Lose the Label
A Student Activist Community

posted by gdobbe on October 15, 2007 - 3:51pm

from a chat with jake:

we're trying to build a community of gen q activists, age approx. 16-26

what does a community of gen q activists need?

what do we want?

what are we going to flock to, and what are we going to shy away from?

personally, i want a place where i can connect with other people, both across the world and in my area, talk about things that matter to us, collaborate on projects, share knowledge, and trigger action

here are some tools i think would be nice to make that happen.

social networking

• we've already kinda gotten this one set up. we have profiles and walls now, and once you've registered, it's pretty easy to use these tools. 
• some handy features to add to this area later would be: pinpoint location searching (i.e., by zipcode, street address, etc.), additional profile content (quotes, religion, etc.)

talk/communication

• we've got private messaging and walls set up and usable. this handles the time-delay communication need, so that people can post an idea on someone's wall and get a response a couple of hours later. at some point, it'd be nice to set up a group with a wall/message board, and set it up so that a group admin can message an entire group.
• we have implemented the IRC chatroom; however, the Java IRC client we're currently using is buggy. a new client needs to be found.

knowledge sharing

• an improved archiving and sorting mechanism. we should be able to locate content by date, subject, author, and keyword. this should be true for blog posts, book pages, and events.
• a wiki, or wiki functionality. some place where people can post useful information that doesn't really fit anywhere else, like where to obtain protest permits, protest chants, congressional addresses and phone numbers, form letters, etc.
• the blogs do a decent job of disseminating information. at some point, there will be too much information to be dealt with on the main page, so we'll need to put a mechanism in place for promoting content to the front page. karma is the start of that (ratings)-- we need to attach a mechanism to the back end for the promotion (promote to front page if rating is greater than or equal to x).

collaboration tools

• groups are what we initially wanted for this, but after using them for a while, they seem lacking. we need the ability to have a common area for like-minded individuals to post goals, updates, task lists, completed tasks, and just touch base. my ideal view of this is a combination of facebook and sourceforge, where you have a collection of incredibly powerful tools at your fingertips, but you don't have to have a working knowledge of those tools to start using them. 
• a group with a wall, a group-specific forum/discussion board, and one or two group-specific wiki pages would go a long way towards accomplishing this. the wall would allow for informal group communication (hey, did anyone call city hall?), the forums would allow for more structured communication (what companies do we want to target in our boycott?), and the wiki pages would allow for the collection of information (phone numbers, addresses, times, dates, etc.) 
• groups also need someplace to post a common task queue. group members need to be able to add tasks to the queue, assign tasks to themselves (admins could assign tasks to any group member and take over tasks if necessary), and mark tasks as completed. the drupal project module could easily be tailored to handle this.
• we also can't forget about intergroup collaboration; the ability to create sub- and super-groups would be nice.
• the communication tools fall into this area as well; you can't collaborate if you can't communicate, right?
• having some mass-production tools would be nice. for example, it would be cool to have a form where you plug in a date, a time, a location, a group name, and some customized text, and out comes a press release in PDF form, ready to be printed. same with a flier -- if you've never made a flier for an action before, you plug in the particulars like date, time, location, and sponsor, pick a template from 5 or 6 choices, and out comes your flier in PDF form. you could handle all kinds of documents this way -- pamphlets, ID badges, etc.

triggering and scheduling action

• this is key. if we can't translate action from online to offline, we're just jacking off. 
• events start to handle this. we can define an event, a place, and a time, and people can kinda search them. 
• events need to be easier to look through. date, time, and location are musts.
• it would be nice to set up groups with a volunteer list or a sponsoring organization, so that people would know who to contact both in terms of leadership and manpower.
• if a group was sponsoring an event, it would be cool to trigger reminders ("5 days until the protest, 3 days, etc.") on the group's wall
• it would be *really* cool to have the ability to send SMS messages to a group of people; both the volunteer list for an event and a group's members would be nice. that way, if something urgent or immediate needed to happen, people could be contacted regardless of whether or not they were online. this would also allow us to use flash mobs as a protest tool.
• Twitter would be perfect for this. All we have to do is set up a couple of Twitter accounts and allow people to track them publicly, including through SMS.