This past summer, The Opportunity Agenda conducted a scan to determine the state of immigration advocacy on the social web, looking specifically at the following: blogs that frequently cover politics and reach a mass audience, Twitter, YouTube, and the two largest social networking sites (Facebook and MySpace). This research built on a similar scan we conducted in 2007.
Turning specifically to blogs, we found that while in 2007 major progressive-leaning blogs (including the DailyKos and others) were unsafe territory for immigration advocates. Today, however, the climate is much more receptive. Major progressive blogs discuss immigration, and the comments are usually constructive. Meanwhile, the pro-immigration-specific blogosphere is thriving. One such blog, Citizen Orange, counts well over 100 blogs actively advocating for practical immigration reform.
While the main point of our scan was to provide a snapshot of online immigration advocacy in the summer of 2009, our research did lead to a number of recommendations.
mentioned or implied enhanced online collaboration. In "Democratic Trifecta", Chris Bowers wrote
Producing this whip count should have the following benefits:
.
.
2. Positive Activism: I have grown pretty tired of almost always opposing legislation that has appeared before Congress these past eight years. This system should provide us with a road map to help pass progressive legislation. By letting us know which members of each committee need to be flipped in order to push good legislation out of the committee stage, and onto the floor of the House or Senate, we can advocate on behalf of good legislation, rather than just opposing bad legislation.
.
.
Anyway, that's the idea. We plan to start it up when Congress convenes on January 6th, and it has us pretty excited. It will be accompanied by some neat maps and activism tools we are working on, too.
In "Next Open Left", texas dem wrote
What are needed are spaces that are expressly designed to allow people to collaborate on specific, defined, short-term projects. Blogs are a powerful platform because of their speed, their permanence, and because they rely on the action of individual free agents -- both bloggers and commenters. They are very good; but we should add to them the ability to facilitate and support group productivity, by adding connected spaces designed for that purpose.
Translating the above into a specific implementation of what an online collaboration environment would look like involved guesswork, since I had no clear set of requirements or use case scenarios to work from. Nevertheless, as a starting point, I believe the sharepoint sites I put together can both enlighten many people as to what sorts of collaboration-friendly web functionality is available, and serve as a useful point to start discussion of what a better solution could look like.
Part of Living Liberally's mission has been to promote engagement and collaboration among progressive organizations. To fulfill this goal we at Living Liberally have decided to feature interviews with people involved in different parts of the progressive movement. Hopefully, through these interviews, we can learn about what progressives are working on today, and get a little more in depth about what its like to be a part of the progressive movement.
Our first interviewee, Daniel Mintz, is in Research and Development at progressive powerhouse MoveOn.org Political Action. He currently lives in Brooklyn and every once in a while shows up at the Original Drinking Liberally. Enjoy!
Seth Pearce: So, what did your parents say when your organization was condemned by the US congress? Daniel Mintz: I think, they, like a lot of people, were just blown away that with so many huge problems to tackle, the US Congress decided to spend so much time talking about a newspaper ad. Just like, whether you agreed or disagreed with the ad, what a manufactured controversy.
SP: What exactly do you do at MoveOn? DM: Officially, I'm in charge of Research and Development, which is to say that I'm the R&D dept. (we're a pretty tiny shop). What that means in practice is that I get to have my hands in lots of cool stuff that we're trying out.
SP: Stuff John McCain would know how to use? DM: Not so much.
SP: People think of MoveOn as this big shadowy progressive organization, running some kind of secret progressive world order- what are some specific things that MoveOn is working on right now? DM: Ha. What are we working on right now?...Let's see...We're getting ready to run a massive get out the vote operation in the fall, hundreds of paid organizers working with tens of thousands of volunteers. We'll be essentially combining our 2004 program, Leave No Voter Behind, where people in swing states canvassed their neighbors, with our 2006 program, Call for Change, where MoveOn members across the country made more than 7 million calls to voters in key House and Senate races.
We're also working on FISA: Right now, we're asking thousands of MoveOn members to call their senators every day to tell them not to cave on the FISA "compromise".
And we're running a National Day of Action for an Oil-Free President at gas stations across the country in a few weeks. McCain is pretty darn tight with Big Oil. Many of the more than 100 lobbyists associated with his campaign are lobbyists for Big Oil. We wanted to highlight those ties and push for our next president to free himself and us of our dependence on foreign oil. So we're holding hundreds of gas station rallies where thousands of MoveOn members will show up at local gas stations to rally and call for a real, progressive solutions to the energy crisis.
In 2006, Matt Stoller presented Working Assets with a detailed critique of online voter registration system we had developed for the 2006 election. A year later, we are ready to roll out what we expect to be a game-changing web tool for the 2008 election as a direct response to the challenge Stoller laid out.
This new generation voter registration tool is being developed by Working Assets and deployed in partnership with Rock the Vote.
Working Assets, Rock the Vote, and other groups have been using the web to help people complete voter registration forms for several years. But our methods were centralized, top-down and to a large part didn't harness the power of the netroots or bottom up campaigns. Our new tool is an advancement over previous versions for several reasons - thanks to Stoller for helping us conceive of these improvements and to Zack Exley for helping us understand how to execute them. In a nutshell, we're making it as easy to register voters on your blog or web site as it is to post a YouTube video. And we're providing easy-to-use tools to measure your progress and get in touch with your newly registered voters.
Over the next month or so, we'll be rolling out the full functionality of our voter registration widget - a portable application that anyone can embed in virtually any webpage, allowing users to complete a voter registration application for their state that they can open as a PDF, print, sign, and mail in. (Check out a live version at rockthevote.com; just click `Register to Vote' on the splash page.) Folks hosting the widget on their sites have administrative rights for their campaign, meaning they can view and display counts of their registrations and even download the data for people they've registered.
The advances are significant. First, users never have to go to a foreign site to complete the registration process. The application lives fully inside the site it's embedded in. Second, allowing users to make their counts public will let different individuals and groups take credit for their work and even encourage some healthy competition. Finally, giving widget hosts full control over their data is a powerful incentive to use the tool for list building.
If you care about what happens on November 4, 2008 (or November 6, 2007 for that matter), you're probably wondering where to get the code. The full administrative interface where you can sign up and grab the widget on your own will be up by September 1. If you want to be updated on the status of the program, or have an urgent need to be signed up before then, drop me an email at aklaus@workingassets.com.
If you're curious about more of the back story, read on after the jump.
In 2006, Matt Stoller presented Working Assets with a detailed critique of online voter registration system we had developed for the 2006 election. A year later, we are ready to roll out what we expect to be a game-changing web tool for the 2008 election as a direct response to the challenge Stoller laid out.
This new generation voter registration tool is being developed by Working Assets and deployed in partnership with Rock the Vote.
Working Assets, Rock the Vote, and other groups have been using the web to help people complete voter registration forms for several years. But our methods were centralized, top-down and to a large part didn't harness the power of the netroots or bottom up campaigns. Our new tool is an advancement over previous versions for several reasons - thanks to Stoller for helping us conceive of these improvements and to Zack Exley for helping us understand how to execute them. In a nutshell, we're making it as easy to register voters on your blog or web site as it is to post a YouTube video. And we're providing easy-to-use tools to measure your progress and get in touch with your newly registered voters.
Over the next month or so, we'll be rolling out the full functionality of our voter registration widget - a portable application that anyone can embed in virtually any webpage, allowing users to complete a voter registration application for their state that they can open as a PDF, print, sign, and mail in. (Check out a live version at rockthevote.com; just click `Register to Vote' on the splash page.) Folks hosting the widget on their sites have administrative rights for their campaign, meaning they can view and display counts of their registrations and even download the data for people they've registered.
The advances are significant. First, users never have to go to a foreign site to complete the registration process. The application lives fully inside the site it's embedded in. Second, allowing users to make their counts public will let different individuals and groups take credit for their work and even encourage some healthy competition. Finally, giving widget hosts full control over their data is a powerful incentive to use the tool for list building.
If you care about what happens on November 4, 2008 (or November 6, 2007 for that matter), you're probably wondering where to get the code. The full administrative interface where you can sign up and grab the widget on your own will be up by September 1. If you want to be updated on the status of the program, or have an urgent need to be signed up before then, drop me an email at aklaus@workingassets.com.
If you're curious about more of the back story, read on after the jump.
STATE BLOGS
Talking Liberally Progressive Parley