Day Traders and Campaign Plans

Marty — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:33:48 -0500

Creation of political will and policy change are an outcome. Changes in political will and policy are not irreversible. It seems increasingly like they are reverse by courts, new politicians and switching party control that long-term shifts will be increasingly elusive if we stay on our current path. The key challenges to fostering long-term change which protect policy gains and multiply the power of political will are. A. Generating deep cultural interest in the issues, problems and solutions. B. Distributing ownership of the effort to fix the problem. Short term policy activities that do not secure long-term solutions are not a solution for fixing deep systemic problems. Passing lots of policy that is far beyond where the culture is ready go begs for backlash, the reversal of political gains and waste organizing effort and resources. Focusing on shifting culture and distributing ownership of the effort to create change secures sustainable gains. Here are three examples.... 1. Gay marriage = Culture has shifted. Political will and policy are tumbling now to align with the culture. In the past gains have been easily rolled back in political and policy context while culture has grown more mature and accepting. 2. Climate Change =...

Do You Care about Communicating with Each Other?

Marty — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 17:33:19 -0500

I was asking the twitterverse about the use of online tools (yammer) and adoption rates and Howard Rheingold flipped back this nugget. Latest: RT @hrheingold: "Success depends on ppl involved care about communicating w/ each other" great metric for network building too. via twitter.com I am inspired to think about lots of the work of network building and creating advocacy networks. Is it possible to nudge people to care about each other? What does that mean? Communicating involves exchanges and listening. It involves connection and sharing of ideas and information. If you are building a network how do you make it easy to make people "care about communicating with each other"? To varying degrees, face to face, meetings, community spaces, get people involved because they lower the "care" threshold among people that might not normally care to communicate with each other. If it takes little effort then I only need to care a little to communicate. If it takes lots of effort to communicate, then I need to care lots. Do emails, twitter, facebook, status updates etc create "care"? Do they lower the threshold so much that they are so easy to use that people that don't normally communicate start...

What information do you like to pick up before starting an online organizing project?

Marty — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:02:47 -0500

I started to think about all the campaign meetings and discussions I have been in over the years. Groups are great and they share lots of data including proposals, plans, budgets, etc. However, I am usually very hungry to sit down with the campaign team to talk about the vision and where things are going. What am I looking for during these meetings? Why does most the literature and information in proposals not give online organizers enough to chew on? What do I really want before I can sit down and develop the best advocacy network strategy for a group or client? These are not in order. Here is a list of things I like to get my head around before I get into thinking about the online strategy. Most of these are obvious but some are driven by what makes a network function. What is the campaign trying to do? What is success? How do the policy team/ campaign team think it will be done? Who is the target audience? Who are the influencers that the online strategy must engage to succeed? What services would be most valuable to them in their own work? Where are the turf wars...

by not having "contol" of brand maybe we become better brands rather than better at spin.

Marty — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:58:33 -0500

This is an interesting. I like the riff on transparency and the clash that transparency will inspire us to be better as reviewers, readers and brands. This transparency vs. control and history and trends vs. spin is interesting. Echo Creator Khris Loux on the Ties That Bind the Real-Time Web from ReadWriteWeb on Vimeo.

Truespin conversation: Testing Tanglerlive

Marty — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 12:55:52 -0500

Individuals Cannot Avoid Jumping to Conclusions

Marty — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 14:44:34 -0500

Here is a good article unpacking the fallout of group think. It is also a nice set of questions for any campaign planning and campaign strategists. The original article is about CIA and failures of intelligence. Our allies often get what we ask for but not what we want. My sense is that the failure of many of our investments and strategies is because we don’t do enough of the following…. 1. Challenge Authority. Challenge Tradition. 2. Probe the Assumptions 3. Look for Indicators. What details could change your mind? 4. Brainstorm the likely responses from opponents. Here is the section from the original article that hit me… What our intelligence system really needs is ways to avoid becoming trapped by the natural tendency to leap to conclusions and stick with them. This is true in other fields as well, which is why so much of professional and scientific training is designed to reduce the errors made by fallible people using weak information. If individuals cannot avoid jumping to conclusions, there are ways for organizations to make up for this. They can systematically solicit the views of people with different perspectives, for example, or use devil’s advocates who will challenge...

Because of You Google Maps Show Live Traffic Reports for Back Roads

Marty — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 17:47:00 -0500

The thinking behind the Google Map service is the way every allied organizer should be thinking. Once you are not stuck at the ground level, we need strategists to step back and look at the 30,000 how can we make this happen. The basic concept behind the way they build information on the map is exactly the way distributed advocacy and social change movements MUST be organizing. How do movements build up the capacity to enable collaboration with “almost zero effort” on the part of the organizers and groups? What transactions of everyone else in the movement you work in would be most relevant to your work? What are the traffic jams of social change? The people with cell phone are collaborating. They benefit from the collaboration. They have accepted the bargain of giving back peeks into data about them in order to see the big picture. When you choose to enable Google Maps with My Location, your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you're moving. When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can...

Human Nature Doesn't Change: Human Behavior Does.

Marty — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 22:23:14 -0500

This is a good presentation. Great line and introduction to the shifts in technology producing changes in behavior. The goal of human nature is hard wired in people. Somewhere in our bipedal mammalian evolution, we picked up socializing and connecting with each other as a species characteristic. The real evolution of the internet is not about the content, marketing, philanthropy, product placement, etc. etc. The core of the network is connecting people to learn and share with each other, to collaborate, to evolve and to be. Our survival in the ecosystem is dependent on communication and collaboration, it always has been and now it is just scaling with the people on the planet. People increasingly turn online to find people who know, people to care, and people to accompany them while they are experiencing life. Those connections are evolving human behavior to a scale and tempo that is not comfortable for many. What if people do get more value and reward from 5000 friendsters than 5 close friends? What if "fame" online is as self-rewarding as fame offline? The buzz about the collapse of social fabric is wrong. The "wisdom of the crowd", "wisdom of the market" suggests that people...

Indictment of Online Strategies: The Man in the Mirror Doesn't Trust You Either.

Marty — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 23:47:45 -0500

This should be a wake up call for lots of online strategies that are not transparent, don't communicate results and just leverage online work to build a base of donating click monkeys. People are not happy with the distrust shown to them online.

This study mentioned in Philanthropy of 587 PEOPLE WHO USE NEW MEDIA ... has nothing to do with the failure of the platform but of the philosophy and world view of those who run organizations.

Online strategy and communications behind many organizations use of the online tools doesn't typically engage, empower and listen. There is a high degree of distrust of online supporters by organizers and organizations.

Somehow the open and welcome culture of organizing "if they show up at a meeting engage them and work with them" has not translated into online organizing space.

Old guard leaders don't trust their own instincts or methods used to filter "good supporters and bad supporters" in the online space and therefore they distrust all online supports and only offer them limited engagement, information or resources.

Data Driven Campaigns

Marty — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:50:00 -0500

Data at work in a defined context. Our movements need to really connect and track data and contribute to community and allies understanding of the data. Time from 7:30 to 8:40 is amazing on the evolution of data enhancements and traffic mapping of engagement with the voters. Important ideas in any organizing context... combined data creates new insights and "synthetic" data based on hard data. By collecting data and sharing the data, it is possible to create new actionable data pools. Carefully targeting allows movements to find new niches and audiences. Careful targeting requires data sharing. Syndicating data access can help drive new levels of power to all that have access to that data. Access to data is scalable. This is a great presentation on the power of data. We need to continue to step up the tools and techniques that are available to allies working together on issues.

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