Along came the spider

Continuing my intermittent ramble about the potential for a network of environmental bloggers, and what’s already out there that does something similar – now we come to the politicals.

Lib Dem Voice, now as I understand it the Lib Dems have a more empowered grassroots, and a democratic decision making structure, which beggars belief when one considers how much of a pickle they’ve got themselves into. However Lib Dem Voice and LibDem blogs do a reasonable job of connecting together the disparate voices of the party. Interesting things include:

• Ask that each blogger is a Lib Dem member – we could do this, and it’d be interesting but probably too restrictive. Maybe we could offer a bonus badge / widget to such folk. This might be an idea in itself, as an offer to such folk, to use as they choose.
• There’s a more dominant mix of official blog posts, as features, than the blog roll which is kind of a big list. Given my current thinking as to how official blogs are separated from bloggers and from local folk, I think this would be an authoritarian step too far.
• There’s a link to LibDig which I don’t quite get. It looks like a more primitive form of micro-blogging. I should check out this Digg it thing. However there’s a slot here for video, which begs the question should there be a separate space / blog roll for videos and video diaries.

Still compared to Mumsnet there’s not much to learn here.

Labour have a Campaign Engine room, which I first thought looked like a bloggers machine, but instead it looks like a party political version of 38 degrees, inviting people to start campaigns and gather signatures on an e-petition. Well worth remembering the next time a Labour MP, complains about the worthlessness of such devices.

Labour central offers the promise of bringing all such blogs under one roof but fails to do so, and Bloggers4Labour simply doesn’t seem to work, which is kind of disappointing. How is one to pinch their ideas, if they’re broken?

Finally the Tories have conservative home, which looks a bit dull, a slightly better showing than Labour – it at least works but without the sense of community of LibDem Voice.

Just to make sure I had a quick look in at the Green Party blogs which is very dead indeed although there seem to be a fair few active blogs out there. I guess there’s a lesson here about being too reliant on the grassroots to keep such things up to date.

For now, that seems to confirm Mumsnet is where it’s at, so time to have a chat / setup a meeting and see what they have to say. And /or probably have a word with the Argentinians about the idea of a pilot in a 2nd language.

There’s something out there (in the blogosphere)

Following on from the ramble about why I want to encourage, and support, people blogging the question rises has this been down before, and what works. Some research later.

Amnesty, seemed have to tired something similar and failed. At the time of writing their bloggers network seems to be being reworked / rebuilt, and a friendly email to the head of their web team seem to have gone ignore. I guess the format as was, didn’t really inspire people to blog – which is a good cautionary tale, and a shame as there’s some cool 3rd party resources aimed at encouraging people to blog on a similar themes via Global Voices advocacy.

[updated] The Amnesty bloggers network seems to be online again, although it doesn’t seem any different. There are 430 (ish) registered bloggers, of which perhaps 10-15 have blogged in the last month, so perhaps 3%. Of these 4-5 are staff – which is an interesting idea in itself – to what extent should one encourage staff to get involved, or even to oblige them to be involved (pros and cons). Finally there’s also some promoted blogs – ‘storified by Amnesty UK’ – so one wonders how much these have been edited into shape.

Mumsnet, ok I found this by happen chance, and it looks to be about as good as it can get. There’s loads of people involved, which may be more of a reflection of the size of their community / readership, then the degree to which they inspire people to blog. Still I’m jealous. OK things that leap out.

• The directory is helpful, sortable in many different ways (categories, A-Z, recency, random), and searchable which is probably better than we can manage.
• The ask is that the blog sticks to editorial guidelines, and is updated at least once a month – this seems low, but perhaps as a bare minimum.
• Is there a cross fertilisation option here – can we ask bloggers to register at Mumsnet as well? if they have something interesting to say to both audiances - oh and vice versa - asking relevant Mumsnet folk to register with us as well?
• The product review widget is a nice reward / motivator and a clever bit of advertising. Not sure how to pinch this idea.
• There are some big names here, e.g. David Miliband, and is there an option to outreach to some targeted friendly people, and/or some interesting others – Chris Huhne? Trials and tribulations on being on the inside, and why I think environmental campaigners are now a pain the bum
• There’s either a profile for each blogger, or a description widget that includes a default Twitter link. Probably a Facebook page link would be a good idea too.
• I can’t face counting them, but there’s probably 800-1000 blogs listed here, which if they’ve all been updated within the month is dead impressive, and powerful. If Mumsnet has 1.6 million unique monthly users, then pro rate we should be able to manage 80-100 blogs (in addition to local presences?)
• Backing the blog network up, is a lively forum, with 3-4 topics a day and 10-100+ replies to each post. There is a lively self supporting community here. Equally someone’s on the case responding to folk, so there may be reasonable team of community managers at work here.
• There’s another as to have 4-6 blog posts up before you can join, seems like a reasonable idea.
• There’s a separate Facebook page, which again seems like a good idea, although in this case less well used, but a way to promote active members of the community – by making them admins.
• The split header block / carousel into links through to profiled blog, seems stong - and again worth replicating
• Bloggers Twitter stream seems like a must have / makes sense.
• Dual top navigation bar, which moves as you scroll also cool – but probably technically difficult.
• Local pages interesting – especially the local directory, and the associated online interactivity. i.e. folk can contribute listings, freecycle stuff, act as a Tsarina (online community manager)
• Maybe also an idea to crowdsource local issues
• Some good tips on blogging anonymously, from encrypted emails to hiding your IP address

Next up Lib Dem voice, and the Labour campaign engine room

Beginnings of a blog about blogging

So I’ve touched about some embryonic plans to develop a new network of progressive minded bloggers, with environmental tendencies, so I thought I’d ask myself why, and what else is out there.

The why?
1) With or without a theory of digital memes, the blogosphere remains important as a tool to reach both the mainstream media, and digital audiences. Ideas and stories that get passed around do well on Google (do people still use other search engines – for better or worse?), and magnify the voice of the progressive agenda. Those stories and ideas eventually recruit others into a wider movement, and influence the behaviour of decision makers – through the perception of noise out there.

If there isn’t an organisation goal (campaign or comms) that this serves, then we should write one.

2) This feels like the right thing to do, and is perhaps even morally correct – which is either something Ghandi or Confucius touched upon. Giving people the tools to make their voices heard online, is a mirror of the work I’ve been doing to enable people to influence, and have a voice, within the political system by lobbying their local MP – and/or significant other local decision makers.

On a broader level society and the state, could be tasked to give everyone this power. Being a bear of limited means, I’ll start with the folk who broadly share the same world view as I.

3) If we want to engage digitally minded people in a sustained way, then there needs to be something constructive for them to do, in between short term campaign projects. This is a perennial problem offline, and here we have an open ended invite to involve people in an ongoing way, using their own initative and creativity, to contribute organically to a changing digital consciousness.

As an engagement option, this sits well of a digital ladder, or as a rock within the streams of engagement – for those who dislike ladders.

Or in one line, this is a useful thing to do, the right thing to do and the pragmatic thing to do.

To be continued

Observations in the pub

I stumbled upon this; Don't dump on me: the 4 behaviours of the social web, in an old fashioned way i.e. using Google as opposed to a clever digital tool. The theory behind it appealed, although I suspect it’s too clever to be actually true, and it got me to thinking.

Back in the day, when we were campaigning for the UK climate change law, we had at our disposal lots of energy, resources and youthful talent (myself excepted). We had a free hand to try many things, and my love of pubs, extensive research (drinking), a random Futerra lecture about engaging new audiences lots of pub conversations led me to push the idea of environmentally themed pub quizzes.

The theory went like this. Folk develop and shape their ideas in pub conversations – and the British spend a lot of time in the pubs. After a few pints, pub conversations evolve into a boasting competition – think the skalds of Viking sagas but without the weapons. The essence of a boasting completion is to impress your friends (and the opposite sex) with some innovative quip, or a delicate morsel of information – the Fact (capitalisation intended). Well performing Facts get remembered and recycled into the next pub conversation making one seem witty and urbane.

So the question is how to introduce such Facts into the conversation? We’d done beer mats – albeit badly, and whereas in hindsight there are probably a dozen other tools available (posters on toilet doors remain interesting to me), we ended up with pub quizzes. The idea would be to make them fun, focused on those nuggets- which people remember, and we’d build support for change, one pint at a time.

Then of course I asked a campaigner to write some questions (I was more naïve back them) and the quiz degenerated into a dull quagmire of climate geekery [pdf], and terrifying factoids to keep one up at night. So much for something light-hearted to reach new audiences and to sneak ideas into popular debate, but still the idea is sound.

So back to social behaviour; the essence is that in the digital world there are droplets (or content generator) who create ideas, or information. Then these ideas / information are distributed by sharers, tofolk (polishers) who then reflect, comment on and polish those ideas before republishing them. Again they are shared and polished again, until over time the waves of internet tides slowly shape those ideas into new pearls, ideas that have been refined, and passed around until they become the new memes of how things should be, or always have been.

As a theory, no one I know has seen it to be true, but again the idea seems sound, it feels like a series of pub conversation, and more how debate used to be, before the passivity of relying on Television to tell you what you think (Before TV).

100 years ago debate and the fundamentals of politics happened in church halls, working men’s clubs and public meetings and attracted large amounts of people to get involved / attend. Whereas a bit old skool but useful (I’ve organised a lot of public meetings), this remains how people discuss and decide what to think about an issue or a candidate. So where are those online spaces, the digital interactive challenges to spoon fed media? And how to create and nurture them?

New ideas do appear, and they are powerful when they do. Once upon a time, killing whales was completely acceptable, cutting down the rainforests was the sensible thing to do, burning fossil fuels was never going to affect humanity, but somehow the meme changed, and the abstract became something people care passionately about. So how to feed and propagate such ideas and memes in the digital sphere?

The theory of droplets, distributors, polishers and pearls is too academic for a pragmatist, but perhaps if I engineer the structures to create the conversation, to allow like-minded people to generate content, to discuss and to pass the content around – then maybe I can model a new theory, but based on an observable reality that matches the digital pathways we carve.

Digital illusions

It's been a lot of months since I last blogged, and in the spirit of the hypocritical I've been working on a new project to encourage, cajole, inspire and support like minded people to blog about things I care about, making the best use of materials I provide, and in their own words. The idea is similar to Mumsnet, but I think I pinched it from Amnesty. Methinks it's time to revive this blog.

Internally we live in rightful fear that we send too many emails to people. This is true in the absolute, and worse when you consider that such minded people receive emails from every other organisation under the moon. As email fatigue becomes more oppressive, and organisations such as Avaaz and 38 degrees do us no favours here, the thinking is that we should get ever better as segmenting [pdf] our email lists. As if one can divine precisely what folk want to read – oh for such hubris.

We often segment by issue (e.g. Peace), but as an organisation we'll usually highly focused on one campaign at a time. So if you are a recent clicktivist, then you will inevitably become typecast by the Zeitgeist of our communications. If we segment such that we only send you emails about that issue, you'll become more entrenched as a specialist, while one suspects forward thinking, progressive folk are in the main pluralists. We lack the unwavering fanaticism of say the Tea Party.

This concerns me, if we confuse recency, and the short term fickle nature of clicktivism with a Cyclopean interest in our current comms. The data I have crunched, and the open rates that I have passed over, would provide suitable anecdotes to support such concerns.

So if I worry about segmenting clicktivists based on issues, should I have such concerns about segmenting based on whether folk want to get active online or offline?

My thinking about inviting people to blog, and connecting people together who already blog, is to develop new deeper paths of engagement for activists who want to do more online. Perhaps in activists who want to do more are already engaged offline, and clicktivists are not so much defined by the digital tools they use, but by lazyness, lack of time and/or lack of capacity to do activism for more than a 60 second burst.

Still there is that man on the Isle of Harris who wants to do something.....

Not the workshop you are looking for

Slowly growing is this idea that for offline activism we have a fairly developed menu of opportunities from signing a petition to organising others, and / or high risk NVDA depending where ones path leads you. In the digital world this menu is far less thought out, clearly includes sending lots of emails, occasional acts of brilliance, but less robust thinking about what’s in between.

On my journey to figure out what is possible in between, I was at least intrigued by the idea of a Reclaiming the Media workshop at this year’s Anarchist bookfair.

Now whatever anarchist media looks like, and one could debate, there is a real strength in the Indymedia network, and in this world of increasingly corporate media, I’d like to at least sound them out as to where the common ground might lie. Equally there’s been some sort of schism between a very anarchic grassroots Indymedia (now Maydaymedia or Indymedia UK - not UK Indymedia?), and a mainly anarchic grassroots Indymedia (now Be the media?), so if only for the lack of clarity I dragged myself out of bed to get down to Queen Mary.

From the side-lines, Indymedia has always done a good job of engaging people at citizen jouralists, photographers, videographers and small bundles of internet activism. As activists struggle to get into the mainstream media, taking control of our own stories seems simply to be a survival trait, so if I could bottle the essence of what’s involved and distribute it, then perhaps we could build another stepping stone, or network, on the paths of digital activism.

As a workshop this wasn’t it. Well not that is was even a workshop, more of a lecture with some interesting speakers from the NUJ (Donnacha DeLong), an investigative Guardian? journalist (Heather Brooke), and someone intelligent but more academic (Becky Hogge). But even though this wasn’t the workshop I was looking for, it sparked an idea, and a note to oneself to go buy some books.

So the idea of net neutrality is new to me (to be explored on a differemt day), as is this digital field, and the idea that one’s access to the internet may change is both scary and empowering. We live in the now, where we have unlimited freedom to browse what we want, without ones service provider choosing our preferences for us. Corporate and government control may be leading us towards Chinese style censorship, but for now we have the most powerful digital tools and freedoms imaginable to achieve change. Time to get on with it.

Past regrets and the quest for digital enlightenment

Life often has too many regrets.

As an activist I regret not being more involved with the road protests of the 90’s and although they were very much the noise that woke me up. As a historian coming of age in the 80’s I regret not crossing the Iron curtain to Eastern Europe, to visit countries as yet unaffiliated by western capitalism, in what must have been a truly alien world, for better and worse. And finally as a child of the 70’s,with a travelling soul, I regret not being old enough to turn on, tune in and drop out to hit the hippy trail from London to Istanbul to Goa and beyond.

The flotsam I’ve found in the beach huts of Dahab and the drug culture of Nimbin suggest little remains of what I would have like to have found, but one day I will follow it. One has to wonder why people started the journey, and if they ever returned. Were they seeking drugs and a good time, to see something of the world that had previously only been accessible to the rich, or something more spiritually enlightening from suburban Guru’s, Swami’s, Lama’s or elderly Beetles.

In a quest for enlightenment, not so much spiritual as digital, I recently returned from a somewhat simpler trail to the remote wilds of British Colombia, via the embryonic protests at Wall Street – which perhaps offered something more cosmic.

The justification to burn carbon, was that the US is pioneering models of online to offline activism and heroic digital list building – using the mass marketing techniques of the commercial sphere. As an event, Web of Change on Cortes island offered the hook, drawing forward thinking digital folk and offline mobilisers, from across the not for profit sector. As a digital quest, well if the UK has sated itself with offline activism, and if the purely online remains in a different sphere then perhaps in and amongst the bears of Canada, I can find out what lies in between.

Travelling invigorates ones imagination, and as jouneys go, the chance encounter with whales, the Rainbows across the ferry bow and time to enjoy Vancouver, Washington DC and New York didn’t hurt. Travels aside, as an event it was interesting but sadly lacking in the cosmic ray of inspiration I demanded.

To take away, were the detailed plans for ladders of engagement (or perhaps swimming pools of engagements) – and apparent pioneering from the Engage Network, some scars from west coast North American hippydom – sorry I’m British, I simply don’t care how you feel about that last workshop, and no I don’t want to express myself – I’ve spent years developing this angst, lots of cool people and future contacts, a new found admiration for the Tea party, lots and lots of academic jargon and yet more buzz words tied to storytelling – although there were some interesting stories to be heard.

But I didn’t find the big answer, which is a shame, so moved on to the offices of Greenpeace in Washington DC, seeking something more. There’s some fuel here, but again more confirmation of my prejudice that the UK is quite good at offline activism. I met like minds, asking similar questions, but no-one really assembling the pieces into some answers.

And finally I ended up at Occupy Wall Street weeks in, which seems disorganised, but a powerful idea, and perhaps the beginnings of something bigger. If such protests can take inspiration from Egypt and find fertile ground at the heart of capitalism, then there is hope for us all – but still they need more people, as the handful in the park, while a very poignant manifestation of offline activism, have a way to go before the authorities become threatened.

So as a journey of 10,000 miles I didn’t find the answer, and perhaps there is more to be discovered in one’s own imagination. And yet I hear good things from Argentina, bold frontiers from the mobile technologies of sub Saharan Africa, clever ideas from Turkey and yet my hope rests in the high tech professional culture and, rapidly emerging activist culture of India. Perhaps there is a path to follow down the old hippy trail to digital as well as spiritual enlightenment.