Tag Archives: Web

1000 Friends of Washington is now Futurewise

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Our friends at 1000 Friends of Washington are now our friends at Futurewise. My talented colleagues just helped them build a new website using Plone, which is pretty snazzy. But what I really want to know is: what you do think of their new name?

Here’s what they had to say about the change:

Why change?

We are doing powerful work. We needed a stronger name. There are more than 300 groups in Washington with the word “Friends” in their name. “Friends of…” is a generic name that made it almost impossible for us to build recognition and credibility with the general public.

Growth management is broad and complicated. The Growth Management Act itself has fourteen key goals. If you have to summarize our work in one word, there is only one word that can do the job – future. We are working to help communities create a better future.

Priorities for a Healthy Washington

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I’m proud to announce that we’ve just launched the Priorities for a Healthy Washington website.

Although the site is pretty basic, the collaborative effort it documents is pretty amazing. Priorities for a Healthy Washington is a coalition of nearly all of the leading environmental organizations in Washington State. This is the third year they’ve come together to create and lobby for a common agenda in the state legislature. They’ve had some solid successes over the past two years, and this year is looking even better.

This year’s Priorities for a Healthy Washington are:

  • Cleaner Cars, Cleaner Air — adopting California’s best-in-the-nation auto emissions standards.
  • Green Building — committing the state to making sure all of its new state buildings meet the LEED Silver standard for high performance green buildings.
  • Sound Solutions — saving Hood Canal and Puget Sound from water pollution
  • Banning Toxic Flame Retardants — getting some of the most dangerous toxic chemicals out of our bodies, our food supply and our wildlife.

Priorities for a Healthy Washington will be sending out a series of email alerts and updates at critical moments throughout the legislative season. Why not take a moment to sign up and stay informed?

UPDATE: Alex Steffen argues that the Priorities are not well framed and not bold enough.

BC4Sale action page – stopping privatization, and saving British Columbia through direct action

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action_coal_in_stocking.gifMy friends at Dogwood Initiative have just launched BC4Sale.org, and are inviting folks to join them in sending lumps of coal to BC Premier Gordon Campbell to protest his efforts to sell off British Columbia’s public resources to his crony capitalist buddies.

This is witty, creative, timely, viral network activism on a shoestring budget. Good stuff.

A website I’m really proud of: BCFacts.org

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I don’t usually toot ONE/Northwest’s horn that hard here on my personal blog, but we recently (re)launched a website that I’m really proud of.

Check out BCFacts.org, which is written by our good friend Matt Price. I think it shows off a number of features and qualities that point the way towards how environmental organizations ought to be doing website development. And because it’s powered by Plone, powerful open-source content management software, we were able to deliver some really high-end features at rock-bottom costs. Among them:

  • Site-wide full-text searching that includes all pages and all word/PDF documents that are part of the site. This is built into Plone, and is one of the best features for data-rich sites like BCFacts.

  • Extensive use of RSS feeds. Again, built into Plone. Because BCFacts is supported by many of BC’s leading environmental groups, having RSS feeds available will make it easy for these groups to incorporate BCFacts content on their site.

  • Any page on the site can be “sent to a friend” via email. Another out-of-the-box Plone feature.

  • Site visitors can add their comments to any fact published on the site.

  • Because the entire site is database-driven, it’s really easy for an non-technical users to publish new content on the site. It takes about a minute to pubish a new “fact.”

  • Plone’s solid separation of content from design made it easy for us to re-use the great graphic design work done by our friends at Communicopia for the original BCFacts site. This made the relaunch far quicker (and cheaper!) than it might have been otherwise.

MediaWiki pulling ahead for full-feature wiki?

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I’ve played around with a bunch of wiki tools over the past year or so, and while I love the concept, the execution has always been somewhat wanting.

And I’ve never seen a good comparative review of wiki engines.

But it’s starting to look like MediaWiki, which powers the fabulous Wikipedia is starting to really pull ahead of the pack in offering a polished, feature-rich wiki environment. (Sorry, Twiki, you’re just too clunky.)

Thoughts?

Blogs as the centers of progressive virtual communities

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The perceptive Matt Yglesias has some interesting things to say about the role of blogs as political community organizing tools:

Looked at demographically, though, what keeps the Democrats in play is the fact that while union families have declined as a proportion of the electorate, what you might call “postmodern” white people — Judis and Teixeira’s professionals, Zogby’s unmarrieds, Brooks’ seculars — have increased their share and come to be a larger and larger slice of the base of progressive politics. The problem with these people — people like me — is that we tend to be radically unconnected from large, formal, social networks. And not in a coincidental way, this characteristic is pretty fundamental to the essence of the sort of person we’re talking about. We’re younger, more transient, start families later, don’t go to church and are generally without strong roots in anything more substantive than an “urban tribe”.

This is all fine, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t work very well for the purposes of politics. Political life in all its manifestations — voting, volunteering, donating, boycotting, letter-writing, petition-signing, calling up advertisers and hassling them, etc. — is beset with collective action problems. There’s almost nothing anyone who’s not super-rich can do to influence the political process that, on its own, will make a whit of difference. All of these activities depend on the notion that if lots of people followed your lead, then something important would happen. But in order to get any of this to happen you need to get a large number of people to behave in a not-especially-rational way, hence the collective action problem. Such problems normally get solved through appeals to group solidarity, but that presupposes the existence of a group. Hence the value of a union hall, a church, or VFW outpost, a Rotary Club, or what have you. The knowledge that there’s a group of people out there you identify with and who identify with you can be a powerful force above and beyond the ways in which such groups simply aid communications.

This, I think, is one of the more important contributions blogs — particularly the amateur blogs — may make to American society in the years to come. They create a sense of virtual community. You feel that you know the people you read regularly, and the people who participate in comments threads on blogs you read. You’re aware of a wider network of people you may read occassionally, or only see on the blogrolls of others. You exchange emails with readers, writers, and commenters. And because the network is merely virtual, it’s remarkably robust and stable, staying in place as you move.

The ensuing discussion is a good read, too.

Herding free-range cats

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Herding free-range cats from the just-added-to-my-blogroll Aldon Hynes is a nice look at the recent CivicSpace developer summit from someone with considerable experience at both software development and group dynamics.

There were a lot of talk about usability, the interface and the users’ experience of CivicSpace. There were discussions of architecture and long-term goals. There was a big of a split between the developers and user interface people, and questions about how functionality should be implemented led to long drawn out discussions. Another dynamic was between the need for immediate fixes and action items to come out in the first version, and longer-term goals….

Open source programmers are the feral free-range cats. Herding them is even more of a challenge….

One of the first things I’ve always tried to focus on with any group I’ve been part of is defining the primary task. I was somewhat frustrated by a lack of clarity in terms of a primary task or specific sets of apparent goals for the summit….

There wasn’t a clear understanding of how all the different people involved in CivicSpace interact, or how we would define success. Yet in many ways, this was highly appropriate. CivicSpace seems committed to a bottom-up, emergent approach to activism. People work on what is important to them, and from that a true vision emerges. In many ways, the summit exemplified this approach….

However, I did observe that I’ve worked with other groups with much clearer goals, and leaders with much stronger personalities that were not able to get nearly as much done as CivicSpace has been getting done. In spite of all the different personalities, goals, agendas, etc., CivicSpace is doing important work, not only in developing and distributing some important software, but also in modeling how progressive open source software groups can work together…..

The New York Model

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The New York Model covers some of the interesting ways that RNC protest organizers used SMS (text messaging), VoIP-powered automated telephone information lines, and other leading-edge network technology to power their “counter-convention” efforts, and the independent media coverage of it.

Fun stuff, although I’m still trying to figure out how it’s relevant to campaigns that are playing out over longer periods of time in less intense circumstances.

VotePair

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Carnet, Rachel, Brent, Kendra and a bunch of other talented folks have just launched VotePair which unifies and extends the various “vote trading” efforts from 2000, in which Nader supporters in “safe” states agree to “pair their votes” with Green supporters in swing states.

It’s nice to see a polished, well-intentioned effort like this, but I’m not sure I really see how vote pairing moves us much closer to creating a multiparty system. Come to think of it, I’ve never seen anyone articulate a clear strategy for breaking the two-party strangelhold on American politics.

iPodder: automatic downloads of MP3 content and its potential for advocacy communications

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Marty Kearns picks up on the advocacy potential of iPodder, a new tool that automates the process of downloading new MP3 files by querying RSS feeds. iPodder integrates with iTunes, so that new content is downloaded whenever you sync your iPod with iTunes. (Neat tricks indeed.)

iPodder’s still on the rough-and-tumble bleeding edge of open-source software hacks, but the idea has huge merit.

This opens some interesting new possibilities for freeing content from our computers — folks could listen to daily campaign updates while commuting.

The big challenge in unlocking this potential is the dearth of engaging audio content. Marty suggests that we auto-convert existing written content, but I think this overlooks the fact that audio is an inherent different medium than print, and interesting audio requires completely different production techniques.

The environmental movement hasn’t yet demonstrated many multimedia production skills. I think this is because doing good multimedia production is extremely time-intensive and requires storytelling skills that our movement simply doesn’t select or train for. As a movement we desperately need to invest more in the skills needed to produce high quality audio (and video!) content. The internet is handing us all of these amazing tools for routing around the traditional media, but we need to rise to the challenge and produce strong content to fill the void.

The good news is that doing broadcast quality audio doesn’t require much gear anymore.

Elements of a good online communications plan

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In the past week or so I’ve read through a few “website plans” and “online communications plans” that have been put together for Northwest environmental groups and all in all, I’ve been pretty dissatisfied with them. None of them seem to deliver all of the elements that you’d need in order to go all the way from idea to execution. I’ve talked this over quite a bit with my colleagues Gideon and Drew over the past couple of days, and I’m going to try to get some of my thoughts down here.

  • Organizing goals — the purpose of advocacy communication is to inspire people to take specific actions that lead towards organizing goals. Therefore, a communications plan has to identify these goals at the outset — they will serve as a “north star” for the rest of the plan.

  • Audiences — a communications plan has to identify the target audiences for the communications. “The general public” is not a valid answer. Niether is “moms.” This is an area where we’re still really weak. Doing useful audience segmentation seems to be kind of a black art, and it doesn’t seem to come very intuitively to our organizations — we are much more comfortable describing people in geographic, occupational and demographic terms than we are at positioning them psychologically. We need to get much better at describing our audiences in terms of their attitudes towards our issues.

  • Desired outcomes — what are the attitude and behavior changes we’re trying to create?

  • Influences — our communications plans need to identify the “forces and sources” that influence the attitudes and behaviors of our target audiences. For example, who do key legislators listen to when deciding how to vote on conservation issues? How do suburban moms decide whether to buy organic vegetables or not? Our communications strategies need to focus on getting our messages into the channels that actually influence our target audiences.

  • Messages and framing — a good communications plan will talk about the good and bad language to use when talking about our issues to our target audiences. How do we create the linguistic structures that position our arguments as winners? Despite some recent good work on this by George Lakoff and crew at the Rockridge Institute, there still remains a great deal of work to be done on this important topic.

  • Content — what content do our target audiences need? What services do they desire? What will engage them in fighting for our issues? We need to learn to see our issues from our audiences’ points of view, and structure our information in ways that make sense to them, not according to our organizational chart.

  • Tactics — a good communications plan will contain specific ideas about effective communications tactics. Websites with features x, y. z. Press releases with specific elements. Specific advertising strategies, etc.

  • Projects — tactics will be bundled into discrete, managable projects that are sequenced in a logical order.

  • Resources — projects will have estimates of the time and money needed to execute them — and to sustain them on an ongoing basis.

What else is missing here?

I’ve upgraded to WordPress!

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All you open-source fans out there will be thrilled to see that I’ve made the move from not-quite-free MovableType to totally-open-source WordPress. WordPress is fast eclipsing MovableType as the blogging tool of choice among bloggers in the know.

Converting all my MovableType entries was pretty straightforward, and documented very well. I was also able to redirect all my old article links, and I’m pretty sure I got the RSS feed to follow as well, so if you’re reading this via RSS, all is well.

As the next few weeks progress, I’ll be continuing to tweak the design and features of the site to show off some of the power of WordPress.

What is blogging?

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Professional journalist-and-blogger Matthew Yglesias offers a few nice observations

about the what blogging is, and who bloggers are. I think it offers conside rable insight into the future of activists-as-bloggers, and more importantly, a n argument for why activists should write blogs.

At the end of the day, blogging is just a mode of presenting text (and, to som e extent, images) and a set of computer programs that make it easy to present t ext in that way. It’s not a method of doing things. The result, I think, is tha t the phenomenon of the “blogger” has no real future, though the phenomenon of the blog does. At the end of the day, Brad DeLong is an economist, Lawrence Sol um is a legal theorist, I’m a commentator, Jeralyn is a criminal justice expert , Laura Rozen is a national security reporter, etc. These are trades — areas o f competence, whatever — that we can all ply in a variety of media, print, web articles, blogs, academic papers (where appropriate), live or taped radio or t elevision interviews, etc. None of us are “bloggers” except in the sense that w e all write weblogs. But we also talk about this stuff to people and that doesn ‘t make us “talkers,” it’s a thing you do not a thing you are and, increasingly , it will be done by more-or-less the exact same group of people who are produc ing text in other formats.

CivicSpace is out

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Zack and his team have launched CivicSpace into the world.

Can’t wait to check it out — CivicSpace is an open-source content management s ystem based on Drupal and designed specifically for grassroots political campai gn websites. It’s based on the work that the CivicSpace team originally did f or the Howard Dean campaign.

What I like about this approach:

  • Leverage of a solid open-source content management system, rather than rebuil ding yet another CMS core from scratch.

  • Focus on empowering other developers and consultants to install and extend Ci vicSpace sites.

  • Field-tested knowledge of cutting-edge Internet organizing.

Thinking about moving from MovableType to WordPress

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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.”

Project to watch: CivicSpace

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CivicSpace is the continuation of the DeanSpace project, and is building a powerful community organizing toolkit on top of the Drupal open-source CMS platform.

It’s not due to be released until June, but this is clearly something to keep an eye on.

Quoth their website:

CivicSpace is being built with the needs of distributed organizations in mind. It will give you and the supporters within your community a solid framework for organizing and engaging those around you in action. But it also will allow you to plug your community into a network of other communities where you can share your ideas, knowledge, relationships, and organizational information. Here are some things it will enable you to do:

  • Create a customizable community driven website with Blogs, Photo Galleries, User Profiles, Friend / Buddy Tracking, Polls, and File Storage
  • Send targeted email
  • Import and aggregate remote content, share users, and sync calendars with any other CivicSpace site
  • Manage your groups membership and contacts
  • Organize events, ride sharing, and RSVP
  • Collaboratively create, edit, and publish documents
  • Easily create discussion forum / mailing lists
  • Allow you to create forms and surveys for data collection
  • VoterID/GOTV