Salsa Scoop
And Thanks for All the Fish
Happy May Day, comrades. We don't do Law Day here. I'll miss you for the next month, whilst across the sea recapturing backpacking and hosteling days of yore (but sadly, not the dollar of yore). Posting will go a bit lighter here in May but besides the watery gruel of prewritten fare should be a few less commonly heard voices both within and without the organization (and if you'd like to submit a guest blog post, contact Mara here) so any deficiency in quantity ought to be overcompensated by quality and freshness. Read more...
08:48 AM May 01, 2007 -
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Cultures of Learning
Michele Martin parses the differences between an organizational "culture of training" ("something that's done TO staff") and a "culture of learning ("something that's done WITH staff"), a follow-up to an earlier musing about the short-term cost an organization bears for investing in learning in which I spoke rather out of school (so to speak) by appearing in the comments section. Michele's content-rich, dialogue-inviting space is really one of the more enjoyable nptech hangouts around, and I like the way she's positioned some of the questions. Though I can't pretend to any particular expertise on the subject of learning as such, the issue speaks to me inasmuch as every important step in my life has come about from exceeding my brief -- and it's ironic to be scribbling this as I shuttle back and forth between a conceptual presentation on some of the more arcane and potentially powerful features in Salsa, our new toolset. It's like learning the platform all over again, and a striking juxtaposition since learning DIA -- and anything at all about online communication -- was itself a venture afield from my former day job of fundraising. At the time we pushed that boat into the water with a few dozen people on the e-mail list, there was no conceivable short-term justification from the organization's standpoint for the time involved, though from my own personal standpoint and that of the organization's long-term interests, it was more defensible. I don't have the slightest answer to Michele's probing, I'm afraid. But I think it's worth the read and the mulling. Read more...
04:44 PM Apr 30, 2007 -
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An E-Organizing (and Just Plain Organizing) Victory: Free Schuylkill River Park Frees Schuylkill River Park
Congratulations to one of the earlier DIA users, Free Schuylkill River Park for doing just what their name avowed.
Every action by the group was meticulously explained on its site (www.freetheriverpark.org), and "action alerts" were sent to its growing list of subscribers any time the group needed lobbying of City Council, CSX or the company's own customers to get behind pro-access initiatives. The response was so instant, the rebuttals so relentless, CSX just couldn't stay nimble.Read more...
03:19 PM Apr 26, 2007 - 0 comments permalink
E-xemplar: Innocent and Executed
The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty is debuting InnocentAndExecuted.org, the online extension of a recent report documenting likely instances when innocent prisoners have been executed. This is a nice basic microsite deployment (redirecting to a content page created in DIA) complete with a toolkit of various resources for organizers, an online action and a project-specific donation page.Read more...
12:24 PM Apr 26, 2007 - 0 comments permalink
Free the Debates
A number of DIA users and friends are among scores of signatories to open letters sent to both the DNC and RNC demanding that debate footage be openly licensed to facilitate remixing, mashups, parody, commentary, and every other manner of citizen intervention free from any possible fear that some intellectual property law could be used to shut down discussion. The letters suggest one of two solutions: place all debate footage in the public domain; or, place it under a Creative Commons license. Here's a pdf version of the letters. That's such a damnably obvious thing to get behind that kos and Michelle Malkin are taking the same tack. And while the danger of an actual lawsuit may be scant -- "suing the anonymous person who made a YouTube skewering you during the New Hampshire primary" is a good working definition of "political suicide" -- one has to appreciate the opportunism of using the situation as a teachable moment on intellectual property for politicos. The parties should do this, of course. But so much the better if it normalizes in some small way the idea that statues surrounding content control and distribution are not fixed on Sinai but open to discussion.Read more...
01:38 PM Apr 25, 2007 - 0 comments permalink
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