Outreach

[RU Sirius]

To gain even a smidgen of credibility for these efforts, we need to get a lot more people involved, even just at the level of joining. This means outreach. This is a place to discuss how to spread QuestionAuthority, OpenSource Party, OpenWire, and so on.

Here are a few of my own suggestions:

1) A few purists might find this distasteful, but we need some people with communications skills and energy and nerve to do publicity. (Would it feel better if I put that word in quotes?) Contact appropriate journalists, influential bloggers, influential politicos, join conversational networks like Daily Kos... and so on.

btw, this is a shitty time to do that. It's a good time to talk about it, but wait until after the holidays. The second week of January would be a good time to begin.

2) We can reach out to create a Board of Directors for each organization. The Board of Directors can be a combination of those of us who are really contributing to the groups and individuals whose names would give the groups some power and credibility. Who would you recruit to attach his or her name to either of these efforts? Let's talk about it here. (I'll also create separate topics for this on both the QA and the OSP sites.)

3) Personal outreach. Are we still being too cool to email or call or reach our friends and relatives and people in our social networks etc.? We need to stop being shy. (Again, you may want to wait until the new year.)

4) You tell us.

[Michael]

I think if there is sufficiently interesting content, then people like DKos and BoingBoing are going to link it anyway (if it's brought to their attention) -- the abuse timeline was a perfect example of that. Do that sort of thing every week or two and word of mouth will do an awful lot.

Issue task forces would help guide that kind of research.

But you know, I only say this because it's the way I think. Other people should focus on other things. I'm not a publicity kind of guy.

[RU Sirius]

Excellent point. More content!

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[RU Sirius]

I would add though that the abuse timeline was read by lots of people and didn't result in that many people joining or writing about QA or anything like that. This is not a culture that encourages people to notice and appreciate the source of content. So there needs to also be a "this thing exists" effort...

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[Michael]

No, that's a very valid point.

I had an idea for an interactive timeline editor -- sort of a timeline wiki extension. There are tools to do most of the heavy lifting already, fortunately. But it strikes me that this might be a good thing to do; take Phil's timeline, make it a database, effectively, and allow things to be added to it. Make it an ongoing research effort, you see.

THEN, once that ongoing effort is established, every time anything related to any event in the timeline is featured anywhere in any medium (OK, this is somewhat grandiose), you hammer it out to them. Post it in the comments: "You know, the context to this story is here on the MondoGlobo Bush abuse timeline," call/email journalists to remind them of the existence of the resource, and so on.

The same general thing could be done with any issue, really. And not just timelines -- some kind of principled index of all the news items related to a given story, the people in it, the people who wrote about it, and so on and so forth. Again, the bee in my bonnet is lack of investigative journalism in today's America (nothing with a high profile, of course, I don't want to diss the people who are out there investigating) and this kind of thing may help.

Just a notion.

Oh -- in re joining. Interactivity would suck a lot of people in. Right now, I figure people come in, see something, say, "Huh, that's interesting," and go their merry way. There's no real notion of what they would be doing by joining, except having yet another venue to flap their jaws. (A venue I like, obviously, but there are already a bazillion such venues.)

So far, there is no concrete Thing to get behind. Once there is -- and here, probably any random thing would suffice -- you'll see people joining. Or so I believe.

[mabeysan]

timelined based wikieditor. me likee.

[Ed]

Unfortunately, people have trouble getting excited about anything beyond a really simple concept (e.g. a hotel break-in) or an image (e.g. Vietnamese monk setting self on fire in protest). I don't know if the media do a poor job reporting, or if there's too much information, or people don't care, but its really hard for people to follow from point A through Z. Sadly, the public is better able to understand A to B.

But fret not, that type of thing is important to have and to document. When all the yelling is done, people are going to need to be held accountable. We're getting a head start on documenting our fascist shift. Maybe it needs to be part of the wiki? (actually, i think it already is)

If its any consolation, that particular article you reference is in line with what Naomi Wolf's "The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot" has to say, so the message isn't lost. The book seems to be selling well, she's popping up in a lot of interviews, and she seems to present the timeline in an interesting manner. If you get a chance, check her out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aW9PulYpjGs

[cRitter]

To highlight this point, compare our presence to StopBigMedia.com. They've got a video soundtrack highlighting the problem of Big Media, along with a picture list of their supporters; easy contribution buttons, and links to clear and concise descriptions of their beliefs.

We've got some of this, but we're still working out the kinks. I fear that a large PR blitz could end up doing harm without a net to catch those who are interested in our cause.

[RU Sirius]

yeah, I've been thinking about this a lot, and I suppose when I envision of a media push in January, I envision the sort of steady but relatively slow trickle of people we saw in the immediate aftermath of the 10 Zen Monkeys/BoingBoing etc. linkage. Just enough to keep the sense of dynamism alive and to bring in a few more of those inevitably few people (no offense intended) who will really contribute in a focused and effective way. Plus, to be blunt, I guess I feel personally media-ready particularlty to communicate about the QuestionAuthority project, but I recognize that once people get here, there is indeed a sense of drift, a lack of focus.

My fear is that an attempt to work out the kinks could go on for approximately forever unless a very few people take charge of it and make it happen. But it would be good to make it happen.

A few things that would be good. One paragraph descriptions that define the essence of the major projects, not so much as abstract beliefs but as action agendas. I think I can write up the one for QA...

A point of focus or two. What about something that people can easily grasp and participate in, either for each project or one thing that works for both (all) projects? A petition? A virtual composite representative character wth some sort of purpose. Something funny that takes shots at conventional politics and politicians?

Maybe, in addition to whatever points of focus can be devised, the homepage should be more like a kind of group blog featuring the best entries we can get that are related to the themes of the groups, as opposed to internal group dialogues... in other words, present a face to the world that makes people want to come back for that, in and of itself....


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[Rachael]

I very much like the ideas of a point of focus or two, something that seems concrete enough that people want to do it and can tell others about it in a sentance or less (I've been having that problem myself) Petitions, funny things, these things seem obvious and lame but I have signed up for many things just because I wanted to help the cause of the petition. Something funny enough that people would show their friends could be even better. I mean, who here hasn't seen "I'm a cat, I'm a kitty cat, and I dance dance dance and I dance dance dance"?
Perhaps more easily achievable is your idea of a group blog as the front page, which I agree would be much more appealing to someone new. Is there a place where essays can be submitted with subject tags and maybe some sort of mechanism for readers to vote for them ?
As far as content goes, would it fit the theme and intention of the project to have nonpartisan (or at least a variety of partisan) information about the current candidates and issues?

[RU Sirius]

How about a parody of one of those polls that chart people on the political spectrum,

like this one: http://www.politicalcompass.org/test

or this one?
http://www.theadvocates.org/quiz.html

With really funny questions. The results don't really even matter.
The four polar points on the political map could be
Nuts
Ignorant
Lame
Weird

I don't know. I made myself laugh anyway...

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[Michael]

I kinda like that notion!

I went and took the political compass test again: Economic Left/Right: -6.62 and Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -7.69 -- makes me weirder than Gandhi. What does that even mean? And I swear I answered all the questions honestly!

[Michael]

Well, now I feel all stupid, because I haven't seen the kitty cat thing.

The group blog is obviously something I should be doing, but this last week has been a horrendous week in a long year of horrendous weeks, work-wise (I am not complaining about income, not complaining, o gods of employment) and so I just haven't had the time.

And to be honest, I'm not sure Drupal -- which has a lot of nice things to recommend it -- is the way to go with community services. So I'm still in an experimental stage.

MovableType is now open-source. That certainly has the right features. Scoop (the backbone of DKos) is already installed on the machine; I find its interface hard to work with, but it does the vote-up thing. And of course Drupal also does the vote-up thing if you install all the right pieces.

As I mentioned elsewhere, what I'd really like to do is to be able to embed Drupal (or other) content into Wiki pages, so that the look and feel of the site is consistent throughout. I think I can make that work if I can just manage to get a good night's sleep. :-) There are lots of MediaWiki extensions that look like they could be adapted to do that sort of thing.

But I'm 100% in agreement that a group blog is a necessity on today's Internet, no matter how it's implemented. Give people a reason to come back today for more funny (or outrage, or whatever their taste) and they'll come. And then some will join.