Training Tuesday: Organizational Change and the Adoption of Online Tools

Today's Training Tuesday comes to us from the Organizing 2.0 conference on December 5th, 2009. We are joined by Kenyon Farrow, of Queers For Economic Justice, Calvin Williams, of the Generational Alliance, and Althea Erickson, from the Freelancers Union.

This week, they are going to share with us how they have adopted online tools in their unique organizations. Next week, we will go into more depth about how these changes took place and what challenges they found.

Kenyon Farrow:


Calvin Williams:




Althea Erickson:


That's all for this week. Check back next Tuesday for part 2 of this training.

Training Tuesday: Learning from Obama for Local Campaigns

Today's Training Tuesday comes to us from the Organizing 2.0 Conference in New York back in December. During lunch, we were joined by Colin Delaney, of e.politics.com. He and Charles Lenchner, of the Working Families Party, held a conversation about how to translate lessons about new media from the Obama campaign to local campaigns.

Not every campaign will be able to have MyBO and an online outreach team led by some of the best minds in the business. There are many new and exciting things that the Obama campaign did in 2008 that will simply be unrealistic for a local candidate to try. However, there are also many things the campaign did that any campaign, no matter how small, can replicate. In the video below, Colin Delaney and Charles Lenchner lead us in a discussion about just that:

Training Tuesday: Translating Community Organizing to Online Space

Today's session of Training Tuesday is from the panel, 'Organizing Theory and Practice: Translating Community Organizing to Online Space'. Our panelists are Charles Lenchner, the Online Organizing Director of the Working Families Party, Joan Minieri the Cofounder of Community Voices Heard and the author of "Tools for Radical Democracy", Kristi Barnes, the Communications Director of New York Jobs with Justice, and Talia Schank, the Grassroots Fundraising and Communications Director of Community Voices Heard.

We were not only blessed with expert panelists, our audience was made up of experts too. This shows how far from "established" online organizing is, the experts are absolutely still students.

What occurred, was a somewhat unique discussion about the successes, struggles, and future potential of using new media in coordination with well-established, person-to-person organizing. In the progressive blogosphere, we have a tendency to revel in the successes. What our panelists focused on in this session was the disconnect between many of the entrenched community organizers, the ones knocking on doors and building relationships one home at a time, with the rather new community of online organizers.

First things first, if you are completely oblivious to the ancient art of community organizing, and it is very ancient, Joan Minieri began the panel with a fantastic five minute synopsis:



One of the major factors the keeps many progressive organizations from more fully incorporating online tools is that many of us are working with the poor, the disenfranchised, and the disconnected communities. Their constituents may not have the most consistent access to the series of tubes that is the internet. This last clip is an example of one theme that emerged throughout the conversation: the internet can be used to amplify the voice of your constituents, regardless of their connectedness.

@Organizing 2.0

(Reposted as part of our staff picks from 2009, originally written by Will Urquhart on 12/10/2009)

Last weekend, I attended the Organizing 2.0 conference in New York, put together by Charles Lenchner of the Working Families Party. This conference brought people together to hear from some of the greatest minds in the online organizing world. I came out of it with lots of great footage, and today we are previewing some of it. The majority of the footage, however, will be featured in our Training Tuesday series. So check back Tuesday at 6:00pm for more Organizing 2.0 footage. We are also collecting all our Organizing 2.0 footage onto one page here. But if you are reading this, then you really should find the time to watch these videos.

Whether you've been actively engaged in fighting the good fights online for years, or you are simply a lurker who visits from time to time to read, your intimate knowledge of the workings of the blogosphere makes you a valuable resource for candidates and organizations. This is a quality that is rather unique. As deeply entrenched as the online world may feel, online organizing is still brand new. You can think of it like this, Organizing 2.0 is still in beta format, and it is open source so people all over the world can develop new and exciting features.

The people you will hear from in the videos below, and the many to come over the coming Training Tuesdays, are about as experienced as we can get. They will provide you with many helpful tips and share some of their best practices.

Ari Melber, of The Nation, gave the opening speech:


That was followed by a conversation between Ari Melber and Nancy Scola, of the Personal Democracy Forum:


The last two videos we have for you today are the closing remarks. First, we have Dan Cantor, the Executive Director of the Working Families Party:


And the closing speech, or keynote address if you will, was given by Deanna Zandt, the author of "Share This!":


That's all for today, but check back at 6:00pm Tuesday for our running series of Training Tuesdays when we will introduce our first round of Organizing 2.0 panel coverage!

If you want to read more about the Organizing 2.0 Conference, check out these links:
DeannaZandt.com: Talk: How Sharing and Storytelling Will Change the World
Peoplesworld.com: Labor & community activists coverge @Organizing2.0 (the inspiration for my title, credit where credit is due)
Sum of Change: Musings on Ari Melber's Speech and the State of TV News
Ari Melber: Obama Campaign Organizing & New Media: Presentation to Organizing 2.0 Summit
theCoup.org: Writing for your Digital Audience

Training Tuesday with #org20: Getting Through the Bureaucracy

This week, we have something new for our Training Tuesday series. We still have plenty of videos left to come from Democracy for America's Campaign Academy, but a couple weekends back, we attended the Organizing 2.0 conference in New York. This conference was a unique opportunity for activists to learn about new media and online organizing from some of the greatest online organizers around.

Today, we present the first session we attended on navigating the bureaucracy of organizations and figuring out how to fit new media into existing organizational structures. Our panelists today are Charlie Albanetti of Citizen Action of New York, Elana Levin of the Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE), and Michael Whitney of Fire Dog Lake. A lot of their advice today boils down to one thing: you need to have a policy for this. That is, you cannot just plop your organization online and expect everything to run efficiently. You will need to sit down with the leadership and anyone else involved online and build a policy for online engagement. This is a process over time, not a Friday meeting over lunch.

Today's training is all bout opening the door. How do you maneuver through the bureaucracy of well entrenched community organizations to provide the conditions necessary to succeed with new media? Not everyone gets to be the Obama campaign with a boss that gets and appreciates online activism (and even they had to fight through a lot of bureaucracy to build their online organization).

Our panelists will provide us with some helpful tips on how to manage your organization's transition into the new media world. There are all these fun and powerful tools available online, but they are useless to you if your organization is not prepared to accept or understand them.

One of the more significant changes you will encounter as you transition your organization from 1.0 to 2.0 is that what was once primarily one-way communication is now heavily two-way (or three, four, five, six thousand.... etc)



Now that you have made it clear that what happens online is very different from traditional forms of organizing, you need to figure out how to include something so overarching and so necessarily flexible into the rigid structure of an organization:



An interesting conversation was sparked by a question about what to do with a boss that not only accepts online activism, but wants to play a large role, maybe too large a role...



And our last video for today, certainly not our least, is about when to train other staff to use online tools and when not to:


That's all for today. Check back next Tuesday at 6:00pm EST for another session of Training Tuesday!

@Organizing 2.0

Last weekend, I attended the Organizing 2.0 conference in New York, put together by Charles Lenchner of the Working Families Party. This conference brought people together to hear from some of the greatest minds in the online organizing world. I came out of it with lots of great footage, and today we are previewing some of it. The majority of the footage, however, will be featured in our Training Tuesday series. So check back Tuesday at 6:00pm for more Organizing 2.0 footage. We are also collecting all our Organizing 2.0 footage onto one page here. But if you are reading this, then you really should find the time to watch these videos.

Whether you've been actively engaged in fighting the good fights online for years, or you are simply a lurker who visits from time to time to read, your intimate knowledge of the workings of the blogosphere makes you a valuable resource for candidates and organizations. This is a quality that is rather unique. As deeply entrenched as the online world may feel, online organizing is still brand new. You can think of it like this, Organizing 2.0 is still in beta format, and it is open source so people all over the world can develop new and exciting features.

The people you will hear from in the videos below, and the many to come over the coming Training Tuesdays, are about as experienced as we can get. They will provide you with many helpful tips and share some of their best practices.

Ari Melber, of The Nation, gave the opening speech:


That was followed by a conversation between Ari Melber and Nancy Scola, of the Personal Democracy Forum:


The last two videos we have for you today are the closing remarks. First, we have Dan Cantor, the Executive Director of the Working Families Party:


And the closing speech, or keynote address if you will, was given by Deanna Zandt, the author of "Share This!":


That's all for today, but check back at 6:00pm Tuesday for our running series of Training Tuesdays when we will introduce our first round of Organizing 2.0 panel coverage!

If you want to read more about the Organizing 2.0 Conference, check out these links:
DeannaZandt.com: Talk: How Sharing and Storytelling Will Change the World
Peoplesworld.com: Labor & community activists coverge @Organizing2.0 (the inspiration for my title, credit where credit is due)
Sum of Change: Musings on Ari Melber's Speech and the State of TV News
Ari Melber: Obama Campaign Organizing & New Media: Presentation to Organizing 2.0 Summit
theCoup.org: Writing for your Digital Audience