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:
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.
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.
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.
Web Worker Daily has a “Look Inside Virtual Company MoveOn.org” it isn’t much of a look that you don’t already know if you know about MoveOn, but vaguely interesting - the virtual retreat sounds torturous, but I suppose if you’ve got a good headset, then it might be okay.
More interesting would have been a review of the headsets, phone systems, and other hardware and software they use. I mean, they can’t really run everything on Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets, and other online technologies - certainly not with their membership databases and other member related information, right?
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)
I had no idea. Now I do. And I still can’t stop the double spacing, can you?