(From this week's Weekly Highlight email. Click here to sign up to receive it in your inbox every week!)

Greetings!

It's the "Salsa Weekly Highlight," your quick hit on what's new in Salsa to help get the most out of your online program. As always, you can find plenty more news, updates, and conversation throughout the week on SalsaCommons.org.

This week, online organizing got a little bit easier. Now, you can put the power of the Salsa organizing platform directly in the hands of your supporters.

mySalsa is a cutting-edge platform that wraps all Salsa's core features into an easy-to-use community portal empowering your people to connect with others and to:

• host events
• start groups
• post updates
• fundraise
• ... and more!

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Apply Today Green Corps’ Field School for Environmental Organizing. GreenCorps is an awesome advocacy organizing training program for recent college graduates interested in pursuing a CAREER as an environmental organizer. I went through (most of) this program in 1997 and highly recommend it for the right person. The deadline is February 1st - apply here Feel free to contact me with any questions - jnet (at)democracyinaction.org or 406-880-jnet (5638)

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Many of us will probably remember, however vaguely, Robert Putnam and his famous "bowling alone" thesis about the decline of social capital in the US. Some of us remember thinking that it was more about transformation and reallocation of social capital, but to make that case right now would be kind of pointless and a distraction from the work Putnam is doing now (even if it's right, which it may not be). Putnam has just published the results of five years of research on the effects of diversity on social capital within communities (which here means neighborhoods or something similar). The conclusion: diversity reduces social capital within the community. Most striking, and most distressing, it turns out too that members of a diverse community not only trust persons of other ethnic groups less, they also mistrust others of the same ethnic background.

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Earth Day Network, one of our newer users, is hailing the approach of their signature holiday with multiple online actions. The action here is pretty straightforward as pertains the technics -- there's also a pledge to use energy-efficient bulbs, which is a basic signup page -- but it's drawing traffic from several enormous mailing lists looking for topical links and turning its supporter signup chart vertical.

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With the young emperor set to cart more bodies to the Sumerian charnel house, we would be remiss to make no comment on the issue of the day, to which so many of our users are lending their energy. We've been spotlighting on the home page the outstanding house party event that True Majority is running through our Distributed Event tool. (And note their comprehensive Event Kit -- putting organizing material like that in the hands of would-be local activists in conjunction with the signup pages is what really makes a house parties action rock.)* More importantly, it's a response to the mad and unpopular "strategy" of more, deeper, and alongside tomorrow's Day of Action to Shut Down Guantanamo (scads of DIA types among the sponsors) represents a critical test for that netroots we keep hearing about.

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