Mike Gravel 08 - Great, or the Greatest
Toward a raising of all issues related to Mike Gravel
For those interested in the political process and the upcoming election. We are dedicated to broadening awareness of Mike Gravel, his issues, his campaign and his progress. Please join the discussion and broaden our awareness.Maurice Robert "Mike" Gravel (IPA: /gɹəˈvɛl/) (born May 13, 1930), is a former Democratic United States Senator from Alas ...learn more
GROUP DETAILS
Created: Sep 17, 2007
Updated: Aug 06, 2009
Membership: Open
Public
Comments (21 - 33 of 33)
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Flag comment for removal angusparker 8 months ago
@Boatsie: As I mentioned before, I think if we had local groups and thematic groups that people were invited to when they joined based on location and AOF we would massify (is that a word?) the community into some smaller set of hubs. The trouble with 1,000 groups is that it fragments our community audience. We need watering holes at which to gather and cross pollinate. Maybe we should call them that 'watering holes'! Thoughts?
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i so conur with so many of your comments. Here are some of my thoughts. For starters, I am working on the WE first newsletter and was so impressed by the Cascadia Portal .... it seems so vibrant and alive and I was thinking of mentioning it as a success story. Whow! So I 'll stop that digging now. One of the ideas i posted on WE Jouralists was the idea of promoting a Scavengar Hunt on WE because the quality of unmediated information here is undoubtedly unsurpassed. Users/students can gain access to exactly what and WHO they would want to use as background, primary sources and springboards for developing ideas.... back about 1 1/2 years ago i suggested WE work with local universities to set up an internship for credit program whereby we could use interns from various relevant disciplines to build up and oversee Areas of Focus, find ways to bring them to life. Then we could also use students from schools of journalism (Annenburg, Columbia) to have a culminating project be marketing WE successfully both virtually and in real life.
The problem of localization is something which has long been on my mind. I live right near WE headquarters. I had hoped that when I first connected there would be a way to become involved in a hands on manner with others who were volunteering.
Through my research so far I am finding there is a great deal of community building and outreacch occuring here at WE... if you know where to go look for it. Personally, I have attempted to create a space here for Transition Towns Marin to come together with similar groups as well as regional and international resources to work together and share expeiences. that has not come to fruiition.
WE is just so enormous. There perhaps is a way to pull active users together on a few projects which could then branch out to include others. It is very disconcerting to see great ideas come up which have not been commented on in a year. Like casting out your line into the void..... |
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I like the idea of local groups too. I also like the idea of meeting and talking to people face to face. I am concerned that texting and email waters done the spoken language and the written language.
There is no substitute for touching and hugging real people.
Try to get together as often as possible. |
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Jim - I'll message you directly with details of a contact person at Interra so you can share your feedback. All the best Camilla
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@Bernard: I've put your ideas into the mix for the geo-proximity tool. I really like the idea of automatically inviting people to 'local groups' (we'll have to have more!)- I think we should do the same thing for AOFs based Groups (e.g. the Earth Charter groups we've been talking about) - so it's both location and interest area. Also, after we have some form of recommendations for members (next month or so), its not too far a stretch to start doing it for group admins. One tool that is in stealth mode right now (still some bugs to iron out) is the new 'News Module' - if you go to the 'Add Subscriptions' menu it gives you the option of 'Viewing Suggestions'. This gives you a list of hopefully relevant RSS feeds for your group. The algorithm currently looks at orgs and resources which are linked to the group or group members and/or match the group AOF. It works pretty well.
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This comment was removed by a WiserEarth editor for the following reason:
I already wrote to James with the direct contact information for Interra. This comment is not relevant to this discussion. |
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Wow! Thank you everyone for reading my post and already replying with some good solutions. I'm impressed.
Thanks to those of you taking time to post excellent answers and training materials. This will really help thoughtful users to use the powerful tools that WE provides them.
I really glad to know we have very tech-savy people at WE to help us meet our goal to better connect users in real life by having locally focused groups. Such dashboard tools would be very powerful in making the user fully aware of WE advanced search features.
That's an excellent next step to have a representative from each major organization take charge in ensuring content is correct and current for their pages. To that end, I think Facebook style WE updates on their own Facebook pages or organizations pages and listservs would be helpful.
I've let organizational leaders in the Northwest know about services WE can offer to support their own goals. It's too bad so many websites have reinvented the wheel creating yet another layer of functionality on their own sites which has already been developed here. Again, I think busy people don't always take time to research existing resources before they go and spend money to create more databases and expensive networking tools.
I enjoyed the Seattle Green Festival this weekend. Sorry I didn't get to meet the couple WE folks I heard were there.
Green America invited attendees to make very short videos for their site about how they are helping the earth. I love public speaking and easily grabbed the opportunity to add my 2 cents. I gave a plug for WiserEarth and the Washington State new electronics recycling program. The video will be posted in a couple weeks at www.greenamericatoday.org with a 1-minute under the name of janine seattle. I'll put a link from my profile once its posted.
Again, thank you everyone for your quick and thoughtful responses.
Warm wishes,
Janine
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@ Angus regarding geographical search, here is my features wish list
In a nutshell, have the same functionalities attached to geographical areas than to areas of focus.
We could later on use geonames geographical entities instead of boxes, e.g. some administrative units (from continent to cities with every intermediate level). This way we could set for example a local group area of interest to be http://sws.geonames.org/2988507 or http://sws.geonames.org/3013738. Which would be yet another hook to the linked data cloud.
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Quick comment on very insightful stuff from Janine, with a shorter experience of WE than her's :
If I was to set priorities now, it would be WE grounding in / synergy with off-line networks, and improving quality on a local basis. Most of the WE data base content has been populated at the beginning by people not directly in contact with the organizations they indexed. This data harvesting was good at the time, to figure out, and make the world figure out, the depth and width of the movement. But now the data have to be consolidated and endorsed by individuals, by WE the people. If I had a vision, it would be that a few years from now, every other organization in the WE data base should be represented by a WE individual member.
And yes Janine, let's not fall in the Facebook trap. And let's not focus too much on what will make the user's life easy. Our Earth is in the bad state it is, basically because humans have stuck for ages to the objective of making their individual own life easier. Might sound rude, but WE's mission is not to nurture "individuals whose attention span is zero". It's to gather people who really pay attention, as the story below has it.
A merchant came to a Zen master and said, "Master, I know you are busy, so please write on this scroll some maxims of the highest wisdom for me to study." And the master wrote, "Attention." The merchant was puzzled, and said, "I don't understand." And the master wrote "Attention. Attention." "But all you're doing is writing 'attention'. Isn't there anything else?" And the master wrote it three times running: "Attention. Attention. Attention." Exasperated, the merchant demanded, "What do you mean by 'attention', anyway?!" "Attention means attention," the master replied. |
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I'm on the same page with Andy. There is no differentiation on the updates. It is hard to tell if the notifications are telling me something specific to me or general to WiserEarth. Social media is at it's best when it creates a compelling issue to talk or act upon that relates to the individual. For some reason the hierarchy of communication is coming through muddled on this. All the information is there, but it needs to be rearranged in terms of how it relates to the individual. Give us the information in 1, 2, 3 steps visually, versus all of it looking the same. It leaves too much to the individual whose attention span is zero to decifer the information.
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Janine - thank you for sharing your observations. Very insightful comments and suggestions.
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What often drives me to reply is reading something interesting in my Gmail inbox. Unfortunately Wiserearth posts me that something has happened, but gives me little clue about what has happened. If I am short of time then interest in WiserEarth notifications (or any other email) is only sparked from the entry as listed in my inbox showing the first line of text of the email. By this I mean that the first line of a notification is critical.
The text showig from all notifications is "Hello andy swarbrick, The following items saved to your watchlist have been updated:" which is the same for each notification from WIserEarth.
Please can you AT LEAST change this so that the notification starts with, say "Updates are:" and then get on with the actual meat of the notification. |
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@Janine: Some very good points which resonate for me. A couple of things that are in the works that might make a difference I've noted below, but it would be great to work on them and other ideas to make WE more interactive and successful for activists who want to connect and take action:
Training materials - I'm leading an effort, mostly based around the blog, of codifying advice on how to run/manage an online community. (It would be great to get you input and feedback on that)
Geographic / Proximity based search - starting development next week is a search engine based on location. It should show Yelp style where things are in relation to you
Recommendation Engine - based on location (closest to you), and other factors (like connections to your friends and groups etc) - content will be recommended to people on their personal dashboards and in groups. This will get around the members having to find content issue we have on WE.
WiserEarth local groups - we now have a Paris and a UK group. Camilla is heavily involved with the Paris group and one of its main tasks is translation as well as networking. UK group just got off ground.
Affinity partners - Melinda, Bowo and others are working to get large groupings of orgs to use WiserEarth. The best way to foster dialoge in many ways is to get existing face to face communities on the site. Its much harder to form a community totally on line.
Let's keep chatting. |