Web of Change 2007 is starting to come alive. We're re-energizing our vision for this year and we're excited. Stay tuned, because within the next few weeks we'll be updating this website with all the information you need.
For now, save the date: September 19 - 23, 2007. And make sure you sign up for our newsletter, too (see the left-hand sidebar).
If you need basic info, you can also peek at the Hollyhock website. See you in September..
Note: This is a reprint from my blog at www.communicopia.com.
A few weeks ago I predicted that this year’s Web of Change conference would be our best ever. I guess you would expect a conference founder to make such a claim, but this year we really pulled something new and magical off.
Web of Change 2006 had almost 80 incredible attendees from all over North America (and one very notable guest from Europe) and the conversations and connections were some of the most thoughtful, insightful, and helpful of my 10 years in this industry.
During the Peer-to-peer breakout sessions (aka “Workshopping your Issue”) a group of us created an ad hoc session focusing on the web site design and development issues faced by the Council of Canadians, a progressive national organization with 70 local chapters scattered across the country.
The Council’s challenge is to create a unified yet flexible web presence for the largely autonomous chapters, while still keeping control of branding and much of the messaging.
Problem Statement (Council of Canadians)
The Council’s requirements and constraints include:
with Roz Lemieux (New Organizing Institute), Liz Butler (ForestEthics) and Michael Silberman (EchoDitto)
notes by Roz Lemieux
Examples of Online Campaigns Yielding Offline Action
• Forest Ethics: Victoria’s Secret campaign
o Goal: Day of action → bring independent actions that happened yearly already together under one umbrella campaign
o Success: 350 actions → campaign win in the pipeline now
o Elements of success:
with Leda Dederich (dotOrganize) and Liz Butler (ForestEthics)
Notes by Phillip Djwa
We need to be thinking about the experience of working with organizations that lack a strategic focus and merge traditional organizing and think about better processes for that.
Talk was about the process for campaign strategy, look at Forest Ethics as a case study, and look at the main questions we have about integrating technology into campaigns.
A lot of times organizations don't have a strategy and/or don't know how to integrate technologies , but as "technologists" (i.e. web people) we are asked to create a website to support them.
However, actually sometimes it is campaign strategy that is needed. Also, technologists that want to help organizations need to know about the campaign to assist in terms of speaking their language.
