Liminal states

For the last six weeks of change.org’s Ideas for Change competition, I’ve been consistently impressed by the advocates for Pass the DREAM Act – Support Higher Education for All Students.

The network of activists promoting the idea are giving the rest of us lessons in how to do it effectively.*  And they and their supporters seem to really get the strategic importance of a potential partnership with change.org, MySpace, and a raft of excellent non-profits.

With the complex political situation around the DREAM Act, social network activism could be a wild card that helps tip the balance and gets Congress to prioritize the DREAM Act — and puts them over 60 votes in the Senate.  Of all of the ideas in the competition, it seems to me it’s got one of the best chances of having an impact.  I voted for it (please consider doing the same) and have been trying to help promote it as well as others.

So when I was talking when I was talking with David Herbert of the National Journal on Monday, as well as discussing my idea, I brought the DREAM Act as an example.  It worked very effectively from the promotional side (David’s article Move over, change.gov discussed and linked to their idea as well as mine) but I certainly wish I had said things differently:

Web strategist Jon Pincus, whose idea “Get FISA Right, repeal the PATRIOT Act, and restore our civil liberties” is currently ranked No. 2, argued that combining grassroots politics with the power of a social networking site like MySpace could prove a potent combination, even for issues that have already been debated ad nauseam.

The online vote could also help push legislation with some congressional support — like the DREAM Act, which would give undocumented high school graduates a path to citizenship — over the finish line. The only obstacle to the DREAM Act, Pincus said, is that it lacks vocal advocates.

“Who’s going to prioritize undocumented minors?” he said. “Nobody.”

Clunk.

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For those of you who have gotten to know me over the last twelve months, Ad Astra (Analysis and Development of Awesome STRAtegies) was a grassroots strategy/culture change project I led at Microsoft.  Its positive focus, wiki-centricity, and network-oriented strategies foreshadowed a lot of work on Get FISA Right and the Voter Suppression Wiki; it’s also where I learned about advertising, something that’s proven very useful in our work with SaysMe.tv.

Wow, what a year!

Welcome to Ad Astrans and friends.  There’s a lot to catch up on and I hope that everybody uses this thread to start doing so.   If you haven’t been tracking it closely, Ad Astra-style wiki/social network activism has gone mainstream over the last six months — poke around the blog for more.  w00t w00t!  More on all that soon …

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Yesterday my former Microsoft colleague Matt Lerner, now at FrontSeat (“software for civic life”) sent out mail about the new ObamaCTO.org site, a user-powered forum for gathering and prioritizing ideas for Obama’s new CTO.  Anybody can register, vote on ideas, or submit your own; in a twist from digg-style rating, each person is limited to ten votes, and you can apply up to three on any given topic.  Unsurprisingly, I immediately voted for Ensure reliable & trustworthy election technologies.🙂

The site’s very well done, powered by UserVoice, with a straighforward interface.  Micah Sifry’s Never Mind Who; What Should S/he Do? on techPresident has more details on this site (as well as a new report on the role of the CTO from the 21st Century Right to Know Project).

And far be it from me to pass an opportunity for grassroots activism by.  Here’s my submission:

Require independent review of projects by technical experts

Over the last 8 years, many governmental projects have failed to take into account basic principles of systems and software engineering, design, computer security, and privacy.  The REAL ID proposal, for example, stored personal data in unencrypted form, relied on databases which didn’t yet exist, and ignored the questions of false positives due to inaccurate data.  Independent review by experts can detect these issues early in the process, which either gives time for them to be addressed or allows the project to be rethought far more cheaply.

If you think it’s reasonable, please vote it up!

jon

With long lines all over the country, the Voter Suppression Wiki is issuing another action alert with a reminder that as long as you’re in line when the polls close, you can still vote.

“Voters who are in line before their local polling place closes must be allowed to vote,” says Lillie Coney of EPIC and the National Center for Voting Integrity.  “Walking toward the line at the time the polls close does not count.  If there is a line after 4PM typically it will only get longer, so it’s best to get in line now for the duration.”

While most election workers are familiar with this rule, some may not be.  Voters who encounter problems should immediately call a hotline such as 1-866-OUR-VOTE (1-866-687-8683) or the Spanish-language 1-888-VE-Y-VOTA (1-888-839-8682).

“Even if you’ve already voted, you can help get the word out by texting or phoning any friends and relatives you know who are standing in line,” says Jon Pincus, one of the organizers of the Voter Suppression Wiki.  “Bloggers and local radio stations can also help by broadcasting this information — and anybody doing last-minute get out the vote work should make sure to tell people as well.”

Poll closing times vary from state to state; http://866ourvote.org and http://govote.org offer convenient ways of checking online.  Be wary of deceptive emails and text messages claiming that the election has been continued until tomorrow — it’s not true.

“In many places, our voting system frustrates people to the point of driving them away from the process,” said Baratunde Thurston, initial creator of the wiki. “We cannot surrender to such a system, and one way to combat it is to make sure people know if you’re in line before closing time, you get to vote. It’s that simple.”

The Voter Suppression Wiki has issued our second action alert, this one focused on preparations for election day at the polls, along with a video that’s already been featured by YouTube. As Baratunde Thurston says in our media release, “All of the debates, research, organizing and enthusiasm can be undermined if people don’t head to the polls prepared.”

Maybe you already know all this — you’ve stored the hotline numbers on your phone (including the Spanish and Asian language ones just in case you run into somebody who needs help), you’ve printed out information about your rights, and you’ve got a six-pack of bottled water and a spare umbrella ready to bring with you to the polls. You can still help by passing the word on to your friends and family, online and off. Get the word out online via email, Facebook, MySpace, Black Planet, Twitter, and other social network sites … and then get the word out offline too, to reach people such as seniors most at risk for voter suppression.

A special note to any bloggers and journalists who are reading this: please provide similar information to your readers. You can cut-and-paste from our action alert and media release; or you can roll your own post from the other great information out there — the Election Protection Resources page on SourceWatch’s Election Protection Wiki is a great place to start. Please take the time and invest the effort to help protect voting rights. While you’re at it, take some of the space you usually reserve for running ads and promoting your site, and use it to promote democracy instead. Please feature election protection information like hotline numbers on your blog’s front page.

And to anybody reading this, please digg the action alert and the video — and pass the links around! Continue Reading »

cross-posted on Pam’s House Blend, OpenLeft, and MyDD and Oxdown Gazette, with various differences due to HTML incompatibilities but some cool polls to make up for it.

Executive Summary:

1. Print out election protection documents on Friday and Saturday, at work (unless you’d get fired) and at home (if you have a fast printer): My Vote, My Right state-by-state voter bill of rights fliers,  Election Protection and Ya es hora more detailed state-by-state legal information, and/or some of the other information linked to in this post.  Don’t be greedy and hog the printer.  Let your colleagues protect their votes too.
2. Give them away and discuss with friends, family, fellow canvassers and phonebankers, and at places of worship over the weekend …
3. Print out some more on Monday
4. Take them to the polls

Details:

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Last-minute strategies to reduce voter suppression

Audio available here

The Voter Suppression Wiki’s Workshop on Last-minute strategies to reduce voter suppression identified several major opportunities to protect voting rights during the week of the election. While election officials, campaigns, and non-partisan organizations have all made major effort to inform voters, there is still a significant lack of awareness of key resources such as state and national hotline numbers and online sites that allow people to check their polling location. Blogs and other online media could play a big role by providing election protection information on their front pages between now and the election; real-world community hubs such as libraries, coffeeshops and bars, and community technology centers also can make this information much more prominent. More effective coordination between election protection organizations, student groups, and community activists can help spread the word more quickly in response to last-minute election alerts such as polling location changes, undelivered ballots, and extensions of poll closing times.
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(original draft 10/6, revised 10/7)

also posted on Pam’s House Blend and Oxdown Gazette

Executive summary

• Help write an open letter to the Presidential candidates asking them to explain their support for the bailout during their debate on domestic policy.  Using the collaborative writing tool at MixedInk, you can rate different versions of the letter, leave comments, edit and remix other people’s submissions, and write your own.  We’ll send the top-rated version to the candidates and the press next Monday – so please get involved now!
• Prepare for publicizing the open letter next Monday: accept the event, forward to your friends, and check your Facebook updates Sunday night
• And while you’re at it: thank and spank, and let Nancy Pelosi know how you feel.*

Details:

Collapsing confidence and buckling financial markets sparked talk Monday that Congress may need to resume work soon on emergency measures to shore up the economy.

— Alexander Bolton, Doubts grow over rescue, The Hill

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Jordy Yager reports in The HIll:

The House is limiting e-mails from the public to prevent its websites from crashing due to the enormous amount of mail being submitted on the financial bailout bill.

As a result, some constituents may get a ‘try back at a later time’ response if they use the House website to e-mail their lawmakers about the bill defeated in the House on Monday in a 205-228 vote.

A question I hope people are asking: why did they underinvest so badly in machine capacity?  And while we’re on the subject, am I the only person who notices that voice mail boxes get filled up by 8 p.m. in the evening?

It’s almost like they don’t want to hear from us or something …

Fortunately, a lot of politicians have Facebook pages.  For example, here’s a thread I set up on Nancy Pelosi’s discussion board a couple of days ago.  Facebook is pretty scalable; I bet they could easily handle a few thousand messages per politician per day.  Maybe more.

List-in-progress of politicians’ Facebook pages here.  If you know other links (on Facebook or MySpace), please add them!

“Now is the time for Congress to come together again and vote on a real, comprehensive plan that will solve the crisis while still protecting the taxpayers and restarting our economic growth.  I am prepared to stay here and in session as long as it takes, and I know many of my colleagues in Congress feel the same.”

— Washington Congressman Jay Inslee

Sunday night’s Treasury phone call provides a stark backdrop for the House’s shocking defeat of the modified Paulson bill.  We — the weird multipartisan coalition involving skeptics, conservatives, progressives, and nervous congresspeople in-close elections — won the battle.  With the Congress out of session Tuesday for Rosh Hashanah, there’s a brief hiatus.  Now what?

I’m not sure that No blank check for Wall Street’s 15 comments and counting on Nancy Pelosi’s profile had a lot to do with this vote … but they — and the handful of comments that are starting to pop up on other politicians’ Facebook pages — certainly lay the base for continued progress.  We continue to get more fans on Facebook, now up to 670.  And hopefully are now getting into a rhythm of checking their updates, too: 15 comments out of 670 people is a little over 2%, which is decent — not great — response rate.

No significant links yet as far as I know.  Oh well.  If changing the world was easy, everybody would do it.

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The No blank check for Wall Street Facebook group is up over 500 people — excellent progress given the paucity of links!   Depending on the agreement of the bailout, and reactions to it on Monday, we may well try to ramp up the wall-writing campaign.   So it’s worth some time thinking about how else we might get more coverage.

The underlying dynamics we were originally hoping for were what happened with Get FISA Right (GFR) and 100,000 Strong Against Evan Bayh.   After a high-profile launch, those groups got a little momentum, and a spate of blogging in the progressive blogosphere led to enough visibility that reporters at blogs associated with the mainstream media (MSM) started to cover them (1, 2).    Blogs like the Washington Post’s Clickocracy, the New York Times’ The Caucus, MSNBC’s First Read, Time’s The Swamp, and so are “in the echo chamber”: campaigns, pundits, reporters, and politicians all read them.  As well as this direct impact on opinion, this also increases the chance that the story will crack through and make it into print, cable, and maybe even network TV.

No blank check for Wall Street launched on Pam’s House Blend (PHB) and OpenLeft (OL), two places where I’ve had front-page posts in the past.  Alas, even though OpenLeft had multiple front-page stories on the bailout that evening, this story didn’t get front-paged.**  Fortunately, it did on Pam’s, which is a big deal.

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Just a quick note: I’ve set up a couple of email lists for No blank check for Wall Street;

– announcements (low-volume): http://groups.google.com/group/nbc4ws-announce

– discussion (potentially high-volume as we get larger): http://groups.google.com/group/nbc4ws-discuss

please join, and let your friends know!