PTP Blog

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!