It has been a very busy couple of weeks, so I've gotten behind in my blogging.  Fortunately, I've finally got the twist to blend together a couple news stories into something that will hopefully have some enduring interest.

Next week I will be presenting the first of 6 talks on Social Applications of the Web for Activists.  The first one is geared towards the ability for online tools to influence elections.  It is also interesting to know that in many ways the USA election cycle has helped to sponsor various surges in participation in online activism.  

We're doing this in conjunction with one of our clients, Octopus Books.  Octopus has a long history of working with and engaging with social activists in the Ottawa area.  I've been helping to lead a few gatherings through Social Tech Brewing now for a number of months, but that gathers mostly techies (and it is only so much fun preaching to the choir).  So these are definitely not geared to be for techies, but geeks are always welcome. If you're interested, please sign up on Facebook, but more importantly come on down on Tuesday.

Future topics so far outlined are:

Topic 2 - Using Photosharing Tools like Flickr to Build Community Identity
Topic 3 - Building knowledge with social link tools like Delicious.
Topic 4 - How to use blogging to build your campaign
Topic 5 - Podcasting to your community
Topic 6 - Online advocacy and bringing your community up a ladder of engagement

I'm also going to be presenting a talk about Client Relationship Management Databases (CRM's) in Toronto at Canada's first Labour Tech gathering.  It's will be a bit more technical and will focus on CiviCRM which is the CRM we've been working with primarily for the last three years.  I've been in touch with a number of unions over the years and see so many benefits to using open source tools to help to collect and manage information about the members, but also disseminate that information.  The type of rich knowledge that an organization can gain by keeping track of communications with individuals, tracking their movement within the organization is also important to consider.

So, now we're down to the twist I mentioned earlier.  Social movements will be able to mobilize for elections much more effectively if we learn to collect information about our supporters and to engage them on a regular basis through simple things like eNewsletters and more extensive campaigns or educational materials.  CRM's are a great way to do that.  Having member pages is good, but it is even more useful to start allowing the grassroots to participate in promoting your campaign.  I was called the other day to help build a virtual call centre for an american campaign site earlier in the week.  Building a list of the activities of their volunteers, how to contact them, what experience they've got, who they've contacted is critical. The more information an organization knows about their supporters, the more they can target communications to them and the more supportive they are likely to become.