Want to see the cutting edge of crowd-sourced video production? The Uptake, hands-down the best guerrilla video shop in the country (they live-streamed the Wisconsin Uprising), has developed a new video aggregator for the Occupy Wall Street movement that lets you easily click back and forth between feeds from 61 different locations (and counting, there’s even an #OccupyLjubljana feed from Slovenia).

Here’s a screenshot of Uptake’s aggregator.

Pretty amazing…

In response to a recent study showing that as many as half of congressional staffers believe online form messages are fake, M+R Research Labs put together a helpful tip list on how to “turn online advocacy into real-world change.” The list was developed to help groups targeting Congress, but they’re equally usefully for local legislative organizing.

1. “Online petitions” should only be the first step. For most organizations, easy online advocacy actions such as petitions or letters to Congress are the best way to recruit large numbers of new supporters. But don’t stop there! Think of your online petition as an entry point for a new activist or a way to begin engaging your list on an issue, and then build up to higher impact actions like phone calls, letters to the editor, and offline events.
2. Make high-impact advocacy easier. Congressional offices pay much more attention to phone calls than online messages (as long as they’re from actual constituents!). But picking up the phone is much harder than filling out an online form to send a letter, and many supporters can find it intimidating. Make sure you’re guiding your advocates through the process and arming them with information, and consider using online tools to make calling and writing letters to the editor easier. For instance, M+R recently helped AARP create, implement and roll out a tool that helped constituents call their legislators with just one click. When users clicked the “call now” button, a personalized link made action-taker’s phone ring immediately, automatically connecting them to their own Members of Congress — no dialing required!
3. Integrate online and offline work. If you’re offering an offline petition, make an organizational commitment to deliver the petitions at a lobby day or press event, tell supporters what you’re going to do, grab some video or at least a few good photos while you’re doing it, and then report back to your activists on how it went. Hold virtual lobby days so that your supporters are writing and calling at the same time that representatives of your organization are visiting Capitol Hill. And help your most hardcore supporters meet with lawmakers on their own. The Human Rights Campaign ran integrated campaigns in 2009 and 2010 that helped ordinary supporters set up meetings with their Members of Congress in local district offices. The sign-up tools and promotions were all online, but the online effort was backed by a strong field team that followed up with constituents to provide them with the resources and support they needed to be successful (and to ensure that their meetings actually took place!)
4. Take advantage of social networks. A recent study found that 64% of surveyed Hill staffers think Facebook is an important way to understand their constituents’ views. Direct your supporters to their representatives’ Facebook pages and ask them to write on their walls. Encourage your supporters to tweet members of Congress who are on Twitter. Last year, the ENOUGH Project flooded the Facebook walls of ten members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee with messages in the hopes of getting the conflict minerals bill out of committee. 48 hours and over 500 messages later, two of the ten — as well as another three who had not been targeted — decided to co-sponsor the bill, which passed into law a few months later. During the health care reform debate, Organizing for America built a “Tweet Congress” tool that allowed users to enter their zip code to find their Representative or Senators, making it easy for them to connect and apply pressure via a new medium.
5. Go local. Capitol Hill is crowded and noisy. New tools make it easier than ever to reach supporters, and easier than ever for supporters to contact Congress — so more people are doing it than ever before. To avoid being drowned out, reach out to members of Congress in their home districts. M+R’s grassroots mobilization team puts organizers on the ground in key states and districts to mobilize local partners, recruit and train activists, push an issue in the local media, provide support to national online organizing, and facilitate congressional contact at town halls and district offices. We use online tools to connect supporters to organizers, generate grassroots momentum, and turn out attendance at locally organized events. It’s a highly effective combination!

As protests in Egypt heat up, government authorities have quickly moved to shut down nationwide internet access — something that is frighteningly  easy for elites to accomplish and should be a wake-up call for all of using corporate-controlled platforms as organizing tools. But undaunted, protesters have quickly switched to using a new app called SayNow that doesn’t require an internet connection to broadcast twitter messages. SayNow is a voice-based social media platform that gives Egyptians three phone numbers to call and leave a voicemail, which is then posted on the Internet as a recorded Twitter message. The messages are at twitter.com/speak2tweet and can also be heard by telephone.

According to the New York Times “The result is a story of a revolution unfolding in short bursts. Sometimes speaking for just several seconds, other times for more than a minute, the disembodied voices convey highly charged moments of excitement or calm declarations of what life is like in the Arab world’s most populous country as it seeks to overturn the rule of its leader. Not all of the callers were phoning from inside Egypt. On Tuesday the service started to identify the country, with a hash mark, from which each recorded message came. While most were from Egypt, they included calls from Germany and the United States in Arabic and English, as well as messages from Arabic speakers in the Netherlands and Turkey.”

This is a great example of the novel marriage of old technology — land lines — with a new social media tool — Twitter. And an App that some of us might find useful for our folks stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide.

Ever heard of “social search engines”? They’re sort of a cross between Google, Twitter and Facebook.  Social search engines aim to connect people with questions to people who can answer those questions. By contrast, regular Web searches take questions, break them into keywords, and then find Web sites that have the most relevance to these keywords.

According to the NYT Bits Blog the “idea has gained momentum with the increased use of Twitter and Facebook, where people rely on their networks for information, blasting queries to their social networks and, if their networks are good enough, getting useful, personalized responses.”  Companies like Aardvark and Mahalo are trying to create better tools for people with questions to connect to people with answers. Some think social search has the potential to go beyond Google and fundamentally change the way people use the Internet.

Rather than trying to replace traditional search engines, the folks working on social search tools believe “there is a large class of subjective questions — especially longer, contextualized requests for recommendations or advice — which are better served by social search than by web search.”

It’s far from clear how social searches might be useful for grassroots organizing.  But then again we’ve always valued community knowledge over “expert” opinion, and we “crowdsource” every day as we knock on doors and organize community meetings…

The right-roots are taking credit for the Scott Brown victory in MA. In Sunday’s Washington Post, two GOP online consultants argue that being out of power has allowed the rightroots to leapfrog over the established GOP leadership. Here are a few of their key claims: 

• Previously rightroots strategists were laughed out of high-level campaign meetings, told that online budgets are the first thing to go and informed that having a Facebook page is “unpresidential.” And it wasn’t until recently that people stopped asking techies to fix their computers.

• Being out-of-power nurtures online organizing: It’s not as though GOP organizers woke up last fall and realized they’d better learn to use this Internet thing. [Repubs] are out of power — and the party out of power has the stronger incentive to innovate. If it doesn’t, the base will. Netroots protests dragged the Democratic Party into the 21st century kicking and screaming in 2006 and 2008. Frustrated with the president and health-care reform, the conservative “tea party” movement has done the same for the Republicans in the past year.

• It’s not that the GOP is any less capable of using technology than the Democrats are. It was just that during the years that the netroots really took off — 2004 to 2008 — Republicans were not angry enough (or desperate enough) to use all the weapons in their arsenal. A single, unifying outrage, like the Democrats’ opposition to the Iraq war and to President George W. Bush, was missing.

• The Internet isn’t a line item in a campaign budget anymore. It’s not just something you have to pay for, underneath catering and radio ads. It has reorganized the way Americans do everything — including elect their leaders. Candidates who would have had no chance before the Internet can now overcome huge odds, with the people they energize serving as the backbone of their campaign.

• These forces all came together in the MA Senate special election. Scott Brown’s supporters became fans of the candidate on Facebook, where they commented on his status updates and uploaded their own photos. The Republican Senate hopeful took to Twitter, using the #masen hashtag to let his followers know how the race was going. His campaign powered its field operation through targeted online ads and Web-based spreadsheets, and raised $12 million from 157,000 individual donations in the last two weeks of the race. After he won last week, his team live-streamed the election-night party in Boston online.

The right roots think that their party seems finally to be catching up online — just in time for 2010 and 2012.

The community using the tool monitors Sidewiki entries by voting up comments that are useful and informative, and voting down irrelevant or unhelpful posts. Similarly, the community can flag any illegal, pornographic or copyrighted content by using the “Report Abuse” button.

For those at the grassroots, Sidewiki allows us to directly comment on corporations and politicians’ websites that block user comments.  It opens up a new space for discussion and debate. And of course, it also gives the other side the same new powers…

Many of us use various forms of direct action in our fights for social justice. And like social movements the world over — such as in Iran, Egypt, Moldova and South Africa–many of us have begun to rely on Twitter to communicate with each other at large protests and other varieties of CD actions (think of the folks in LA that were using Twitter to warn immigrant workers of impending ICE raids). Well, according to a recent report in the Guardian, we should be worried: A New York activist was recently arrested by the FBI and charged with using Twitter to help demonstrators evade Pittsburgh police.

This case of Twitter activism and the government’s response is laden with irony. According to post on the Progressive Exchange Listserve, the arrest is:

Most striking because just a couple of months ago Twitter prided itself on being used by protesters to  evade police repression  — in Iran. Democracy Now did an interview with Elliot Madison and his lawyer yesterday.  When the host said they were the first activists to have been charged with crimes for use of Twitter to monitor police activity at protests, Elliot responded: “We’re not the first. We’re the first in this country. During the Twitter revolution going on in Iran, in Moldova, in Guatemala, in the earlier newscast about Honduras, in all those cases, repressive governments have arrested folks for using Twitter.

The only difference is, in all those cases the State Department, the US State Department, has condemned the arrest of these Twitter activists and had gone so far in the Iranian situation, the State Department, according to an article, asked Twitter to postpone its regular maintenance so as not to interfere with Iranian protesters to be able to send out their tweets. So the only difference is we’re the first arrested here. But this is a—over the past two years, repressive governments have been arresting people. The only difference is, the State Department has supported—I’m expecting the State Department will come out and support us also.”

This news proves that we need to be increasingly conscious of the implications of using public social networks as we fight for social change. Two of the most obvious issues we need to think through when we are planning protest activity are:

• Government officials are now actively monitoring our social networks. According to the Guardian:  “Twitter has rapidly established itself as an important tool in the armory of protest groups and demonstrators. During the summit, the police openly monitored Twitter to listen in to the protesters’ communications.”
• These tools are owned and operated by corporations: Twitter, the corporation, is aiding the police in their efforts to track down activists acting within their constitutional rights to protest.  In the Pittsburg case, Twitter provided information on the Twitter users’ locations so the police could go after them.

The Wilburforce and Brainerd Foundations have released a new report that examines the fundraising successes and lessons learned from the Obama for America Campaign’s new media program. Here are a few of their key lessons:

Discipline: The discipline to develop best practices and stick to them is what often separates a mediocre online program from a truly great one. This includes the discipline required to ONLY send content that you know your supporters will value, instead of sending out the press release from your communications department. It also includes the discipline to adhere to a consistent brand, including look and feel, and message narrative. It means, in short, the discipline to stay ON message. David Plouffe, Campaign Manager, described this philosophy as “a belief in alignment…That alignment is really hard, though. We had to step back every day and make sure: Are we in alignment?”

Spotlight on Supporters: The campaign made a concerted and deliberate effort to keep the spotlight on the people who supported Obama, and not just on the candidate…Not only were supporters a core part of the campaign story at every level – including in the national media – but the campaign also created tools and forums that encouraged two-way communications and invited people ‘in’ to the campaign. However, these tools were not necessarily as critical as the story about the tools, which was really a story of how supporters became the center of the campaign. In July 2008 a New York Times reporter wrote, “The campaign’s new media strategy, inspired by popular social networks like MySpace and Facebook, has revolutionized the use of the Web as a political tool.”

Nimbleness: Being able to react quickly to breaking events was critical to the new media program’s success. Again, this can be seen in the campaign’s response to Palin’s “community organizer” comment. The campaign was able to turn on a dime and launch a fundraising email…In addition, the campaign used video as a rapid response tool. Instead of taking days or months to produce videos, the campaign would at times have a new video out within a few hours (or less) of an important speech or media moment. This frequently meant that instead of reacting to the news cycle, the new media team was actually scooping traditional media by getting their content up on the web faster than traditional media outlets could report on the story.

Authenticity: In the nonprofit sphere, email copy seems to see-saw between wonky and dumbed-down. But OFA managed to do something unique – share real, inside campaign information with its supporters, while making that information accessible and meaningful. For example, the campaign published a seven-minute video of David Plouffe on YouTube, detailing the campaign’s electoral vote strategy – filled with wonky, insider information.

Content Matters: From top-notch emails, to 1,800 videos, to amazing graphic design, the new media team demonstrated a serious and intensive focus on content. The campaign deliberately built profiles of specific online personas (David Plouffe, Jon Carson, Barack Obama, etc.), giving them each a unique voice. Scott Goodstein, the campaign’s External Online Director, described how good content trumped all of the individual new media tactics: “Tools are a frying pan. If the ingredients (the content) aren’t tasty, you’re still going to have a horrible dinner.”

Data-Driven Culture: More so than any campaign in history, OFA was a data-driven operation…By the general election, they had a six-person analytics team and they had tested and measured every aspect of the online program, including messengers, messages, layout, design, video, voice, segmentation, and other tactics. Entire projects were scrapped because the data showed they weren’t effective; resources were then directed to higher-performing strategies.

YouTube has created a new “News Near You” feature that senses a user’s location and offers up a list of relevant videos, allowing Youtube to “essentially engineer a local newscast on the fly.”  Trouble is that right now there is not enough “professional content” from TV stations so most of the YouTube videos near you come from nontraditional sources: radio stations, newspapers, advocacy organizations, churches, colleges and, in the case of a San Francisco outfit called VidSF, three friends who despise the local TV diet of fires and homicides.

While it lasts, this is good news for grassroots groups. Instead of collecting and ranking web content automatically with digital spiders, Youtube is asking video “news makers” to sign up as a partners and then list their materials for local viewers.  Since the system is driven by location, if your local TV stations are still stuck in the 20th century, you actually have a shot at controlling and framing the local YouTube content stream.

VidSF is a great example of the new breed of local news broadcasters — including ones without broadcasting licenses, the traditional barrier to entry in local markets — that is emerging online . The NYT reports that mobile phones and the increasing demand for citizen journalist content promises to make “News Near You” a dynamic and promising news space online. They point to the new iPhone, for example, which includes a video recording capability with a “send to YouTube” button, suddenly making it simple and fast to upload clips. Rachel Sterne, the founder and chief executive of the citizen journalism site GroundReport, said the feature “trains laymen to be reporters.” And YouTube says it is developing tools to automatically spotlight those citizen videos as they come in.

As we’ve said before on Crib Notes, with traditional news organizations in fiscal crisis, some of us may want to begin moving more deliberately into the reporting void as hybrid citizen journalists/activists. Since we now own our own cheap, fast and simple “printing” presses (blogs, websites), video production stations (Flip video recorders and YouTube) and broadcast networks (News Near You, listserves, Twitters feeds, Facebook, etc), we might expand out coverage of local community and political struggles to include local cultural events, inspiring human interest stories, etc. — but frame them within a larger political context.  Others of us may want to increasingly give our members the tools (and training) to report on the events they care about (this may well include news that falls outside immediate organizational interests) and provide them platforms to reach larger audiences.

Just as the news industry collapses, average people are increasingly hungry for information and news about these extraordinary times we’re all living in. Maybe we can begin to fill the void.

Those of you obsessed with power analysis might want to check out LittleSis’ collaborative relationship mapping database.  The site “is an involuntary  facebook of powerful Americans, collaboratively edited by people like you. We bring transparency to influential social networks by tracking the key relationships of politicians, corporate executives, lobbyists, financiers, and their affiliated organizations.”  In other words, Littlesis takes a page from Facebook by featuring interlinked personal profiles of powerbrokers.  Here are few of the key features:

Mapping Relationships: LittleSis offers a modest amount of data about people and organizations themselves, but it’s focus is on the relationships between them. There are currently 120349 relationships linking entities profiled in the database. The word “relationship” is broadly defined, and can include:

• Organizational affiliations: employment, directorships, memberships.
• Donations: political contributions, grants.
• Social: family ties, mentorships, friendships.
• Professional: partnerships, supervisory relationships.
• Services/contracts: legal representation, government contracts, lobbying services.

Datasources: Some of the data derives from government filings, news articles, and other reputable sources. Some data sets are updated automatically; the rest is filled in by the site’s user community.

1/2 wiki, 1/2 Facebook: Making edits on LittleSis is more like adding friends on Facebook than modifying a Wikipedia page. The editing process mostly consists of adding relationships between people and groups. Users don’t have to be great writers or learn a special formatting language in order to contribute quality information to LittleSis.

Littlesis might be an interesting tool to play around with at the state level by mapping powerbrokers in your community…