PTP Blog

this page contains a nice summary of the SEIU’s Since Sliced Bread site and some of the discontent surrounding it.

In case you’re not familiar with it, the goal of SEIU’s site - http://www.sinceslicedbread.com was to solicit new and fresh ideas that

“are original and creative, [and] have the best chance of practical success and would most effectively:

• Grow the economy
• Create good-paying jobs that allow people to raise a family, afford health insurance, pay for their children’s college education, get additional training and save for retirement
• Encourage existing companies to expand and entrepreneurs to start new ones”

the site was the vehicle for a contest offer $100,000 to the finalist with the best idea “since sliced bread” yeah, you get the idea.

As the contest moved into the final stages of voting, a fair bit of push back came from a number of places. The site I linked at the beginning of this post summarizes and links to some commentary on this push back and draws a number of interesting lessons about this type of online engagement.

Just saw that the Pew Internet and American Life Project has released a new study that finds that:

The internet and email expand and strengthen the social ties that people maintain in the offline world, according to a new report released today by the Pew Internet

I haven’t finished reading it yet, but from I have read it largely confirms what many of us in the Technology and Community Organizing space have been saying for a while now - that internet use doesn’t replace face-to-face contact, but can serve as a powerful add-on to enhance that contact.

It’s not a terribly long read, so if you’re intersted in this sort of research, check it out. I’d love to hear what you think of their findings.

Over at the Personal Democracy Forum, there’s an interesting read on how People for the American Way used SMS as part of their mobilization strategy around the Roberts nomination process.

Of note is their response rate to the SMS opt-in - 27% as well as the suggestion that they failed to use the tool in the Alito nomination process because PFAW felt that despite the high opt-in rate, they could still reach more folks via more traditional outreach methods: email, phone, etc.

Also of note though is the conclusion they draw from the high response rate: that the “conventional” notion that SMS is really only a tool for reaching younger folks just isn’t true. They suggest that the majority of the folks that opted-in to their SMS engagement were middle-aged “activists.”

I’m posting this here because I think there are implications for information security and privacy the go beyond the situation in China.

The NY Times is running an editorial titled Beijing’s New Enforcer: Microsoft. This follows a longer piece covering the same issue in the weekend’s Week in Review.
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NPR has a great tool on their website:NPR station finder that’s a cool little Google Maps mashup. You enter in a city and state and it returns a map of the closest NPR station(s). Clicking on a station pulls up more information including rough coverage area - really useful when you’re on the road and want to tune in.

After about a week and a half, my skype username/password has finally be restored. Ultimately, I had to go through the Skype User Forums and ask one of the Skype customer service folks there to reset my password.

So, although I’m back on Skype, I’ve got to say that the customer service experience was less than pleasant or easy to navigate.

Or at least it should be according to David Geilhufe who asks: Where is the nonprofit API traffic?

And it’s a question I was asking myself today as I looked at the GetActive API and thought “but this doesn’t help me at all!”

Saw
this on the 37signals blog and thought it might be of interest to some of you.

At PTP, we’ve been pretty strong advocates of a rigorous functional design process for things like websites and databases because we’ve felt it’s the best way to get the best product from your TA consultants - or at least as the best way to communicate what you think you want to folks who’re going to build it.

The 37 Signals article I’ve linked to takes a different approach - build the interface as the design the spec:

We suggest building the interface first and using the actual screens as the functional spec.

Not sure what I think, or even if the approach is doable for community organizing groups, but it’s an interesting approach.

Mail merge is a powerful tool that I love dearly, but let this be a lesson to all of us - pay attention to detail when you’re inserting those merge fields. This is a marketing email I got today. Note how my name changes from Arif to Joe between the salutation and closing of the email:

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I wouldn’t quite say that this was a New Year’s resolution of mine, but at some point over the last week, a small part of me started to feel that reducing the size of inbox was probably a good idea. I mean I’ve done more than enough lecturing about how bad it is to have a super-full inbox, and I’m the one of the worst offenders I know with over 6000 messages in my inbox.

So, today, after reading Fresh Start: The Email DMZ, I did as instructed:

1. Open your email program and create a new folder called “DMZ“
2. Go to your email inbox and Select All
* You might alternatively choose all email older than n days
3. Drag those emails from your inbox into the DMZ folder
4. Go, and sin no more.

it’s only been a few minutes, so all I can say is that as of now, the experience is startling - I click over to my mail program and my Inbox is empty! I’m embarrassed to admit that I actually did a double take and wondered if I was looking at the wrong folder.

If this actually works, I’ll let you know how it goes.