Jon Stahl's Journal

If anyone can explain to me the theory of change behind Earth Hour, or how it actually builds power for the climate change movement, I’d love to hear it.

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My friends Tim Walker and Michael Silberman have been doing some thinking about the long-term problems with many of the approaches to date about social change + technology and have popped out a provocative (and very welcome!) manifesto about the need for “web thinking.” http://www.echoditto.com/insights/webthinking I was honored to contribute some thoughts on the early [...]

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Copenhagen was doomed to failure from the day that Obama decided to do health care in 2009 and not climate legislation. Enviros should have recognized this and responded by de-emphasizing the strategic importance of Copenhagen, and focusing their limited resources to prepare for 2010.

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I’ve been thinking a bunch about the challenges of making cultural transformation in the organizations I work with here at Groundwire.  It’s a tough challenge.  The first step, it seems, is about naming the changes we want to help folks make. Here are some rough notes that popped out as I was gathering my thoughts [...]

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Come join our team at Groundwire (formerly ONE/Northwest) and help us build a better world! Groundwire is growing, and we’re looking for an experienced strategy consultant to join our team.   Our ideal candidate will have real world, senior level organizing and/or fundraising experience (online and offline), believe in the importance of relationship building for [...]

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I’m really surprised by the adulation that the Obama transition team’s website, Change.gov, has gotten.  To me, it looks like a pretty design (all of Obama’s design work has been really excellent!), and a few web forms that dump your information into a black hole, never to be seen again (so far).  This is what [...]

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[18:00] I’m liveblogging from the event ONE/Northwest is hosting tonight, titled “Political Campaigns and Technology.” We’ve got about 50 people in our office here in Seattle, gathered together for a fast-paced peer-to-peer learning session in which we’re going to explore the various ways that political campaigns are using technology to build and sustain relationships, and [...]

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Please go read this incredibly insightful reflection by Eugene Eric Kim. If you’re too lazy, I’ll clip the most important part for ya: The following day, I co-led a session on this topic with AngusParker. Two of the participants were dealing with the specific challenge of connecting members of a national network of leaders in [...]

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Michael Gilbert picks up on an important piece: How Technology Almost Lost the War: In Iraq, the Critical Networks Are Social — Not Electronic A couple of key ‘grafs: The network-centric approach had worked pretty much as advertised. Even the theory’s many critics admit net-centric combat helped make an already imposing American military even more [...]

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