Get FISA Right

I didn’t know what to expect before I went to Sen. Russ Feingold’s listening session in Fond du Lac this morning, but all early indications warrant immense confidence that progressive activists in general and Get Fisa Right in particular can leverage these for impressive results. My experience this morning has made me supremely confident that our goals for the “GFR Heart Sen. Feingold” campaign are entirely reachable, and I think it will be a boon not only for our work but for the progressive movement in general if we take advantage of these!

First things first—-a recap of what these listening sessions are like. Sen. Feingold pledged upon his first senatorial run to hold open meetings in all 72 counties in Wisconsin every single year. This must be quite the strain on him, yet this strain did not seem to mitigate the utility of these open meetings as he went beyond the call of duty (and over the time limit) to ensure that he answered EVERY SINGLE QUESTION posed to him.

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My post on Get FISA Right’s dailyish updates is up in the Political Tactics section of The Seminal.   Here’s the introduction:

Every activism campaign faces the challenge of keeping people informed without overloading them. It’s particularly acute for Get FISA Right because we’re explicitly trying to engage with people who prefer to get their information via social network sites (Twitter and Facebook so far) as well as the more traditional blogs and email.* Hopefully our experiences will be useful for other activism campaigns as well.

Our goal is for people who have even a little bit of time available to be able to quickly see what’s up — and where they might be able to help. For active Get FISA RIght members and allies in the civil liberties community, it’ll be a minimum-investment way of staying informed. For the 95%+ of members who only have time intermittently, it’ll be a quick way of coming up to speed when there’s an action alert. And for potential members, bloggers, and the media, it’ll be an easy way of tracking what’s going on and deciding whether it’s interesting.

Assuming we can make it work, that is. It’s worth a try.

Rich Jensen has an entertaning, albeit somewhat inaccurate, summary on digg.  Speaking of which: digg it! And it’s also on reddit, with a much better title: Keeping in touch with the online world.  Yeah, that’s what I meant to call it, really.

Thanks to Josh Nelson and The Seminal for the invitation to guest-blog!  For a new blog like ours, opportunities like this are extremely valuable.

Update, February 9: notes available here.  no download this time, sorry 😦

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