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. 

Queens man indicted for the fourth time

No updates from the Queens Eagle (only covered the first time), so here we go!

CNN: Trump indicted in Georgia 2020 election subversion probe

MSNBC: Read the indictment

Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Copying of election data brings conspiracy charges

Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Trump, 18 others indicted for trying to overthrow 2020 Georgia election

JustSecurity.org: What to Expect When You’re Expecting a Trump Trial in Fulton County, GA

CNN: Read the annotated indictment

Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Complete coverage on Georgia grand jury and indictment

The Bulwark Newsletter: What’s new in the latest Trump indictment

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!

Do not mourn for the US women’s soccer national team

I read that the USWNT lost to Sweden on a shootout after the match was a draw. There are a number of stories/analyses about the loss and the meaning of it. Perhaps the team felt expectations to be able to win a World Cup for the third time in a row. Some picked at how one of the shootout goals was determined using electronic equipment. This same kind of equipment was used to determine that Michael Phelps won a race in the the Olympics by 1/100 of a second. It is the way that the game is played. To say that using shootouts or technology is “cruel” does not make sense. These are the rules of the game, this is how the game is played. This is sport – someone wins and someone loses.

As for the question of dynasties or multiple championships, it can happen. The New York Yankees, the Golden State Warriors, the Boston Celtics, the Los Angeles Lakers, the Tennessee and UConn women’s basketball teams, all had multiple championships in their respective sports. Was it “cruel” that they had their period of domination? And over time, as those teams lost key players and other teams developed their talent, those teams fell. This is the eternal cycle of sport.

The main thing to remember is – this is why they play the game – sometimes the favorite is upset (think NCAA mens and womens basketball tournaments – indeed ALL athletic tournaments) – you have to go out and do your best, and even then, it may not be enough to win. However, if you gave it everything you had, and still lost, you still have the knowledge that you did all you could do, and that day someone else was better. Again, this is the eternal cycle of sport. There will be another World Cup in 4 years – let’s see what happens then.

Queens man indicted for third time

Again, it seems like the Queens Eagle (which covered Trump’s first indictment) is passing again on this topic, so I am covering it here.

CNN: Donald Trump has been indicted in second time in two months for attempts to overturn the 2020 election

CNN: Live news coverage on August 1, 2023, the date the indictment was made public

CNN: Read the indictment

CNN: Annotated version of indictment with links to other material

CNN: Live coverage of Trump’s arraignment on August 3, 2023

CNN: Latest coverage on August 4, 2023

CNN: Who are the co-conspirators mentioned in the Trump indictment?

CNN: Trump’s surreal arraignment day in Washington augurs ominous days ahead

CNN: Hub for info/reporting on all criminal indictments for Trump

Court Listener: Follow the filings on the January 6 indictment

Slate: Jack Smith case is prosecutorial masterpiece

Slate: US v. Trump will be the most important case in our nation’s history (Richard Hasen)

TPM: John Eastman reiterates support for full insurrection

Election Law Blog: Lawyers for Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Moss: Rudy Giuliani Has Not Contested Civil Conspiracy Charge with Donald Trump and Others to Defame Them Regarding False Claims of 2020 Election Fraud in Georgia (link to filing)

Amazing! The website for the Oregonian (the main newspaper for Portland, Oregon) now has a RSS feed! There has not been any feeds for this site in years – glad to see there is at least one feed now…