Action

There are 51 posts filed in Action (this is page 3 of 6).

DIY Television: A handbook

Community Media: A handbook for revolutions in DIY TV (via Frank Meeuwsen) – I read through this site today, it has a nice history of alternative television (my words) and suggestions on tools/methods on creating your own television (notice I am not using the word “videos”). The impression this handbook gives is that distribution is as important as production (if no one is watching, is it TV?). In today’s splintered landscape of news/information/entertainment in video form, I don’t know if this will take hold to any significant degree. However, it did make me want to make a video…

There was also some discussion of podcasting as a democratic new medium. As a podcast producer myself (Convocast, Thinking About Tools for Thought, In The Car Podcast), to me this might be the way to go to get your message out (and can still be done cheaply on WordPress.com or using my notes on self-hosted WordPress).

Making progress in the world

It is easy to fall into a “consumption” mode of life, where most if not all free time is spent taking in news and information about things, but not producing anything with that news/information, or not producing anything at all. Similarly, it is easier to comment on the current state of affairs in the world than it is to take action to make something happen. It is easier to complain about your job, or neighbors, or other people or events, than to make some change (get a different job, find new friends, move). 

To me it comes down to three things: (1) what do you want?, (2) what do you need to do to get what you want?, and (3) what are you doing about it? I have problems with the first one, for sure. Trying to make a decision about what to do with my free time, or what thing I want to change in my life, can be a difficult process – there are so many choices, and only so much time. If I do not decide what I want, I can’t move on to items 2 and 3.

Here is an excerpt from a post by Gary North (paywalled), writing on “What Do You Really Want to Achieve?”: 

Here are the three inescapable questions: (1)What do I want to achieve? (2) How soon do I want to achieve it? (3) What am I willing to pay (do without)?

When you have this on paper, you are ready to develop a plan to achieve this. This plan must have time markers: quarterly, yearly, five years. It must have specific intermediate goals that will let you measure your progress.

This is psychologically difficult to do. Most people will not do it. Those few who do will not follow through with self-evaluations on time, which involve plan revisions. So, time dribbles away. Progress is catch-as-catch-can.

Finally, this post breaks down this method of making progress (even though it focuses on screenwriting, the advice is sound for any endeavor):

“A dream written down with a date becomes a GOAL. A goal broken down into steps becomes a PLAN. A plan backed by ACTION makes your dreams come true.” 

Time to get started figuring out what I want!#

Greg Wilson: Eleven Tips for Organizational Change “This was a proposal for the US Research Software Engineer Association 2023 conference, but was rejected…. I recognize that they are incomplete—in particular, that they are strongly biased toward what works in affluent, democratic societies—but if you’re tired of rolling heavy rocks up steep hills over and over again, maybe they will help.”

The subject of organizing in activism

Ken Smith recently wrote about how Rosa Parks was successful because “Rosa Parks had this skill set, these allies, this long-term strategy with her people . . .”. To me, this implies organization, or an organization with goals and plans to achieve those goals. In Jacobin Magazine, Clement Petitjohn writes that social movements in the US have typically relied on “professional organizers”, while in France this formal role is scarce. Quote: “This doesn’t mean that no organizing is done in France, of course. It just points to the fact that the various tasks associated with organizing work break down differently in France and in the United States.”. Petitjohn has a new book from Haymarket Press titled “Occupation: Organizer – A Critical History of Community Organizing in America”, based on research he did for his PhD at the University of Chicago. The Guardian newspaper has a recent article on the efforts of the French unions on protest the raising of the national retirement age.

For other looks at organizing, Joe Burns’ recent book Class Struggle Unionism “draws on years of labor activism and study of labor tradition … and outlines the key set of ideas common to class struggle unionism and shows how these ideas can create a more militant, democratic and fighting labor movement. “. Finally, for people trying to figure out where they might participate as an activist, Hillary Rettig’s book The Lifelong Activist “…is based on my many years’ experience as an activist and coach: work in which I learned which personal habits, thoughts and beliefs tend to help people succeed at ambitious goals, and which don’t.”. This book is now available free online.

Followup on “Tools next to tools” post by Ken Smith and activism

I really liked this post by Ken Smith on how FeedLand has a link-blogging feature (to help easily publish items of note) and his repeated call for activism and how tools can support activism. I thought that was great how Ken added a link to a “Get involved” page on how to be a part of how his NASA news product is put together.

My contribution to this discussion is to point back to two posts (Looking for tools for a citizen’s toolkit and Using non-violence techniques to achieve goals) where I collected some resources for training for activism. Ken, how can you and I get these into some of these things you are publishing? You talk about “Almost nobody’s helping us educate ourselves on activism that has a chance.” Well, let’s do something about that.

To start, I have just created a public OPML file with the links from these posts, it can be viewed here. If you have other links to add (or if other readers have links), I will add them. Then, you and I should continue to refer to this list whenever the subject of “how to learn how to be an activist” or “how to get involved” or FILL IN THE BLANK HERE comes up. How does that sound? Let me know what you think – over to you!

In the end, it is up to us

This phrase first came to my mind in a therapy session, but since then I have realized that it applies to every aspect of our lives. The first time it came to me, I wanted the therapist to “fix” something, but in that session, I saw that it was up to me and the others involved to solve the issue. The therapist could suggest options or encourage/facilitate dialog, but it was up to us to solve the problem in front of us.

In this current political, economic, social, and media atmosphere, there are many people (sometimes, it feels like EVERYONE) who are calling out problems wherever they turn. Many people are experiencing social and economic problems. Many people look to their local, state and federal governments for help, and those organizations/agencies/administrations all seek to address the problems of towns, cities, states, and the nation. Still – I believe that for almost all problems that occur in our lives, the first step to solving the problem starts with us. In the political realm, it may mean giving up the comfort of armchair quarterbacking the evening news and spending your time and money to support or fight against an issue or candidate. In the economic realm, it may mean having to seek other employment, education, or assistance. In the social realm, maybe the people you associate with are dragging you down, and a change is needed. For many, inaction is the default response to problems.

So, the next time a problem appears in front of you, ask yourself the question – is there something I can do about it? It may be that the answer is no, but the reflection is vitally important. I feel that all of us have agency to take some steps to improve our lives or where we live or our world. Indeed, in the end, it is up to all of us to work together to solve the problems that face us. 

Using non-violence techniques to achieve goals

In a recent post on Waging Nonviolence, organizer George Lakey related a story about use of non-violence training and techniques in a boycott of South African sport teams during the apartheid era. Through these trainings, anti-racism and anti-apartheid groups were able to work together to come up with a plan to stage de-centralized civil disobedience events. The New Zealand government could not handle this approach, and cancelled a tour by the South African rugby team.

With the upcoming mid-term elections, there may be problems resulting from election protestors and disrupters. These techniques may be of use in this troubled time. We will have to wait, watch, and perhaps take action to preserve our democracy through civil disobedience.

Upholding our democracy

The United States is having challenges in maintaining and upholding democracy. In Oregon, all of the candidates for governor have all called each other “extreme” for one reason or another. In many states, people who deny the results of the 2020 presidential election won their primaries and are candidates for high office. The Democracy Day journalism collaborative held an event in September 2022 to highlight issues and seek solutions. In a post on Waging Nonviolence, the group outlined seven ideas for coming together as partisans for democracy:

  • Look beyond electoral politics
  • Define “anti-democratic” behavior beyond partisan identities
  • Bridge the understanding of “anti-democratic” behavior to mobilize against it
  • Calling out toxic othering
  • Now is not the time for neutrality
  • Partisanship for democracy versus bipartisanship
  • A cross-ideological democracy movement is both necessary and possible

This post is excellent reading, with many links to supporting material. As for each of us, let us do what we can to help uphold our democracy.

More thoughts on organizing information for use

I recently created a web app to use the opmlPackage NPM module from Dave Winer to display the contents of four OPML files at one time. The app uses the includes feature, which can read other OPML files from a single OPML file and save the content locally for processing. I created four OPML files myself for this test app, but the four files could have been created by anyone. 

So the main benefit of the OPML Includes site is that it can display multiple outlines (which can be edited by multiple people, not just one person) and have the content refreshed whenever someone goes to the site. If the content is changing on a frequent basis, this could be an easy way to see the updates. If the content is fairly static, it may not be significant. In that case, single page apps could be used to view the outlines separately, so perhaps there is not much benefit in using the includes feature in opmlPackage.

Ken Smith has had some thoughts about potential uses:

“And I’m still musing about uses. About the slide down into the archive problem of blogging and social media, and maybe using the app as a partial remedy. Keeping the good stuff in view, and adding to the good stuff over time and linking the good stuff to a wider circle of relevant content. Taking the web part of the web seriously rather than letting the slide down into the archive turn it all into ghostly memories.”

Again, an OPML outline, rendered using existing tools, could provide a way to collect that information in a single document. In 2010, Jay Rosen’s Studio 20 journalism program at New York University partnered with ProPublica to research the area of “explainers”, or explanatory journalism at a site called explainer.net. The site is still available on the Internet Archive. I think that this is a method of addressing the “slide down into the archive” problem, but it does take effort. Someone has to create such an explainer, and then monitor the Web for items related to that topic, read and curate them, and add them to the explainer as needed. The main problem is someone has to have the desire and interest to collect information on a topic and share that information. If there is no one with that interest, no tool for collecting and displaying that information is going to be of much use.