General
Mobilizing Communities in a Connected Age: New Report from ZeroDivide and Mitchell Kapor Foundation
The Mitchell Kapor Foundation*, in partnership with the ZeroDivide Foundation recently released a report titled “Mobilizing Communities in a Connected Age.” The report is an assessment of advocacy organizations’ use of technology, and is a companion report to their recent report that outlined the challenges facing philanthropy’s efforts to support technology use by advocacy organizations.
Both reports are well worth reading in full, and you can access both of them from the ZeroDivide Website. What I want to focus on here are the key findings of the report on advocacy organizations, and the implications for community organizing groups.
In the report, Tina Lee, the author conducted a scan of the field, and based on her findings, categorized the field into three categories: Leading, Aspiring, and Legacy organizations. The report details a number of findings that we’ll likely return to in later posts, but overall, four themes emerge that have critical importance for community organizing groups:
1) Integration is key
2) Integration of communications is of particular importance
3) Successful technology integration flows from support by organization’s leadership
4) Organizational culture is a determining factor in success
These are themes that PTP has been talking about for years. In fact, take a look at our 2004 report “From Exclusion to Inclusion: Stengthening Community-led Organizations with Effective Technology” to see how things have shifted over the last several years. More recently, we’ve taken these concepts and made them central to the design of our programs – everything we do is really aimed at integration, communications, and working to shift culture.
We encourage you to download and read the ZeroDivide report, and if you’d like, post back here with any questions or comments that you’d like PTP to take up in future posts. The ZeroDivide reports, taken together, paint a picture of a changing field, and we’d like to invite you to join us in unpacking the implications of the reports for community organizing groups and how we can more effectively work together to build the capacity of the field.
*The Mitchell Kapor Foundation is a supporter of the Progressive Technology Project and included PTP in the survey of groups that are cited in this report.
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! Muy pronto, el gran estreno de TechCamp en Español en Chicago, IL ¡
Se llevara a cabo el 25 de Agosto (12:00 del mediodía) hasta el 28 de Agosto (12:00 mediodía)
Inscríbase ahora (Hay becas disponibles para cubrir la matricula de TechCamp)
¿Necesitas desarrollar tus habilidades básicas de computación?
¿Estás interesado en mejorar tu confianza y habilidad en el área de computación?
¿Prefieres aprender sobre tecnología en Español envés de en Ingles?
Si respondistes "SI" a alguna de estas preguntas entonces inscríbase ahora mismo para atender TechCamp.
PTP ha diseñado un programa especial de entrenamiento para organizadores comunitarios que están interesados en desarrollar sus habilidades y conocimiento en el área de tecnología
El entrenamiento TechCamp está diseñado para desarrollar las habilidades en el área de tecnología que son esenciales para la organización comunitaria
Lo siguiente es lo que puedes esperar aprender durante 3 días en el TechCamp de PTP:
- Desarrollaras habilidades y conocimiento en el área de tecnología, basada en la organización comunitaria:
o Estas incluyen habilidades básicas de computación: mecanografía, manipulación de archivos, tipos de archivos y más.
o Introducción sobre las más comunes aplicaciones de base de datos: Filemaker y Access
o Entrenamiento en una actual base de datos: manipular datos e información, generar informes, y generar consultas de datos..
o Correo electrónico (e-mail) y la red (internet): cómo utilizar el correo-e, manejar la bandeja de entrada (inbox), lidiar con spam, utilizando la red – hallando y manejando información.
o Mantenimiento de hardware (equipo físico), resolución de problemas comunes, fundamentos de red informática (network), técnicas de supervivencia básicas sobre el servidor de archivos (file server).
o Sostenibilidad financiera de tu Tecnología: Como recaudar fondos para mantener la infraestructura tecnológica.
- Aprenderás sobre la tecnología en un ambiente de colaboración y apoyo mutuo, con otros organizadores que viven los mismos desafíos suyos.
Clic aqui para mayor información sobre TechCamp en Español
¿Para quién está diseñado TechCamp?
Este taller está diseñado para organizadores comunitarios, líderes, y aquellos que apoyan organizaciones comunitarias dirigidas por la comunidad y dedicadas al progreso y al cambio social. TechCamp está diseñado para las personas interesadas en desarrollar su conocimiento y habilidades en el área de tecnología. TechCamp es un entrenamiento para organizadores, diseñado por entrenadores que entienden, y tienen experiencia en el área de organización comunitaria. TechCamp está basado en 10 años de estrategia organizativa en el área de entrenamientos de tecnología hacia organizaciones comunitarias.
Todavía tenemos cupo. Inscríbase ahora para nuestro TechCamp en Agosto por medio de nuestro sitio web.
Si tiene preguntas sobre nuestro taller, puede llamar gratis al 1-866-298-6463 ext. 10; zona local por favor llamar al (612) 724-2600 ext. 10 (Laura Gaitán).
PTP's Special Projects Coordinator in American Prospect
The American Prospect recently published an article by Christina Roessler, PTP's Special Projects Coordinator on "Changing Water Policies in the Dry Southwest." Read it here.
Progressive Technology Project's reach within the social justice movement
We've been looking at the grassroots community led social justice organization movement lately. As part of this we decided to see who PTP has reached over the years. It's interesting primarily because it shows how widespread the movement is. Here's a map from our web site:
what happened?
PTP's blogs have been consolidated into one big blog. We apologize for any broken links or other inconvenience this may cause.
We'll try to get the big bugs taken care of this week, so with any luck your links and feeds will start working correctly soon. The smaller issues will have to wait till later in the month.
As always, your comments, suggestions, and feedback are welcome.
twittering at the US Social Forum
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.
PTP at the US Social Forum
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!
“soft launch” of PTP’s Voter TechKit
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.
starting TechCamp today!
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.
Voter TechKit
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.
