silbatron

Top of Stowe / Mt Mansfield VT

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 20:00:00 -0800

Shockingly there was enough snow to ski on

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Untitled

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 20:32:34 -0800

Taken at Blackwater Falls Overlook

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Hamburg models Christmas off a children's fairy tale, but IRL (last wk)

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 17:10:02 -0800

Taken at Rathausmarkt Hamburg

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Sri Lanka photos. Mostly elephants.

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 14:49:02 -0800

I was expecting something like South India -- a place I've never visited but imagine to be hot, crowded, and poor from all that I've heard and seen.

Sri Lanka was nothing like that. Instead it was green and lush, rapidly developing (no obvious signs of extreme poverty), and full of friendly people working to rebuild a country stunted by and still recovering from 26 years of civil war that only just ended in 2009.

I was lucky enough to visit the island in September at the invitation of the US State Department / US Embassy in Colombo to help lead a digital activism training for students across South Asia (see WICPER Training for Trusteeship). My colleague Susannah Vila posted some of her thoughts on the experience here on HuffPo.

We didn't have time to see much while there, but we did cover many hours of rough roads from rainforest-like mountain regions (Kandy, Kigale) to capitol city (Colombo) to -- briefly en route to airport -- tropical beach. I have many more miles of Sri Lankan beach to explore in my career. The elephant photos below are from the Pinnawala Elephant Orphanage, which was more like a park/refuge but seems to have started as an orphanage.

By the way, the US Embassy in Sri Lanka has an impressively active social media presence; here they are on twitter and facebook.

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They literally made my breakfast today (thx folks; grt work)

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 21:01:34 -0800

Taken at Creek crossing farm

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A new warrior up close: my visit to the Rainbow Warrior III [pics]

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 09:10:00 -0700

I'm here in Amsterdam for a whole mess of meetings with folks across the global organization at Greenpeace and the timing happens to coincide with the launch of GP's latest, um, campaign tool -- the Rainbow Warrior III.

Here are some quick pics I took from the tour that Martin Prieto (GP Argentina) and I took with one of the new deckhands, Pablo. He was good enough to show us his quarters, not to mention the helipad (!), radio room (awesome gadgets), campaign room, engine room, and much more

It's bigger than I expected -- barely fits under the veranzano bridge apparently. But it also seems sturdy. Which is good because previous GP ships have had to withstand everything from bombings to pirate attacks. Hopefully this crew faces none of that.

For some great behind the scenes (reality tv?) stories of the new hands on deck and this maiden voyage, check out the videos my colleague Brian Fitzgerald has been producing by following the RWIII's twitter, or here is the full series and background, pretty cool:

https://www.facebook.com/newhandsondeck?sk=app_162569423837389

The visit:

See the full gallery on Posterous

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Just another Amsterdam sunrise

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 00:23:54 -0700

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Time capsule thoughts on rapidly changing role of NGOs in change-making; on successful "engagement" [vid]

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 15:17:26 -0700

What am I most inspired by these days? That's the question the staff of Hollyhock threw my way while we enjoyed their edenic retreat center on Cortes Island -- once again the setting for our annual Web of Change conference in September.

Here's my answer, which feels particularly bound to this moment in time, immediately on the heels of the Arab Spring and on the cusp of the Occupy movement going to scale.

And Jason Mogus (Communicopia), our founder, had some really smart things to say about opportunities for new thinking and radical digital approaches in the face of major recent setbacks:

Finally, the real prize. Charles Tsai wisely asked several participants and colleagues to give us a sense of what successful supporter engagement meant to them, and he captures some great quotes and thoughts from some brilliant minds in this video for the Knight Foundation:

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Cliche but perfect fall weekend

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 19:35:00 -0700

See the full gallery on Posterous

Larriland Farms, Maryland

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Why do bad things happen to good digital people?

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 16:26:00 -0700

It's hard to believe now, but when I first tumbled into consulting in 2004, most of the conversations we had with ED's and CEOs started with the reasons WHY they should consider the power and potential of the internet in/on their work.

Today digital is a given for nearly every organization -- from new upstarts to 40-year old institutions like the one I now work with. Instead of asking why digital, we're now talking about WHERE the digital function should sit wtihin an organization. Comms? Fundraising? Operations? Campaigns? Somewhere else? It's a tough question -- because digital ends up touching almost every aspect of an organization's work and identity and the idea of restrcuturing one's organization is almost as appealing as a root canal.

In my last few years of advising organizations, I often felt as if we were doing more management consulting than digital campaign consutling. It may be a dull topic for those who prefer tools and tactics to organizational politics and beurocracy, but the internal dynamics and structure are what enable or disable digital staff from functioning and succeeding. And these internal structures sure as hell matter to any staffers banging their heads against the wall watching colleagues at competing orgs speed ahead with innovative supporter engagment work or online campaigns.

So after working with dozens of amazing clients over the years at EchoDitto, the digital consultancy I co-founded, I compared notes with my colleagues Jason Mogus and Christopher Roy at Communicopia.

We summarize in this pair of articles for Stanford Social Innovation Review the ways in which we're seeing digital teams / the digital role running into trouble within orgs and, more importantly, some models for overcoming those challenges:

Part I: The Five Dysfunctions of a Digital Team

Part II: Four Models for Managing Digital at Your Organization

Hope you find something useful in here and that it starts a productive conversation wherever you work. Let us know if that's the case or if you have other models to add here.

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Just our prez and me, hangin out reppin our country in rural Kandy, Sri Lanka

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 11:10:12 -0700

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The original thriller. Mcarthur's first tape

Sat, 13 Aug 2011 10:14:10 -0700

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Swing your partner round and round...

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 19:09:26 -0700

Taken at Elkins WV festival

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Dusky Georgetown. Tut tut.

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 16:43:00 -0700

Taken at Georgetown, DC

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Comically picturesque ride through Champlain Valley w/ savage

Sat, 30 Jul 2011 11:01:52 -0700

Taken at Charlotte VT

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A trip through the childhood archives to help explain today

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 11:06:30 -0700

I've been lucky to have some downtime before transitioning into my new job next week. I made a brief stop through my childhood home along the way to chip away at some 30 years of stuff that's accumulated. Among the piles of crap to recycle or get ride of were a few gems that made me wonder if I were going through my own history or that of some other kid. Some amusing, some frightening. And a few things that helped me understand how I ended up doing some of the techy and activisty/organizing things I am today:

In 1995 I conducted an exhaustive search for our family's first internet service provider following my discovery that there was more to the world / internet than AOL -- like the WWW! and newsgroups! and email! From the printouts and notes I ran across, it appears that there were hundreds of terrible ISP options to choose from, all with different types of local dial-up numbers and varying levels of included hours(!) for internet usage. We landed on something called North American Internet (NAI) which can't still be in business. I can still hear the modem logging on.

On April 16, 1996 (when i was prob in 10th grade) I wrote a lengthy email plea to Nicholas Negroponte -- founder of MIT's Media Lab, Wired columnist, later the founder of One Laptop per Child, and newfound personal hero after i had finished reading his Being Digital (1995) -- asking for his help and advice on how to get my school to apply for funding to get a laptop in the hands of every middle or high schooler. He was gracious enough to write back very quickly with the advice that i be a little more geeky on the outside (rather than just at home on my computer) so that the school would see how many of us could benefit from more technology in our hands.

Circa 1998 I went to a local planning and zoning meeting to ask some challenging and un-welcomed questions about what environmental precautions were being included in plans for a single family residence (headmaster's house) that my high school was planning to build several feet from wetlands. These wetlands were the same wetlands that the school had used to inspire an awareness in our young brains about the natural world and its delicate ecosystems -- horseshoe crabs, egrets, and all. They built the house anyway, abutting the marshland and still way to close in my opinion, and hopefully they found a way to prevent the septic from running straight into the marsh / Long Island Sound.

The real goldmine was with Michael's News, a type-written and hand-written multipage "newspaper" that i published while in elementary school for a lucky audience (and circulation) of maybe 25 grownups (parents' friends), at no cost to the "subscribers" who never knew when the next issue might arrive. It was a very serious operation with press hats, deadlines, a dot-matrix printer, and even a production dept (ie use of a copy machine). You can imagine how much important personal news I would have had to share at the age of 10. In one news roundup I found, I was able to report that "Michael has received a 18 mile cake. He says that the ovens are twice the size." Between that and the "Annual Michael Day" that "calender makers" were declaring for the following year, it seems that I had a pretty healthy sense of self back in the day.

Primarily I'm just glad that most of the things I discovered about myself were in a box or drawer and not an internet archive that I had to search online for. I can selectively share the things above that I think are funny or interesting, many years after the fact, versus having so much of that already available for anyone to dig through online.

And I feel lucky to have grown up before the digital age we have today really took shape (cell phones on campus were only becoming a thing in my senior year). There are plenty of weird things we do at a young age that make sense at the time and are part of learning and exploring and growing up -- but there's no reason that any of us should have to be publicly self-conscious about them now. I now understand why and how parenting changed dramatically in the digital age.

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After eight wonderful years, the next chapter

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 15:24:41 -0700

Just finished drafting this note to share with friends and colleagues about my next step...

I'm writing with some exciting news. I've accepted an opportunity to launch a global digital mobilization lab with Greenpeace. I'll be starting in August as the Global Director of Digital Innovation.

It's an incredible opportunity to not only work on issues close to my heart but also go deeper with much of the online engagement and digital campaigning work I've been doing with EchoDitto for years -- and that I first got a taste of way back on the Howard Dean campaign.

The Lab will be working with wildly talented Greenpeace campaigners in some 42 countries to help push the known boundaries of how we engage people in online campaigns. We'll be serving (and learning from) allies outside of Greenpeace as well. The plan is to build a team that can experiment with everything from tried and true tactics to newer and emerging opportunities for online advocacy, fundraising, marketing, and communications.

Here's the official announcement about my new role and the vision:

http://huff.to/oRCl04

As you might imagine, accepting this opportunity means I won't be able to continue in my current role at EchoDitto. Perhaps naively, I never pictured leaving this organization that I love so much; it's been a dream to work with such an incredible team on world-changing projects and clients. I plan to stay connected to EchoDitto as a founder and owner / board member -- and am looking forward to helping continue to prove the viability of this unique business model and make an impact from a different seat.

Although this is a global effort and with a great deal of travel, I'll remain based in DC, anchoring this new unit to the Greenpeace USA headquarters in Chinatown. Come visit!

I've been deeply impressed with the caliber of the campaigns Greenpeace has been launching lately. Phil Radford summarizes a few of the recent wins in his announcement:

Greenpeace already has a successful track record leveraging digital strategies for its campaigns. The Los Angeles Times called Greenpeace's recent campaign against Mattel's package sourcing "a social media battle over the rainforest" when over 180,000 people viewed an animated YouTube video of Ken breaking up with Barbie over her destructive ways.

Last year Greenpeace rallied hundreds of thousands of supporters over Facebook and Twitter to emailNestlé about their destructive supply chain. The result was a shift away from deforestation by the world's largest food and drink company. Back in 2000 Coca-Cola agreed to remove harmful chemicals from its refrigeration equipment -- also convincing Unilever and McDonald's to follow suit -- after an online-focused campaign. Apple removed toxic substances from its products after the online public mobilized around the "Green My Apple" campaign.

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In Maine, bad dogs don't chase just squirrels...

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 07:48:10 -0700

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How to travel like Bond

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 14:47:00 -0700

Every other week at our EchoDitto staff meeting, we ask a different staff member to teach us something in five minutes. Somehow I had escaped the Random Employee Generator... until now.

Here's a copy of the hotly anticipated presentation. Highlights include tips for escaping bedbugs in your hotel and cheating the lines at Penn Station. But you'll have to get in touch if you want explanations why all the principles in here are true -- the comments line is now open.

Apologies in advance to some copyrighted photos that I ripped off without attribution. Definitely shouldn't have done that.

silbatron

Top of Stowe / Mt Mansfield VT

Untitled

Hamburg models Christmas off a children's fairy tale, but IRL (last wk)

Sri Lanka photos. Mostly elephants.

They literally made my breakfast today (thx folks; grt work)

A new warrior up close: my visit to the Rainbow Warrior III [pics]

Just another Amsterdam sunrise

Time capsule thoughts on rapidly changing role of NGOs in change-making; on successful "engagement" [vid]

Cliche but perfect fall weekend

Why do bad things happen to good digital people?

Just our prez and me, hangin out reppin our country in rural Kandy, Sri Lanka

The original thriller. Mcarthur's first tape

Swing your partner round and round...

Dusky Georgetown. Tut tut.

Comically picturesque ride through Champlain Valley w/ savage

A trip through the childhood archives to help explain today

After eight wonderful years, the next chapter

In Maine, bad dogs don't chase just squirrels...

How to travel like Bond

Going global in Bloomington MN