The day: The Saturday night of Netroots Nation 2009
The place: The bar at the Westin in Pittsburgh
The culprits: Spedwybabs, Stranded Wind, Donnamarie, Floja Roja
The conversation: Politics of course
"Wouldn’t it be funny if we organized a bunch of bloggers into a union of sorts and then posted on Daily Kos making all kinds of demands and punk’d Bill O’Reilly and others into thinking Markos and Soros were having labor issues?"
And so it began. The next day after an outing to see Falling Water, StrandedWind and a few others (unfortunately I had to catch the train home and missed the fun) came up with the name "Blog Workers Industrial Union & Benevolent Society." Within minutes we posted our first demands.
Soon we merged with the International Brotherhood of Shop Pooties and we were off to the races. A Facebook page was created and we started talking about what we as a union could do to make a difference in our world.
Timroff designed this nice shiny logo for the Union:
Then in October we took a day trip to DC
and things got serious. I had some campaign volunteering and staffing experience and realized we had a gaggle of excited bloggers who were eager to be more than just an ATM for great progressive candidates across the country. We started exploring what we could do in that space, and soon we started matching up campaigns and volunteers for things like blog writing, google alert management, social media support and other tasks that could be done remotely.
Then we started taking a closer look at the world of social media, specifically Twitter and found a massive disparity between what the GOP was doing in that space and what our Dems were doing. On Dec. 2 we announced the formation of Progressive PST. Using Stranded Wind's computer programming skills and my messaging experience we developed a set of tools that are now being used by some of the coolest campaigns around including Lois Herr, Manan Trivedi, Billy Kennedy, David Cozad, and more. We also make our help available to assorted non campaign groups like Netroots for the Troops and Center for American Progress.
But we’re not done innovating yet. Recently Stranded Wind and a few others announced the creation of the Progressive Congress News Feeds a joint project between PPST, BWIUBS members and Progressive Congress. These news feeds will help congressional staffers keep up on news of interest in a variety of policy areas. I will soon be adding another layer to these by putting together a top level digest of this news that can be quickly digested by higher ups on congressional staff like a chief of staff or comms directors. I have also been chipping away in the background on developing a few new uses for twitter in the political world including the use of twitter as a channel for constituent services- after all shouldn't elected officials make themselves available in areas like social media where their constituents are congregating? I'm also exploring how this can be done via facebook. The use of social media to help focus test messaging and ads for smaller campaigns that can't afford to spend $3000 just to test such things is another project I'm exploring and developing.
Along the way we’ve made a lot of new friends, enjoyed the whirlwind that was Netroots Nation 2010 and continue to plot and scheme for the future. Won’t you join us? You can do so by joining the Facebook group, and following Spedwybabs, StrandedWind and the Union on Twitter. Join the fun and help shape the future of the Progressive movement.