tag:typepad.com,2003:weblog-161 2010-02-03T17:02:47-05:00 Advocacy Strategy for the Age of Connectivity. TypePad tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8341c42e853ef0120a8599572970b 2010-02-03T17:02:47-05:00 2010-02-03T17:02:47-05:00

I started to think about all the campaign meetings and discussions I have been in over the years. Groups are great and they share lots of data including proposals, plans, budgets, etc. However, I am usually very hungry to sit down with the campaign team to talk about the vision and where things are going. What am I looking for during these meetings? Why does most the literature and information in proposals not give online organizers enough to chew on? What do I really want before I can sit down and develop the best advocacy network strategy for a group or client? These are not in order. Here is a list of things I like to get my head around before I get into thinking about the online strategy. Most of these are obvious but some are driven by what makes a network function. What is the campaign trying to do? What is success? How do the policy team/ campaign team think it will be done? Who is the target audience? Who are the influencers that the online strategy must engage to succeed? What services would be most valuable to them in their own work? Where are the turf wars...

Marty http://www.network-centricadvocacy.net/2010/02/what-information-do-you-like-to-pick-up-before-starting-an-online-organizing-project.html tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8341c42e853ef0128772bfbe3970c 2010-01-29T13:58:33-05:00 2010-01-29T13:58:33-05:00

This is an interesting. I like the riff on transparency and the clash that transparency will inspire us to be better as reviewers, readers and brands. This transparency vs. control and history and trends vs. spin is interesting. Echo Creator Khris Loux on the Ties That Bind the Real-Time Web from ReadWriteWeb on Vimeo.

Marty http://www.network-centricadvocacy.net/2010/01/by-not-having-contol-of-brand-maybe-we-become-better-brands-rather-than-better-at-spin.html tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8341c42e853ef0128770ec08e970c 2010-01-25T12:55:52-05:00 2010-01-25T12:55:52-05:00

Marty http://www.network-centricadvocacy.net/2010/01/truespin-conversation-testing-tanglerlive.html tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8341c42e853ef0120a7ede43f970b 2010-01-19T14:44:34-05:00 2010-01-19T14:44:34-05:00

Here is a good article unpacking the fallout of group think. It is also a nice set of questions for any campaign planning and campaign strategists. The original article is about CIA and failures of intelligence. Our allies often get what we ask for but not what we want. My sense is that the failure of many of our investments and strategies is because we don’t do enough of the following…. 1. Challenge Authority. Challenge Tradition. 2. Probe the Assumptions 3. Look for Indicators. What details could change your mind? 4. Brainstorm the likely responses from opponents. Here is the section from the original article that hit me… What our intelligence system really needs is ways to avoid becoming trapped by the natural tendency to leap to conclusions and stick with them. This is true in other fields as well, which is why so much of professional and scientific training is designed to reduce the errors made by fallible people using weak information. If individuals cannot avoid jumping to conclusions, there are ways for organizations to make up for this. They can systematically solicit the views of people with different perspectives, for example, or use devil’s advocates who will challenge...

Marty http://www.network-centricadvocacy.net/2010/01/individuals-cannot-avoid-jumping-to-conclusions.html tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8341c42e853ef0120a7d7b2e3970b 2010-01-15T17:47:00-05:00 2010-01-15T11:48:58-05:00

The thinking behind the Google Map service is the way every allied organizer should be thinking. Once you are not stuck at the ground level, we need strategists to step back and look at the 30,000 how can we make this happen. The basic concept behind the way they build information on the map is exactly the way distributed advocacy and social change movements MUST be organizing. How do movements build up the capacity to enable collaboration with “almost zero effort” on the part of the organizers and groups? What transactions of everyone else in the movement you work in would be most relevant to your work? What are the traffic jams of social change? The people with cell phone are collaborating. They benefit from the collaboration. They have accepted the bargain of giving back peeks into data about them in order to see the big picture. When you choose to enable Google Maps with My Location, your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you're moving. When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can...

Marty http://www.network-centricadvocacy.net/2010/01/because-of-you-google-maps-show-live-traffic-reports-for-back-roads.html tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8341c42e853ef0120a64b45b5970b 2010-01-13T22:23:14-05:00 2010-01-13T22:23:14-05:00

This is a good presentation. Great line and introduction to the shifts in technology producing changes in behavior. The goal of human nature is hard wired in people. Somewhere in our bipedal mammalian evolution, we picked up socializing and connecting with each other as a species characteristic. The real evolution of the internet is not about the content, marketing, philanthropy, product placement, etc. etc. The core of the network is connecting people to learn and share with each other, to collaborate, to evolve and to be. Our survival in the ecosystem is dependent on communication and collaboration, it always has been and now it is just scaling with the people on the planet. People increasingly turn online to find people who know, people to care, and people to accompany them while they are experiencing life. Those connections are evolving human behavior to a scale and tempo that is not comfortable for many. What if people do get more value and reward from 5000 friendsters than 5 close friends? What if "fame" online is as self-rewarding as fame offline? The buzz about the collapse of social fabric is wrong. The "wisdom of the crowd", "wisdom of the market" suggests that people...

Marty http://www.network-centricadvocacy.net/2010/01/human-nature-doesnt-change-human-behavior-does.html tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8341c42e853ef0120a67fd20a970c 2009-11-10T21:50:00-05:00 2009-11-10T21:50:00-05:00

Data at work in a defined context. Our movements need to really connect and track data and contribute to community and allies understanding of the data. Time from 7:30 to 8:40 is amazing on the evolution of data enhancements and traffic mapping of engagement with the voters. Important ideas in any organizing context... combined data creates new insights and "synthetic" data based on hard data. By collecting data and sharing the data, it is possible to create new actionable data pools. Carefully targeting allows movements to find new niches and audiences. Careful targeting requires data sharing. Syndicating data access can help drive new levels of power to all that have access to that data. Access to data is scalable. This is a great presentation on the power of data. We need to continue to step up the tools and techniques that are available to allies working together on issues.

Marty http://www.network-centricadvocacy.net/2009/11/data-driven-campaigns.html tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8341c42e853ef0120a65a2c10970b 2009-11-05T21:19:04-05:00 2009-11-05T21:19:04-05:00

We keep our products simple. I'd rather have people grow out of our products, as long as more people are growing into them. http://ow.ly/zIGI The Way I Work: Jason Fried of 37Signals Man. Wow… that is a line that should be burned into every social movement. Jason is talking about products at 37 Signals but I would love to see that approach taken by our justice, environmental and other progressive movement organizers. How many would pass? What % of our users do we graduate? Serve the new people well and you grow. If you want to grow a movement build it to serve the newbie not the old baby boomer that wants you to add increased science policy review language onto some obscure wetland legislation. (press feed from ascribe)?

Marty http://www.network-centricadvocacy.net/2009/11/id-rather-have-people-grow-out-of-our-products-as-long-as-more-people-are-growing-into-them.html tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8341c42e853ef0120a657af6b970b 2009-11-05T15:15:44-05:00 2009-11-05T15:15:44-05:00

Here is a great riff on culture and collaboration that resonates with me. It fits with the seven elements of a healthy network and begs the question…. can you manage “culture”? Yes. It is possible to establish and set the culture of a group. There are 3 ways to build culture in an organization or network. 1. Leadership- Leadership in culture is very different from leadership in an executive sense. There are leaders that serve others. Leaders that direct and drive. And leaders that focus on process and infrastructure. There are very few people that realize they are controlled or follow culture but most of us are sheep grazing on pastures of culture. The culture sets the terms of acceptability (you know the day you square danced or moon walked). Leadership in a culture is not being a boss but leading in vision or service. Leadership is also exerted by those that see the culture and shape it by weaving parts of it together or drive wedges in the cracks. 2. Language – A culture can not emerge without commonalities. Common vision, common stories and common language. Words, pictures, music, stories that unify and define “who is in” and “who...

Marty http://www.network-centricadvocacy.net/2009/11/collaboration-anti-culture.html tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8341c42e853ef0120a6569550970b 2009-11-05T09:59:00-05:00 2009-11-05T09:59:00-05:00

This is in line with the training work we have been doing on twitter for activists. The power of Twitter comes from 3 sources for activists. The ability to instantly connect people who don’t know each other but care about an issue, event or action. (#hashtags) The ability to set up a group of trusted people and connect them even if they are not in front of computer but not tight enough to share cell phone numbers with each other. (lobby days, coordinating action etc.) The ability to scale up your listening, broaden your radar and listen to people you don’t normally get to listen to so regularly. (Micah Sifry is one of the smartest and well connected activist … who does he follow? Follow them directly.http://twitter.com/Mlsif/following) and now his lists…http://twitter.com/Mlsif/techpolitics Jack Dorsey nails it… Good Huffington Post Interview… Impact: How can people use Twitter more effectively for social change? JD: I think the biggest thing is supporting each individual update more, getting away from [Twitter] being a social network and focusing on individual tweets, so that you can create a whole movement from that. Right now we have the hashtag, which was invented by our users, but it's still...

Marty http://www.network-centricadvocacy.net/2009/11/twitter-cofounder-jack-dorsey-on-using-twitter-for-social-change.html tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8341c42e853ef0120a65402f8970b 2009-11-04T16:28:35-05:00 2009-11-04T16:28:35-05:00

Here is a cool example of the networked culture connecting art supporters and artists. This is in the same stream of thinking behind innocentive, kiva, extrondinaries, 99designs, daylo, spot.us bounty county, etc. I like the design and the concept. They also seem to have jumped on some great projects from the launch. Screen clipping taken: 11/4/2009, 4:23 PM

Marty http://www.network-centricadvocacy.net/2009/11/be-a-producer-networking-the-arts-and-project-development.html tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8341c42e853ef0120a6a556b3970c 2009-11-03T14:26:15-05:00 2009-11-03T14:26:15-05:00

Google can monitor health-seeking behaviour in the form of queries to online search engines, which are submitted by millions of users around the world each day. " we can accurately estimate the current level of weekly influenza activity in each region of the United States". The question is does the early spike mean that America "is Done" with the flu or are we going to see a Feb-Mar spike that is 2 or 3 times greater than the current levels.

Marty http://www.network-centricadvocacy.net/2009/11/flu-trends-shows-the-early-spike-of-h1n1.html tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8341c42e853ef0120a64abdf6970b 2009-11-02T10:48:18-05:00 2009-11-02T10:48:18-05:00

This should be a wake up call for lots of online strategies that are not transparent, don't communicate results and just use online work to build a base of donating click monkeys. People are not happy with the distrust shown to them online. This study mentioned in Philanthropy of 587 PEOPLE WHO USE NEW MEDIA ... has nothing to do with the failure of the platform but of the philosophy and world view of those who run organizations. The online strategy and communications behind the use of the online tools doesn't typically engage, empower and listen. There is a high degree of distrust of online supporters by organizers and organizations. Somehow the open and welcome culture of organizing "if they show up at a meeting engage them and work with them" has not translated into online organizing space. Old guard leaders don't trust their own instincts or methods used to filter "good supporters and bad supporters" in the online space and therefore they distrust all online supports and only offer them limited engagement, information or resources. Often people are left feeling "not trusted, disconnected, left behind and like "ATMs" because that is the true way "serious organizers" often feel toward...

Marty http://www.network-centricadvocacy.net/2009/11/indictment-of-online-strategies-the-man-in-the-mirror-doesnt-trust-you-either-.html tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8341c42e853ef0120a6285ab1970b 2009-10-29T16:03:00-04:00 2009-10-29T16:03:00-04:00

I really thought this was a good presentation on innovation process and practice. I like how it resonates on personal experience level and how it bumps up against the network design issues and the paradoxes of building network power and performance to create intentional change. First, the discussion fits well with the type of work I do with partners. It is interesting to see John focus on the conceptual clarity and need to ask and queue up the right questions. Partners often balk at the really important part of the work that is focused on syncing up the network vision and our efforts with the current contexts and realities that are buffering and shaping the context. Second, this presentation bumps into the system and process questions at the network level. What systems do we have in place that actually DESTROY innovation at scale across groups and in an issue and advocacy network ? How can networks innovate? How can networks be supported in innovation process? I find it interesting that John limits this conversation and thinking (national or organizational level) to centralized planners and individual examples. John provides the right process (everyone knows the process, set of practices that work...

Marty http://www.network-centricadvocacy.net/2009/10/john-kao-innovation-nation-meets-nonprofit-networks.html tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8341c42e853ef0120a6286ed5970b 2009-10-28T09:49:56-04:00 2009-10-28T09:49:56-04:00

It is tragic that we don't have intentional efforts to drive power, leadership, budgets and responsibility into the hands and power of tested, smart and emerging young leaders. They are interested in engagement without joining. Why do most of the models for engagement include "joining and membership" vs action, output and results of conversation. The youth are not interested in joining becoming member movement's that have delivered the current world to their door. They are interested in power freedom justice global perspectives engagement and voice Energy Action Coalition continues to pump new ideas and insights into the drive and trends they see on the ground with young diverse and mobilized base. There is good insight into the language, channels and rhythms of youth leadership that are very important to heed.

Marty http://www.network-centricadvocacy.net/2009/10/engagement-without-joining-youth-vision.html