Online Environmental Communication
Worst headline. Ever.
It’s about auditing (duh)
Growing Pains at NPR
See you at PlaNetwork!
Adventures in Domesticity
Dinner and a Movie (the day after) Tomorrow
Creator of Gaia hypothesis urges rapid adoption of nuclear power
The Long View
Thinking about moving from MovableType to WordPress
The fallacy of social entrepreneurship
Business (at least business as it functioned in the 20th Century) is in fact exactly the wrong model for leadership development. You don’t want to train a whole mess of egotists who excell at making funding pitches to boards. What you want to do is train people to collaborate effectively, to build networks of innovation and communication, to spread tools and swarm problems and maximize the impact of available resources. Nourish the network!