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Crazy Davids vs Insane Shelliaths

My favourite ad of all time is Apple’s “Here’s to the crazy ones…”

As someone who has personally worked with crazy, been accused of crazy, and sees the organisation he’s volunteered for and worked for regularly described as crazy, the only sane reaction is to not think of it as a pejorative.

Are you crazy? Here’s a test:
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Screw nature: it’s about the fate of the Lolcatz

Sumatran Tigers? Fuggetaboutit. Activism is about cat videos.

I was a proud participant in the SOPA protest. This website, along with 25 Greenpeace websites and every website I could influence, went dark to demand the internet remain a haven of free speech, and the free and creative playground that it is now: a safe place to put popular culture in a blender and give it a whirl, a place where We the People determined the democratic discourse, not our corporate overlords.

I was also a proud participant in the Copenhagen Climate petition — the worldwide attempt to hold world government’s feet to the fire of public opinion and set them skedaddling to do something about — you remember it — that slow cook problem facing our froggy planet in its pot of warming water on the fossil– fueled range.

When I compared these two global mobilizations, it left a bad bad taste in my mouth. In a matter of not even weeks, the internet stood up to save itself from certain death in numbers that made the Copenhagen effort look like a nursing home petition to enlarge the bingo cards.

We — and when I say “we” I mean You, I mean Me — rightly accuse governments of having their priorities back-asswards when they can find trillions of dollars to bail out banks within months, but balk at the 10 million over three years they agreed to put down to save the worlds forests and buy us precious time to wean ourselves from our vodka and milk diet of fossil fuels. But what did We just do?

In 2009, a year-long effort by a huge swath of civil society raised 17 million signatures to demand climate action at Copenhagen.

Last month, in a matter of mere days We amassed more than 100 million signatures to save the internet.


According to Wikipedia:

On January 18 itself, more than 8 million people looked up their representative on Wikipedia, 3 million people emailed Congress to express opposition to the bills, more than 1 million messages were sent to Congress through the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a petition at Google recorded over 4.5 million signatures, Twitter recorded at least 2.4 million SOPA-related tweets,[3] and lawmakers collected “more than 14 million names — more than 10 million of them voters — who contacted them to protest” the bills.

The fate of the Siberian Tiger, the Orang-utan, and that most charismatic mega fauna, adorable baby homo sapiens of the future, continue their slide to oblivion unchecked. But it may be time that We simply stop talking about them, and focus on the threat that climate change poses to the wildlife that really seems to matter to all of us: LolCatz, Sneezing Pandas, and Dramatic Gophers.

1-24-12 #2

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1992: A memo to Greenpeace from David McTaggart

I was reminded by a friend of this email, written by David McTaggart in 1992 and sent widely throughout Greenpeace at the time. The internal squabble it was intended to address is long a thing of the past, but the summation he gives of the organisation’s early strategy and development and founding principles has some unique value. It’s something that struck a chord with many people, and I’ve been asked periodically to dig it out for internal use for almost two decades now.

I believe this is the first time it’s been let out in its entirety in public — the laundry here is old enough now that it won’t mind an airing, and I’m glad to say there’s nothing here that would be read as heresy in the Greenpeace of today — in fact, we may be more aligned at this moment with some of David’s thinking than we have been at many times in the years since he wrote this.

David was Greenpeace’s chairman from 1979 until 1991, the year before this was written. More than anyone, he was responsible for keeping the organisation together in the late 70s and throughout the 80s, and he created an international structure which, with some bumps, served us well back then, and components of which are still present in our governance structure today.

2011 will mark the 20th year since David retired from active chairmanship of Greenpeace. He was a mercurial, charismatic, unpredictable, charming and infuriating guy – I worked with him for ten years and few days went by that he didn’t try the patience of everyone around him. But re-reading this reminded me of what a privilege it was to be a part of his story arc, the things he set in motion, and the vision that he set forth for Greenpeace.

To: Greenpeace Offices (List), Allships (List),
To: Executive Directors (List), Campaign Directors (List),
To: Trustees (List), Atmosphere Campaign (List), Whales (List),
To: Nukes (List), MEDTOTAL (List), Toxics Project Coördinators (List),
To: Canvass (List), Greenpeace Board (List)
From: David McTaggart
Date: TUE 18-AUG-92 20:59:15 GMT

———-

Dear all,

I’d like to offer my best wishes and support to all of you during this difficult time of changes. In my current role as Honorary Chairman of the International organization, I’d like to take this opportunity to offer some observations about the original ideas about where we wanted to go and how we wanted to get there. Perhaps these ideas will help you to focus your thoughts as you face the difficult decisions which will confront you at this crossroads.

I am no longer directly involved in shaping the future of the organization. I will continue in the background, quietly helping reach specific campaign goals with my political contacts, but I have no intention of getting directly involved again: I am now sixty years old, and I think my twenty years with Greenpeace added thirty years to my age. Enough.

But I can’t stop caring deeply about Greenpeace and where it is going, and I’ve been watching from the sidelines for a long time with increasing concern.

Rightly or wrongly, the organization has strayed from the original concepts which I and a handful of others once hoped would guide us. Perhaps the original ideas were wrong. That’s for you and the future to decide. But for the benefit of those who were not around (and some who were), I’d like to summarize a few of the most important ideas which I thought should guide our growth:

1. To work internationally;

2. To have fast decision-making and strong leadership: From the National Boards to the International Board to the Executive;

3. To concentrate our best efforts on two and maybe three major international problems, and to complement these with a single national campaign to build local support;

4. To work on one or possibly two soft issues;

5. To be financially stable on an international basis, with money put away for emergencies;

6. To stay out of party politics;

7. To remain non-violent.

That sounds pretty simple, I know, and we can all probably agree on the general ideas represented above. All the same…

1) Working Internationally

Some 15 years ago, there were a lot of environmental groups surfacing within the boundaries of many countries, but none were working internationally.

The goal in building Greenpeace was to build it internationally — to not allow it to fall into the trap of the many groups which tried to forge so called “International” organisations without paying attention to centralized decision making. Yes, I know: we don’t like the words “centralized decision making.” But the multinational corporations and governments whose policies we are trying to change fear those words in the context of mass movements and opposition.

I won’t name it, but one organization that tried and failed had no international structure to turn to for conflict resolution and leadership. They were underfunded in poor countries and sitting on money in rich countries, who argued that they should not have to share it since they had raised it.

While they still have a few strong offices that do good work nationally, they spun out of effective existence years ago on the international scene.

We did it right. We first built our membership in Europe and North America, with the object of seeing if we could get a factionalized group across two continents to sit down together and win a couple issues. We built a communication network which allowed us to exchange information and ideas across borders in a matter of hours rather than weeks. We agreed to expand slowly, out from the centre, and to forge a single image all over the world: One united organization working on the same issues and sitting down together to work out our priorities, our goals, and, most importantly, our differences.

I for one never had any delusions that there would not be differences. This was and still is our biggest challenge: forgetting centuries of nationalism, fences, histories, religions, philosophies, competition, misunderstanding, and hatred, and learning to work together.

We made a major mistake early on in 1979, giving every country a veto vote. It was a very fast lesson in the limits of consensus decision-making and how it stifles action and slows you down. We agreed to get rid of it. We set up Council, declared we would make decisions by 3/4s majority, set up a majority vote for the Board. We argued, we disagreed, we voted. But once a decision was made, we all accepted it and worked together. That was the key.

When we wanted to open an office in Germany, it was fought against tooth and nail by our Netherlands office, our UK office, and our French office. If we had been operating by consensus back then, one of our largest and most effective offices probably would not even have been started. The struggle to open offices in the Nordic Bloc, the Med, Latin America, and the Soviet Union are further examples of the same thing more recently.

2) Fast Decision, Strong Leadership

To be international we agreed there was a need for a simple leadership structure that combined fast decision making with wide accountability to the whole organization: leadership that supported the Greenpeace world without favouritism. We needed strong national boards to appoint a strong international board to appoint a strong Executive. We agreed that by funneling accountability in that way, we avoided the impossible situation of an international Executive answering to more than a dozen bosses.

The leaders of the organization were supposed to keep us focussed and effective. They were supposed to keep us away from diluting our issues and message with items that other groups were working on. They were supposed to be capable of delegating responsibilities. They were supposed to have the authority to give a campaigner a mandate to do a job and keep them away from the paper-pushing and meetings, meetings, meetings, that are symptomatic of having to please too many people. They were supposed to be able to work with scientists, politicians, and action people alike. And they had to be able to take some heat, because this was not intended to be a consensus organisation.

Any group of homogeneous, like-minded people who can all agree on everything is living in twinkie land. That’s for the Moonies and the Scientologists and the Flat Earth Society and all the other groups that are doomed to the fringe, where they can talk to themselves and the people who agree with them and nobody else. Consensus is not the way to build a massive international movement. It needs the bitter, cold-blooded natural selection of argument and debate, not molasses, compromise, and dilution.

3) International & National Campaigns

Concentrating on two or three issues was more than a way to focus limited resources. It was also an attempt to build a record of success by declaring a goal, pressing it hard, declaring the victory and moving up to the next rung.

No campaign should be begun without clear goals. No campaign should be begun unless there is a possibility that it can be won. No campaign should be begun unless you intend to finish it off.

Naturally, we were set up to be prepared for major international crises.

Our early formula was simple and still sound: Basic research to find the weak points, quiet approach to government and industry outlining our concerns and possible responses if those concerns are not met. A sincere attempt to win without going to war. If no response, WHAM: hit them with everything we have: Mail Outs, members, actions, media, letters, votes, boycotts, ads, articles, all in a coördinated way: if it wasn’t hard enough to hurt them, better not to bother.

Look at Greenpeace today. Imagine if we could concentrate today’s staff and funding and campaign tools the way we once did, when the entire organization had a stake in how a single campaign was going. All it takes is agreeing the goals without spending thousands of hours in meetings, then giving somebody the authority to make fast decisions toward reaching those goals and staying out of their way. It ain’t complicated.

Ironically, we are better equipped now to concentrate our international efforts then we ever have been. We have our largest grass-roots membership ever (for a while, anyway), better communications, better access to information, and a bigger name. Yet we find ourselves compartmentalized and competing within the organization. We shouldn’t be meeting over campaign funding and regionalism and voting structures and representation and structures and structures and structures and all that crap. We should be putting our energy into tactics, targets, strategies.

4) Soft Issues

We must have at least one soft issue to draw the public’s awareness, to take the edge off our “whack-em” image, and to show the positive side of what we are fighting for. Anybody who has ever tried to sell Greenpeace to the public knows that dreams are better than nightmares at winning people over. The campaigns to save the whales and to preserve Antarctica are good examples of winning people in to the fold and then slowly leading them into one or two other heavy issues. Hundreds of thousands of people who may have been ambivalent about nuclear power joined Greenpeace to save the whales. Who knows how many of them heard the message about nukes?

5) Financial Stability

We set out to have a strong and broad-based financial basis so we could work internationally without fear of being controlled by high donors, large corporations, foundation grants, etc, who could make us dependent on their funding and then step in to shape our course. We also set out to have enough money put away that we could make it through a cataclysmic loss in income — either as a result of an unpopular action by ourselves, a ghastly mistake, or the concerted attempt by a group of governments or industries to shut us down.

Most of you who were around know that I tried to force this issue time and time again. However, while many national offices built up significant and healthy reserves, international was never “allowed” such reserves. This points out a severe structural weakness in the way our finances are organized, and one for which I take full responsibility. National offices should never have been allowed to have full control over the funds they raised. Again, it is my own fault, but it contradicts everything we were working for to build an international organization which is dependent for its income on its national offices.

Please do not misunderstand: I am not pointing any fingers and for the most part the national offices today are cooperating internationally admirably. But take this as a warning for the future; unless Greenpeace collectively controls the funds raised in national offices, you will always face the possibility of renegade offices and the spectre of subtle economic blackmail by the rich and the few.

6) Party Politics

Our agreement to stay out of party politics was an attempt to maintain a hard-line, outside the compromises of the political world. It was also intended to ensure our appeal to a wide range of people across traditional political lines. It should also have meant an agreement to stay out of human rights, political philosophies, economic theory, advocation of anybody’s ball-of-wax Agenda for a New World Utopia. There are plenty of other groups doing excellent work on hunger, abortion, women’s rights, aboriginal rights and all the rest. We are not out to save anybody’s version of democracy or justice or fair play: because our membership can agree to disagree on all of that if they want, as long as we keep the number one goal in mind: We have to get our world into the 21st Century in one piece. Fuck everything else. If you want to build an international movement, and you want it to be as strong as possible, you have to accept everybody. You can’t stand at the door and examine their voting record and how they feel about men’s rights or women’s rights or father’s rights or mother’s rights or or Communism or Democracy or Republicans or Tories or Christian Democrats or or AIDS or farms subsidies or abortion or vegetarianism or Jesus Christ or Mohammed or Buddha and turn them away if they give you an answer you don’t like. Make no mistake, there are thousands of important issues in the world today that require urgent attention, but we can’t do it all. And if we try, we won’t get any of it done.

The original idea was to keep it simple: to limit ourselves to a handful of important environmental goals without compromise or complications: to just get on with it.

7) Non-violence

There is a gray area between violence and non-violence. Years ago, once we decided a specific campaign goal, the most intense debate usually centred on how far we could take our actions and still remain non-violent. We need to reopen this discussion, I believe, and investigate ways of making our activist campaigns heavier. Don’t misunderstand, I am not suggesting we go violent, but we need to look at new ways to spur action and concern.

In summary

As I said earlier, I decided to step out of the picture to let new minds and new ideas begin to shape the Greenpeace that will see the beginning of the 21st century. I still have some suggestions, though, and I’m happy to elaborate if anyone is interested in bringing the organization back closer to its roots.

To my thinking, the key issue facing Greenpeace right now is focussing the enormous resources out there on a simpler, clearer, slimmed down number of campaigns, ones with goals that the public can readily grasp. If there is a “process” you need to be concentrating on, I would say it is finding the fastest and most efficient way of doing that.

I respectfully submit these thoughts primarily for the benefit of the newer folks, the grass roots people who want to see some leadership and fast decisions, the activists who are looking to get a job done rather than arguments about how many administrators it takes to do it, and the old-timers (the few remaining) who shared the excitement and satisfaction of helping build this ship called Greenpeace.

I wish you all the best,

David McTaggart

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Farewell the Sirius: second star to the right, and straight on til morning.

They gathered to farewell a ship — former captains, campaigners, and crew — and raise a toast to a creature of steel and wood and rope which had been their home, their guardian, their fierce champion, and occasionally their trickster nemesis.

And, as whenever a Greenpeace salty dog or two is gathered, they rose, one by one, to tell the stories of each other’s exploits, to rib one another with tales of embarrassments and foibles, and to praise such little-known skills as a crew member’s ability to climb out of the porthole of a captain’s cabin, back in the porthole of the lounge, and get back into her own cabin without being detected by the watch. Or so she thought, anyway, these many years.

These are the gatherings where we tell the stories we do not tell in press releases.

Stories like the beer run that two rooky crew went on in one of the rubber boats, tying up to the quay side and setting off to hoist 4 crates apiece, hard work in the burning afternoon sun, and so deserving a stop in a pub for a cold one. Or two, or three. At which point locals were coming in and laughing about someone’s rubber boat. Their rubber boat, it turned out, as they finally staggered to the quay side with their four crates apiece to discover the tide had gone out, and left their hapless craft suspended by its lines 2 meters in the air.

Or the story of one captain’s first day on the ship, when in the middle of the complicated operation of launching a zodiac at speed, he went below to fetch life vests.  The sight that greeted him when he returned to deck was indelibly impressed: all he saw was a row of bums along the rail, where every crew member was leaning over the water. The zodiac was below them, upside down in the sea, its occupants sputtering and clamouring onto the overturned hull. “What have I got myself into” was all he could think.

Or the one about the arrival in Istanbul, where because Sirius was registered as a yacht (there’s no marine classification for eco-campaign ships), she was welcomed into the Yacht harbour, crowded with dozens of tiny, fragile, outrageously expensive luxury vessels, including Gerald Ford’s three-master.  When a harbour pilot’s instructions were misunderstood, the only choice to avoid catastrophe whas a full-speed maneuver and a subsequent dropping of anchor. The anchor chain, however, snagged on the moorings of a dozen ships as the Sirius reluctantly slowed to a halt, dragging the yachts in that part of the harbour into a petal pattern around her. It took days for divers to sort the tangle out.

The Sirius was launched as a Greenpeace ship in 1981, and for nearly two decades sailed the waters of the North Sea and Med, notching her rails with arrests and victories against environmental abuses that were then commonplace, many of which today would be four-star scandals of major media magnitude in Europe: the dumping of raw Titanium Dioxide waste into European rivers, the tipping of barrels of radioactive waste into the North Sea, the slaughter of whales off Gibralter by Russian whaling ships, the harvesting of red coral with iron drag bars.

She placed artificial reefs designed to snag illegal driftnets, her crew boarded radioactive waste ships and occupied cranes to stop the loading of deadly cargo.  She faced Russian and American war ships, painting them with nuclear symbols to identify them as carrying nuclear weapons at a time when neither side would confirm or deny their presence. She called Italy’s attention to the presence of cruise missiles at a US submarine base at La Maddalena, and found radiation on the seabed where none was supposed to be.

She hosted a concert by the Waterboys in Dublin, she helped found our office in Greece, she first carried Greenpeace’s message to Africa. She fought radioactive waste discharges in Sellafield and Cherbourgh, she campaigned in the Adriatic and the Irish sea.

She was shot at, rammed, and arrested.

And she was loved.

She has spent her last days at a wharf in the Netherlands, where children, my own sons included, have gone with their school classes to spin the steering wheel, try on a survival suit, sit in one of those rubber boats, and hear of her history and the issues she worked on.  But the school programme has been expensive to run, the ship has become increasingly expensive to keep afloat in a place that’s safe for children, and the decision has been made to find a new home for her at a maritime museum, or as an historic bead and breakfast, or failing that, to take her apart for recycling.

Somehow at this point, our party turned into a meeting. A classic crew meeting in which everyone asked if there wasn’t something we all could do to keep her going, or to send her off with one last campaign, or to commandeer her, as once was done, in an act of mutiny against the forces of bureaucracy and budgets.  The meeting concluded without a clear conclusion. Greenpeace will retire the Sirius from her educational duties, but beyond that her future remains undecided.

The Sirius was named for a star, the brightest star in the night sky, sometimes called the “Dog Star” and a faithful friend to navigators since human beings set out in ships. In the 19th century, it was discovered that one reason it appears so bright is that it’s actually two stars, a binary pair, set in a luminous cluster.

Whatever the fate of the wood and steel and rope of the Sirius may be, her memory will be kept bright by the companion stars who turned up to see her off: the crew and captains that brought her story to life, and sailed her, ever true, into a place in history.

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They gave us a break: the Kit Kat campaign ends in success

Chalk one up for Social Media, the megaphone of the world’s second superpower, Public Opinion. Over the weekend, Nestle conceded to worldwide demand that they stop using palm oil from rainforest destruction in their products.

Our flagship tactic in this campaign was a parody of a Kit Kat ad, which Nestlé, in what in public relations circles is known as a “Fuck ME, how could you be that stupid?” move, attempted to ban from the internet. Which virtually guaranteed that “the internet” would strike back and insist that it be seen. (It finds censorship distasteful, this Internet Thing…) They created a cause celeb out of a brand attack, and fuelled the fire of their own roasting.

They fanned those fires by a hamfisted handling of the reaction on their Facebook page, where people flocked to protest the clearing of Indonesian rainforest to plant palm trees, or to cry foul over censorship of Greenpeace, or to, frankly, join in the fun of watching a public relations bonfire. Nestlé’s official voice came across as dictatorial, condescending, and clueless. Some posters were heckled by the Nestle administrators, some even found the only answer they got to their appeal to the company’s conscience was advice on improving their spelling.

There was something very deep at work here. Nestlé, no stranger to public criticism, appeared to have no experience in handling it. They profoundly failed to listen to their customers. They underestimated the brand damage that could be inflicted upon them. They misjudged the speed at which a social media attack can move.

They thought that an old model was at work here, in which a corporation can manufacture truth, create a demand for it, and then sell it to people, or even force it down their throats. That paradigm is still strong (witness what the oil and coal interests have done by funding and fuelling the climate change denyosphere) but the Kit Kat campaign is a great example of how it can be challenged.

Regular readers will remember that I put together a provocative video paraodying Kit Kat’s initial reaction, based on the Hitler Downfall meme. I pulled it within 24 hours, though, when I witnessed the misunderstanding of a couple people who were unfamiliar with the meme. They read a literal accusation of Nazi-ism or Nazi-style evil into it, not realising that the clip had become, within its intended audience of the subculture which lives and works in the Social Media haunts, a cultural emblem of any situation which provokes an over-the-top response. (For an exhaustive discussion of this meme as subcultural metaphor, and even why it’s funny, see Alex Leavitt’s thoughtful piece here.) As negotiations with Nestléat that moment were, let’s say, tense, I didn’t want to risk the misunderstanding of the top brass there – who had already demonstrated they were not fellow-travellers in the social media subculture. But I did promise a couple enthusiastic folks that I’d reintroduce it once the campaign was won.

Ironically, the meme itself has now effectively been shut down by YouTube content ID block as a result of a copyright claim from the producer of Der Untergang, the source for the original clip, despite the fact that all of the instances I’ve seen to date would almost certainly pass the tests of Fair Use. The copy below is NOT hosted by YouTube, thank you very much.

I’m reposting it as a reminder to others who might find themselves at the pointy end of a social media attack, because the moral of this story is really simple. If your audience/customer base/supporters have a bone to pick with you about your sustainability, your ethics, or the role you play in the ongoing struggle to make this world a better place, deal with the substance of that issue. Respond to it, engage with it. Listen to that voice. Never, ever, try to silence it.

(This video may disappear if someone disagrees that it constitutes Fair Use. If you want to download a zipped local copy of this flash version you can do so here.)

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Greenpeace International migrates to Planet Three

Planet 3

Planet III — launched May 2010

It sounds like Sci Fi. But it’s the latest incarnation of the “Greenpeace Planet” website and Content Management System, which we launched today. It involved more than a year of effort, lots of sweat and blood and not a few tears,  by a great many people led by Andrew Davies.   The  system selection process alone evaluated 42 long-list and 12 short-list candidate systems with a global User Reference Group, that amazingly came to a unanimous decision about the technology.  The new site has been designed from the bottom up to integrate social networking and draw big focus on our online campaign efforts.  It’s also, thanks to the Design Eye of Elaine Hill, a drop-dead gorgeous piece of eye candy.

It moves us ever closer to a dream that a bunch of Webbies had back at the turn of the century (ayep, that long ago) when, over beers, we considered what it would be like if instead of having dozens of different Greenpeace national websites and designs and systems around the world, we could work together to come up with a single common but flexible design, run by a common content management system that would allow us to share content and assets around the world, clone stories within language groups, and aggregate the global people power of our online actions across the globe.

At the time we had those discussion, our Greenpeace International page was composed by hand,  and its big cutting

Greenpeace website 2002

edge feature was a background image that changed randomly when you hit the home page.  Sometimes you’d get moss, sometimes beach, sometimes tree.  It was way cool in its day, in the same way the HTML command was cool in its day.

Most of the content we were posting then was press releases, slapped into HTML and FTPed over to our web server, which was in the attic of our office, by a two-man web team, Martin Baker and Gillo Cutupri. Martin did the words. Gillo did the pictures. By 2002  we had a sign-up form, where you could add your email to a mailing list, which we’d set up at the encouragement of Kevin Jardine, who prophesied that email lists were going to be important, and one of the website’s main purposes should be to get people networking with us through email so we could involve them in “online campaigns.”  This was crazy talk.

April 2003

We launched a site in 1999 that was built on Zope.  It’s big design feature was a spinning globe, and it had menus with “rounded corners.” These were achieved with tiny rounded corner gif images carefully placed with a relatively new technology called CSS.   But it also boasted an online forum, which would grow into a community of activists that did some amazing, pioneering online campaign work over the years.  One of the veterans of that community, Lisa Vickers,  found her way from forum member to volunteer to a Greenpeace ship and works today at the Greenpeace International headquarters as a digital campaigner.  I knew her for years only as “Lizardfish” from the forum.

Planet 1, our first real global content management system, was built in OpenACSand ran on the most robust technology of its day: an AOL server. Yes, AOL, as in America OnLine, the first Server Farmers.  We needed to build our own content management system because none existed in those days that would work in every character set, every language, every layout we needed to serve an organisation that had offices in Russia, Japan, Thailand, Israel and the Arabic world and was moving into China.  Bruno Mattarollo, an Argentine techie and activist, came on board as technical lead.  At some point we realised we needed project manager, and recruited Danielle Hickey, who had run Greenpeace Australia’s web presence, to leave Sydney and join the mad crew in Amsterdam. (She would eventually head back to Sydney with Bruno in tow. I tried to get them to name their first child Planet One. Fortunately, they resisted).   The build of Planet One was insane.  I remember pizza-fuelled nights in the office that lasted until most of the bars in Amsterdam were closed (and bars in Amsterdam stay open verrrrrry late) and a small army of webbies and volunteers helping move thousands of pages that had been hand built into a database. We celebrated the launch with super soaker squirt guns in pedal boats on the Amsterdam canals.

Planet One served us until 2005, when it was time to move to a new system, developed by Lars Pind and

Planet II: April 2005 — May 2010

project managed by Stephen Donnelly over the course of two years. It marked a new era as we moved steadily from a handful of pioneering offices to bring 22 or our national websites on board, saving millions of eurodollars by not pursuing multiple national design and backend tracks.

Planet Two was designed to inform, inspire, and engage. It carried on and refined the tradition of the Greenpeace website as news magazine, with a backend that was designed to widen the number of people who could publish content to our website — from HR Managers posting jobs to press officers posting press releases to publication managers publishing reports — we brought a wealth of content forward.

But when it came time design Planet Three, we were all about “Inspire, Engage, and Mobilize.” We wanted actions that our supporters could take big and proud. We wanted ways our supporters could replicate content through social media to be everywhere. We wanted the site to provide positive feedback for actions taken, donations made, letters sent, petitions signed. We wanted a sign-in system that would allow the site to recognise our supporters and personalize their experience. We wanted a site that featured our award-winning photography in big bold formats. We wanted a site that was less about us, and more about our amazing network of supporters and what they can do. And that’s what Andrew and his team delivered.

 

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Can this Earth Day video get more views than Justin Bieber?

Yes. It can.  To everyone who tweeted, Facebooked, up-thumbed, blogged, emailed, IMed and otherwise digitally disseminated our “Give Earth a Hand”  Earth Day video:  YOU ROCK.   We asked if we could beat pre-teen hearthrob JB’s video to the top of the chart, and you rocketed us into the #2 slot for the day on the Viral Video Chart.

But can we, in the remaining hours, beat the drunk guy trying to get his flip-flops on?  Come on, people! You know what to do!

UPDATE: IT’s 1:26 AM CET and Linkin Park just released a new video and grabbed the top slot, sending both drunk guy & flipflops and the Earth Day video a notch down.  Here’s the YouTube awards status:

#3 — Most Discussed (Today)) — Nonprofits & Activism
#75 — Most Viewed (Today)) — Australia
#98 — Most Viewed (Today)) — Canada
#74 — Most Viewed (Today)) — Ireland
#3 — Most Viewed (Today)) — India
#23 — Most Viewed (Today)) — New Zealand
#11 — Most Viewed (Today)) — Israel
#31 — Most Viewed (Today))
#24 — Most Viewed (Today)) — Spain
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Hands across the water, Hands across the sky. Good Night, Earth Day.

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10 questions to people-power your activist campaign

Cool Sexy Crowd

Over the weekend, I was lucky enough to hang out with a fine bunch of rabblerousers. We talked about movement building, and the kinds of things that make some campaigns successful in attracting big, unruly crowds, and the kinds of things that turn those big, unruly crowds into game changers.  We workshopped a set of questions worth asking if you want to gather a storm crowd and generate  some lightning.

1. Can you tell the story of our campaign to a 7 year old?  Who are the bad guys? How are they vanquished? Who saves the day? Even better, can you describe our campaign in a tweet?

2. I support you. Why do you need me? How can I make a difference?  How can I be part of the story? How can I bring it into my own community? How can I make my friends care about it? What have you got for me to do that’s more than a petition and less than getting arrested? Are you willing to let go some of your control, and let me have some responsibility?

3. Have you got objectives for which large numbers of people are going to be essential? How will we make a difference?

4. What are your key moments? When can people intervene and make a difference?

5. How are we a threat? How do we provoke the pushback that creates movements — where Goliath goes after David, when Gandhi or Mandela or Rosa Parks got thrown in jail?

6. Can we reach the decision makers directly? If not, what are the leverage points or power constituencies that we CAN reach that have the ear, or some other part of the anatomy, of the decision maker?

7. What makes our campaign cool and sexy?  What makes it witty? What makes it hilarious?

8.  How can we get others to carry our message? Who are the Third Party Validators who can say exactly what we say, but won’t be dismissed by the people we need to sway?

9.  What parts of our work can others do better? What part of the work are we uniquely suited to do? How do we focus on those things, and let others do what they do best?

10.  How do I know that others are involved? How do we create the sense of collective, of community, of movement? What are the signals by which we recognise each other, where are our gathering points, where are we counted?

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The Complete Idiot’s Guide to climate negotiations

I wrote this in 2001, at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg which was considering [urgent] action on climate change. I hope, that as Ministers now consider the draft agreement for [urgent] action at the Copenhagen Climate Summit, and Heads of State arrive to begin wrangling, that things will be different.

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Being a Head of State at the Earth Summit Copenhagen Climate talks

Hi kids! Have you been watching the proceedings of the Earth Summit in Johannesburg UN Climate talks in Copenhagen? Do you wish that YOU too could take bold commitments to save the world and turn them into mushy language full of loopholes, wiggle room, and ambiguity GUARANTEED to ensure you never have to lift a finger to save the planet???

Well now you CAN! Let’s pretend you’re a real world leader in Johannesburg Copenhagen! Here’s what you should do when handed a draft agreement.

Let’s say this draft contains the following statement:

All countries agree to phase out coal.

Isn’t that just awful? So clear and so simple a child could have written it, but it’ll mean a lot of work for you when you get home. It may also make some of those pals of yours a little bit upset. They might not buy you any more elections! So let’s swing into action!

Now, if you’re a national delegate, you can tell the Chairman that you want to put that statement in brackets. Brackets mean you’re not entirely happy with that text, and you’d like to strangle it. Go on. Any country can do it, all by themselves, for any reason at all. Brackets are cheap, so sprinkle them liberally throughout any text that suggest actually doing anything! It’s so easy!!!

[All countries agree to phase out coal.]

Now that you’ve got it in brackets, let’s add some cool inactivating phrases. Personally, I’ve always liked “take measures to.” Watch!

[All countries agree to {take measures to} phase out coal.]

Still, that’s a bit too crisp. So let’s reach into our document hat and find another nifty nugget. How about “have instruments in place”??? Sounds like lawyers will get involved! Now THAT ought to slow things down! Continue reading

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Thank you, Earth Day

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 coördinated way, and today we took the biscuit.

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Letter to an activist

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.

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Driving Apple to boast about green MacBooks

Apple launches the new MacBook with a TV ad touting the MacBook as “the greenest”

While I’m awaiting the reviews from our tech folks as to how much of that is greenwash and how much is substance, Ethical Corporation heaps  praise on the Green My Apple campaign for even getting them to the point of setting Green objectives and turning the environmental friendliness of their product into a spec and sales issue:

Rather than charting the environmental progress of Apple, the ad should be seen as a celebration of successful NGO campaigning by Greenpeace. This comes at a time that so many environmental campaign groups have been emasculated by the corporate dollar of so-called partnership. 

While they won’t say it publicly, industry insiders are the first to admit that they need campaigners to be tap, tap tapping on their corporate windows. What concerns them – and what should worry all of us – is that there is not enough tapping going on. ”

Amen to that.

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Greetings, Hippies: my Greenpeace induction speech.

A few years back, some bright spark in the Greenpeace International Human Resources department created an induction programme for new Greenpeace staff, and asked me to give a speech about “the old days.” I did, and because no good deed goes unpunished, ended up giving it again and again and again.  I finally wrote it down… or rather, I wrote down one version which I would deliver if I could actually stick to a script. Enjoy.

—————–

Greetings, Hippies!

Aha, I see a few of you cringing — but you’re in Greenpeace now, and they’ve wheeled me out as the honorary dinosaur. I’ve been asked to tell you a little bit about your past — about the organization’s past. I know a lot of you who have never known a world without the internet, DVDs, or Super Mario (and some of you look like you’ve never known a world without Facebook, which is profoundly scary) — you  may think that Greenpeace is a multinational corporation born in the marketing department of some slick PR firm, or the result of dot com boom startup.

I’m here to tell you, kids,  a hard truth:  your parents were hippies.

And I hope you’re sitting down, because it’s genetic.  Which means you’re hippies too.

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Recipe for saving a small planet

Here’s a little something I whipped up for my email signature a couple weeks ago:

 

Recipe for saving a small planet

Preserve 2 pristine polar seas
Add equatorial rainforests (intact)
Set aside 4/10ths of the world’s oceans
Sprinkle with reallocated military spending
Whisk in 1 energy revolution
Season with sustainable agriculture
Add fresh, clean drinking water
Let cool.

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Wall Street Journal: Parody ad flips Unilever

Catch that subhead? That ain’t Mother Jones there, that’s the Wall Street Journal, saying that the Greenpeace Dove ad parody campaign flipped Unliver into a policy of only buying palm oil from suppliers who can demonstrate they don’t cut down forests — Unilever’s mumbled demurings notwithstanding.

There were other elements of this campaign that don’t get that banner head treatment — months of research our Forest team put into our “Burning up Borneo” report on just how badly the world’s thirst for Palm Oil is wrecking Indonesia’s rainforests and how big a role Unilever products like Dove play in that market, quiet meetings with Unilever to ask them politely to do something about the problem, banners and monkeyshines at Unilever headquarters around the world when they didn’t — all of them essential to Unilever taking action, even if not as sexy as a piece positioning YouTube as an activist tool.

But whoever edited that headline decided that the parody ads were the big guns, and that’s a reflection of the power of brand attacks. I’ve been harping on this for ages, but harps wouldn’t be harps if they didn’t bear repeating: corporate targets are far easier to move than governments. Our first taste of this at Greenpeace was in the early 90s, when we were opposing Shell and the UK government over the dumping of the Brent Spar oil platform in the North Sea. The UK government was ready to fight it out with us. Her Majesty’s government does not bow to public pressure groups and all that. But Shell, having watched its reputation and brand value plummet as Europeans expressed outrage over treating the North Sea as their private garbage bin, did the right thing and backed down — leaving a redfaced UK government sputtering.

When we went after Coca Cola in 2000 over their use of climate-killing chemicals at the Sydney Olympics, we had an entire land-based campaign with all the traditional bells and whistles ready to launch. But we never got to deploy. We had pre-launched a brand-attack website with Adbusters, and were a bit surprised when the CEO of Coke rang us up within two weeks of going live to say they were committing to a phase out — a promise they made good on. Damn. Wasted all that work on those banners.

Our campaign against Electronic waste is moving the entire PC industry toward cleaner production and better recycling methods — not by changing international policies or national regulations — but by creating a race for Green kudos with our Ranking Guide, which pits brand against brand.

The jury is still out on whether Unilever is serious, or just trying to shoo us away with good noise. If they do what McDonalds did when we challenged their Soy purchasing policies — that is, actually engage with the industry to try and solve the problem of soy displacing Amazon rainforest, rather than simply switching to another supplier and ducking criticism — then Unilever probably gets out of the crosshairs. If they just punt out a roar of greenwash, that ain’t good enough.

But on balance, this all adds up to one thing. Governments are becoming obsolete as targets. Multinationals, not governments, determine where the world is heading. They are more flexible, more responsive to public pressure. And for activists, that means if we want to change the world, we need to change our targets. We don’t always have a choice, but when either a government or a high-profile, retail-facing corporation can both move an issue, choosing the corporate target is simply a no-brainer.

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