Writing
725 posts on careers, communication, technology and civic life, since 2005.
A last check of the RSS reader brought sad news tonight, Kurt Vonnegut died today at 84. I spent 2 weeks in the summer before my 14th birthday laid up in bed with an unexplained sickness that led to, or followed a spinal tap, depending on how you look at it. Standing was unbearable. I read probably half a dozen of Vonnegut’s books while sick.
The New Organizing Institute has just announced its Summer 2007 Bootcamp early admission application process. NOI trains political organizers to use the new tools of the trade: the internet, blogs, social networking sites, and the like…. The Summer Bootcamp is an all expenses paid opportunity to get up to speed with these tools and get ready for the 2008 political season. CivicActions co-sponsored RootsCampNYC with the NOI back in November.
Last week I was back in NY and walking down Avenue A. I ran into Judy Bodor, wife of Nick, the owner of Alt.Coffee. She mentioned to me that Alt would be closing this week after nearly 12 years! The NY Times marks the passing in an article today . I walked into Alt.Coffee…
My brother sent me this article from the NYT about an internet cafe in NY called Alt.Coffee . Alt(dot) as it was often called was one of the first internet cafes in NYC opening in 1995 with a full T1. I started hanging out there when it first opened and I was a student at NYU.
I just got an email from Greenpeace’s Beka Economopoulos (who I know from NYC activism circles, and of NotAnAlternative.net and Brooklyn CoWorking).
CivicActions has been working with the Free Software Foundation on the DefectiveByDesign campaign since last May. In that time we have seen a significant shift in the way DRM is talked about in the news media and an increasing awareness of DRM among music fans and the general public.
I’ve been down in California since Tuesday, met with Henri, did some work from Aaron’s and then went down to Yahoo in Sunnyvale for the Open Source CMS Summit (OSCMS 2007) and DrupalCON .
Owen recently posted a cool data visualization site . I was talking to a friend last night who pointed me to State-Machine.org , a data visualization site for political funding. The site allows you to compare different sources of campaign funding (3 axis) and distributes the presidential candidates accordingly. This is very cool!
MySpace and Presidential Politics Sunday’s NYT ran an article about MySpace’s new Impact Channel where presidential candidates’ profiles will be aggregated and presented for MySpace’s 60 million (mostly young) American members. The article basically says “candidates are going where the voters are” and expects that MySpace and the Impact Channel could have an, err, impact, on youth turn out and the election.
I got an email from Ethan today who is in Brooklyn working with Arthur and Zoey and one of our newest clients. On his way from their hotel to the client’s office, they spotted this poster: ShayaIsComing.org is a campaign of the Laborers Eastern Region Organizing Fund, one of our clients!