Author: Ruby Sinreich

RootsCampSL today!

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Well we didn’t meet two weeks ago because Second Life’s update took everything offlien for a few hours more than expected. Last week I was traveling and my co-organizer was to tired from RootsCampDC to pull it together. Now this week SL has another upgrade running over time, but it might be done any moment now.

If it comes back online before 4 pm EST, we will still be meeting. Please log in and the location will be sent to the SL Netroots group. Hope to see you there.

On the agenda: recent advocacy and education in SL including: Save the Children’s “Yack Shack”, Mansajeros de Paz’ homeless avatar, and Mia Farrow promoting Darfur awareness tomorrow.

Also, I’ll be taking suggestions for better meeting times. 😉

Worst idea of the week

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The first time you run a protest campaign, you might get admired for attempting to shape the debate and standing on your principles. But if you don’t make a dent, and then use that nothing you gained to run again, people start to see that you are running for yourself more than anything else.

Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who unsuccessfully ran for president in 2004, said Monday he is planning another bid because his party isn’t pushing hard enough to end the
Iraq war.
– Ohio Rep. Kucinich to run for president – Yahoo! News

What a waste of time. It seems even more pointless than Nader’s half-assed “campaign” in 2004. Even progressive Democrats will be ignoring Kucinich this time.

Woodbrookershuis

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In spite of getting a cold and the rain barely stopping long enough for this picture to be taken, I had a great time this week at Greenpeace’s Global People Project meeting in Barchem, Netherlands.

I met people from Brazil, China, Thailand, the Philipines, India, Turkey, Poland, Germany, Switzerland, France, Belgium, and the UK, not to mention a few Dutch folks. People in the Netherlands are direct to the point of bluntness, but warm and friendly too. I like to think honesty can be an enjoyable trait instead of a liability. 😉

I am a great panelist

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Why do I mention it? Well neither of my brilliant proposals for sessions at South by Southwest Interactive 2007 were accepted, but I really, really want to go. It’s a lot easier to ask my organization to foot the travel bill if I can get a free registration and a little good publicity for our many good ideas.

Also, I want to bring my husband who is even less likely to get his employer to pay for it. If I am already covered, I can better help pay for his registration. We already have a free place to stay with my grandmother who lives in Austin.

So if you are putting together a panel for next year, please consider what a fun and informative speaker I can be. People said I was the highlight of my SXSW panel last year in spite of being the least famous person on it.

Here are the two panels I proposed, but I can talk – at length – about just about anything. (Just ask my husband. 😉 )

  • If All Politics is Local, Why Are you Still Reading DailyKOS?
    In the small ponds of city and county politics, bloggers can be very big fish. Just like the much-celebrated national bloggers that aim to set the tone in Washington, local blogs are increasingly influential. Like their national counterparts, local blogs also have the eyes of the media, elected officials, and even voters. Local political blogging can arguably be more powerful than national blogs – join us to discuss the potential and the reality.
  • Advocacy 2.0: Movement-building in the Age of Connectivity
    The technology shifting our culture is also changing the context for political and issue organizing. Nonprofits and community groups have been getting on the cluetrain. New organizing strategies leverage today’s tools to empower and connect activists and volunteers to each other and action. Call it user-oriented, bottom-up, network-centric, or web 2.0. Campaigns must encourage their supporters to express their voices or they’ll take their time, opinions and dollars elsewhere.

Other things I would kick ass talking about include:

  • Second Life, especially advocacy and social change work therein
  • Nonprofits, how they do and don’t use technology, what they need, and what they want
  • Social networks, mapping and analysis, tools, use in community organizing
  • Blogging and community, both virtual and not, blogger outreach
  • Local advocacy, municipal and county politics, city planning, growth management, local candidates and campaigns

RootsCampSL is over, long live RootsCampSL

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Day 7_052 So during the week of Novemeber 8 to 14 I blogged my head off about RootsCamp in Second Life. By the end of running the whole thing I was a bit exhausted and have been remiss in writing about what a great success it was, and how the community we developed is not going away!

We had a dozen different sessions and activities attended by easily over 100 people (avatars) at various times over the week. It was very fun and educational. And more importantly, it strengthened the nascent activist culture in SL and built a community that will continue to seek out and develop opportunities for progressive advocacy in-world. And on that note…

I am pleased to announce that the SL Netroots group (which is the RootsCamp community) will be having weekly meetups in Second Life. They are every Wednesday at 4pm eastern time (1pm Linden time) including today. I will be leading today’s meeting so please stop in. You have to join our “SL Netroots” group to get the announcements about meeting locations as we do not yet have a permanent home, but I think today’s meeting will be at the Tech Soup office on Info Island.

The RootsCampSL wiki is the place to go for tons of information and on-going updates. I was especially pleased with how we integrated several collaborative tools to collect and share information on the wiki. For example:

These are free tools that can be used with any event or campaign, so I hope we also did a good job of demonstrating how easy it is to involve a community by opening channels of communication and amplifying each other’s voices. I can’t wait to see what happens next!

Why they hate us

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I’ve got a backlog of things I need to blog, so look for a bunch of new stuff in the next day or two. Meanwhile you may wish to cleanse your mental palate (after watching the above sickening video) with this excellent animated short that I saw at the Carrboro Film festival: All’s Fair in Love and Police Actions by local artist Alex Wilson.

“What if an icon like Marvel’s Captain America was to the U.S. government what Mickey Mouse has been to Disney? Here’s what a taxpayer-funded Steamboat Willy might’ve looked like during the Vietnam War in 1971.”

Even Kissinger knows we can’t “win” in Iraq

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[President Nixon’s Secretary of State Henry] Kissinger presented a bleak vision of Iraq, saying the U.S. government must enter into dialogue with Iraq’s regional neighbors — including
Iran — if progress is to be made in the region.

“If you mean by ‘military victory’ an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don’t believe that is possible,” he told the British Broadcasting Corp.
– Kissinger: Iraq military win impossible – Yahoo! News