Dear X,
Yesterday we had an argument. The crux of our argument is this: You believe real actions to save the planet are taken by trained, specialist activists. Online actions, such as emails from a supporter don’t count. You called them “trivial.”
I disagree.
Filed under Activism, Digital Issues, Popular
I gave a presentation to the Greenpeace Frontline folks here in Austin this week. Frontliners are the folks who go out in the street recruiting new supporters and talking about the solutions that Greenpeace stands for. It’s a job much like the first one I had with Greenpeace, as a door to door canvasser. So I was more interested in what they had to tell me than what I had to tell them — anyone who has ever done this kind of work knows how valuable the beat on the street is to knowing what’s resonating and what’s not.
Happily, many said that global warming and energy issues were way up on the agenda of what people were supporting them for. Less happily, it was also the subject on which they were getting the most grief. This is Texas, after all, oil country, where the big SUV has a loyal following. But more generally, even people who support Greenpeace were worried about were the lifestyle changes that Global Warming might mean.
Filed under Digital Culture, Environmental Issues, Greenpeace
Somebody could make a fantastic Blurb book simply snapping geek fashions at SXSW. Some howling good t-shirts too. My favourite today: “I see dead pixels…”
Filed under Uncategorized
Aporistic learnings from SXSW so far:
A bullet point in a powerpoint which wraps is not a bullet point, it´s just a bad sentence.
If you want incremental improvements, ask your users. If you want breakthroughs, ignore everybody. @kathysierra
We got more going on than we think. We could do a few things to create a 21st century we could be proud of. #brucesterling
Key to civilization is how a society treats children, the elderly, the homeless, the downtrodden and the debased. #brucesterling
The elderly will be the backbone of the non-commercial social web. They’re not so weak they can’t hit the return key. #brucesterling
Took #brucesterling’s advice, Googled Obamatrons, best headline: Obamatrons sing ‘Obamalujah’
Kittens wake up your brain. @kathysierra
The surest way to guarantee nothing interesting happens is to assume you know exactly how to do it. @kathysierra
“Second life is dead? GREAT, we love dead things.” –Colleen Morgan at archaeology panel
When audience goes into Blackberry prayer mode: Hands come together, head bows… I know I have lost you. Craig Ball
#cshirky: The internet is the largest group of people who care about reading and writing ever assembled in history.
Recipe for leveraging the Wisdom of Crowds online: Small simple tasks, given to Large Diverse groups, Designed for Selfishness in which results aggregate.
Your spam filter is millions of years old. What gets through: Chemistry. #kathysierra
Best design philosophy: Zero to Smile in three clic ks. (From the makers of Spore)
And some very Cool links that I learned about here:
The Best Of the Twittersphere: http://www.favrd.com
Dedicated to the art of Powerpoint sharing: http://www.slideshare.net
Get corporations to respond to complaints: http://www.getsatisfaction.com (And should we in Greenpeace think about using this to get customer support for Planet Earth??)
Track Twitter tags: http://hashtags.org/
Text, video, picture sharing network: http://www.utterli.com/
Facebook Connect: http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/
Crowd sourced disaster reporting: http://www.ushahidi.com/
Event Live Blogging: http://www.scribblelive.com
Crowd sourced advertising: http://www.geniusrocket.org
Create your own theme song, which plays every time you come into the room where your blue+tooth enabled device detects it: http://blog.pixelfumes.com/?p=232
Mobile Activism — cell phones as activist tools: http://mobileactive.org/
This guy, an online wine blogger, was treated like a rock star here: http://garyvaynerchuk.com/
Fantastic to watch, impossible to describe,
A poetry slam about non-profit ROI
The groups that take blogs and facebooks and twitters
And turn them to saving both people and critters
Spun iambics and rhymes around all their banter
In this panel assembled by (brilliant) Beth Kanter
They told of Twestivals, LoL Seals, and Apps
That raised money, awareness, and the eyebrows of chaps
In management who aren’t down with the groove
Of using these cool social marketing tools
They took tweets from the audience, how cool is that?
And one of them wore that cat hat cat’s hat!
I loved it, I learned stuff, I had a great time
And yeah, I was the guy who was tweeting in rhyme.
Charlene Li on what’s happening *outside* the Online Social Networks was both scary and exhilirating.
Look at Facebook Connect, and you get a taste of what the future holds. Anyone on Facebook is providing three levels of information:
–Identity, who you are
–Contacts, who you know
–Activities, what you do.
All of that is useful information to other sites, that may want to rate how valuable you are for targetting an ad, or what new customers you might bring to their site, or how your activities make you likely to be a customer for their or others’ products.
Filed under Digital Issues, sxsw
Brilliant, as always, Lawrence Lessing talks about how our trust in government has collapsed, how money is at the root of it, and how we can make an easy change to the system to restore integrity, and break the dependency of politicians on corporate and lobbyist election funding.
He riffs on why Wikipedia leaves 100,000,000 USD on the table, as the 9th biggest website in the world, because it doesn´t accept advertising. Because the founder wants people to see Wikipedia in all its wonder and with all its flaws, of which there are many, but he doesn’t want anybody to say that it’s not trustworthy, because it´s all advertising fluff.
He talks about Hillary Clinton’s U-turn on opposing a bill stopping people from escaping credit card debt through declaring bankruptcy, after she got 140,000 from financial interest groups.
He talks about how the science around drugs is undermined by doctors getting up to 250,000 from a company whose drugs they are reviewing.
Doubts feed a dealy meme: “Classic tobacco science.”
He asks why governments get easy questions wrong? Why do they back down to the sugar lobby and say, ok, a balanced diet can consist of 25% added sugar instead of the 10% ceiling the World Health Organisation inisists on.
Why did the government delay ten years in acting on climate change, when the scientific community was 100% clear in the consensus that it was real and human-driven?
Lessing does not believe we have the same corruption of government that we had in the 18th century. Instead, we are facing “Good Souls Corruption.” They take legal acts, they take ethical acts. And yet they do the wrong thing.
And his assessment: that people in Congress need to have a laser focus on money in order to fuel their election campaigns. They need to spend 30–70% of their time, depending on how close to election, raising money to get re-elected. And this turns them into addicts.
He doesn’t question the need for lobbyists. They explain complex issues. But in the current system, this is tied to money. The lobbyists are the pushers of the crack.
He calls for citizen funding of elections, to break the destructive debilitating dependency on money.
He calls a strike. No more money for congressional candidates until they agree to endorse citizen funding of all elections. No corporate money. No lobbyist money. And from his activist website http://change-congress.org he has racked up 100,000,000 in pledges.
He runs a video of Al Gore saying that in order to solve the Climate Crisis, we need to solve the Democracy Crisis.
And he makes a fantastic, direct call to action to every person in the room to fix the failure of trust in their own government. To remember not simply to take individual actions to do the right thing, but challenge the government itself to do the right thing.
Standing ovation. Brilliant.
I immediately signed up to the strike. You should too.
I really enjoyed “Is Privacy Dead, or Just Confused,” a panel chaired by Danah Boyd. A super set of panelists, but judging from what I was spurred to write down, the superstar was Judith Donath, of MIT Media Laboratory. Some extremely sharp and useful observations about the spectrum of privacy. Here’s a taste of what she said:
History is the equivalent of the body. By creating a body of history, we establish social control. Public spaces are places where there is common control of behaviour, private is outside those rules. A public space can be the dinner table. It’s a matter of what social controls you accept.
Filed under Net Culture, sxsw
Well, first thing this morning I called up my 10 year old son, Doon, on Skype to let him know that I had seen the preview of the Galactic Extension Pack for Spore.
Now, this may not have been a panel with direct relevance to activist organising in the digital social sphere, but dang it was fun. The first thing I had heard of Spore was here at SXSW back in 2007, when Will Wright demonstrated some early development work. I missed the presentation, but the buzz about it was intense, and someone got the whole thing on Viddler.
Caryl is a great speaker, and I loved her description of the design philosophy behind the editors in Spore: Zero to Smile in Three Clicks.
They succeeded. From my 4 year old son all the way up to their 50 year old dad, we love Spore at Casa Fitzgerald. Our friend Boris, who is a scary-good ten year old artist, creates objects with Spore that I defy anyone to look at without breaking into a goofy grin.
And I found this bit strangely compelling, about one of the artists who had found a sketchpad from when he was ten years old, and how Spore enabled him to bring those early creations to life.
There’s a longer video here with some visuals previewing the new Terraforming module, which looks far better than the clunky system currently in the release version.
If there was a takeaway from this for me about User Generated Content in the activist world, it’s the importance of fun, of enabling someone to make something very cool, very easily.
Now, if only the real planet Earth had a global temperature slider as easy to use as Spore’s.
Filed under Creativity, sxsw
Panel with The Go Game staff: they use ARGS to promote corporate team work. They call them Urban online adventures
In a typical Go game, every team has a web enabled phone and a camera. They are let loose on a town or a casino or a golf course. Some missions are scanvenger hunts, some are real people recruited via Craig’s list. Folks dress up like obvious tourists, or ninjas, and jump out at players. That kinda thing.
In other variations, a team solves a puzzle or creates something in the form of a video or a photo. E.G. In 12 minutes, recreate a famous film scene by filming your fingers as the characters.
“And people pay us for this. Woo hoo!”
“Runs with SXSWissors” creates a virtual high school, and players have to compete to graduate from Freshmen to Seniors.
Alas, I can’t play, because my cell phone is unAmerican. DOH.
From the audience questions came a plug for one I can play though: The Hat game from British game outfit Hide and Seek.
Clue: look for the people with the umbrellas. Of course, on this rainy Austin day, that could be tough.… But this looks like fun.
Filed under sxsw, Uncategorized
Chris Tolles kicked off with the slide above, comparing sites in the top 10 most visited URLs consisted largely of UGC, 1998 vs 2008.
Then he introduces the big question as “how are we going to make money from this” and wham. I’m in the wrong room again. Happens a lot here, I’m a lonely little activist petunia in an entrepenurial onion patch.
But it’s a really good session, with some excellent questions from the floor.
Filed under sxsw, Uncategorized
I have not lived in the States for almost 25 years now, and every time I come back there are surprises.
One that gets me is the need to “remember to order the smallest size” because volume creep has meant that what *$s calls a “Tall” coffee, their smallest size, would feed a European coffee habit for a month. OK, I exaggerate, but really. When it comes to food and drink portions, everything is GIGANTIC here.
On the “I love America” side there’s this, found at the Dallas Fort Worth Airport. An iPod VENDING MACHINE for pete’s sake. If my pal Gillo were here, who I believe is now a Bishop in the Holy Church of Apple, I would have had to have peeled his fingers and face away from the glass to make the flight. This is just unfair for an airport on the transit route to SXSW: Geek bait.
On the “What’s wrong with this country?” side, there’s this. Almost five bucks? For water? In a plastic bottle that will outlive my children in a landfill or an ocean trash vortex somewhere? And RIGHT NEXT TO perfectly potable water from the tap? Jeez louise.
Filed under Activism, Environmental Issues, sxsw, Travel
I’m in the airport lounge at Schipol hitting myself on the head. I’ve been planning my schedule at SXSW in Austin (Woo hoo!!!!) for the last couple weeks, in those spare micro-slivers of time one finds if one looks hard enough, and trying to figure out how to share it here. DOH. It’s an RSS feed dummy. Render in Feed2Js and hey presto, here it is, after the More click.
If you want to hear about any of these sessions in particular, leave a comment. I’m planning on live blogging some, but not all.
Every Ted winner gets to make a wish. Sylvia wished we would all campaign for Marine Reserves. I’m helping Sylvia. How about you?
Filed under Activism, Environmental Issues, Nature, Whales
30+ years geek-tweaking Greenpeace, which has allowed me to combine my love of technology, globally people-powered trouble-making, hippy do-goodery, and boats.
