Category: Advocacy 2.0

Yesterday I gave a talk to an undergraduate class at UNC (COMP 380, Computers & Society). Thanks to Robert Peterson for connecting me with professor Jeannie Walsh. I spoke about my two favorite topics: network-centric advocacy, and OrangePolitics.

Here is a video of my talk (warning, it’s 75 minutes long), and below are the two parts of my presentation:

Click To Play

Continue reading “Ruby goes to class” →

And here’s the proof: Marketplace: Giving goes online, too

I thought Janet Babin’s story was quite good, and she effectively got the point across that nonprofits need to do more to put their supporters in the driver’s set. She even pronounced my name right! I have just two small clarifications:

1. I am not a consultant, but in fact a full-time employee with benefits, etc. at the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and
2. In the second clip, I was not saying that “we” FOR don’t get this, but that “we” nonprofits in general don’t get the need to open up and trust our supporters.

Overall an excellent story, and I hope I get the chance to work with Janet again! Read on for a transcript, or click here for an MP3 of the segment.

Continue reading “Why yes, you did hear me on your NPR station last Thursday!” →

I’ve been struggling for a while with issues of free speech in the community of commenters over on OrangePolitics.org. Over the life of the site, there has been a small group of people who are generally screwing it up for the rest of us. Instead of informing and getting to know each other, the site devolves into nasty bickering which no-one wants to read except maybe the 5 people involved in it. I know I don’t want to read it, and that’s not just because half of it seems to be based on the premise that I am an evil dictator who is trying to control your life and ruin your neighborhood.

I often hear from folks who have varying success at ignoring the negative elements and usually just stop reading the site. I try to remind people that you can just read the posts and skip the comments (especially via RSS), but most OP readers don’t value that distinction very much. Lately the tension has gotten worse and some commenters have become increasingly toxic.

So as we are approaching the second major platform change to OP (from WordPress to Drupal), I’m starting to think about how to help the readers feed back into the system and have some collective say about what words and what behavior is or is not valued. It’s already going to be a great improvement that trusted users can have their own blogs on the site. I’m especially interested in Drupal modules that might help with rating content (both posts and comments), although I also accept that some manual moderation will probably be needed, especially in determining what goes on the front page.

Brian says that allowing the community to vote will encourage gaming of the system, and I think he fears that this could put the difficult people even more in charge. While this is certainly possible, I have more confidence in the commenters and especially the (silent) readers to balance this out and result in the right outcome most of time. This isn’t so much a wisdom of the crowd thing as it is a Buddhist thing, at least for me. I need to believe that everyone is essentially good. Otherwise I wouldn’t be working to amplify their voices, help them vote, help them make media, etc.
Continue reading “OP becomes its own worst enemy” →

Thanks to the Triangle Community Foundation for bringing Rob Stuart to town and organizing today’s Civic Engagement and Technology Workshop. I really enjoyed seeing a lot of my old NC nonprofit friends as well as making new ones.

As promised, here are the materials I used in my sessions. First, my seven-minute overview of OrangePolitics. Then my network-centric advocacy presentation, which was referred to in our discussion of social networks. And here is a Second Life slide show that I prepared but didn’t end up using.

Finally, here are some of the social networking sites that I demonstrated. If you sign up for any of them, please look me up and say hello!

http://Facebook.com
http://MySpace.com
http://SecondLife.com (virtual reality)
http://Flickr.com (photos)
http://Twitter.com (mini-blogs)
http://Last.fm (music)
http://YouTube.com (videos)
http://GoodReads.com (books)

Learn more:
Pushing Power to the Edges
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network
http://www.netcentriccampaigns.org
https://lotusmedia.org/in/nptech/advocacy

The bad news: Anil Dash is not going to be able to attend and speak at ConvergeSouth today due to air travel problems. He’s a smart guy and a good speaker and I know he’ll be missed.

The good news: I will be sitting on the Social Networks panel instead of Anil! I don’t think we’ll be using formal presentations, but I will probably base my remarks on my typical network-centric advocacy thoughts. You can see my recent presentation on this from Yearly Kos at https://lotusmedia.org/advocacy-20-the-slideshow

Update: Everyone keeps telling me to add this presentation to SlideShare.net, but I don’t really see the advantage of that over Flickr where a lot more people might see it. However I did upload it to Google, so if that floats your boat: have at it.