[sthompson]

Hi Aaron, thanks for starting this topic. We got your email here at Vive and think what you're doing seems really interesting, and useful. Any suggestions for how we could possibly make use of it with this site, and how we can support you?<br /> <br /> BTW, I've created an entire section for discussions of tools for online activism, since I'd really like to see more tech-heavy discussion on the topic between people who know what they're doing. I used to work for MoveOn.org as you know and I've seen what can be done with these tools up close. But it seems as though people working on these ideas haven't connected much here in Canada yet.<br /> <br /> Here on Vive our resident tech expert is Jesse, our tech director and coder of most of the site. I'm more an idea person, in other words I can sometimes come up with ideas but I can't code them myself. I'd really like to use this site to become more innovative, and develop new tools for activism--that's been a goal from the beginning, but for that, we need more people willing to work on it and code. The software is open source so really anyone with motivation could do it, but for some reason no one does. Right now it's hard enough to put even some more basic coding together, since we just need people to share the work. For example just finding someone just to make PHP pages for sending email postcards has been unsuccessful so far. Let alone getting into developing more tools to be tested with the site.<br /> <br /> Jesse has said maybe we should put some effort into creating a separate open source Vive technical project to attract more interest, which may be a good idea, and give us the ability to bring together people who have a passion for this kind of work. I think the potential for online activism has just barely been explored here in Canada, and it's a huge source of strategic power to the left if we can just start tapping into it.

[gaulois]

Technology generally gets in the way when the objectives are not clear. It would be useful to have a better handle on them as online media participants. Am a little sceptical about campaign email letters. The main issue that I see is to get people out of their apathy. The best way to do that is to educate them. This gets done through their medias in some sort of info-tainment way. By raising the bar on the conventional medias, we would do this "online activism". Improving interoperations with other medias (i.e. media watch) could be quite useful.

[sthompson]

MoveOn.org grew to an organization of 2 million people, lot of $$ and considerable clout just through online petitions and email campaigns that use simple technology like the ability to forward or to "tell-a-friend" to spread the word and gain support. So why be skeptical? But Vive certainly has evolved mainly in an alt media way, and yes, looking at ways to improve/build that with technology is important. I view our strategy as two-fold, with emphasis on both: 1) educate/inform 2) act.

[akreider]

Developing your own platform is hard. Unless you have a lot of staff/volunteer time or other resources, or unless you are doing something complex that must be done your own way, it makes more sense to use an existing platform.<br /> <br /> I'd recommend <a href='http://www.civicspacelabs.org'>CivicSpace</a> which is basically a version of <a href='http://www.drupal.org'>Drupal</a>.<br /> <br /> That platform would work well for this site (I think - I'm not an expert on content-management systems). They've got a module format - where you build small modules to add extra features. Someone could write an email-postcard module.<br /> <br /> They have a lot of development going on to make the software better. If you have a good suggestion, someone might take you up on it.<br /> <br /> --<br /> <br /> That said, I've been developing my own platform. I guess I didn't know any better when I started! It is a lot of work - I've been working on it (and doing some outreach too) for three years, full-time.<br /> <br /> I'm going to try and merge my software so it will run on CivicSpace/Drupal (as well as by itself) - we'll see how well I achieve that.<br /> <br /> ---<br /> <br /> My software is aimed at anyone who wants to do networking and to work on campaigns. My belief is that there are a lot of alternative media sites (at least in the US), and that nobody is doing a good job of promoting networking around building skills and winning campaigns.<br /> <br /> MoveOn and other organizations only reach people at the surface level. Getting someone to donate money or send an email or write a letter is a first step towards becoming an activist. It's a lot different from getting involved in a local group, organizing meetings, holding events, and struggling to win a campaign and feeling empowered when you win.<br /> <br /> Skills are critical. We have majorities of the public on our side on most issues, but only a fraction of these people have skills and the confidence to run campaigns.<br /> <br /> My software pushes skills by sharing information about upcoming events (half or more of which are conferences - many of which have skills workshops) and with over 300 online resources (often related to organizing).<br /> <br /> I've got some stuff for campaigns - including the ability to connect everything to a campaign, and for people to write campaign updates, and soon: the ability to create customized campaign websites/webpages.<br /> <br /> --<br /> <br /> How vivelecanada could use this software ranges from just plugging into one feature, like the events calendar (displaying an upcoming list of events in Canada and giving people the opportunity to add their own), to using the whole thing - so your users could search for people, groups, resources, campaigns, email lists (etc), in Canada.<br /> <br /> It'd install and run on your site. So it'd attract people to your website, and in exchange you'd be attracting people on this site to start sharing information with a network of many activist websites (all running the software).<br /> <br />

[sthompson]

Bearing in mind as always that I am not a technical whiz by any means, and I'm still waiting to hear from our tech director etc for their probably far more accurate thoughts, here are some random thoughts of mine...<br /> <br /> I do agree that email campaigns like those run by MoveOn reach only the surface level of activism. However, that is undoubtedly part of the reason they've been successful with that, because sending an email requires a lower level of commitment and it is therefore easier to GET that commitment from people than it is to get a higher level of commitment (sitting on a board, running a campaign). And of course mass emailings etc DO have the great potential to make an impression on decision-makers (see for eg missile defence and ceasefire.ca) AFAIK they have also used that surface contact to get people involved with organizing phone campaigns, meetings with politicians, etc. So basically some techniques should be used as a point of entry/low commitment activism, and deeper commitment encouraged as well. <br /> <br /> Talking specifically about Vive since that's my own main concern, I think we already do encourage a bit more participation than say MoveOn on this site, by allowing more comments, having forums and letting users post material to the site. We also started the Canadian sovereignty Meetups through Meetup.com which give people a way to get together in person and potentially organize their own chapters/events--so far under-utilized, IMHO. <br /> <br /> Holding skills workshops or helping people find skills workshops etc to train them to be activists is an interesting idea though--skills workshops, as part of conferences on deep integration issues, might be a great way to train people for this work, or at least those people motivated enough to want to become more active. We do have some information on this site about how to act (see blocks in actions section) but not a whole lot. When I think about our site specifically as it currently is and how to apply that, maybe a regular "how to" column in the stories on the site, likely in its own "Activist How-To Section" so they would be archived in one place, highlighting different aspects of organizing, with simultaneous mailings to members through our "take action" email list, would be effective? We could even ask activists across the country to guest-write them. However we're not currently offering resources as downloads the way your site is, which I think is a very good idea; we do have a downloads section of our own, and could encourage more posting of "resources" there, but offering access to your resources may also be very helpful to our members/readers.<br /> <br /> As for platforms etc...on Vive we're using Geeklog and a lot of what we've been doing involves just adding to/altering features Geeklog has. Not sure how that compares/would work with the module system on CivicSpace; that's a question for someone who can program. I took a look at the benefits/features section of CivicSpace and saw a few interesting things which at the very least might provide some inspiration for how to improve the features we have. We already have forums, but we can't yet "even enable your forum to accept and send email messages just like a yahoo group"; I like the idea of the following "Attach files to any post as easily as attaching files to emails"; we have a calendar and events listing, but it would be useful to "send and track invitations to events and find and manage volunteers"; we have mailing lists but they could have expanded features, we have a user registration form but we could be collecting more data and doing more with it, etc etc. It would definitely be useful to have better campaign pages within our site, which could as you suggest "connect everything to a campaign and for people to write campaign updates" etc.<br /> <br /> More re the CampusActivism website. It's a little different for us because we don't have a "location" per se--we're totally web-based--and your site works on geographical locations in large part (but I guess most would). I could see it being useful to promote our actions etc and make sure more activists across Canada know about them. I very much like the general idea that something could be uploaded and appear on a network of websites across Canada; whether this would be accomplished with your software or other software, on your site or on another site, it would be very useful to allow groups to upload Canadian sovereignty campaigns for eg to one central site and have them instantly appear on all sites connected to that site and infor sent to all interested people (that'd be much better than the simple list of websites/campaigns currently offered on Securitycheck.ca). It would be great if we could develop Vive or Securitycheck.ca into something like that for sovereignty sites, beyond our current event/calendar function. I also like the idea of uploading flyers and having several websites access them, but not just as an example to use when creating their own campaigns, but so they can actually print them and distribute them as part of currently running campaigns. <br /> <br /> There must be so many innovative tools for activism out there, and so many that could potentially be developed...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br />

[Jesse]

Geeklog, the software we currently use, has a decent plugin system, which we're using to some extent. What we *really* need is a bilingual CMS, which I have yet to find. The lack of french content is really holding us back at the moment, much more than any inability to send postcards.