OC-Tech: Grassroots Technology and the emergin progressive movement

<p>So i was just taking notes on this entire session and i lost them. I am fooling and really should write in a word doc and then cut and paste into my blog. The good news is you are not going to get my near transcript like notes of the session and you will get more of my thoughts on the session. Not necessarily my thoughts on the issue at hand, but thoughts on the session.</p> <p>Bob Fertik just raised a great point: Terry Chiavo had a few dozen people outside the hospice and they were on the news for 10 days straight, but 10 Million peopl eprotesting the Iraq war got little coverage. The Republicans are organized and we are not. There is a vast right wing conspiracy, they meet in DC every week. They get together and they talk, and they know they have to play as a team because they are fewer. The progressives need to think about winning. If we have more troops, bigger numbers and count every vote. We have a database nightmare. There is no unified national voterfile and that is what we need. And we should have universal registration. The database needs to have a db that has email and contact info and clean. The progressive movement needs to work with Democratic party. We have bad data, we don't have systems in place to update the data after the calls, there is no feedback loop.</p> <p>Bob is great here. he just hit it on the head. The progressive movement was wasting so much time because of bad data. Calling supporters over and over again, and calling dead people over and over again.<br /> If we had email for everyone who voted for John Kerry we would win every battle. until we build the infrastructure we will not win. We do not have leadership. and that is why we don;t have the technology. We haven;t had progressive leadership since the assassinations of the 60s. I never thought of it in those terms.</p> <p>The progressive movement needs to come together and pool our resources. If we do we will win. if we do not we will lose. Over and over again.</p> <p>Bob should have been the moderator of the panel.</p> <p>Afte Bob's moving presentation, the room got animated, and the discussion quickly devolved into a "Democrats are losers because they are not strategic" and "what is a progressive" and "republicans strategized" for a few minutes. The woman from Orchid Suites said that the tech needs to build from the ground up, otherwise folks will not buy-in and orgs will not be able to support it. Odly enough I used the [l:http://www.orchidsuites.net/|Orchid Suites] web form to invite them to sumbit a proposal to the NYSenateDems RFP and never got a response. </p> <p>The recent article on the [l:http://www.movementasnetwork.org|Movement as Network] on Three Pilars of Social Source seems relevant to the discussion here.</p>