As the Blog Workers Industrial Union and Progressive PST have developed, each fed by the other's activities, I've never publicly articulated the driving principle, but this is all about OSINT, or open source intelligence collection, coupled with both overt and covert message management.
We're at a tipping point, a place where people have been intently watching our rise, and I feel we're about to get ripped off by some non-hackers in suits – guys who don't pack the gear to invent and run such an operation. That isn't going to stop them from adding a couple of zeros to the price tag and continuing to shadow our efforts.
As has been noted in less public venues, I'm ”a special kind of asshole”, and I really don't like having my work cloned without even so much as a thank you, so we'll establish prior art right here/right now.
If you intend to act, and you want to do more than flail, you must have some sort of clue as to what is happening. We have a lot of means to collect information – Google Alerts, Google Reader with select feeds, Twitter hashtags, and so forth. There's a lot of art to this, but we recently made an interesting step forward in data collection with the addition of a Twitalyzer agency account. Here's a view as to what we're doing for the @McAdamsforAK Senate campaign, tracking the candidate's account, and we're also keeping an eye on the team account, the press agent account, influential Alaskans, and his opponents.
Once you've got your intel sources you need to collate and distribute the signal you've teased from the noise. We have our Twitter network including our rapid response tools, our Facebook networks, our Google Talk and text message channels to various leaders, and all of this converges to drive conversations in many venues. Desired outcomes are both private and public interactions. We've recently taken a big step forward in both collection and dissemination in both these realms with the use of the NetVibes system.
I've published a Stranded Wind page. I'm offering a tab for the Railroad ReModelers Club, a community based effort to get the United States off oil based transportation. I'm keeping an eye on our efforts for the McAdams and Glassman Senate races, and I like to see what @glogothetis is up to with the Giannoulias Senate race, because they display much #clue in social media operations.
We're offering curated public/private presences for political campaigns and issues. Campaigns are sometimes slow to adapt our methods and their budgets are right. The Railroad ReModelers Club has an essentially unlimited budget in this space, as it's a pet project of boatsie, @RL_Miller, me and a few others. The Wiser Earth presence is a root exposition of the players and thinking behind the effort, the Facebook effort and Flickr group tap into the passions of railfans everywhere, and the NetVibes presence on my account is a prototype for what will become another full featured public face for the operation.
Message mangement is key to winning campaigns and obtaining desired legislation. The last year has seen a flow of single use tools morphing into integrated systems, each with its own unique angle. Most have been market and sales focused; only some of them are general enough to use for our purposes. Our messaging system was expressly built for electioneering and activism and that part has done well, but our attempt to provide a means to track context failed as an internal development project. The barriers to taking the well regarded Request Tracker and melding it with Twitter proved to be too much for our limited development resources.
We were tidily bailed out of this situation by an introduction to the people from SmallAct. Their system is a rapi1dly evolving social customer relations management (#SCRM) platform and they've been quite willing to take our input on the needs of political operatives. This culminated with an integration of our two systems last week, with our messaging engine now being able to transparently push content through theirs. Our ability to deliver messages will be dramatically enhanced by the interaction tracking capabilities this system provides.
When we set out on this path last fall our initial claim to fame was a tiny bit of software. Things have progressed pretty much as we expected, with new tools arising that could easily fill in the gaps we knew we had. Our message creation and delivery system remains unique, so far as we can determine. We've relentlessly focused on relationship building in the blogosphere, in the twitterverse, with developers of good quality tools, and on Capitol Hill. I might get slapped down tomorrow, but for the moment it appears we've sucked all of the oxygen out of the room by being first to market and demonstrating a clear vision of where things are headed.
We're going to capitalize on this, getting satisfaction in the three ways that matter – actual checks, seeing the legislation we want passed, and by electing more and better Democrats.