Ahh, at last our secret project sees the light of day. Together with the Yes Men, Greenpeace is distributing 50,000 copies of an International Herald Tribune spoof dated December 19th 2009 hailing an historic breakthrough at the Copenhagen Climate Summit.
We put together an online version as well. This was a huge team effort, knocked together on a very short timescale (the website got built over the last 72 hours!!!) and with creative input from a whole bunch of folks who had a lot of fun.
The Arctic Sunrise departs shortly on a voyage that will take her to the end of the world .. beyond 75 degrees North, and out of the range of the much-beloved VSat that brings us broadband connectivity even at sea.
Me and the kids went out to Ijmuiden beach on Sunday, and Doon´s pal Nissar showed us this cool trick. I have a feeling Kathy Sierra could explain why this kind of thing grabs the brain’s attention — it just looks WRONG. A human being doesn’t work like that. We have millions of years of experience stored up in our brainspace about what’s normal, and this, or the Exorcist trick of a head turned completely around on its shoulders, just radiates shivering not-rightness.
What’s this got to do with digital communications or activism? Not a lot. Hey — it’s the weekend.
Horror movie caterpillars infest Amsterdam, originally uploaded by Brianfit.
Spinselmot or — I think — Willow Ermine (Yponomeuta rorellus). Until last night’s storm tore through most of the webs, the larvae of these black and white moths had engulfed whole trees, mostly willow, in the Rembrandt park and here, along the Sloterplas. I’ve seen pictures elsewhere of them engulfing nearby park benches and bicycles as well. I’d call these Stephen King caterpillars.
Irma has better pix and calls them “Cristo Moths.” It’s apt — the infected trees stand out like silver ghosts, covered from trunk to twig.
“We’re just going to a protest” Doon said to a neighbor as we biked by on our way to a flashmob at Schipol.
Dutch environmental group Milieudifensie organized a protest against airport expansion here and in cities across Europe today. We had a blast for a good cause.
I was browsing through Greenpeace images on Google tonight for a cover for my son’s school report, and found some cool stuff I’ve not seen before.
Beth Kanter is one smart cookie:
Interpretive dance, is when a dancer (or dancers) often improvising (though sometimes it is choreographed) a dance to another medium. Technology adoption is part choreographed, part improvisation. The point of that Hinchliffe makes about best practices for adoption of Enterprise 2.0 (or social media for inward facing work) is that there aren’t any best practices. You have to improvise!
According to Hinchcliffe “Organizations are unique, and operate in very different ways and therefore what may work for one business may not work for another.” And if you’re talking about organizations working together with other organizations, that is also unique.
So, we should try to avoid at all costs asking this question first “What tool should we use?” Stop thinking that adopting social media or social software or online collaboration tools is a matter of selecting a tool off a menu. There is a process that requires understanding the space between the tools and the people and having someone who knows that space so well they can an interpretive dance between the technology and the users.
Beths Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media: The Interpretive Dance of Social Media Adoption.
OK, I admit it. Martha and I rushed the stage like a couple of 16 year olds during the final set of Jackson Browne’s concert last night in Amsterdam, and barged our way shamelessly to the front. And I mean THE front. Hey guy with an original “Saturate Before Using” t-shirt, we’re sorry about those toes…
Who could resist? “For a Dancer” performed acapella with Venice, ” Lives in the Balance” restored to his set on request of his son Ethan (”If ever there was a time to be a protest singer, I guess now would be a good time…”), Steve van Zandt’s ”I am a Patriot” pulling the crowd into the heart of the moment and, of course, the set pieces that either were or weren’t on the playlist to begin with, but were when Jackson shifted the river of the music at audience request.
Chavonne Morris and Alethea Mills stole the show in a couple places. The whole band had lightning in their pockets, and thunder in their shoes, though I could have done without some of Mark Goldenberg’s seemingly cross-modal guitar noodling early in the show. ”Nervous and intrusive” is how Tjan puts it, and Tjan is right.
I heard Take it Easy, Doctor my Eyes, Barricades of Heaven, Tender is the Night, Running on Empty, the Pretender, Rosie, These Days, Something Fine, Time the Conqueror, Live nude cabaret, Off of Wonderland, Going down to Cuba, and the ever-audience-beloved-close-out, Stay.
I’m sure someone will post a full and ordered playlist, but I went to this concert without the minidisk recorder, without the camera, and didn’t take notes. The last time I did that, I found myself so distracted with making a record of the event, I think I missed a good deal of the event. This was a concert to be lived in. Jackson made mention at one point that he hated looking out onto a sea of cell phones and cameras. ”We came a long way to be here with you, and it would be nice if you could be here too.” Well, there you go — that “same wavelength” thing.
And that is part of what makes Jackson a Rock 2.0 singer. His concerts are participatory. He watches, he listens, he takes suggestions, he responds to his audience. He chats. In fact, he chatted last night about a difference that Marth and I had noted many times, and talked about on the way in to the show — the difference between a Dylan and a Jackson concert. Jackson rapped a bit about how he went to see Bob, and the guy never said a word during the entire event, other than to walk out on stage at the end and make a shrugging gesture. Or how Van Morrisson will turn his back to the audience for 30 minutes. This was classic Jackson chat — it wasn’t mean, it was sweet and self deprecating, coming back to a “So what’s wrong with me?” note.
Not a thing, man. Not a thing.
Today was a good day. Greenpeace offices around the world did something extraordinary for Earth Day. We set aside our national differences, we erased our borders, and focused on doing one simple thing globally.
All we did was drive a video up into the upper ranks of the most popular items on YouTube and create a minuscule, viral outbreak of hope for our planet’s future. But to do that, we combined the forces of our mailing lists around the world (3 million strong), our blogger network, the marketing expertise of our fundraisers, the interweb expertise of our digitial communications departments and web-footed friends, and we used them to push a piece that was stitched together from the work of countless activists who have taken inspiring actions for the last three decades.
Now, why is that making me button-popping proud? Because you have to be tryin so hard, Ringo, to make this or any organisation overcome nationalism and act in a globally coordinated way, and today we took the biscuit.
On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 7:40 AM, Someone who shall remain anonymous wrote:
Hi Brian,
Not sure who handles the Greenpeace International twitter account [Greenpeace_intl]… but I’m hearing complaints among my friends who follow it about the barrage of (essentially) the same post today and I have to say, I kinda agree. I understand the want to drive traffic, but.. if people unfollow because of it?
Just sayin’!
Also, hi!!
—————————————————————–
She raises a really valid point. Did I fail to reflect that in my reply? There’s an inherent trade off in how you use twitter as a push channel for a global audience with short attention spans AND a loyal audience who are following you attentively. Unlike email marketing, there’s no real hard data yet on what constitutes spamming your own followers. So is it wrong to use your existing channel for a constant stream of tweets like this? Here are the tweet streams for the last 24 hours:
My name is Brian Fitzgerald, and I lead the (multiple) webby-award winning digital communications team at Greenpeace International. This blog is (mostly) a glimpse behind the scenes at Greenpeace and a repository for lessons learned and experiments in online activism and social media. I believe that Planet Earth is evolving a mammalian brain, and that the internet is knitting the neural cortex. We are the synaptic nerves that constitute its conscience.
More me and mine here.
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