Another nice entry in the podcast series of NYC-based consultant Big Duck, this one on designing for the web and e-mail. For some reason, it was overshadowed by something or other that happened this week.

"This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change." Barack Obama

Obama said it himself in his acceptance speech last night - We have a CHANCE for change. If progressives are to realize our ideals into policy/action, we're going to have to sustain grassroots pressure with all the tools in the tool box.... you know my favorite.

So what he's saying is this - Look, I can't just waive a magic want and grant you policies that make sense. This is still politics USA. Your tribes need to provide a groundswell of support for each and every issue to give me the political cover to make change. Voting me in is not enough - the party's just getting started.

It's our time for offense and not a time to fall asleep at the wheel now that the D's are in charge. It's our chance to organize and move decision makers, and the public, toward a sustainable future. Listen up - they will not do it for us.

While I'm excited about this change, it's tempered with 15 yrs of working as an advocacy organizer on federal issues. The so called glory days of Clinton brought our national forest THE worst logging policy ever created - the "Logging without Laws Rider" that suspended federal envr. laws for 2 years. The dems did very little to improve national forest policy when they had a chance. Why? Politics ... our issue was sold out for gains elsewhere.

So do I think Obama and the Dems are going to champion our causes? Depends on how we organize.

The role of online communications will play a huge role in this next chapter and we want you to be ready.

With this window for change, DemocracyInAction is committed to help you achieve your goals. Stay tuned for our continued improvements to Salsa and tools we offer to our community.

Historian Arnold Toynbee theorized that civilizations gained the brio to flourish in the face of a "challenge-and-response" scenario: a military defeat, an inhospitable climate, or some other hindrance, was requisite to call forth the creative energy that would build an empire.

There's a lesson there for progressive advocates rolling out of bed this morning with an extra spring in their step ... and for conservatives who'd just as soon pull up the sheets.

Progressive online organizing has blossomed during the opposition's governance, and it's survived the post-2006 Democratic majority in Congress -- for understandable reasons. But one onion-layer behind the netroots in the Internet organizing history are Matt Drudge and Free Republic: online spaces that grew huge in the late 90's against the challenge-and-response scenario posed by the Clinton administration. Nowhere is it written that liberals must dominate cyberspace.

Come January 20, 2009, the Democratic Party will control the White House and Congress. And that means that progressive organizers would do well to keep an eye on the the responses their conservative opponents begin to make.

Obama partisans can be forgiven their gloating this morning, and it's hard not to be amused by the mouth-breathing stuff about a centrist Democrat going all Five-Year Plan.

But victory is fleeting -- and it's a poisoned chalice, inasmuch as progressives face a tougher calculation critiquing Democrats.

Conservatives will have the luxury of opposition: no need to own and finesse the inevitable missteps any governing party has, just full-bore opposition. It's just the sort of thing to fire up, say, a small-dollar fundraising juggernaut, and more besides. In fact, the situation is strikingly analogous to that of Democrats four years ago.

So brace for conservative online organizing to ramp up, and get creative. And don't be afraid to crib some notes when it works.

Right-wingers will be energized by the challenge, and the intelligent ones are already doing their own institutional rebuilding. Sure, liberals can laugh at a misstep here and there ... but better be sure it's not actually a stroke of genius.

Check out this great video from Missoula 501 Club presenter, Harold Shinsato, programmer for SAP. He explains that real power of technology is to provide your organization's early adopters and innovators with online tools which can form a tribe of empowered supporters.

Remember last year when the holiday fundraising season suddenly appeared! Perhaps the phrase "if I only had time" was muttered? October is a great month to start your online holiday fundraising plan. You'll need time to 1) use the month of November to remind your supporters how great you are, 2) integrate your online and offline fundraising and 3) map out your online communication plan, to name a few.

HOLIDAY FUNDRAISING WEBINAR - Listen and watch this (unedited) webinar I gave about online holiday fundraising

This 1 hour workshop covered the following:

- What should my online donation page include?
- What are they key elements in an online holiday fundraising email appeal? When to send?
- Ideas of how to use November as the "month of thanks"
- How to integrate your online approach with offline fundraising

On Friday I helped train 30 of the most important people in New York in online activism and social networking. I refer of course, to the women and men who work with young people after school lets out. These ‘Out of School Time Providers’ work with the kids from the neighborhoods with the highest poverty rates. If they can engage, motivate and enrich lives, then those kids have a better chance of getting to college, finishing high school, or at the very least, staying off the streets.

We went over the usual suspects: CRM, web 2.0, MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube. Then we opened it up to questions and ideas for online projects that could be used as part of after school programs. This list might be interesting to others:

Questions:

• How do we implement programs that use the internet in the face of restrictions, safety concerns and bureaucratic hurdles?
• How can we measure the benefits in ways that make sense to senior management and funders?
• How can we work with a mix of kids, those with lots of access to the internet, alongside those with limited access?
• What’s a good place to start?
• How – and should we – get students to use language in adult ways, as opposed to slang, acronyms, etc.
• What tools exist for moderation, privacy, and security that can be used easily?

Ideas from the brainstorm:

• Add an online component to regular homework for extra credit. Small things, like posting a book review you read as a Facebook note.
• Find a school in another country to establish a cybe-rpenpal program.
• For any group that has shows (theater, music, dance) incorporate online marketing or event RSVP’s.
• Use Cafepress and other sites to offer products for sale. Look at examples of business ideas that work – maybe some implemented by other young people.
• Upload videos from school around a particular theme. For example: have a praise day, where students offer a compliment or praise to someone else in the community – a teacher or fellow student.
• Explore questions that have no easy answers: how are public schools funded? What is the typical student loan debt?
• Collect email addresses of graduating seniors, so that incoming seniors can ask them questions about their lives and experiences.
• Use polling/voting/deliberation technologies to figure out what youth want to accomplish as a group, and leverage those interests to make programs more successful.
• Use online advocacy to work on social issues of concern to the students.

CRM technology is becoming cheaper, easier to use and more pervasive in all kinds of environments, including education. My motive in presenting at this program was to make contacts with the nonprofits who run after school activities, in case they need to – ahem -- engage in online fundraising and advocacy. That might take a while. Still, the folks and the room taught me more about the space they work in, and I taught them about the nonprofit-tech space. What a wonderful use of my DIA approved volunteering time.

This program was offered by the Partnership for After School Education.

Building Stronger Programs Through Collaboration
2nd Annual Conference for Out-of-School Time Providers
NYC Department of Youth & Community Development
October 9, 2008

The weight of public response to the bailout measure that's had all Congress atwitter this fortnight overwhelmed House servers earlier this week, slowing or preventing some messages to Representatives.

As of this writing, with debate underway on the floor (liveblog at the Grey Lady; video stream at C-SPAN), the writerep system appears to be functioning normally for this writer but still displays this warning:

Due to an unusually high amount of emails currently being submitted through the Write Your Representative feature (above), you may experience a slow response or error message when attempting to send emails through this system during hours of peak demand. We apologize for this inconvenience. Our technicians are working to fix the problem. Thank you.

So what's an activist organization to do?

The ubiquitous Colin Delany of epolitics.com has a handy cheat sheet of other actions you might consider mobilizing -- good brain food even during those humdrum times when economic apocalypse is not upon us and the Hill is handling its e-mail with only the usual degree of malfeasance.

Let me venture an option 1(a) further to Colin's first suggestion to "spam" (sir, I protest) "other people": everyone in town is eager to get back out on the stump. That makes opponents in congressional races a prime potential messaging target -- probably mostly for groups with a significant local presence that can pick the precise targeting method and finesse the messaging.

Candidates attempting to unseat incumbents look to your humble narrator like a largely untapped e-activism vein.

And unlike incumbents, at least some of these might want these messages -- at least if it gives them an opportunity to demonstrate transparency and responsiveness. I daresay an outside actor like the British WriteToThem.com (nee FaxYourMP) could find aspirants interested in plugging into the same conversations a ready source of content and eyeballs -- and simultaneously move existing members away from the writerep chokehold the next time the Invisible Hand goes panhandling.

Bailouts got you down? What better way to show your organization is paying attention and relevant, than with rapid response tools such as petitions and campaigns.

These tactics on their own won't do much (well, except grow your list!). Consider combining them with a strategy that includes an offline approach, such as printing and delivering your petitions in a creative way, along with calls, in-person visits, etc.

Below is a great example from member group, Campaign for Fresh Air and Clean Politics, who used Salsa to take action on the bailout. Notice how they also used the "letter to the editor" tool and sign-in page.

Tell Congress: Stop the Bailout

Letter to the Editor

Sign in form (keep me updated about the bailout)

If you're thinking, well our group doesn't work on financial issues, think again. This bailout and stock crash will effect everyone's organization, whether it's a massive hit from your funders or a trickle down policy effect. If you don't have a clear target or strategy now, use a petition tool to broadly state that your group is concerned about "x" and how it relates to your issue. This will grow and engage your list and perhaps provide political fodder.

It's probably the only way folks will listen when everyone is thinking about finances. Bring it back to where people are at.

Making change is about endless pressure endlessly applied.

p.s DIA would love to share other examples of how folks are responding the the crisis, especially with issues that aren't immediately connected.

Pretty big news -- if long past surprising -- that Rosenberg co-conspirator Morton Sobell copped to the spy ring after maintaining his innocence for the past half-century.

And an excerpt as revealing of the Grey Lady as of Sobell:

In the interview, Mr. Sobell drew a distinction between atomic espionage and the details of radar and artillery devices that he said he stole for the Russians. “What I did was simply defensive, an aircraft gun,” he said. “This was defensive. You cannot plead that what you did was only defensive stuff, but there’s a big difference between giving that and stuff that could be used to attack our country.”

(One device mentioned specifically by Mr. Sobell, however, the SCR 584 radar, is believed by military experts to have been used against American aircraft in Korea and Vietnam.)

"However"? Is that the "offensive" use of firing against the planes that are bombing your country?

Dan Brister, Project Director of the Buffalo Field Campaign, talks about how he hopes Salsa will mobilize grassroots support around the protection of Yellowstone's last wild buffalo.

The NY office of DIA is putting together a client training for September 8th. Come join us! There'll be four different sessions (you can pick two), presented by April Pedersen (E. Director), Chris Lundberg (CTO), Jon Wheeler (Managing Director), and myself.

And of course, there's a Happy Hour at a nearby bar to follow.

Click here for more info

Wish you could be in Denver for the DNC? I know, I know, me too.

Your next best option is to stay tuned via The Big Tent

The Big Tent is the place to be for new media journalists, bloggers, and non-profit leaders covering the Democratic National Convention in Denver.

The quadrennial -- or biennial, now that the summer and winter games are staggered -- hypocrisy irony of the "Olympic Movement" formulation from the mouthpieces of global capital is probably not actually any more finely described by Beijing's turn on the stage than by any other ruthless global hegemon's. Hey, Mary Lou Retton was sticking vaults and selling breakfast cereal while Central America was crawling with death squads.

But China has brought renewed hand-wringing from the guardians of right-thinking about the wrongness of bringing politics into a "Movement" so palpably political from the get-go, and so explicitly marked in its most memorable moments -- Jesse Owens in Berlin, the Blood in the Water match -- by political valences.

And then, of course, there's this:

Today's not the calendar anniversary of Tommie Smith and John Carlos's famous protest, but it's almost (as of this writing) the very moment of the men's 200 meter finals, the event that put them on the podium to deliver it.

Here's the Beeb on that Olympic moment in that pregnant year:

"Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are." -Bertold Brecht

It's now been three and a half years since DemocracyInAction and I got together -- three and a half years of change and growth and learning on the fly.

We got to thinking ... why not try out a long-distance thing?

So I'm excited -- and, yeah, a little nervous -- to announce that next week, yours truly will shake the Beltway dust off his heels and open up DemocracyInAction Midwest. (That name could be a little snappier. Suggestions?)

DIA Midwest will be based out of lovely Bloomington, Indiana, conveniently located where someone smarter than I can study something I don't understand while I do stuff like this:

(And of course, the ol' hobby blog.)

It turns out that most of what I do I could easily do from a decent broadband connection on Io, so it'll be an evolutionary rather than revolutionary change in my own daily schedule.

But DIA Midwest -- that is, me, in my den -- will obviously be turning user focus towards groups in the region, along the lines of our existing field offices in San Francisco, New York, and Montana.

And dang if Bloomington isn't right in the middle of the action:

That's a whole new territory to learn.

So you'll see me stalking the conferences, mailing lists, happy hours and blogs from Nashville to Chicago, from Hockeytown to the Show-Me State ... especially when basketball season rolls around.

Trepidation notwithstanding, I'm looking forward to it.

D.C. is not bereft of charm but it's a company town, and even if my never-changed Washington (state) license plates attest another state of mind, I've somehow managed to keep my hearth in the capital for nine of the last eleven years. Helpfully, that game-changing global communications infrastructure we're always nattering on about here has sprouted up in that time ... so you can change your longitude without changing all your friends.

Just the same, everyone needs a new beginning now and again.

I'll see you on the other side of the drive.