Digital Advocacy Gets Reaction From Government

I recently joined, along with about 100,000 (and counting) people, in a Facebook group - Canadians Against Progroguing Parliament. I also joined one on ACTA - the Anti-counterfeiting and Trade Agreement that I've written about in other articles.

I write about government (Our Masters) sometimes, mostly to get something I've been stewing over out of my system. This (writing) is like taking an anti-histamine when you have an allergic reaction - you see I'm allergic to bureaucrats and politicians - I break out in shouting.

The thing is that until the advent of the huge social sites such as Facebook, getting the attention of our political leaders (or for that matter learning about what they were up to that was not directly available in your local newspaper) was really hard. Letters (snail mail) were pretty much the only thing that counted, although some open line radio programs and the callers' rants were listened to by some politicians.

Today however, we have the internet in general and the big social sites, Myspace, Facebook, etc., in particular. These sites allow what used to be a "back fence" conversation (over the back fence with your neighbour) that might eventually reach a hundred people over a few weeks, to blossom into a movement with hundreds of thousands of participants in hours or days. Regardless of how a statistician would categorize this "self selected" population as not necessarily representative of the overall population, the fact is that anything that gets this number of people interested enough to clutter their in-box with its messages in today's over-communicative atmosphere bears looking at by the subject of it - in this case the Prime Minister and his government. 

Digital Advocacy is another of the sea-change elements of the internet that is really starting to change the way the world works. I recently wrote about another one - Accountability Journalism - that is also making its influence felt.

What it comes down to is that you, yes YOU, can start such an advocacy group if you feel strongly about something. It doesn't matter if it is strictly local in nature, although many such groups tend to disappear into the noise on Facebook - but don't let that stop you from trying.

You see, the fact that someone, anyone, feels strongly about something, can act as a focal point for others who otherwise would think that only they feel that way. The problem in many cases is to somehow let these others know about how you feel and what you've done about it.

There are a couple of ways to do this - in fact there are many ways. You should try to do at least some of them, and as many as you can - even if it takes you months or years - you see the internet never forgets! The stuff you do today will be found by the search engines - and will be available to you to reference, "forever"

So, let's get started. I'm going to use the ACTA group as an example because I just decided that it is time the world came to realize what it is that some of our politicians are trying to do to us, and that there are now enough people talking about the problem that getting a group to start to grow is possible. 

First - I checked Facebook's search engine and found there are actually two ACTA groups. If there had not been one then I'd have started one. As it is, I've joined only one because I don't think having two at this time is a good idea. I joined the more active one, even though it has slightly fewer members at this time. There has not been any activity on the other one since November. I also messaged the group's originator and offered to help administer the group and to suggest that it be extended to include other country's opinions (than the US) since this is in all our best interest.

Now, I'm going to go and create a Squidoo Lens site: ACTA where I get a chance to focus on this one topic, bring together RSS feeds, articles, books, photos and any other types of content, from anywhere, into a single all-encompassing page.

If you don't already have a blog, you can get one and focus it on the one topic you're interested in - and then use twitterfeed to push new articles both to twitter and to facebook as I do.

Then you can get all your friends and other contacts to take a look at your group - and either give you feedback on why they don't think it is a good idea, or to get them to join - and start the ball rolling.

Once you have the group - tell the relevant officials, company, group or whatever it is about that you have it - and that they should consider dealing with the concerns you raise. There's no use in creating a group just to *censored* - you should try to get things fixed. After all, we didn't invent the internet just for entertainment :)

richard

Tag: digital advocacy acta conversation twitterfeed accountability journalism squidoo lens