If We’re Going to Hell in a Handbasket . . .

we’ll buy the basket through a catalog. In 2005 alone, more than 19 billion (Billion!) catalogs were mailed in the US alone. Too often, we don’t want these catalogs, our name was purchased by a company that just sends out a huge amount of catalogs and hopes someone, somewhere will buy something. It’s annoying, moreover it’s wasteful. And now there’s a great new website called Catalog Choice to help us manage what we get and stop getting what we don’t want to get. The site is sponsored by the Ecology Center. It is endorsed by the National Wildlife Federation and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and funded by the Overbrook Foundation, the Merck Family Fund, and the Kendeda Fund.

The site has a greater user interface, it’s easy to sign up (for free!) and opt out of the catalogs that you don’t want to get anymore, reducing the clutter in our mailboxes and landfills at the same time. You register for the site (you will get an email to click on it and verify your address, so make sure to use a real email), then type in the names of the catalog you don’t want to receive anymore.  Try it, it’s so easy, fun and makes a difference!

To follow up on last week’s post, 10questions.com sponsored by TechPresident is really taking off! As of yesterday, Micah writes that over 20,000 votes for videos have been cast. The New York Times, a partner in the development of the site, had this to say about it yesterday. Hurry up and vote (or better post a video and vote) before time runs out!

10 Questions for the Candidates

My friends at TechPresident have just launched a very cool new site called 10 Questions. Here’s the nub of it: Over the next month voters, citizens, people of all stripes and persuasions post videos on the site posing questions for the candidates, subscribers to the site will vote on questions winnowing them down to the top ten. The candidates post video responses to the questions, us real people spend the next month or so deciding and discussing whether they answered them at all, adequately or well.

In essence the site takes the YouTube debates to the next logical step of removing the broadcast media filter entirely and letting us wrangle with issues, questions, responses in the lovely, messy way a democracy is supposed to work.

I’ll be sure to keep a careful eye on how the questions are unfolding over the next few weeks!

I’m Sticking with Web 2.0 Is Easy to Use

I seem to have struck a chord the other day in my post about the useability of Web 2.0 tools here. A few thoughts as I stand (or actually right now sit) my ground on this. The comments were made by people who provide support to nonprofit folks who need help using the new technology tools (and I know this to be the case with these particular folks who are working very hard and doing a great job providing much needed support.) But here’s the problem. If you spend all day helping people who are having trouble using tools, then it looks and feels like an overwhelming number of people are having trouble using them (and, please remember, I’m talking about Web 2.0 tools like cell phones and blogs, not software applications like Excel which are incredibly difficult to use because the Empire wants to keep it that way.) But there is a much larger universe of people who aren’t having trouble, particularly younger people.  I stick with the statement that an overwhelming number of people find these tools easy to use and that’s why they have spread to quickly and widely.

I have the luxury of looking at the social change world from the vantage of what I hope it will become in the future. For people who spend every day dealing with how it is now, a much more difficult and wearing task, it can be difficult to see where it is all going.   I respect how hard the day-to-day struggles can be for some folks, but I also know that the explosion in the use of social media tools is no accident — it’s because they’re so easy to use for millions of people — and the future is very  bright for their growing use and expansion as children growing up fluent in the use of social media become older.

Life and Death in Our Post-9/11 Police State

(Cross-posted on Huffington Post 10/1/07)

The death of Carol Anne Gotbaum in the custody of the Phoenix Police Department last Friday afternoon is a shocking, unbelievable and a sad personal story. But, this tragic event is also a lesson in the inappropriate militarization of civilian police departments since 9/11. The fundamental question is this: Why was Carol Anne treated more like a prisoner at Abu Ghraib than a woman in distress who needed medical help?
Prior to 9/11 it would have been inconceivable that the National Guard, in full regalia and armed, would patrol public spaces like Grand Central Terminal. This greater military presence makes major American cities look more like third world countries with soldiers aiming their M-16s squarely at US citizens. Is it really that big deal, isn’t it keeping us safer, some might ask? Well, yes it is a big deal, and no it isn’t keeping us safer because the rules for safekeeping by civilian police are decidedly different from military protocol. The mission of the police is to support and safeguard the citizenry, the military is charged with securing and defending a space, a land, a country – and to do that you have to subdue the enemy – even if that enemy is sometimes us.
So, here’s what we know so far about what happened to Carol Anne Gotbaum last Friday. Gotbaum became very upset and agitated when she was not allowed to board her flight late. She began to yell and threaten airline personnel. Two Phoenix police officers arrived at the concourse, had trouble subduing her, and ended up handcuffing and arresting her for disorderly conduct. According to a police spokesperson, they didn’t have to “pepper spray or Tase her or anything else.” I guess she was lucky that no presidential also-ran was around or else the Taser gun would surely have been used to protect such an important person from disorderly conduct.
According to one news account, Gotbaum yelled, “I’m not a terrorist! I’m a sick mom! I need help!” But there is no indication yet that the police ever contacted a doctor on her behalf. The assumption was that this was a security problem not a medical or personal one. She was left handcuffed and shackled to a table in a locked room for what the police say was 10-15 minutes, we may never know exactly how long, until they found her dead. The police department’s initial comments that she appeared to strangle herself with the handcuffs that were behind her back are laughable — if they weren’t so sad and heartbreaking, particularly for the three children under 11 years old who are now motherless.
The difference between a military and civilian response is so stark in this sad story. A woman loses it in an airport terminal (and honestly who among us hasn’t wanted to, especially in the last several years?) and she is treated like an enemy combatant rather than a woman in need of help. Why did the police feel it was necessary to physically subdue and shackle her and lock her in a room handcuffed and chained to a table? Because that is the appropriate military response to a security threat.
Police departments, encouraged by elected officials like Rudy G. who value order over personal freedoms, have come to view almost any public disturbance as a terror threat. Better to be safe than sorry in their minds. You lock up problems and throw away the key, as the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay are left to rot away, so was Carol Anne left to harm herself, or die of some ailment that the police seemed uninterested in treating. But, is it really better to be safe than sorry? Our slide into a military state is eroding our fundamental rights – slowly, inexorably, perhaps even permanently.
When, where, how does it stop? Well, we clearly can’t count on our representatives, especially the lily livered reps in Congress who gave the feds more freedom to detain and interrogate people just this past August, to have the courage to change the public debate. It has to come from us, from individuals and citizens who know that this is not the way the United States of America should work. It’s time to say enough is enough, we want the exit door out of the military-industrial complex before we all get shackled and left to die in locked rooms.

Do “Most People” Really Find Web 2.0 Tools Hard to Use?

The Overbrook Foundation report on the readiness of their human rights grantees to fully engage in the Web 2.0 world is circulating widely. Many people have found it useful. And some less so. Jayne Cravens, shared these thoughts (in part):

“ *You* may see Web 2.0 tools as easy-to-use, but many, many people — in fact, *most* people — don’t. Just because you and, perhaps, those you associate with see these tools as simple, the majority of people and organizations do not, and if you cannot appreciate that point-of-view, you cannot help nonprofits to embrace Web 2.0.”

In the report, we defined Web 2.0 tools to mean new wireless and web-based technologies. Let’s start with wireless. Does Jayne think that using a cell phone is difficult? Is sending a text message difficult? “Most people” find cell phones easy and essential to use. This isn’t a euphemism in regards to cell phone usage and US citizens (we intentionally limited the study scope to US based organizations.) According to the Pew Center on the Internet and American Life nearly three quarters of all American adults have a cell phone. Nearly 60 percent of American adults over the age of 60 have cell phones. Thirty percent of overall users say they couldn’t live without their cell phone. Millions of them are text messaging use their cells, increasingly emailing using their more expensive smart phones and instant messaging.

How about blogs? According to Technorati, the leading blog tracking website, there are over 107 million blogs. Over 4 million bloggers update their web logs daily, or over 50,000 posts an hour. Creating a free blog on blogger.com or wordpress.com or other services takes less than five minutes to do. In my over three years of studying blogs and working with bloggers, young and old, I’ve never heard a person say that creating or updating a blog is difficult to do. Millions more set up email accounts for free in seconds, and use instant and text messaging.

Please note that I am responding to the issue of whether using Web 2.0 tools is difficult. They are not difficult or expensive to use that’s precisely why they have spread so far and wide so quickly. Where nonprofits and NGOs are struggling, is a people problem not a tech problem. Many people find it intimidating and overwhelming to try to stay on stop of all of the new tools, moreover, and here is the most critical point for activists, too many leaders of activist organizations don’t understand how they need to change the way they work to use the tools to best effect. A blog is an opportunity to create a community-wide converation about issues. Organizations that have blogs without the ability for readers to comment is a lost opportunity; a brochure not a conversation.

The activists who participated in our group discussions at the Overbrook Foundation were primarily executive directors of human rights organizations. Their dilemma was that too many of them didn’t know what they didn’t know. Consultants and other support people, like Jayne, are critically important in providing information and support to these people and organizations to help ease their transition from the old broadcast world

In summary, the tools themselves, are indeed very easy to use. The transition to a new culture of open, networked organizations is incredible difficult, particularly for organizations and individuals who were successful in the old era. But that’s a people problem not a tech challenge. And I agree with Jayne that as a community of funders and support organizations we are not doing a great job of easing that difficult transition for most groups. That was the underlying reason for doing the research for Overbrook in the first place, the very difficult struggle that organizations, and the people who run them, are having keeping up in the Connected Age.