Activism

There are 126 posts filed in Activism (this is page 8 of 13).

Activism in Atlanta

I did a search for “activism 101” yesterday, and found an episode of the podcast While Black, recorded in 2019, interviewing an activist called City. City does activism in Atlanta, Georgia, with a current focus on police brutality. I listened to it today, and jotted down some notes when the interviewer asked for three things that someone who wants to get involved in activism should do (35-40 minutes into the podcast):

  • Find what problem that you are going to be passionate about.
    • Half of the people only find problems that everyone is talking about, but are not passionate about it 
  • Find your organization that is already working on that problem.
    • You don’t have to join them, but you can work along side them
  • Put yourself in a position where economically your problem can be fixed
    • Make sure that your livelihood is not affected
    • Have something or someone that can take care of you/family
  • Everyone is needed – even social media activists
  • You need goals
    • If you don’t have that, you will be running around with your head cut off

Tools and activism

Ken Smith posted some quotes from Pete Seeger recently, where Seeger states that working within one’s home community is the most important work we have to do right now (Ken’s post title is “Essential Local Politics”). I feel that there is a great amount of information available online to help/assist/train individuals how to do work/activism within their communities. I have a list of resources available here, but I think the Community Tool Box from the University of Kansas is an excellent place to find frameworks for identifying an issue or issues to get involved with, and to identify concrete next steps.

In an earlier post, Ken Smith appears to express the opinion that he would like to see tools that help people get together to do work, to create content, to organize activities, and to have identity to allow them to affiliate with others and have a stronger voice. In a similar way to my first paragraph, I think there are many available online tools to help people with this work. Stephen Downes has created a massive resource called “Creating an Online Community, Class or Conference – Quick Tech Guide”. I think the tools identified here could satisfy a lot of what Ken is looking for supporting activism. I welcome Ken’s input on this. 

More on curation workflows

Ken Smith has written a reply to my post on engaging and curation. In the post, he discusses “standing searches” for a topic or phrase, and how (to me) that curating RSS feeds can be a search at a particular level. He also addresses the topic of activism, and how the concept of search might apply there, but that activism needs something more. I would like to explore this more.

The most common type of “standing search” I am aware of is Google Alerts (see link to this at Google). I am sure there are other services providing this type of functionality. As for curating RSS feeds, this can be done for private consumption using any feed reader (Feedly, River5, The Old Reader, FeedLand, and so on). I like using River5 because it supports display of aggregated feeds (or rivers) easily in a single page application (such as bloggers using the Old School blogging tool in Drummer, bloggers using the 1999.io blogging tool, and writers from Politico following the Ukraine war).

So, curation can be performed by collecting feeds that generally post on a topic. However, these feeds may benefit from further curation, in that if a user is interested in a subset of stories/posts contained within those feeds, it could be distilled into an even more focused list of stories/posts. The Radio Userland tool supported creating feeds of this kind in an easy manner, displaying items from subscribed feeds and checkboxes next to the items if you wanted to copy those into an editing window and then post them in a particular category on your weblog. I think there is a need for this kind of tool – I am going to try to prototype this in the near future.

Another level of curation could be to provide additional text/narration/analysis of the stories/posts – to add more value than just a link and the initial paragraph from the post – to tell the reader why they should take a look at this post. Blogger Jason Kottke been practicing this type of blogging for a long time. Currently, several people whose work I follow add this analysis within the context of a newsletter (Stephen Downes’ OLDaily, Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from An American, and Joyce Vance’s Civil Discourse are excellent examples).

All of the above examples can feed into groups of people interested in activism related to a particular topic. Jennifer Hofmann runs the Americans of Conscience Checklist. Started as a single person effort, this site has grown into a group of people who review items to include in the checklist, and organize the work of distribution. The checklist itself is a set of concrete actions to protest or support different issues. From past posts to the website, it is apparent that multiple people are monitoring activities of multiple websites/organizations, and the group draws on this information to select issues to push out to subscribers. Ken Smith himself has created lists of things to do in Indianapolis, which is another example of organizing information for use.

To sum up, I think that there are tools that can be used and workflows that can be defined to support curation and engagement. I have tried to collect some resources/food for thought in this post. I welcome Ken’s further thoughts on this topic.

Engaging and curation

Ken Smith recently wrote about engaging others on a topic and on curation – I have a few comments.

From the engaging others post:

The famous speaker works up the crowd about this or that issue, and then at the end the audience files out and recedes and fragments into their many private lives. It is a parallel case for blogging and other social media, isn’t it? We nod at the end of a message that moves us, but the publishing platform is not set up to encourage and simplify further steps: affiliation with others, for one thing, the power move that gives political beliefs a kind of social body moving, speaking, and echoing widely in the world.

From the curation post:

Used to be if you followed the daily writing of 15 interesting bloggers, each one would be following 10 different bloggers and journalists you weren’t following, and so your 15 would keep you informed about the best writing each week by 10 x 15=150 people they respected.

These are important ideas. The first suggested that there should be ways for readers to engage and stay engaged with a subject or topic. The second suggests that there are workflows that could be created to follow posts on a topic and create linkblogs or other collections that could curate the best info out there. For both of these, it sounds like users and developers should start to “party” and work together as mentioned in a number of Dave Winer posts (Dear Doc and Dave, What I Wanted from Blogging, What I Wanted from Blogging Part 2, Scripting News from January 22, 2020). If anyone is interested in working together on these ideas, let me know!

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 will of the majority

There have been a number of instances of the majority party in different states taking action against minority party representatives (Montana, Tennessee). In these instances, the minority party representatives tried to voice opinions that were at odds with the majority party, and were silenced for it. In other states, minority party representation is hobbled by gerrymandering and voter suppression. Even with majority rule, there should be minority rights:

“Minorities — whether as a result of ethnic background, religious belief, geographic location, income level, or simply as the losers in elections or political debate — enjoy guaranteed basic human rights that no government, and no majority, elected or not, should remove.”

“Among the basic human rights that any democratic government must protect are freedom of speech and expression; freedom of religion and belief; due process and equal protection under the law; and freedom to organize, speak out, dissent, and participate fully in the public life of their society.”

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.

Remembrance of the 2nd anniversary of the January 6th Insurrection

Two years ago today, Donald Trump sent a mob to the US Capitol to disrupt the counting of the Electoral College votes and attempt to have Donald Trump named the winner of the 2020 presidential election. We did not know then that this was the final step of a coup-conspiracy to keep Donald Trump as president. I was at my laptop computer, watching the events of the day on C-SPAN, thinking this was going to be the final step to take for the election of Joe Biden as president. Instead, a horrifying set of events unfolded where our democracy hung in the balance. In the end, the rioters left, and the counting of the electoral votes was completed. I have a liveblog that I created that day, it is still amazing to me the comments of the senators and congressmen/women who tried to protest the results of the election. The work of the House January 6th committee has documented what led up to the events of January 6th. In the published version of the report from HarperCollins, MSNBC legal correspondent contributed a foreward describing the eight crimes of this coup-conspiracy (parts of this are available as a podcast and a Substack newsletter, and discussed on the Brian Lehrer Daily Politics podcast).

Last year, there was a ceremony at the Capitol where the only Republicans in attendance were Liz Cheney and her father, Dick Cheney. Today, the House Democrats met on the steps of the Capitol in remembrance of this event, with one Republican attendee.

Joe Biden gave a speech and awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal to individuals who helped keep that election safe.

A remembrance rally was held in Washington DC:

Let us not forget, so that this cannot ever happen again…

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!