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

In the homestretch

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Today at RootsCampSL was really great and just as interesting as I had expected. I’m really tired and trying to conserve energy so I won’t write much. We had nearly every seat filled for Rik Riel and In Kenzo‘s session about political activism in Second life, and it generated lots of great discussion and ideas about how to support each other in this kind of work.

day 6 screen 3

Tomorrow’s finale is a conversation about how to use Second Life as a campaign tool in 2008, and it will be followed by a party! Someone said they’d bring drinks and someone else is getting a DJ. Should be fun.

This is your last chance to be a part of this groundbreaking online organizing event. Sessions start at 4pm EST. Hope to see you there tomorrow!

Would you rather be the oppressor or the oppressed?

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Ruby mashup As you can see at left, my avatar in Second Life is African American. Once in a while people ask what my race is in real life and why my avatar is black.

Today I had another one of those conversations and I thought I’d post it here as it was pretty interesting. I’m bolding the especially good bits since it’s so long. Pardon all the typos, this is as-it-happened:
Continue reading “Would you rather be the oppressor or the oppressed?” →

Haggard’s a bottom

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There’s a lot of interesting background in this fascinating interview with the gay prostitute (currently unemployed) who outed christofascist homophobe Rev. Ted Haggard.

Q: So no one from the Human Rights Campaign or The Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund has even called you? At the very least they could invite you to a chic cocktail party with David Geffen.

A: I’d be happier if they bought me a loaf of bread and some peanut butter.
– Features : Radar Online

Via Wonkette, of course.

RootsCampSL can’t be stopped

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This weekend featured a couple of excellent sessions. Saturday we had a presentation from the founder of the CODE PINK group in Second Life (below left) and Sunday two expert machinima makers (below right) talked about how that emerging art is being used for social justice (links at the end of this post).

Hiro & moo day 4_009

In next two days we will be working up to a fever pitch with at least three sessions each day, including our closing party. Any suggestions for how to make the party festive and social? See the schedule here.
 
Some machinima links from yesterday’s session:

  • a simple tutorial: http://altzoom.buhbuhcuh.com/classroom
  • great example: http://movies.lionhead.com/studio/koulamata
  • how to use the alt-zoom camera: http://moomoney.wordpress.com/2006/09/14/how-to-alt-zoom-camera
  • In Kenzo’s videoblog, including Camp Darfur mashup and Manor Meta shorts: http://inkenzo.blip.tv
  • Hiro/Paul’s blog: http://blog.machinima.org
  • moo’s blog: http://moomoney.wordpress.com

I can’t wait to check these out!

Fun stuff at RootsCampSL this weekend

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RootsCampSL Day Three update, and weekend preview…

Day3_002 Yesterday I led a session on basic building in Second Life which also included a great discussion about what kinds of activities and “builds” in SL are effective politically. One my favorite RootsCamp moments so far happened, when I told everyone how to manipulate objects and invited them to try to move the stools we were sitting on. Suddenly seemingly fixed objects started flying around with no respect for the laws of physics.

We also had an interesting presentation from Aldon Hynes, Technology Director of the Ned Lamont for Senate campaign. It was interesting to learn about the internal needs of a campaign and what worked well for them. I was surprised to hear that they considered whether to even have a campaign blog or just reply on the supportive community of progressive bloggers in Connecticut.

This weekend we have some very fun sessions: today at 4pm EST I will do an open thread/open house, which will be about anything we want. I may continue the SL building lessons if folks are interested. Then at 5pm the founder of the CODE PINK community in SL will lead a discussion on “Pink Jesters, Lingerie & Cyber Disobedience.” Tomorrow at 6pm there will be a session on “Using Machinima for Social Change / Political Action” with Paul Marino, Moo Money, and Beth Kanter. That should be pretty awesome.

The rest of the schedule is already packed with goodness (see below), but you can still propose sessions any time until Tuesday afternoon.

Continue reading “Fun stuff at RootsCampSL this weekend” →