Post by Gary Riccio on Sept 9, 2020 9:26:10 GMT -5
Almost all the actions we are identifying involve providing information to voters--whether by phone calls, letters, postcards, texts, social media or face-to-face interactions. We will continue to develop the Forum so that it clearly highlights our purpose, our main activities, and specific actions that we/the viewer might get involved with. It's also a place where we can post articles and opinions. We hope the Forum can serve as a means of browsing or wandering if you think there might be interesting things to learn about and get involved with, but you are not quite sure what they are.
Most of the information is available through the third-party sources described in this Forum, thus it provides an opportunity to gather and distribute it to others. The most powerful strategy is to encourage the people you contact to pass the information along to people they know so we can leverage the power of social networks. Third-party sources can lead you to strangers you can contact as well. It is your decision who to contact, and there is no need to be limited on your own locality.
As with all information-gathering activities, it can be time consuming. The important point about this is that for every hour you invest in such effort, you will saved that amount of time for every interested person to whom you pass the information; that is, you will have given the gifts of both time and information. You thus can be a "force multiplier" through any effort you put into this. It's not just a matter of making the lives of other voters a bit easier. In many cases, it will be the difference between whether someone else gets involved or not (e.g., if they would not have been able to put in the effort that you did about how to become involved).
If you do ten hours worth of work, and you share it with ten people, you will have saved others in your social network up to one hundred hours of work. If each of those people contact five other people, you will have saved a broader social network up to five hundred hours of work, directly and indirectly...
Collectively, this information sharing can help turn the tide in voter suppression by helping voters overcome impediments of time, money, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, motivation and unequal access to representatives and election officials (de facto poll taxes in the modern age of myopic privilege).
We have been finding out about numerous Get-Out-The-Vote (GOTV) initiatives, and we have communicated our initial findings and experiences to peers in our community. The resulting peer review has revealed that most people have many more questions than conclusions. Some questions are based on curiosity, and some on skepticism. In general the review suggests that most people have a very difficult time knowing where to start. Dorie Seavey put together a table at this link, based on questions from our peers, that compares three different kinds of GOTV initiatives to show how a GOTV volunteer can assess and choose one to participate in. In addition to the table, the document also is accompanied by a longer list of initiatives that we have not (yet) specifically compared and contrasted.
This Forum also is a source of information relevant to a particular question that one might have about elections and electoral justice in the moment. It was created partially for that purpose and, as important, so that any of us can contribute to this knowledge base in a place where people in our near or distance social network can search for information relevant to a question they have in the moment.
The board is not an online course to be taken, or even a newspaper to be read every morning. It could be used for the latter, however, and the abstracts or key points for any links in individual posts can be browsed as one would do with headlines or front-page lead-ins common in news outlets. The short lead-in summaries are valuable for people who don’t have the time or inclination to read the material at a link in the post (posts need not include links).
There will be an unknown number of people, perhaps even a majority, who don’t have the time and inclination to search message boards even though it is considerably more efficient than more global “Google” searches. There is nothing wrong with that. Individuals in such a demographic generally prefer to get information orally from an acquaintance in a more satisfying interpersonal interaction.
Thus there is a need for a small number of people who are willing to do an information search for their acquaintances and and answer questions from them. That is an exceedingly valuable service or gift one can provide to another. The general consensus is that only 1% to 5% of participants in a community of interest need to be such a catalyst or evangelist. We all can recruit a few others to do serve this role. It would be particularly valuable to recruit knowledge transfer catalysts/evangelists in battleground states.
The implication is that familiarity with searching this message board enables one to become a knowledge transfer catalyst/evangelist to which others should be to reach out, preferable one-on-one, about questions they have and for which the catalysts/evangelists can provide answers.
Most of the information is available through the third-party sources described in this Forum, thus it provides an opportunity to gather and distribute it to others. The most powerful strategy is to encourage the people you contact to pass the information along to people they know so we can leverage the power of social networks. Third-party sources can lead you to strangers you can contact as well. It is your decision who to contact, and there is no need to be limited on your own locality.
As with all information-gathering activities, it can be time consuming. The important point about this is that for every hour you invest in such effort, you will saved that amount of time for every interested person to whom you pass the information; that is, you will have given the gifts of both time and information. You thus can be a "force multiplier" through any effort you put into this. It's not just a matter of making the lives of other voters a bit easier. In many cases, it will be the difference between whether someone else gets involved or not (e.g., if they would not have been able to put in the effort that you did about how to become involved).
If you do ten hours worth of work, and you share it with ten people, you will have saved others in your social network up to one hundred hours of work. If each of those people contact five other people, you will have saved a broader social network up to five hundred hours of work, directly and indirectly...
Collectively, this information sharing can help turn the tide in voter suppression by helping voters overcome impediments of time, money, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, motivation and unequal access to representatives and election officials (de facto poll taxes in the modern age of myopic privilege).
We have been finding out about numerous Get-Out-The-Vote (GOTV) initiatives, and we have communicated our initial findings and experiences to peers in our community. The resulting peer review has revealed that most people have many more questions than conclusions. Some questions are based on curiosity, and some on skepticism. In general the review suggests that most people have a very difficult time knowing where to start. Dorie Seavey put together a table at this link, based on questions from our peers, that compares three different kinds of GOTV initiatives to show how a GOTV volunteer can assess and choose one to participate in. In addition to the table, the document also is accompanied by a longer list of initiatives that we have not (yet) specifically compared and contrasted.
This Forum also is a source of information relevant to a particular question that one might have about elections and electoral justice in the moment. It was created partially for that purpose and, as important, so that any of us can contribute to this knowledge base in a place where people in our near or distance social network can search for information relevant to a question they have in the moment.
The board is not an online course to be taken, or even a newspaper to be read every morning. It could be used for the latter, however, and the abstracts or key points for any links in individual posts can be browsed as one would do with headlines or front-page lead-ins common in news outlets. The short lead-in summaries are valuable for people who don’t have the time or inclination to read the material at a link in the post (posts need not include links).
There will be an unknown number of people, perhaps even a majority, who don’t have the time and inclination to search message boards even though it is considerably more efficient than more global “Google” searches. There is nothing wrong with that. Individuals in such a demographic generally prefer to get information orally from an acquaintance in a more satisfying interpersonal interaction.
Thus there is a need for a small number of people who are willing to do an information search for their acquaintances and and answer questions from them. That is an exceedingly valuable service or gift one can provide to another. The general consensus is that only 1% to 5% of participants in a community of interest need to be such a catalyst or evangelist. We all can recruit a few others to do serve this role. It would be particularly valuable to recruit knowledge transfer catalysts/evangelists in battleground states.
The implication is that familiarity with searching this message board enables one to become a knowledge transfer catalyst/evangelist to which others should be to reach out, preferable one-on-one, about questions they have and for which the catalysts/evangelists can provide answers.