PTP Blog

PTP’s experimenting with twitter at the US Social Forum.  You can subscribe to our feed or add us if you’re already twittering yourself.

Almost the entire staff of the Progressive Technology Project is going to head out to the US Social Forum this afternoon and tomorrow.

We’re part of two sessions that are happening on Friday and Saturday, so if you want to catch us, here’s where to find us:

We’ll be hosting a poetry-slam style “Tech Slam” for the “Building Technology Skills, Building Movement: Organizing Technology Community of Practice” session on Friday the 29th. The tech slam invites you all to share your stories about how technology has helped your organizing work. We’re asking folks to follow a general outline of leading with the organizing challenge your organization faced, and from that, where and how technology was integrated in your organizing strategy and how it helped achieve your goals. We’ve got a number of folks ready to share their stories, including groups like Direct Action Welfare Group, Community Voices Heard, and Jobs with Justice, and you’re welcome to join in as well. There are even some prizes in the mix!

We’ll follow that up with a session called “Electoral Organizing + Technology = Power!” a session that draws from our recently launched Voter TechKit. In that session, we plan to interview Bineshi Albert from Sage Council (now with Center for Community Change) and Henry Serrano from Community Voices Heard. After we hear their experiences on using electoral strategies to complement their base-building organizing, we’ll dive into an area of technology that often causes consternation for folks doing voter work - the database. We’ll share what we’ve learned about source for voter data, along with a look at what the overall data cycle looks like. We’ll follow that by asking participating organizations to chart out their data-cycles and we’ll spend some time identifying areas where improvements could lead to greater ease of database usage. That probably sounds fairly dry and technical, but I promise that it will be fun and interesting.

See you in Atlanta!

As Mark has noted on his blog, we’ve semi-officially launched our Voter TechKit - a training resource designed to help 501c3 organizations navigate voter engagement work, with an emphasis on the technologies that support voter engagement.  Take a look and use the link along the bottom of the TechKit site to share your feedback.

the first TechCamp of 2007 starts this afternoon in St. Paul, MN!

If you missed registration for this one, you can still register for the second TechCamp of 2007 starting at the end of July at UC Santa Cruz in Santa Cruz, CA.  More info on TechCamp is here.

Social Networking Mania or Guilty Pleasures?

Are you on myspace? Friendster? Facebook? Linked-In? Hi-5? Or have you been fortunate to escape the clutches of the “in-thing(s)” these days. I couldn’t tell you which of these are pure social networking tools and which are guilty pleasures masquerading as social networking tools. But I do know some of these can look a lot like an online dating service gone bad rather than a network to connect you to people within your vocational or social realm.

Okay, I confess, I have a myspace account. And like everybody else on it, I too can claim I have a legit reason to indulge myself regardless of all the spam and other madness that goes on there. Because really, its madness.

I don’t have a thorough nor thesis-worthy understanding of social networking as a phenomena, but I might hardly need that to know that a lot of these online facilitators are just plain bizaare in terms of functionality. For instance, for a little while there I was bombarded with emails about “are you on facebook?” When I finally joined all I earned for my leap of faith were emails that said “so I sent you a message on facebook, did u get it?” I like email somewhat so this is tragic. Really it is.

Hence, I dedicate this blog entry to all inquiring minds, especially those that are (or not?) in this matrix but wish they had taken the red pill so they would at least know what the fuss is all about. From a limited and “reluctant insiders” perspective, I will divulge secrets of the matrix (in this case myspace) Is it worth it? Does it work? What’s it good for? Is it the best out there? And of course how many agent smiths (aka spam) are there?

“Is it worth it?” Well, I’m on myspace as an artist so I bear the cross, suffer the hacking, spamming, and endless advertisements sprawling all over the site. I also run a myspace site for PTP’s Techcamp to connect with organizers and organizing groups that are on it as well. Unfortunately 10 out of every dozen friend requests I get for Tech Camp are from “lonely” and “friendly” cyber-created Eves looking for Adams, with little interest in learning basic computer skills useful for organizing. It could be funny or annoying. The latter is more true. But then again I see a reasonably successful US Social Forum mobilization campaign on myspace and that seems to attract the “right” audience.

Is it the best out there? Technically that should be an emphatic no considering all its telemarketer-ish tendencies; i.e. loads of unsolicited and unwanted info. But as is the case with many other technologies, the most popular ones aren’t necessarily the most useful or manageable info. There are over a100 million (and counting) members on myspace. Whew. That’s hard to compete with. The reach and possibilities of these figures are really enticing and might be a reason a lot of artists gravitate to the myspace medium.

There is much more to be said, but I have to pull out a “to-be-continued” right here and ponder how myspace and facebook ate my emails and churned them into emails about messages online.

We’re excited to announce that we’ve brought up the initial version of our new online training environment for community organizers. We’re calling it a Voter TechKit because it offers a comprehensive orientation to voter projects for 501C3 community organizing groups, with a particular emphasis on technology. I find the best part to be the video snippets from experienced community organizers. Thanks to Henry Serrano from Community Voices Heard in Harlem, Bineshi Albert from Sage Council in Albuquerque, Anthony Thigpenn with SCOPE in Los Angeles and Robby Rodriguez from SWOP in Albuquerque for their willingness to be beautifully videotaped for this project. Learn more about them here. We also had great authoring help from election maven Jan Adams, formerly of Californians for Justice and Applied Research Center.

Check it out and make sure to give us feedback on what works and what doesn’t. We’re intending to keep adding to it as we go along.