I think there’s a lot of value in the knowledge management field that we can use when we think about how organizations can use technology more effectively. This is a nice summary of the low hanging fruit on the path to more deliberate engagement with how we know what we know and how we share it.
Knowledge Management: Finding Quick Wins and Long Term Value
In the “note to self” category, the NY Times wrote some thoughts on a number of small LCD projectors. We’re often asked to recommend projectors, so I’m betting this article is of use to some of you.
Free is the Operative Word
I don’t own a television and honestly you can blame it on Youtube. Thanks to an impressively current and copious volume of clips from public TV and cable, the compulsion to get a TV is really at zero to none. After all, if anything “important” was said on the 7:00 news, my highly driven “e-journalist” compadres who are religiously dedicated to uploading videos on Youtube and the likes, will post it in a jiffy without a hint of fear of copyright laws. And all the videos are available for FREE of course.
I spend so little time in my home and it’d be wasteful if not downright absurd for me to deplete my pocketbook for the sake of cable pleasures. Not to mention, I can watch entire soprano episodes and HBO Bill Maher shows with the same pause and rewind possibilities TIVO offers. That’s called getting a good return on your wifi.
Straight from the Source - News just how I want it
In some far future KKKramer (Michael Richards), should probably write a book, and aptly title it “Internet Video Zealots Ruined My Career.” Ten years ago, we would have received second hand reports about his less than charming remarks to some audience members and there might’ve been a series of contrary recounts of what actually happened. Well, it was 2006 and all somebody needed was a cell phone with video capture capability and an online computer to upload it on. I doubt print press accounts of Richards could’ve horrified me as much as that raw grainy and unfocused footage of his vicious performance/attack. One things about internet video; Most people who put them on don’t worry about the repercussions or losing their day jobs as a result
They will be a Rerun this time: Ready Availability
In his brilliant piece about revolution, Gil Scott Heron told us that those that wait for the rerun wait in vain. Well he’s right, except if you have Google and Youtube of course. You might probably catch the footage in a less than timely fashion but still…
More importantly though, Its amazing how internet video is a readily accessible cache of news. There is no controlling how many times and at what time people view a news item. It’s no secret that media conglomeration means a lot of the same stories are being televised or not. Without subscribing to any conspiracy theories, we can safely say, under the guidance of common sense, that Program directors, executives, and owners of news media wield significant power over what can be seen. After all its private enterprise, so it’s a legal right to hold sway over what can be seen.
Well, along comes the world of internet video, where non-journalists or us mere mortals who have no fear of job security, post and watch what we want for our own enjoyment, or for our own political motives. No longer is it the case that we can only see sanitized reruns of controversial news items.
Don’t Throw Away Your TVs Just Yet
The online environment has created many more possibilities than regulators have probably envisioned. Its another realm of democracy, a cyber democracy, which laws in our real life society may be seemingly ill-equipped to deal with: at least from the eyes of regulators and those that own media. I personally like the freedom in the virtual world because it suits me well: i can watch the news when I want to, and decide for myself what news item to remind myself about. I suppose there are more reasoned and analytical appraisals and critiques of video news and the internet in a macro sense. Feel free to share any you know with me. Peace
Kwame (Amet)
over the last few weeks, I’ve been circling back to a pretty simple question: how can PTP staff do a better job of tracking and sharing what we know about the groups that we work with? It seems pretty simple on the surface - we just use our database, or some sort of database at least.
you’re probably not surprised to hear that the question is a fair bit more complicated than it might seem on the surface. We currently use our database to track most of this information, largely through entering notes of conversations we have with groups. This information is accessible when you’re looking at an individual contact - you can pull up notes from prior conversations and get a feel for what’s transpired between PTP and that individual. Similarly, when viewing an organization’s record, we can see a list of recent contacts with all individuals at that organization.
this is all fine, and works well to give us information on the history of the facts of the relationship, but tells us very very little about the meaning of those facts and doesn’t contribute to an overall picture of the current state of the organization, its relationship to PTP, or the technology developments coming out of the group and their implications for our program.
What I’d love is some way to look at the aggregate of what we know and use that to help take the pulse of technology use by community organizing groups. I don’t even mind needing to do some reading or digging to get there. The problem is that the current system just doesn’t seem to really lend itself to that application of what the database holds.
We were recently in a discussion where the question of the efficacy of social networks such as moveon, truemajority, and the personal democracy forum came up. Someone expressed the view that when grassroots political dialog is conflated into “netroots” political dialog, community organizing’s constituencies are pushed out of the debate.
Community organizing is primarily concerned with making a local impact through face-to-face organizing. Some organizations and coalitions have a statewide impact and, every now and then, a national impact. Netroots uses internet communications to work in the opposite direction, first building a national or regional caucus of donors and bloggers, then it attempts to drill down. In the process, the issues and concerns of community organizing are just about entirely ignored by the netroots sphere.
While financial considerations are not the only factor, the economic base of blogging - online advertising - reinforces a self-referential model. It’s internet eyeballs that pay the piper. Bloggers drive traffic by reading and referencing each other. Netroots bloggers are not venturing out to make connections with existing community groups and learning the values and issues that drive this form of grassroots democracy.
Have you ever studied a map of moveon.org meetings or truemajority sponsored demonstrations? Placed on a map, the e-rooters are concentrated in the northeast, the upper Midwest, skip over the near west, and pop up again in the three western states. Online social networks are by and large an urban/inner suburb phenomenon. Community organizing shares some of this turf but is spread out across many more states and into the rural communities. Even where they are in the same cities, the organizational bases usually aren’t in the same census tracts or even the same zip codes. (It’s common knowledge:mydd Chris Bowers or Imedia Connection covers the daily Kos last year)
There’s more that they don’t share. They aren’t the same gender, color or religion. They also aren’t likely to see each other in school, on the job or shopping. Young people may meet in myspace, but even here the net fails to bridge the grand canyons of class and ethnicity. Consequently, when issues are debated or candidates vetted, it’s done by well meaning people who by and large haven’t experienced living a lifetime on low wages, losing a job promotion because of skin color or language skills, immigrating, union drives, inferior schools, coal companies grinding their landscape to dust.
Which leads us to the question in our discussion, if our constituencies are not part of the discussion are they better off with or without netroots?
this article suggests being very careful about how you use it:
“It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented.”
For more ideas on how use power point well, take a look at the Presentation Zen blog.