easy way to impact the election

Cool idea, something anyone can do. You can use Blogger or MySpace blogs to do it, and possibly LiveJournal, too. Easy way to impact races all over the country from home.

Yay technology.

Two things.

One, a message from group member John Szewczyk:

Anyone who lives in the Vermont Area and is interested there is a service leadership conference in Montpelier the weekend of November 10th-12th. If you are interested I can email you the registration form and information. It costs money to attend but if you are involved in some kind of leadership role at your school you could get them to pay for it, like I did. Actually I won't be able to attend but I sent my entire AmeriCorps team there on the schools budget. I attended this conference last year and it was a great learning experience, there are many different workshops on all aspects of service and you can choose which ones you want to attend and personalize the experience for your own interests, plus I got to network with a bunch of other kids from other schools around here who are interested in the same things we are. If you want info email me at 4achange@norwich.edu, I will also keep you on an email list and inform you of future opportunities I come across.

Two, another baby step for the website: it's now got a functioning chatroom. Like I said in the last post, cool to see stuff developing. Hard to say how far away we are from completion, but progress is progress.

Okay, that's all for now. Stay tuned, there'll be more posts next week. And if you have announcements you'd like to see here, please get in touch with us. Thanks!

Website Update

Jake D has finished the registration/login feature of the site, so you can go over and register now. Nothing to do yet (the other features aren't set up yet), but it's a start. Pretty cool to see the site evolving!

http://www.losethelabel.org/

Next up: profiles and forums.

We still need help with the coding and layout. If you or anyone you know are tech savvy and able to donate some time, please contact Jake D at jduhig at siu dot edu or me at stremolo at hotmail dot com.

The Website's Potential

A scenario to illustrate what I want the website to be capable of:

On Monday, President Bush nominates Judge Erwin Jiggledurmer for the Supreme Court. He has a track record of opposing civil liberties, abortion, and GLBT rights. He has hinted that he favors overturning Roe v Wade.

University of Oklahoma student Jenny Wonglejonk doesn’t like the nomination. She is part of the campus ACLU chapter and wants to do everything in her power to stop the nomination from going through. But what can she do as just one student at just one campus? People in Washington DC don’t care about what happens at the University of Oklahoma. What to do then?

On Tuesday, Jenny posts a blog on LosetheLabel.org criticizing the nomination and asks if people are interested in organizing protests at their campuses to resist the nomination. Over 100 people leave comments on the blog pledging to get involved and a movement is born. They create the LosetheLabel group “Students Against Justice Jiggledurmer,” which they use to communicate with each other and and work out event details.

Wednesday night, they hold a meeting in an AIM chatroom. They set the protest date for the following Thursday. They also create committees to manage fundraising (they plan to ask for donations through ActBlue.org, a website Jake Thorn told them about) and media issues (if they’re going to protest at 100 campuses, it makes sense to have a press release and contact some major media outlets beforehand).

They organize protests at their schools (or contact other activists at their schools to organize protests… Amnesty International chapters, Democratic clubs, women’s rights groups, etc). The next Thursday, only ten days after Jenny’s blog, protests go off at 100 campuses (the participants call their Senators, too, and write letters), gaining national media attention (Jenny’s interviewed on Anderson Cooper 360 that night) that provides critical muscle to Democratic Party opposition to Jiggledurmer, whose nomination is defeated.

What the website needs for something like this to happen:
*a messaging feature
*a profile feature (to strengthen the culture, bring people closely together)
*a blog feature that allows anyone to post diaries, and anyone to post comments
*a groups feature that enables smooth distribution of information
*a large, diverse, engaged community from which to draw volunteers
*a blog culture that centers on action, not just opinion
*Jenny Wonglejonk

We already have the people. And even through Facebook’s crappy technology, we have the technology to accomplish feats like this… it’s just a lot harder than it needs to be, since the community isn’t focused on facilitating activism and the culture is so resistant to it (lotta apathetic people on Facebook). Still, groups, discussion threads, notes, and messaging make it at least hypothetically possible to pull it off. The culture isn’t there yet, but the tools are there.

We’ll need a lot more, but we have enough to start moving in this direction.

This is what I see the group evolving into. For ANY issue. We need to be respectful of each other. In the example, it’s entirely possible that someone else at LosetheLabel will organize events at 100 other campuses in FAVOR of the nomination. I don’t know. But I’ll tell you this, no matter what, the end result is young people engaging in politics and becoming empowered.

Empowering young people is about the best thing we can possibly do for this country.

The Origin of this Group

So where did this group come from???

The Short Version:

Facebook.

The Long Version:

Around September 4th, Facebook changed its format to include a controversial information-sharing feature called “Newsfeed” that disturbed hundreds of thousands of users. A group called “Students against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook)” emerged and gained roughly 500,000 members in a matter of hours. Wall posts were moving at extremely high speed, reaching rates of 100 posts per minute.

It was a riot.

I was watching this unfold and I thought two things. First, ‘holy crap, this is hilarious, it’s a damn riot.’ Second, ‘what if we could channel some of this energy into something more productive?’

So I decided to experiment.

I created a group called “Students for Changing the Post-Minifeed World.” The purpose was just to steal some of the energy from the “Students against Facebook News Feed” group and turn it into action on social justice issues. The first step was just to assemble all the people who were watching the Riot and wishing we could do something more.

So me and a few UCSB activist buddies started spamming the wall of the “Students against Facebook News Feed” group with the following scripts:

Hi, sorry to interrupt the minifeed hatefest, but we created a group yesterday for people who care about things other than minifeed. Please join it … if you care about things other than minifeed. We’re just trying to channel this energy into something productive.

Link: http://ucsb.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2207879909

Thanks for reading.

and this one:

Spamming for social justice!

http://ucsb.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2207879909

Bump!

We worked in teams. One or two people would post our spam message over and over again on the wall, and one or two other people would defend them when trolls started calling them fags and whatnot. That way, we could post the message and explain it and recruit members at the same time.

In other words... we were winging it.

But about 300 people joined the group on that first night.

It continued growing for a few days through invites and further raids on the “Students against Facebook News Feed” group. We reached 700 before we leveled out.

So we had spontaneously gathered 700 students from all across the country who wanted to fight apathy.

Not bad!

So now that we had the people, we had to figure out what to do. I posted a discussion thread asking what cause(s) we should get behind, but we weren’t able to agree on anything and it was getting divisive and contentious. Understandable, considering that we’d come together in such a spontaneous way… how can that many people agree that any one cause is more important than another???

No worries.

So instead of committing to one issue, we came up with a way to take up every issue.

A website.

A Facebook for student activists. A place where well-meaning people from all over the country could come together and meet and organize national networks around the issues they care about. An action center. A forum. A think tank. Good people. Good ideas. Good results. Communication facilitating action.

Social networking for social justice.

We also set a ‘meeting’ for the following Sunday night, to be held in an AIM chatroom. The agenda consisted of drafting a mission statement and developing a course of action.

Roughly 20 students participated in the meeting. We came up with a name—Lose the Label—and the mission statement on the group front page right now. We also developed the website idea.

The site ran into problems initially (site hosting issues), but as of writing, they’re making good progress. It’ll be weeks before it’s up, but when it is, we’ll have an incredibly powerful activism tool. We just have to be patient. If you can help, please contact Jake Duhigg at jduhig@siu.edu.

In the meantime, we’re going to start using the Facebook group itself to facilitate activism. The discussion threads have a lot of untapped potential, hopefully we can use those. Next week should be very interesting.

So that's where the group came from. (And a hint at where we're going.)

Stay in touch and please come back to this blog for updates on what we're up to.