Recently, I wrote a post about an idea of trying to get the @kamalahq social media feeds going again. I took the following actions:
Reached out to the communications contact for my county Democratic committee, sent them a pointer to my post, and asked if there was anything the county committee could do to help. The person wrote me back, said they agreed with my post, and added a link to the post in that week’s newsletter. I waited a few days, but did not get any response. I touched base with the county committee person again, the response was “there are some connected people on the mailing list. I have not written back.
I signed up for a trial of LinkedIn Premium to be able to send directly email to Lauren Kopp (head person of @kamalahq feeds), asking if the feeds might be restarting. No response yet (need to remember to cancel my trial….)
Sent email to the digital director for the Oregon Democratic Party, with the same info I sent to the county party committee. No response yet.
What to do next? I will follow up to the state party office (probably should write the top person) and the county committee (maybe the comms person has some other ideas). I am not surprised by the level of response, but perhaps a second try will get a little farther.
There is a saying that ” your vote makes a difference” or “every vote is important”. In a Oregon House race that just concluded, every vote was, indeed, important.
This happened to be Oregon House District 22, in which I reside. The incumbent, Republican Tracy Cramer, was being challenged by Democrat Lesly Munoz. On November 5th, initial results showed Cramer leading by over 500 votes. However, as votes continued to be processed, Cramer’s lead narrowed. On November 14th, Munoz took the lead by a single vote.
Oregon is a vote-by-mail state, and in addition, Oregon counts votes mailed that are postmarked by Election Day and received within 8 days after Election Day. As a result, my county (Marion County, Oregon) was still receiving valid votes through November 12, and then was continuing to process ballots after that point. so vote totals kept changing.
After all valid ballots had been counted, there were still over 800 ballots for this House district that needed to be “cured” to be considered valid ballots. In general, this meant that there was a signature verification issue, and the ballots were set aside. Marion County then sent letters to all of those registered voters informing them of the problem and told them they had to go to the county elections office to “cure” their vote by 5pm on November 26th. The campaigns and parties also received lists of these voters, and worked to get these voters to cure their ballots. As of November 25th, there were still over 500 ballots not cured, and the last report from Marion County showed Munoz ahead by 149 votes. The final unofficial tally was released by Marion County around 6:00pm on November 26, with Munoz leading Cramer by 161 votes. Yes, in this race, every vote did make a difference.
Recently, Dave Winer has written about how the Democratic Party stops communicating its message when the election is over. His position is that the Republican Party has supporters/surrogates/podcasts/TV networks pushing the Republican message 24/7/365, but that the Democrats are only “on-the-air” during the lead up to an election.
This is not a new message from Dave Winer. He has long voiced the opinion that past Democratic campaigns (Obama in particular, but now Harris as well) shut down the campaign websites they created, lost contact with the voters they organized, and left a void in the Democratic Party organization. See also similar comments from Ken Smith echoing this refrain.
Shortly after the election, Dave Winer put out a request for identifying who was behind the @kamalahq social media feeds, which did a good job of responding to Republican activities during the 2024 presidential campaign, pretty much in real time. Within a few days, he had a name (Lauren Kapp), a link to her LinkedIn site, and a link to one of her TikTok videos, where she said that two staffers and three interns produced the content for these feeds. Based in the frequency of updates, I would say they worked seven days a week keeping the flow of content going.
I think it was great that Dave Winer was able to use his blog and network to find this person. His next steps were a little underwhelming, and I think it is worth taking some time to analyze how the “call to action” could have had more effect. His post of November 19th where he revealed the identity of Lauren Kapp included these words:
“We need to get her back on the air, with her team, fully funded and supported. We need leadership on the social web.”
Good statements, but no next action step provided. Also, the use of the “royal we” (“We need to…”) implies that someone needs to take the ball and move it forward, but no effort is made to identify or motivate “them”. If you wanted to try to do something about this communication problem, why stop at identifying the talent and leaving the rest up to “them”? Dave recorded a podcast giving some more detail on how he sees this project, but again, no next step is provided. Also, I think it would be easier for the target audience (“them”) if there was a next step in the post instead of trying to get someone to listen to a podcast that has no action step.
Two days later, Dave Winer followed up on his first post, saying he would contribute $100 to get @kamalahq “back on the air”:
“Let’s get the Dems back on the air before the inauguration. I’ll kick in $100 to get it started, and I’ll tell everyone I know to fund it too. There’s no time to waste.”
A nice offer, but who is going to do something about it? The phrase “when everyone is in charge, no one is in charge” comes to mind. Dave’ earlier version of this post encouraged people to reach out to every Democratic influencer they know about this topic, but it ended up getting revised to “I’ll throw in money when someone else puts it together. Maybe he made some other efforts, but if he did, why not tell us about it?
Before I examine some alternatives, I want to be clear – this is a typical problem of ideas thrown out on the Internet. “Here’s an idea, world – get back to me when you have it implemented”. I am boring down a little deeper on this one because Dave puts out calls like this fairly often, and I think it’s a good idea, but sometimes ideas need help.
Now, what if there were some steps suggested that people could take like:
Reaching out to Lauren Kopp before even making the first post and seeing if she is interested in participating in keeping this news flow going, and if she is, telling us about it. That could provide a spark.
If she is interested, start a GoFundMe or some other crowdfunding vehicle to see if there is other interest.
Reach out to your local Democratic county organization or state organization, provide links to these posts, see if there is interest/support (here is a next step for readers)
Keep banging the drum (Dave says he does this for projects he is promoting)
These are a few ideas of how to help make this idea (getting a prolific social media platform for Democrats going again) a reality again.
SPOILER ALERT: I actually did steps 1 and 3, will post back on what response I get…taking action is key, not just posting ideas on the Internet…
Beardy Star Stuff: Building on-the-ground community democracy (November 2023) – more good stuff on organizing (saw it in Featured Posts section)
Beardy Star Stuff: Organizing and active citizenship – practical advice for taking personal action in the world (thanks for reposting this!)
I have finished updating KamalaCampaignTimeline.com with the latest campaign news through September 1st – check it out!
I just finished listening to the two podcasts by Dave Winer on what we need from Biden, and his conversation with Jeff Jarvis on how to work around the brokenness of the mainstream media in the 2024 election. This was an excellent conversation. I have several comments on the Jeff Jarvis podcast, and will cover them in this post, and there is a separate podcast at the end of this post.
Jeff Jarvis brought up two points based on prior writing/conversations with Dave Winer. One was “the power of the link”, and the other was that people should uses their own personal spaces to respond to someone else’s post or story. I agree that if you are going to talk about someone, or something that they wrote, you should link to it. However, recently Dave Winer wrote a post critical about the people and work of the Podcasting 2.0 effort (how they reimplemented rssCloud), but he did not link to the thing he was complaining about (I had to track it down). How does this square with what was discussed in this podcast? I think it is inconsistent at a minimum, and perhaps bordering on hypocrisy.
Another topic was people commenting on social media posts, and how a lot of these comments were “spam”, in that people were not responding to what was posted, but were posting to try to take advantage of the “flow” of the original poster (in this case, I am assuming it was Dave Winer – it could also happen to Jeff Jarvis, but it was Dave Winer who brought it up). This is a tricky topic. Both Dave Winer and Jeff Jarvis said they want to encourage conversation (well, maybe it was Jeff more than Dave). However, if you want to have conversation, you have to give people the chance to say something. If the response to comments is deleting comments, or blocking people because they disagree or are critical, this discourages people from commenting. If I write a post commenting on another post (either compliments or criticism), how should I inform the person or site I am are writing about? Both Dave Winer and Jeff Jarvis said people should be “respectful”. That sounds good, until the conversation gets blocked. I do not have any solutions to offer here, but if someone wants to have a conversation, it has to be two-way/bidirectional. In the case of social media apps, part of the design of the apps, in my opinion, is to encourage conversation. Blocking people and deleting comments in a thread do not give the impression that someone wants to have a conversation.
The next topic I would like to address is providing an alternative to the mainstream media. Dave Winer talked at some point about individuals creating stories (covering events (like reporters, I suppose)) and creating/editing a flow of stories (again I assume this is mainstream media stories, which is a lot of what get commented about on blogs). I will address the “flow of stories” idea first. During the 2020 George Floyd protests, I started a site to curate the mainstream media and social media coverage of the protests in Portland, Oregon. The site was called Portland Protest News, and I updated it daily for a month and a half before I had to stop due to an illness. I set up news flows from mainstream media (primarily using RSS feeds), reviewed those feeds on a daily basis, selected stories to post, created a post with links to those stories, and also created a newsletter with the same content. At best, I was able to do this in an hour. Most of the time, it was 1.5 hours, and sometimes two hours. It was difficult to do this and work a regular 8 hour day. To me, the curated flow that Dave Winer talked about in the podcast with Jeff Jarvis would take at least this much time. Someone would have to put in that time to create a dynamic site with daily posts.
Next, I would like to discuss the topic of people covering events. I thought the idea of protesting the New York Times was interesting, and the idea of others news organizations covering that protest might occur. However, in a recent post of mine commenting on an essay by Anne Applebaum on protests in Poland, Applebaum stated that protests, if not carefully targeted, achieve little. I do not think there would be a clear enough goal to make protesting the New York Times effective. I think that the idea of independent writers/bloggers attending events and publishing accounts of this events is worthwhile, but I think there are several issues as well. Finding out about events takes work, attending events takes time, and writing about the events takes time and effort. Who will do these things? Who will coordinate this work? How will the posts/stories be distributed so that others can find out about them? The story “The Little Red Hen” comes to my mind, where one animal does all the work to produce a loaf of bread. Where are the “little red hens” to do this work?
There are some independent news organizations covering state legislatures (States Newsroom) and voting issues (Votebeat). There are small news startups trying to cover local news (Salem Reporter in Salem, Oregon as an example). There is even a online newspaper in Washington state (the Sammamish Independent) that is produced by volunteers. These are all current examples of independent coverage. Some of them have some funding, but many are dependent on subscriptions or donations. Doc Searls, in his work at the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University, has written a series of stories about “The News Commons“, and experiments in the Bloomington Indiana area. So, I point to these examples of “little red hens”, each with a focus, but providing inspiration and food for thought to others.
I welcomed this podcast, as it shared many ideas and food for thought. I hope my analysis has done the same, and I welcome any and all feedback. No one will be blocked or deleted, I assure you!
I recently posted a quote from Hannah Arendt: “We are free to change the world and start something new in it” . I would like to point to a recent post by Ken Smith about how to solve the problem of Donald Trump. He organized his post as a series of problems to be addressed. I think the structure of this post could be implemented as a website in a fairly straightforward manner. I will try to create something in the next week that could serve as a model. Maybe I can even get Ken Smith or someone to collaborate with me on this project. Any assistance would be welcomed!
Yes, I watched the CNN debate on Thursday with Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Yes, I thought Joe Biden’s “performance” at the debate was poor, compared to the confidence of Trump’s presentation. However, Biden answered the questions set by the moderators and generally answered those questions truthfully, while Trump repeatedly refused to answer the questions in the debate, even after being pressed several times for some of those questions. Trump told so many lies that it took CNN’s Daniel Dale several minutes just to list all the lies that Trump spewed out over the course of the debate (also see text of fact checking). As Joe Biden mentioned afterwards, “It’s hard to debate a liar.”.
While Biden’s performance is rightly being criticized, it was the debate moderators who allowed Donald to steamroll the truth with an incessant stream of increasingly bizarre and dangerous lies — that he, not President Biden instituted a cap on insulin, that blue states allow women and their doctors to commit infanticide, and that Nancy Pelosi was somehow responsible for January 6th — while refusing to answer the questions asked of him. Why Jake Tapper and Dana Bash chose to abdicate their journalistic responsibility in service to a man who is an enemy of American democracy and a free press only they know, but that abdication should be a much bigger story, I know who Joe Biden really is. And I know who my uncle really is. And I’ll take the decent guy with the sore throat who believes in democracy over the rapist insurrectionist monster every single time.
Biden will not step away from the 2024 election cycle because it would hand the presidency, beyond any doubt, to a confirmed rapist, serial sexual assailant, active insurrectionist, convicted felon, pathological liar, malignant narcissistic sociopath, gleeful adulterer, career criminal, unrepentant con man, traitorous would-be U.S. dictator, misogynist, antisemite, racist, homophobe, transphobe, Islamophobe, and budding war criminal.
Tonight was the first debate between President Joe Biden and presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, and by far the most striking thing about the debate was the overwhelming focus among pundits immediately afterward about Biden’s appearance and soft, hoarse voice as he rattled off statistics and events. Virtually unmentioned was the fact that Trump lied and rambled incoherently, ignored questions to say whatever he wanted; refused to acknowledge the events of January 6, 2021; and refused to commit to accepting the result of the 2024 presidential election, finally saying he would accept it only if it met his standards for fairness.
The American people have a choice between a convicted felon and liar, and a man who has fought to preserve democracy and improve our way of life. I am going with the second one.
How many people does it take to change the world? This BBC article summarizes research by Erica Chenowith, finding that non-violent protests engaging 3.5% of a population have never failed to bring about change. For the US, this would be 11,721,000 per this Wikipedia article. Let’s get started!
