Web of Change

Lead by Eric Squair and Cristen Perks


Agenda
- MANIFESTO
- STRENGTHS
- WEAKNESSES
- BEST PRACTICES
- EXAMPLES
- DISCUSS
- FACEBOOK!

MANIFESTO
Why organize in pre-existing online communities?
Why use pre-existing software tools?

• If you build it, they may not come
• Fish where the fish are.
• My message IN their life, not their life
• Optimize resources (time & money)
• Silo Destruction
• Low barrier to entry
  

WORKING GROUP: WHY TO BUILD YOUR OWN TOOLS

See the attached file for photos of the flipcharts from Rob Purdie's session on Values Based Project Management. 

with Liz Butler and John Warnow

notes by Donna Barker

What got you involved in the activist movement/advocacy/social change?

➢ Friends invited me to a rally
➢ My grandmother
➢ Earth Day, 1998
➢ I was working and burnt out and decided if my life was going to suck I wanted it to be for a good reason
➢ I had good teachers
➢ I used to watch National Geographic instead of Sesame Street
➢ Junior High teacher told me my generation had to get its shit together
➢ Dinner with friends who told me about an organization I should join
➢ My family instilled values and my university situation fermented into action
➢ Family and spirituality
➢ Brother in law is an activist and he asked me to help out
➢ Shock during my first year of university to see inequality in the world
➢ Making a final commitment to be a vegetarian and researching the meat industry and the power of corporations shocked me
➢ Spirituality and personal elements and a bad break-up
➢ When I was 7 I lived in Paris for 6 weeks and saw a homeless person for the first time
➢ Moved to DC to escape rural America and found opportunities to make change that aren’t available anywhere else
➢ I grew up in a family of Cape Breton socialists with salt of the Earth prairie farm folk
➢ When I was a kid I went to pro-choice rallies with the head of my church and my mom at 8 years old

We have to step back to look at what gets people engaged and what starts them down this path. The internet is now our tool to find people but that is tapping into the stuff we all mentioned only on a cursory level. Most of what gets people involved is a major inter- personal interaction.

How do we come as close as possible to get people to face to face.

People sign things online that they don’t remember or don’t understand. It doesn’t get them committed to the cause.
Getting someone out on the street or getting them to write a cheque proved a stronger belief in and connection to the outcome of the campaign.
Does anyone have a personal friend who they’ve never met and only ever emailed? It’s rare. But you can meet someone once and email for years and feel like they’re a friend.

Session lead: Dave Eaves

Notes by Dharma Dailey

1 sentence take away: It's all about toasty warm fuzzies.

Defining Collaboration.

Collaboration implies very different things to people in the room. For some it means getting work done together for others it implies power sharing in decision making. For the facilitator, collaboration implies that we have an equal opportunity to influence each other.

Online collaboration works well for:

Tasks broken down into chunks that are managable by one person or one discrete group work well for online collaboration.

Online is good for educating on issues and concerns: such as Bugzilla
Bugzilla walks you through the issues and concerns really well, so has taken off.

Online collaboration - Room for Improvement:

Strategic conversations don’t happen well online.

It’s very difficult to establish trust online. Trust is essential for making decisions.

Shared decision making via only online is challenging.

Scaling issues.
Projects that generate a lot of volunteer interest may have these additional problems:

• leaders keep going back to the same people. (online trust issue)
• • those who think differently are harder and harder to engage with while people who think like you tend to stay around.

Led by Jon Stahl and Tate Hausman

Notes by Cristen Perks

Effective uses of CRM (What people would like out of the ideal CRM):
- CRM as operating system built by direct input from users/constituents.
- CRM as collaborative workspace
- "Trigger" events that initiate proactive human action
- Event driven messaging - sequences initiated based on individual action (e.g. Dell)
--- Predefined sequences of engagement asks
- Cross platform marketing among organizations (danger: privacy issues)
--- Failed example:  America Votes 2004 coordinated canvassing (political world is ahead here and is working from a public list)
--- Creates a lot of demand for content
- More aggregation of public data from/about constituents
- Groups coming together to support each others ends/campaigns (coordination)
--- Who gets to control who gets to talk?
--- Even intra-organizational turf issues must be addressed

Example of collaboration: Washington State Priorities for a Healthy Washington
 - Must start with objectives

"curriculum based approach"
--providing information on demand
--predict what's going to happen in the future (based on CRM data)

Demographics
--expressed interest
--behavior  -> most predictive!

What to track:
--keep track of skills!!
--who people know (relationships)

Tension between silo'd data
--Only collect what you can act on

Transactions vs relationship

How do we figure out what people want and give it to them?
--being of service to our constituents

Online volunteering ("crowd sourcing")
-- e.g.  distributed phone banking

FOLLOW-UP:
1.  Privacy and friends (self-organized session)
2.  Collaborative lists in WA and beyond (dinner tonight)
3.  Network-centric organizing - facilitating other relationships

Led by Favianna Rodriguez, Tumis

notes by Mack Hardy

- Cultural work and radical graphics
- The role that designs play in inspiring people
- telling a story, and talking about how the graphic design created uptake of the project
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- Year 2000
- Not in our name - women of color against the war
- War Targets Poor People of Color
- posters and graphics are highly visible and accessible non online people
- 2003 WTO - talking about the role of globalization and farmers
- Human Need not Corporate Greed -
- going after republicans and democratic national conventions
- big business sitting on top of the world
- Stop the Evictions - spanish and english
- graphics and web
- we need to visulize and share our vision
- people need to be able to see themselves
- posters are good for illustrating
- Housing is a human right
- working class families are being pushed out
- Oakland for the people
- gentrification
- Queer Latinas Youth Conference
- issues of representation, how are you representing woman, people of color
- what is our responsibility to representation
- Education, not Incarceration
- Prop 21 - 3 mistamenors, and you get life
- Dolores
- creating images of empowerment
- International Migrants Day
- how do I reach a population that is not on line
-