Liminal states

1. Email the link to your friends and listservs.
2. Post it to your profile and share it on Facebook or MySpace
3. If you’re a blogger, write up a post on it and include the code for the widget (available here).  Then sign up as an “endorser” (the link’s on the right-hand side of the change.org page)
4. As other bloggers to mention our idea and sign up as supporters

We’re having a conference call to discuss promotion on Tuesday, January 6, at 5 PM Pacific/8 PM Eastern.  Please RSVP on Facebook or MyBO if you’re interested!

Stay tuned for more!

jon

PS: and if you’ve got other ideas for promotion, please mention them in the comments

PPS: please also consider voting for Pierre Loiselle’s Repeal the Patriot Act idea.  If we decide to combine the ideas later, you can always change your vote …

Last year I proposed an experiment on OpenLeft that involved “mutual guest-blogging“: four great bloggers who didn’t usually hang out there making front-page posts, and in return the OpenLeft front-pagers posting on the other blogs.  The idea was to expose bloggers, readers, and commenters to new perspectives, and hopefully build some connections that could lead to potential alliances.  It didn’t all work out exactly that way, but the underlying idea is a good one, and I think this could be a useful technique for the change.org/MySpace Ideas for Change in America competition.

A quick recap on the competition: second-round voting is January 5 to 15, and the goal is to finish in the top 10 overall.  Along with email and social network, blogs were one of the most effective forms of promotion in the first round; in the second round, bloggers (as well as non-profits) can sign up as “supporters” of an idea so their influence is likely to be even larger.

My idea, Get FISA Right, repeal the PATRIOT Act, and restore our civil liberties has a decent shot (it finished #10 in the first round despite virtually no exposure in the blogosphere), and we’re going to be doing a lot to promote it.  (Discussion here — please join in!)  Both for Get FISA Right in particular and the civil liberties advocacy community as a whole, this is a great opportunity to reach out to a much more diverse audience than usual.  And the same’s true for any of the other ideas — many of which (for example Pass the DREAM Act Now!, End the Global Gag Rule The Family Union Foundation for Obama, Stop NAIS! ) involve situations where privacy and civil liberties issues are critical.

Continue Reading »

Also posted on the new Get FISA Right blog

Happy new year!

My idea Get FISA Right, repeal the PATRIOT Act, and restore our civil liberties finished #2 in the Criminal Justice category of change.org/MySpace’s Ideas for Change in America competition, and so has advanced to the second round.

We can revise the idea over the next couple of days (suggestions please!) and then second-round voting runs from January 5 to January 15.  We’ll be promoting it actively, of course.  There’ll be a press conference on January 16 to introduce the top 10, change.org will work with each of them to help build and promote national advocacy campaigns.  With change.org’s 200,000 members, proven ability to attack media attention, and a great list of partners for Ideas for Change in America, it’s a great opportunity …

And some really tough competition.

Continue Reading »