The New York Grassroots Media Conference folks are holding a networking event Saturday evening (1/30), 6-7 pm. These folks hold an annual conference focused on media democracy for New York.  
The Open Planning Project
148 Lafayette Street, NYC

There are Crisis Camps around the world where technologists meet to create, improvise and implement collaborative tech efforts to assist with humanitarian needs in Haiti. Check out this amazing global phenomenon at www.crisiscommons.org.
One of them is taking place this weekend in our fair city:

Crisis Camp Haiti NYC- New York technologists helping the Haiti relief effort
January 30 & 31
Saturday (10-5) and Sunday (10-5)
http://www.eventbrite.com/event/543649069

So much going on these days in the world of online organizing. I’d love to chat with you about it all! And we will, if you make it to our next event.

10 Tactics for Turning Information Into Action is a film by the Tactical Technology Collective that includes stories from activists around the world who have successfully used digital technologies to change the world. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion. We’re proud to host the New York premiere with our partners, Grassroots Camp.

When: Wednesday, February 17, 2010 7:00 PM
Where: The Tank Space for Performing and Visual Arts – 45th St. and 9th Ave.
Tickets are $5.00 in advance: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/96989

---

Elana Levin and I wrote a post about the best organizing lessons from the Organizing 2.0 Conference. We’re super happy that Allyson, the editor at Frogloop, asked us to write it. Frogloop, btw, is an excellent resource for students of online advocacy. Excerpt:

What made Organizing 2.0 unique was the emphasis on organizational change, in contrast to tech tips and tricks that other conferences already explore. While participants got a healthy dose of standard fare (writing for emails, CRM fun, how to prep for a web redesign, social media 101, etc.) they also heard from multiple speakers about the challenges that online work faces within our organizations – and how to overcome them.

Read more.

---

Ari Melber (our morning session keynote speaker) has published his report on Organizing for America’s first year. It’s an analysis of arguably the most important organization within the Democratic Party. Catch it here: http://techpresident.com/ofayear1. It’s a serious read for serious online organizers.

---

Paid Summer Program for Young Leaders
Do you know a passionate young leader who would be interested in being a part of progressive change this summer in Washington DC?

The Center for Progressive Leadership’s New Leaders Internship Program is a paid ten-week summer program in Washington D.C. for young people from underrepresented communities across the country who are committed to developing their leadership skills. Each New Leader is matched with a paid internship in a leading progressive organization in DC, including policy and research work, advocacy, organizing, media relations, and on-line communications. This is a fantastic opportunity.

---

The Brecht Forum is holding its annual Grassroots Fundraising Conference on February 19-20. I was there last year – it’s well worth it. Details here.

---

Rootscamp DC – Feb. 20-21. Sponsored by the New Organizing Institute. This is THE unconference on online organizing for community organizers, labor, and folks outside the beltway. We encourage you to attend! Let us know if you’re going as well. Register here.

After waiting a day or two, we’re crossposting our article from Frogloop, Care2’s nonprofit online marketing blog. (Our conference was lucky to have a speaker from Care2, and Frogloop is a fantastic resource.)

In December, we held one of the first conferences devoted to the intersection of online and community organizing, with a special emphasis on the labor movement, local electoral campaigns and small organizations.  It was gratifying to be able to discuss issues that weren’t getting enough attention at other conferences we attend.

What made Organizing 2.0 unique was the emphasis on organizational change, in contrast to tech tips and tricks that other conferences already explore. While participants got a healthy dose of standard fare (writing for emails, CRM fun, how to prep for a web redesign, social media 101, etc.) they also heard from multiple speakers about the challenges that online work faces within our organizations – and how to overcome them.

Simply put, the emphasis on best practices and skill sharing fails at the point where organizers function in an organization that simply hasn’t made a commitment to change. Evidence of that is all around us in the form of Executive Directors and managers who think they can devote more attention to online tools without simultaneously decreasing attention somewhere else. Or what about the gap between status power and expertise that develops in teams where the newest and least empowered member has to spend energy persuading the boss instead of getting work done? Three of the sectors where this comes into play the most are labor, low-income grassroots economic justice groups, and local political campaigns.

Interested in changing the dynamics at your organization? Check out these suggestions attendees developed at Organizing 2.0

• When introducing or explaining a new use of a tech tool, put in mission oriented language senior staff can understand. Instead of “let’s use social media” reframe it and say “here’s a plan to reach an additional 1500 people with our message.”

• When your organization has staff and membership training on organizing or communications include online organizing or online communications training as part of the curriculum.

• Set rules and procedures in place as much as possible, so that staff can respond without having to seek language approval from gatekeepers in real time.

• Make the case that online tools are not the sole province of the communication department or an IT staffer, but a natural part of most departments. Look for how that’s already true (in your organization or a similar one.)

• If your boss is insisting on writing for the web (yay!) but won’t take any edits and writes like it’s a newspaper column (sigh) – divert him or her to the Huffington Post, and keep your blog – bloggy! Also train other staff like researchers, organizers and members in writing for the web.

It can be hard for some old-school groups to understand the significance of the “engagement” ladder and ways of measuring it. Some groups value only one or two metric (votes, money) and find it hard to connect them to newer and softer metrics (click rates, comments, fans, advocacy actions). Demonstrating how these different metrics support each other can help get leaderships buy-in. If you tout the importance of the metrics important to you (as well as studies and data) that attitude can trickle up the ladder if couched in the right language.

That said, there is good news to celebrate.

In Washington DC, we have Union City News, an excellent model for a daily labor newsletter that ties together action alerts, news, job postings and cultural events of interest to the labor community. Chris Garlock, the editor, thinks it is the only instance of a comprehensive daily e-newsletter produced by a Central Labor Council in the entire country.

Brad Levinson of SEIU presented on their efforts to implement online organizing at the local level. He demonstrated ways potential members reached online were folded into on-the-ground organizing. Amber Sparks talked about how the UFCW ramped up its presence on social networks its members were actually using. They have even been able to successfully use Facebook for workplace organizing campaigns. Check out their Facebook page full of active members.

FireDogLake has a new section called Work in Progress. In it, Michael Whitney covers labor news for the broader, non-labor netroots audience. Which is to say, there are other sources of labor news and commentary, but FDL does a great job conforming both to labor AND digital culture. (But don’t forget Richard Negri’s blog for a more within the labor movement style).

The New Organizing Institute is holding one of their RootsCamps in Washington, DC on February 20^th. This time they are reaching out in particular to attendees from grassroots economic justice groups, labor, and folks not living and working in DC. (Consultants looking for clients – stay away! This is about empowering staff to do their own jobs even better.)

As for Organizing 2.0 we are continuing to offer monthly training in online organizing skills. If you are interested in joining our announcement list, sign up here.

Online organizing is here to stay, but its adoption will look different in the labor and community organizing space, as opposed to large political groups and national nonprofits. As these groups do make the transition, expect to see more of their staff and volunteers attending the right conferences – and visiting nonprofit practitioner blogs like Frogloop.

*Writen by Charles Lenchner and Elana Levin 

Our event last week was fantastic. We’re grateful to Shane and Elizabeth for teaching us the ins and outs of using free and low cost tools to advance our nonprofit missions. Grassroots.org has a fantastic list of great tools, which you can see here. More information about low cost alternatives exist over at Idealware and on the EtherPad of a recent NTEN webinar on the same topic. Free tools are priceless.

In other news:

The New York premiere of 10 Tactics for Turning Information into Action will take place on February 17th at The Tank. Save the date. As soon as The Tank has the film on their ticketing system, we’ll send out the link. You’ll want to register early – our events do fill up.

Tomorrow, Jan. 20: Comparing Constituent Relationship Managers – Become an Educated Consumer of CRM’s. January’s 501 Tech Club event begins promptly at 6:30 in the Financial District. RSVP:http://501techclubnyc.eventbrite.com.

Rootscamp DC – Feb. 20-21. Sponsored by the New Organizing Institute. This is THE unconference on online organizing for community organizers, labor, and folks outside the beltway. We encourage you to attend! Nate and I will be there, so let us know if you’re going as well. Register here.

The Journal of New Organizing has its first issue out. Congratulations! Some of us have been salivating over this for some time. Do yourself a favor and take a look.

Over the past six months or so I’ve been saving advocacy emails from a set of groups, especially around health care. The idea was that looking at the advocacy emails side by side, from groups that are competing for attention and loyalty from fairly similar demographics, would yield interesting insights.

At the very least, one could browse through email campaigns the way that graphic designers and ad agency people browse through books that just have examples of interesting print work. It would be a resource for generating ideas (= copying), learning about the long narrative arc of each organization, and looking back at at a unique slice of American social-political history.

The problem is – how to display this resource so it’s most useful? The best case scenario would be to subscribe to the alert list of an organization with an email address that is configured to post each new email as a complete blog post. You would visit the site, click on ‘MoveOn’ and see the sequence of MoveOn emails delivered to me, or the fake persona that I signed up with.

Blogger and WordPress.com both have ‘post by email’ features that look useful. They are; but not for CRM advocacy emails. The biggest problem is that they see a line as a sign that the post is over, and a line can be ‘– ‘.  So you can’t really automate a system where new emails just end up as blog posts.

Another issue is tagging. It looks like I have to manually tag each and every email to make sure that the sequence has a tag or catagory, and therefore a link that connects the reader to the entire sequence from that organization. Unless…. maybe if we had a separate blog for each and every organization, each with it’s own email address feeding the posts?

Luckily, Posterous.com exists – a relatively new blogging platform that is easy to use, designed to convert almost any email into a stand along post, as long as it comes from the proper address.

What do you think of this solution. I’ll create five Posterous blogs for five online campaigning organizations. Using unique email address for each organization’s list, the process of uploading each new email as a blog post will occur seamlessly. As a last step, I’ll create a blog that:

A. Aggregates every new post from the five Posterous sites on a single page.

B. Has a handy link in the navbar to the five Posterous sites so you can see the entire email sequence from any single group.

I haven’t done all this yet, so please offer your helpful comments.

There have been some great articles about the conference in recent weeks. Here’s a few:
Chrissie Brodigan put out a straight up review full of wonderful comments. But there’s more: she reviews the use of online media by the Thompson and Bloomberg Mayoral Campaigns, and offers ten tips for the next generation of online apps. Read Brodigan on Huffpo for the details of each tip:

1. Data-Hungry Developers Must Diet
2. Imitate, Integrate, or Borrow From “Four Square”
3. Meme, Mob, and Maybe Mock With Social Activities
4. Create a Feedback Loop Around Local Issues
5. You Lose Your Virginity Once, But In Politics You Have Primaries
6. Keep it Simple, but Leverage Advanced User Personas and Segmentation
7. Get Your Google Map On
8. Provide “What to Expect” When You’re Expecting Voter Turnout
9. Translation Party
10. Accountability Analytics Are Awesome

Learn more about Chrissie B.

Peter Miller is less focused on elections, but has gone on the conference trail. As a fan of conferences, I get really excited about any article that makes the effort to compare and contrast them. Miller attended Technology for Social Change — The Grassroots Use of Technology Conference X at Northeastern University in Boston before coming down to NY for Organizing 2.0. Both events have a similar theme, but cover very different topics.

There are basically two communities at work here, and while they overlap at the margins, they are not the same. On one end of the spectrum you have local community technology advocates, who focus on storytelling, bridging the digital divide, access to basic tools for nonprofits, and technical education with an emphasis on open source tools. On the other you have the full-fledged online organizers and new media gurus, folks who take access to broadband, Content Management Systems and Constituent Relationship Managers for granted. For this group, it’s not about access of purity of code, it’s how to increase online donations by 15% with A/B testing or provide a clear-cut ROI for ten hours a week on Facebook.

Miller did a group job covering both conferences. If you missed the event – and want to understand exactly what you missed without having to catch up on all the content – read his article, posted on the Open Media Boston site.

Libero Della Piana covered Organizing 2.0 for the People’s World. His main take away:

While acknowledging the real challenges of the “digital divide,” the unequal access to new technologies in working-class communities and communities of color, presenters and participants alike saw embracing new technology as key to organizing victories today a and in the future.

It’s true, although it doesn’t quite capture the intensity of the argument. For many years, some quarters of the social change world have resisted adopting needed technological change because of spurious claims that it simply didn’t apply to communities with less access to computers and internet. On the other hand, enthusiasts who spoke of the internet as a magical tool that automatically increases democracy are guilty of underplaying how it can also exacerbate existing inequality.

That said, it does feel like we’re all finally on the same page.

A few notes for those of you checking in…

Session info is up.

Happy Hour 5:30-7:30 at the Heartland Brewery, near Times Square. 127 W. 43rd St.
bet. Broadway & 6th Av.

This morning we had 30 places left.

Welcome, CWA Local 1180, our latest sponsor! We still need a few more though.

Just saw that Richard Negri is coming. He edits http://unionreview.com/. See you there!

Participants are coming from Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Washington DC and of course New York. New Yorkers are coming from the City, upstate, and Long Island.

Still looks like we have a third from labor, a third from community organizing groups, and a third active in political groups. Perfect.

Needed: volunteers to help film sessions. Must own video camera. Touch base if you can help. Thanks!

Organizing is enjoying a renaissance these days, as evidenced by a steady stream of articles and books about last year’s presidential election campaign and the impact it had on legions of young idealists. It’s worth noting then that the two forms of organizing – community and online – have actually been engaged in a ‘frenemy’ type struggle for years. Why has it been so hard for America’s bastions of community organizing to understand, embrace and work with the tools of online organizing?

On December 5th a mostly volunteer group will be putting on the first ever conference explicitly aimed at the intersection between community organizing and online organizing. This is important: two of the most important actors in the progressive movement (labor and community organizing groups) have lagged far behind in the race to adapt their methods to the current moment. It’s a troubling situation that won’t change on it’s own.

We live today in the age of Obama, the nation’s first ‘community-organizer-in-chief.’ Because he is also the first president to master online-offline integration, we might also call him the first ‘online-organizer-in-chief.’ But if you tried to find out where all the community organizers are hanging out online, you’d be searching a long time.

What is community organizing?
The tradition of “community organizing” is a bit more specific than the simple juxtaposition of “community” + “organizing”. Saul Alinsky, author of “Rules for Radicals” did the most to define the field. Community organizing marries professional organizers with populations suffering from oppression rooted in powerlessness or poverty. The organizer helps develop leadership from the affected community who then work with existing networks (such as churches) to fight for change at the local level.

Online organizing only emerged in the last decade. Largely white, educated, and somewhat privileged citizens combined a very low threshold of activity (petitions, small donations) in large numbers to have a major impact primarily on national and international issues.

It’s against this background that community organizing guru Marshall Ganz told The Nation in 2008 that what MoveOn does is marketing, not organizing. Many of us toiling in the internet trenches heard our work being being trashed by organizers who had no problem with mediation by phone, paper, and transportation- but resented the emergence of online space taking up so much mindshare.

This was a generational divide driven by technological change, not a real conversation about means and ends. Ganz was faithfully representing a real disdain felt by ‘real’ organizers across the traditional community organizing and political world. Of course he wasn’t alone; I’ve met dozens of leaders and activists who referred contemptuously to ‘point and click activism’ as some kind of problem to be solved along the path to genuine organizing.

Adding to the division is the false and misleading use of the phrase ‘online organizing’ by opportunistic groups that engaged in one way P.R. and mass email broadcasting. The past few years have seen a simultaneous deepening of online organizing practice along with the widespread use of simplistic email advocacy masquerading as online engagement. There aren’t enough of us pointing out the difference.

Today, one year after the historic Obama victory that melded some of the best in community organizing with the best in online organizing, one notices two very important sectors still lagging behind: labor and community organizing groups, the two main inheritors of the Alinsky tradition. Meanwhile, MoveOn now employs numerous community organizers and is happily deepening the relationship of its online, more visible elements with local chapters and trained leaders.

Don’t complain, organize
Over the past two years I’ve talked with a lot of really smart people in the community organizing world and in labor about the obstacles facing some groups as they look at using online tools. It’s an important discussion that folks outside and inside those movements should have more vigorously. That said, why not just jump in and work with anyone who wants to advance?

That’s what Organizing 2.0 is all about: bringing online organizers, the netroots, community organizers and the labor movement together. Finally. Not at the national level, where high powered political directors issue instructions to well staffed new media teams, but at the local level, where online strategies require generalists, lay leaders, volunteers and member engagement to succeed.

Organizing 2.0 reflects the passion of its (mostly volunteer) organizers. A passion to build capacity, drive the progressive agenda forward, empower more citizens, mobilize more communities, democratize more institutions, elect more populists, secure more rights, and share more of the wealth. Not all of us are digital natives. But we can all, to borrow a phrase, learn to organize smarter, not just harder.

Registration is still open for Organizing 2.0 in New York City. $10-$20, but it’s filling up fast.

Organizing 2.0 is sponsored by The Murphy Institute for Worker Education, Working Families, Change to Win, Netroots Nation, Network for Good, Union Jobs Review, Manhattan Young Democrats, and the New Organizing Institute.

Charles Lenchner is Online Organizing Director for the Working Families Party in New York.