I have a service work opportunity for those who are more interested in policy more than in politics. We've been building things in social media for the last year or so, mostly on Twitter, and we have a major project that is getting off the ground.
If you're an intent watcher of any of: energy, economy, environment, education, immigration, LGBT issues, labor, healthcare, or national security and if you can spare an hour or so a day you can make a difference.
Come below the fold for the details.
I started watching Twitter in the spring of 2009 and six months later we started actively working in the area. We would be the service minded members of Twitter's #p2 community along with some Kossacks, and working would be tech support, blogging and other copy writing, and building Facebook and Twitter presences for Democratic campaigns and Progressive causes.
We got a lot of help along the way – Kossacks, both famous and obscure came forth with tips, recs, comments. And tips as to who would be interested in helping, recommendations as to which campaigns might need the things we do in that area, and comments in surprising places as to the value of our work.
Instrumental in our breaking out of the blogosphere and into the wider world of organizing have been Rick Sloan from the Union of Unemployed, Alan Rosenblatt from the Center for American Progress, and Darcy Burner from Progressive Congress.
Rick and Alan have provided a steady flow of advice and contacts, but Darcy had the real treasure – a little position paper about the need for a better way to handle message delivery. I scanned it. Then I read it. Then I started building a little corner of it.
Now, 120 days into construction, we've got a partisan policy oriented news service with the primary mission of helping Progressives in Congress get a handle on all of the stuff that is coming at them each and every day. I'm the plumber, not the finish guy, so this is not as pretty as it could be, but as chief plumber I make sure the daily fill and drain works as intended.
There are a couple of different sorts of roles that we need to fill:
Each policy area needs a legislative strategist. This person will keep an eye on the flow of news, on the flow of legislation, and they'll be responsible for deploying resources to help move bills through Congress. Resources include good working relationships with perhaps half of the Progressive leaders on Twitter, an expanding reach among Facebook activists, and the reach that DailyKos and other blogs provide.
Each policy area needs at least one lead editor. This person decides on which Twitter feeds go into the news room for their area, they watch over the paper.li daily policy news, and they can instigate daily special reports based on Twitter lists. Some of the people doing this are bloggers of some note, others are just lurkers who pay really close attention. This is similar to the work the Rescue Rangers do, or Leanan of the Drum Beat, or the crew at The Automatic Earth.
Each policy area needs some backup editors. These people are news watchers, they can promote links to the daily policy news whenever they find something good, and they'll stand in for the lead editor if they need a day off.
We use NetVibes for consoles, paper.li for publishing, Twitalyzer for finding things and ranking Twitter users, SmallAct for customer service, and some stuff Progressive PST wrote to run the system. We've got a handful of folks who can do the various techie stuff but it wouldn't hurt a bit to spread it around. Drop by and we'll provide pointers for how to get started as well as taking on any tech support questions you may have.
Each policy area is making connections into the Facebook activism community. I don't get the sense that there is a big overlap between those folks and DailyKos, but as this will get cross promoted to Facebook I should say that we're looking for contacts who either have a crew there or want to form one.
If you are a person who writes about policy but you don't have the time to spend on things like this we'd still like to hear from you. There's a lot of paid journalism and think tank work that goes into the daily news flow but we'll always make time for a well reasoned, well written article from a citizen journalist.
Thus far this has been a pet project among a few of the twitterati. What we think will happen next is that the editors and strategists will form some sort of governing board. They'll manage the day to day operations, recruit and train new folks, and engage in process improvement by taking feedback from Congressional staff, think tank policy writers, political strategists, and from the netroots activists who will use the system to learn what will happen next in policy and where their organizing efforts will be needed.
So that's that. You can find @StrandedWind if you want to know more about technical stuff, @RL_Miller is our first legislative strategist, and @Unenergy can speak about both technology and editor duties. The elusive @quietis can be found ... occasionally.