e.politics: online advocacy tools & tactics

Unity ‘08, Michael Bloomberg and the Mushy Middle

In the spirit of not wanting to kick a dog when he’s sad and ailing, I have avoided saying anything unpleasant about Unity ‘08 in quite a while. But an email today from its founders endorsing Michael Bloomberg has forced me to reconsider that silence and lean back into a fighting stance, prepared for some Chuck Norris-style ass-whoopin’.

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2 comments January 15th, 2008 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us

The Backlash Against Political Robocalls

If there’s any piece of the primary season frenzy that seems designed to drive voters insane, it’s the unsolicited phone calls. The ones from real people are bad enough, but robocalls were clearly invented by someone with a deep hatred of the human race. With that in mind, I’m pleased to present a couple of recent examples of robocalls working against campaigns in New Hampshire. First, Romney loses a vote:
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2 comments January 15th, 2008 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us

Democrats for Mitt in Michigan, The Video Edition

Garance Franke-Ruta wrote up a genius new bit of citizen activism in The Trail last night: a self-described “dude you’ve never heard of” named Andy Cobb has posted a video on YouTube laying out the case for Democrats crossing over and voting for Mitt Romney in the Michigan Republican primary. Noting that “There is no greater voice against Republican candidates than this Republican candidate,” the filmmaker argues that a carefully considered vote for Romney can “keep this circular firing squad of jerkos alive.” It’s damn clever and at least as well-written and well-edited as any online video produced by the campaigns themselves:

For all the talk of using the web to bring citizens into the presidential debates and such, this is one of the REAL ways average people are getting heard — they’re creating something compelling and/or funny and putting it out there for the world to see. Get some blog pickup and a mainstream media mention or two, and all of a sudden you might just have thousands of people paying attention to what you say.

– cpd

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More Than Nerd-Cool: Online Collaboration Tools Have Political Uses

At last week’s tech project management workshop, a software developer from Community IT Innovators talked about a worldwide collaboration that’s plenty nerd-cool but also gives political communicators something to chew on. Late last year, a group of 30 or 40 software developers scattered around the world gathered for a live debugging session. They were working together to fix final problems in the next version of the open source content management system Joomla, and they used five key (and either cheap or free) technologies to work together:

• Skype. They began the session with an internet conference call to get everyone on the same page and assign basic tasks
• Chat. To communicate quickly as they moved through the process of fixing bugs, they used IRC. Instant Messaging would have been an alternative.
• Screensharing. When they ran into problems that needed a picture rather than words, they used free screen-sharing software. This way, a developer in India (for instance) could show a developer in Europe what he was doing and either get or give help.
• Google Spreadsheet. They used a Google Docs spreadsheet (also free) to track changes and allow all participants to view the project’s status and make updates.
• Face-to-face. Many of the developers were gathered in small groups and could help each other directly, turning to their online colleagues only when needed.

Obviously, this was a group of power-users rather than newbies, but the tech tools they used are available to anyone in the world with a decent internet connection (and IRC and Google Docs will work over dial-up). Besides the political implications of their project — many advocacy campaigns are using Joomla and similar CMSs to build websites and maintain them easily — political communicators shouldn’t ignore the potential of distant collaboration that this example illustrates. From environmental work to democracy-building to media relations, the ‘net provides tools that make it infinitely easier than ever before to organize and communicate across borders — or across the building. Most political users will obviously lag behind the tech elite in adopting them, but these applications are so useful (and cheap) that even the tech-averse can’t ignore them forever.

– cpd

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