Don’t hire an Internet person 15 June, 2007
Posted by Zack in Online organizing, progressive strategy.18 comments
Every day I have the same conversation with at least one non-profit or campaign. They call and say, “Do you have an Internet person we can hire?” (Today I had four of these calls, and therefore this post.)
“No, don’t hire an Internet guy,” I say. “You need to make your senior leaders, campaigners & organizers responsible for the Internet just as they’re responsible for everything else. The Internet is the biggest, greatest opportunity you have—so why would you outsource it to some Internet person you’ll just stick in a closet anyways?”
But it usually feels like I’m wasting my breath. They call back a few weeks later and say, “We’ve taken your advice and decided to hire an Internet person…do you have any recommendations?”
So I think that all of us “Internet people” need to put our foot down. Let’s remove “Internet” from our titles and resumes. The longer we leave “Internet” on our name tags, the longer we’re enabling all this bad behavior—and devaluing our own contribution to the movement at the same time.
I know people who are the future of the progressive movement. Most of them have “Internet” stuck on them. But they are not Internet strategists, they are strategists. They are not Internet communicators, they are communicators. They are not Internet organizers, they are organizers.
Don’t take that “Director of Internet Communications” job. Take the “Director of Communications” job.
Everybody knows it’s time for a changing of the guard. To stop thinking of yourself as an Internet person is one way to help make it happen.
The geneome is a network, not a checklist of traits 15 June, 2007
Posted by Zack in Pseudoscience.add a comment
Not too many decades ago, scientists tried to link personality characteristics, intelligence and propensity for certain kinds of behavior or mental disorders to bumps on human skulls. In our time, scientists do something equally as silly by trying to map the same mysterious and enormous phenomena to individual genes.
A major international collaborative study has just given us a little bit of relief from that sort of present-day pseudoscience:
An international research consortium today published a set of papers that promise to reshape our understanding of how the human genome functions. The findings challenge the traditional view of our genetic blueprint as a tidy collection of independent genes, pointing instead to a complex network in which genes, along with regulatory elements and other types of DNA sequences that do not code for proteins, interact in overlapping ways not yet fully understood.
…The new data indicate the genome contains very little unused sequences and, in fact, is a complex, interwoven network. In this network, genes are just one of many types of DNA sequences that have a functional impact. “Our perspective of transcription and genes may have to evolve,†the researchers state in their Nature paper, noting the network model of the genome “poses some interesting mechanistic questions†that have yet to be answered.
More here.
Yay for the WY GOP 12 June, 2007
Posted by Zack in 2008.add a comment
(If this is real anyways…)
If you’re from Wyoming and over the age of 35, you can apply to become the state’s next senator.
The Wyoming Republican party announced the open-ended process to succeed the late Sen. Craig Thomas (R-Wyo.) at a press conference this morning, and posted an application form on the state party’s website.
“The process will be open. I want to invite every citizen of Wyoming to come and observe our work. Wyoming’s Republican Party has an incredibly deep bench, and we are going to see many of our best and brightest seek this chance to serve,†said Republican party chair Fred Parady.
But, actually, you can see from that “deep bench” quote that they’re still thinking in terms of all their State Legislators, Mayors and other career politicians. Why not invite “every citizen” not just to observe, but to consider running. Surely there are some amazing local leaders and business people who could put a better face forward for the party than whoever is sitting on the “bench.”
Thank you Ousmane Sembene 11 June, 2007
Posted by Zack in The Big Stuff.1 comment so far
Ousmane Sembene, Senegalese filmmaker and writer, dies at 84.
Please sometime read God’s Bits of Wood. It’s just the most amazing story…of a little girl, a father, a massive citywide African railway worker strike under colonialism, a revolution, a vision of the future. If we could somehow capture the spirit in which those characters lived in that book, and make it real again for this generation that’s coming up all around the world today. Then…even if we failed just like they did to make the revolution, at least we’d be keeping history going.
Ganz at Pentecost 4 June, 2007
Posted by Zack in prophetic politics.1 comment so far
Marshall Ganz just gave a great talk to the conference. He closed with four key elements that he believes link organizing together:
1) Relationships and relational skills. Relationships are the fundamental material of organization. Petitions are not relationships. Donations are not relationships. They may be very important, but they are not sufficient. What does it take to make a relationship? Commitment. Are you going to build relationships? Or are you just going to get names and dollars? It takes a community to build relationships.
2) Motivation. Why does your campaign, your effort, matter? Why should I commit my life to this? Anyone who challenges the status quo is not going to have the resources that those in power have. You have to compensate with resourcefulness—and that is driven by motivation and determination. Values are necessary for motivation. Stories are a key way to share values. Stories evoke feelings. Feelings drive motivation. The question is not whether we know the right thing, but whether we will act on it—and we get there through stories. Sometimes we get so focused on the nuts and bolts, that we forget to celebrate the values that we share. We have to do that or we will lose our way.
3) Like Jesus said, “Be shrewd as snakes and innocent as doves.” Be wily and resourceful. Use your creative and analytic powers. Being strategic means stepping out of routine and being thoughtful about mobilizing resources to accomplish the things that will make a difference.
4) Action. There’s a disrespect for craft prevalent today that gets in the way of action. There’s a difference between talking about action and acting—and that difference is capable practice of the craft of organizng. Example: holding a couple house meetings that go nowhere vs. holding house meetings that are designed correctly to breed additional house meetings.
Live blogging Pentecost 4 June, 2007
Posted by Zack in prophetic politics.add a comment
I’m at Sojourner’s Pentecost conference today. A few weeks ago I wrote about the ADD nature of tech conferences—where everyone has laptops open and barely pays attention to what the speakers are saying. Here, right now I’m the only one with a laptop open. Freddie Haynes, the pastor at a big Dallas Evangelical Church was just up. He had the whole place on their feet as he preached a message of economic revolution with some great metaphors. Example: Earth is like an insane asylum. And there’s a faucet running, and a sink overflowing, making a mess of the whole place. And because it’s an insane asylum, someone gets a mop and just starts mopping—only mopping—without thinking to go to the source and turn off the faucet. As the water rises, the insane just keep mopping. And so we have to take over this insane asylum by going to the source and fixing the fundamental problem.
It’s just the exact opposite experience of the typical tech conference. There is no way to keep a distance from the experience while posting slightly snarky comments about it the way we often do at tech and political conferences.
Now Brian McLaren is introducing the next panel. He’s talking about how, decades ago, many conservative Christians withdrew, in a way, from the “public square.” But at the same time, they set up vast networks ofconservative Christian radio and television broadcasting. The way he says it, they set up a new “civil religion” by establishing that broadcasting force, as well as by signing on with one of the political parties.
Shane Claiborne just told a great story: In Philadelphia, where he works with the Simple Way community that he helped found about 10 years ago, he says they’ve basically made homelessness illegal. For example, they’ve made it illegal to distribute food to homeless people in parks. So Shane and others set up in a park to serve communion. And because Catholics believe that the food in a communion service is not actually food but is transformed into the “body of Christ,” everyone participating said they were Catholics and told the police what they were serving wasn’t food. They got arrested anyways, but won in court.
Last night, at the opening “revival” Jim Wallis told two good jokes, one religious, one political:
Two Christian members of Congress, a Democrat and a Republican, are talking about their Faith. The Republican says to the Democrat, “You’re not a real Christian. And to prove it, I bet you twenty bucks you can’t recite the Lord’s Prayer.” The Democrat took the bet and started off, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray my lord my soul to keep…”* And the Republican says, “Wow, here’s your 20 bucks, I didn’t think you could do it!”
* Not the Lord’s Prayer, but rather a typical nighttime prayer taught to small children.
A man is drowning in a river, 100 feet off shore. A Republican hears the man’s cries, runs to the river, and throws out 50 feet of rope. “The rest is up to you!” he yells. A Democrat sees this and is appalled. He runs off and finds 200 feet of rope, throws it out to the drowning man…. And then lets go of his end of the rope.
I’m going to the Sojourners presidential candidates’ forum tonight here, so I’m looking forward to that.
