As I wrote in my previous diary, I attended Camp Obama and learned how to become a community organizer for Barack Obama exactly one month ago.
One of the important yet simple tools that my community group Temescal/Rockridge Neighborhoods for Obama! (please only sign up if you actually live in that neighborhood, that's the point) has implemented is using Google Docs to track our new volunteers.
What I'd like to do tonight is to provide you with a very elementary guide to using a Google Doc and show you a template for building a New Volunteer database. I'd also like to, in the process, tell you some stories from my recent Obama organizing and invite you to share your own...
What's a Google Doc and why should you care?
Well, that's a good question. First of all, let me show you a video that will explain the basic concept of sharing information using Google Docs:
Now, as in most things regarding community organizing, there are essential and powerful components in the methodology that get lost in the shuffle. Let me see if I can tease them out and explain them to you.
Google Docs:
a) let you share data with other people
b) let you collaborate on a document or data set with other people
c) create equal access to information
d) allow people to create persistent sets of information that don't get lost so that a volunteer recruited off a sign in sheet in June can be contacted in July (versus being lost in the bottom of a filing cabinet) and added to the overall city-wide list in August (where their skills can be utilized to the max!).
Whew! That sounds like a bunch of overblown claims. Let's take a a look at exactly what I mean. Here is a sample GoogleDoc New Volunteer Template.
That volunteer template is about the simplest spreadsheet you could imagine. (Yes, Veronica Smith is imaginary, you can and should delete 'her' when you create your own spreadsheet.) But here's the thing. Robert and Susan and Jan and I have used almost exactly the same GoogleDoc Volunteer Spreadsheet to log 70 volunteers from eight different neighborhood meetings we have attended or hosted in the last month. All we did was go home, take the volunteer sign up sheet from our meeting, and enter the data onto our shared GoogleDoc!
All of us have access to the data, and Google has quick and easy ways to share that data (while retaining the privacy of our volunteers) with the Oakland Campaign headquarters.
With the advent of Google Docs, what was once a fact of life in community organizing, the lost, corrupted and out-of-date sign-in sheet, has become a much more powerful tool. Our group set a goal of 100 local volunteers on that doc by our July 12th Voter Registration event. We are going to blow that out of the water.
And here's the totally radical thing. You can start your own "New Volunteer Community Organizer Doc" using the exact same template I shared with you.
- Go to the Left Hand side of the document and click on the "File" drag-down menu.
- In that menu select the "Copy Spreadsheet" function.
- In the Pop-Up Dialog Box enter a new name for your Volunteer Sign up Sheet, preferably using the name of your local group, and click "Ok"
- Once you've done that, click on the "Share" tab between "Discuss" and "Publish" on the right-hand side of the Doc and choose the following settings to create a private document that will be shared with your local community organizer team:
- Invite people as "Collaborators"
- Enter email addresses, separated by commas, of the people in your local organizing group
- Leave "Collaborators may invite anyone" checked
- Unclick "Invitations may be used by anyone"
- Leave "Anyone one can view this document" unclicked
- Click on "Notify me at MyEmailAddress" for a daily update of changes to the document.
When you are done with that, go to the upper right and click on "Save and Close" and you will have your very own New Volunteer Sheet ready to go!
It should show up when you go to your Google home page...click on "Docs." (I recommend saving that link in your favorites bar.)
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Okay, so why is this important?
Here's the scoop. On Friday and Saturday I did what organizers do in election years. On Friday I met with a group of young, green, multi-racial sustainability and permaculture advocates in West Oakland. We ate vegan food and we talked about how to seize the "Obama organizing" moment to generate local empowerment on issues relevant to youth in West Oakland. On Saturday I attended a "Unite for Change" House Party in my Oakland neighborhood. We drank wine, at hummus and pita and cheese, and we talked about making a difference in 2008.
In both cases, we sat in circles, we introduced ourselves, we told our stories and discussed our politics. All of which represents a tremendously powerful form of local organizing that I will discuss in further diaries.
But, here's my point: at the end of both of those meetings what we were left with was a list. All the ideas, the people, the connections, the organizing potential of those two groups was boiled down to the power of the list that we made of the meeting that we had.
GoogleDocs (or some other technology if you choose...I'm agnostic on this) allows us to save and share and collaborate on the content those lists.
Lists are about people and organizing potential.
So are elections.
Even if you do nothing else from this diary, think about that. There will be other chances to learn organizing tricks this year. Hopefully, I'll be sharing them with you.
But don't forget that. Lists are powerful. So are people when we come together and organize locally to make change in our communities.
Sometimes that wonky, geeky, techie solution is actually a powerful tool for change.
A collaborative document is just that.
Give it a try.