Alex White » action

Five articles I’m reading today

Alex — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 02:27:53 +0000

Rebuild the Party

A pro Republican renewable website aimed at rejuvenating their grassroots.

As Republicans, we face a choice.

Either we can spend the next several months — or years — trying to figure out what just happened, excusing our defeat away as a temporary blip or the result of a poor environment, and waiting for Barack Obama to trip up. Or we can refuse to take this defeat lying down, and start building the future of our party now.

The Tea Party is Over

A grassroots reaction to the conservative Tea Party, tracking extremism and threats of violence.

Patriot Majority PAC is working actively in 2010 at the grassroots level to defeat Tea Party candidates across the United States. Patriot Majority is also putting together a tracking program of Tea Party activity nationwide to monitor outbreaks of actual violence, threats of violence or other types of extremism.

Ten Things You Can Do To Win A Political Campaign

An article in The Nation with some tips for progressive campaigners

The 2010 midterm election cycle is in full swing, with right-wing pundits predicting a Congressional turnover just as sweeping as the Gingrich revolution of 1994, while the left is mostly hoping a loss of seats won’t damage Obama’s presidency as badly as the GOP’s triumph did Bill Clinton’s. So what should grassroots activists and candidates do? Consultants have made campaigns seem like rocket science, but they aren’t. The basic formula is “50 percent + 1 = power,” but there are a lot of ways to reach that goal. Malia Lazu, Mel King Community Fellow at MIT, has come up with ten things progressives can do to build a campaign for candidates who deserve to win.

Next Labour: Winning the battle of ideas

David Milliband’s nomination speech for the British Labour Party’s leadership.

We need to begin with why we lost. The essential problem was simple. In a change election we were perceived to be defending the old order. Future is the most important word in politics; but we looked out of time.

Understand this, and we can rebuild. Be brutally honest about it: for too many people, we were not the people’s party that was created 100 years ago, but the politicians’ party. We were perceived by too many voters, our people, as out of touch.

Canadian Liberal Party: Victory Fund

The Canadian Liberal Party is one of two progressive parties in Canada.

Engagement starts here

Building trust and policy that Canadians care about takes time and money. The Victory Fund is the simplest and most affordable way to support the Liberal Party and helps us pursue our ambitious goals both nationally and locally.

Labor in Melbourne

Alex — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 05:18:46 +0000

I’ve written here about how the Greens Party are burying the record of first ever Federal Greens MP Michael Organ in order to promote Adam Bandt yet another white male lawyer (a second being the Greens candidate for the state seat of Melbourne).

Cath Bowtell's campaign website

Cath Bowtell is the Labor candidate for Melbourne. If elected, she would be the first ever woman elected to the seat of Melbourne, alongside the first ever woman Prime Minister Julia Gillard.

Cath Bowtell was the former senior industrial officer for the ACTU and was intimately involved in securing improvements to workers rights under the Fair Work Act.

Her website is a good example of a strong campaigning website with a community action focus. There’s some nice integration of cutting edge web apps, as well as good use of social media and email. The design is nice and clean, with good amounts of white space. Given that her campaign has only just gotten up and running in the last fortnight, this is a stellar effort.

Declaration: I am a volunteer on Cath’s campaign.

Future Proof in Alphington

Alex — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 05:28:37 +0000

Future Proof, a new community project aimed at promoting the uptake of solar panels, has launched its pilot program in Alphington.

We aim to prepare our communities, homes and businesses for a low-carbon future – to make them future proof – by making Melbourne and Australia leaders in renewable energy use.

Future Proof aims to address the major problems facing homeowners wanting to buy solar power: expense, complexity and risk.

Future Proof removes cost as a hurdle to solar adoption through organising “solar communities” into bulk-buying collectives. Homeowners can help each other understand the complicated process of buying solar panels, and ensure they get the best deal and highest quality panels.

If you live in Alphington, click on the image above (or here) to sign up and express your interest in installing solar panels on your home.

Engaging the progressive grass-roots in the UK

Alex — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 04:19:27 +0000

The UK Labour Party have been widely decried as being on their last legs, out of ideas, dead ducks, etc. However, behind the scenes, a growing movement of vibrant progressives is building and organising. Much of it is being supported and encouraged by the Labour Party.

This rise of progressive online political action also coincides with the decline of the Tories polling – with Gordon Brown and Labour now in with a chance to win the election.

While I could talk about 38 Degrees (the UK version of Get Up! and Move On), the example that I really want to highlight is MyDavidCameron.com.

This is an example of Labour engaging with progressive grass-roots activists without trying to seize control. It challenges the traditional monopoly that the Tories have had on internet campaigning in the UK. MyDavidCameron taps into activists who aren’t necessarily pro-Labour, but who are deeply skeptical about David Cameron and the Tories, and do not want them elected.

CLARIFICATION (15/04/10): The MyDavidCameron website is independent of Labour, and was set up “by a left-leaning graphic designer… the Labour party quickly adopted its template.”

The point of my highlighting this is to show what can happen when a political party lets go control of their online space. They have successfully engaged with a group of online activists, who are now spreading the anti-Tory message. It’s a particularly simple, yet effective method, by asking progressive activists to come up with their own slogans to replace Tory propaganda.

This site shows that with political courage and risks comes great rewards. Remember – it could have all gone wrong. So kudos to the Labour strategists who had the foresight to allow this website to go ahead.

For a more detailed analysis, there’s a good article by WeAreSocial – a social media strategy company in the UK – who’ve written about MyDavidCameron.com.

Postscript: This blog post on MyDavidCameron.com shows the natural limit for this campaign, and also why it is probably most powerful during the 30 day campaign than necessarily the hard slog of continuous campaigning.

Oh, those naughty Tories. Stealing our ideas about co-ops (and messing them up in the process) was bad enough. But stealing our ideas about spoof posters (and messing them up in the process) is simply unpardonable.

Shortly after we spoofed the first Tory election poster, I acknowledged that this project had a limited shelf-life. And so the fact that the Tories are now trying to get in on the joke can only suggest one thing: we’ve reached our sell-by date.

There is a lot of talk in the online community on this site that most of the spoof posters have a shelf-life of 1-2 weeks at most. This seems to me to underline why this kind of campaign sight is most effective during the actual campaign period. It is during campaigns that most people become politically engaged, and there is also a large amount of Tory (or Liberal Party) material to spoof.

Despite this, the site was by all measures, a massive success. There are scores of spoofed posters, it received lots of mainstream media coverage, as well as coverage in blogs, Twitter and Facebook, and the website itself received over 250,000 unique visitors.

This year was great

Alex — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 23:21:08 +0000

The ITUC has launched a new online campaign highlighting the exploitation of workers and children in the third world.

The campaign’s website – Change the World - is very professional, although it is unfortunately flash-based meaning that it takes a long time to load.

The campaign’s posters are amazing – very confronting and stark in exposing the truth behind international big business’s role in child labour, and socially destructive outsourcing.

Check all the posters out here.

The problem of crowd-sourcing campaigns

Alex — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 06:04:36 +0000

I’ve written previously about a very successful grassroots campaign – Save VCA – and how it brought together a diverse group of people. A key element to the success of this campaign has been its coordination at an early stage.

There is a very interesting discussion about the No Clean Feed movement by Mark over at Larvatus Prodeo, discussing the limitations of the campaign so far:

It’s a bit of a case study on the limitations, as well as the benefits, of crowdsourced campaigning.

Alex Schlotzer, an ACTU online campaign officer and senior Greens Party member has a good analysis of the No Clean Feed movement to date:

The kind of fundamentals a campaign needs to sort out before launching into the next wave of protest emails; electronic petitions and rallies.

This isn’t about a brand, marketing, customers or what halo strategy should be employed; this is about cold, hard politics. It’s about finding the right kinds of messages and ensuring a focussed, evolving and sustained dialogue with Australians so they either get on board and help make their marginal MPs paranoid and/or they change their vote. (The first is probably easier to do since an election makes all MPs a little paranoid at the best of times.)

Then there has to be a coordinated effort of engaging and organising concerned Australians through a combination of online and off-line methods. What happens online and off-line should compliment each other.Â It is truly amazing that for so-called Internet geeks and social media professionals that what matters politically is totally ignored in favour of the fancy, pretty approach and more banging on (analysis some will call it) about the evils and flaws of Conroy’s Internet censorship regime. A lot has to be done to make sure that the Government doesn’t use a victory in the next federal election, as fodder (read “mandate”) to push through with something that only serves to further erode and impinge on our civil liberties and human rights.

Who cares which of the 4 (to-date) anti-internet-censorship website looks the best or is the most plugged in to web2.0 or SM, when the basics for any political campaign are forgotten at best and completely ignored at worst.

So before the Australian Interwebs embarks on its next un-coordinated and ill-conceived round of “campaigning” with poorly timed rallies, can there first be a single coordinating group formed, with a single focussed message and a real plan for political action?

I’ve seen today that Electronic Frontiers Australia, the online liberties group, have appointed Peter Black as a campaign manager for the No Clean Feed campaign (which will be getting a name change soon).

Peter Black is a lecturer and lawyer from Queensland. I wish him well, and hope that can turn the NCF movement into a organised, coordinated campaign.

No Clean Feed campaign needs to drop their "censorship" obsession

Alex — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 21:14:22 +0000

There is a fair bit of soul searching that seems to be going on in the “No Clean Feed” movement of late, especially following the lack of mass-rallies in support of the campaign following the release of the Federal Government’s report into the Internet filter.

UPDATE: Read the key messaging ideas for the No Clean Feed campaign.

The debate is turning around how the campaign and its leadership can best express the major flaws of the Government’s filter. Some commentary, led by Crikey pundits like Possum Pollytics and Bernard Keane, had led the No Clean Feed movement to thinking strategically about how to approach the campaign – targeting the Government where it could hurt: electorally. (Unfortunately, as Possum points out, the Internet filter is not, and is unlikely to become, a significant election issue.)

Many in the movement, including the folk at Electronic Frontiers Australia (a cyber rights group) have decided that they should focus on the “censorship” angle. That is, they should point out that the Internet filter is a slippery slope (or the thin end of the wedge) towards online political censorship:

Focus on the fundamental problem with the Governmentâ€™s plan â€“ they are going to open the door to banning political content! Every conversation should quickly drift you, â€œyeah, but they are gonna ban political stuff like euthanasia and abortion and who the hell knows what else â€“ you might disagree with it, but we donâ€™t need to ban that stuff?â€

There are several groups going down this line: Reporters Without Borders for example says Australia risks joining the “censorship club”:

If Australia were to introduce systematic online content filtering, with a relatively broad definition of the content targeted, it would be joining an Internet censors club that includes such countries as China, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Other groups go down this line, comparing Australia’s Internet filter with those used by totalitarian, third world regimes.

Many also make the point that the Internet filter opens the door to online political censorship, as ACMA (the Australian Communications and Media Authority – the authority tasked with keeping the blacklist) can decide unilaterally what sites are blocked. The logic is that the site blacklist is kept secret, and that a future Commonwealth Government could direct ACMA to blacklist sites that discuss “politically sensitive” issues, like abortion, euthanasia or drug use – or even other “objectionable” political views.

Drop the censorship line

In my view, the No Clean Feed campaign’s focus on the Internet filter equating to political censorship is foolish. It does not live up to most Australians’ lived experience. Few Australians are affected by the “censorship” inherent in the current refused classification material regime.

Josh Mehlman at the ABC’s Drum discusses why the campaign so far is largely an “echo chamber”:

Filter opponents appear to believe Twitter, online petitions, protests and letter-writing campaigns will be enough.

However, 10,000 people blacking out their avatars, retweeting blog posts and furiously agreeing with each other on Twitter merely adds to the cacophony of the echo chamber; it has no effect in the real world.

The closed circle of the Australian Twitterati and their friends in the technology and political media might well believe everyone is against the internet filter since everyone they know is talking about it.

(Of course, he’s good at criticism, but provides no concrete suggestions, other than “the campaign should be better”.)

For all the reasons that the movement has castigated itself over (wrongly) focusing on the language of “clean feed”, Internet speeds or similar, the language of “censorship” is similarly the wrong track.

Most Australians don’t care about censorship. If they did, complaints about our existing censorship regime (the classification system) would be higher. I’ve written about this here: Filtering out the muck and the filth:

The Australian Government already censors most material that Australians are (legally) allowed to read, watch or listen to.

…

The problem with the #nocleanfeed crowd is that theyâ€™re clamouring over the civil liberties arguments, the â€œAunt Gladysâ€, wowser arguments, and freedom of expression arguments, only when it threatens their download speeds.

The Internet filter proposes to apply the same classification standard that exists for every other publication type in Australia, to the Internet. We already have the Government telling us what we can and can’t watch, read or listen to on TV, DVDs, radio or with books and other print publications and art.

All the kerfuffle over civil liberties, when Bill Henson’s photos were seized for being “child p-rnography”, was largely confined to the “latte-set” – inner city trendies and arts boffins. What the Henson episode showed was that most Australians were unconcerned that a famous Australian artist was accused of being a p-rnographer – more so when it was discovered that he visited primary schools to look for models.

The same can be said of the Howard Government’s introduction of sedition laws. Although there was a hue and cry about them from civil liberties groups and online action organisations like Get Up, the on-the-ground response from the electorate was completely absent.

So long as the Government says that the list of refused classification materials includes weird p-rn and fetish material, Jihadi propaganda and other unsavoury material, the censorship line won’t work.

Australians don’t think they live in a country like China, Iran or Saudi Arabia. Even with an Internet filter, Australia won’t be like those regimes, even if it has the technology and tools to become like them.

The real, lived experience of most Australians won’t see them lose a single right or liberty. Most Australians will think that it is a small thing to lose – access to fetish p-rn, euthanasia manuals and Jihadist manifestos – for “cyber safety”. Even if the filter doesn’t work.

Focusing on censorship has a “silver bullet” for the No Clean Feed campaign is misguided.

In my view, stronger arguments can be made that:

The filter won’t catch, find or stop a single child s-x offender;
The filter will harm Australia’s productivity and economic prosperity, especially in the areas of education and medicine; and
The money spent on the filter would be more effectively spent on the Australian Federal Police, who will actually find, stop and catch pedophiles.

I will be updating my proposed Key Messages in the next few days, focusing more on concerns from parents, and giving some more concrete advice for lobbying Members of Parliament.

Blog Action Day

Alex — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 22:25:10 +0000

Today (15 October) is Blog Action Day – a day when bloggers from around the world commit to promoting a single cause (climate change this year) and thus raise awareness of that cause.

Climate change is, simply, the greatest ethical, political and policy problem of our age.

Climate change is something that is close to my heart, and is a policy problem that I consider regularly, especially in my work and studies. I have written about climate change often on this blog. I have also been trained as part of The Climate Project to give Al Gore’s climate change presentation.

As a diabolical policy problem, climate change is a challenge which is easy for our political leaders to do very little. It is easy to “green wash”, or to take only some action to mitigate climate change. There is enormous efforts put in by polluters to muddy the debate about mitigating climate change, to create uncertainty, fear and doubt.

This post will be principally about what unions can do about climate change, and what they are already doing.

Unions are well placed to be global leaders in changing perceptions on climate change. In Australia, there is a lot of research which backs this up.

Australians by and large want there to be action on climate change (around 90%) and many are willing to personally do something about it – if they are convinced that what they are doing has an effect.
Australian union members by and large trust their union on workplace matters.

This means that if unions turn issues such as climate change into a workplace issue, then many of their members will be willing to take action.

The benefits are obvious. Firstly, unions can lead positive mitigation action on climate change through persuading workers to change their personal activities (turning off computers, car pooling to work, etc) and empowering workers into having employers change their policies and practices to be more sustainable (purchasing 100% renewable energy, only using recycled paper, carbon off-setting flights, retrofitting buildings to be energy and water efficient, etc).

Secondly, for unions there are many benefits. By turning members into climate change activists, the union increases its overall number of union activists. While a member may be inactive when it comes to negotiating a new collective agreement, that same member may be willing to stand up to an employer over the purchase of a fuel efficient car fleet. Once a member has been engaged, enabled and activated on one issue (climate change), it is far easier to make them active on a range of other issues (such as workplace rights, health and safety or collective bargaining).

Finally, unions need to be seen as leaders in the climate change debate. Not a debate over whether climate change is real. But rather how our society, community and economy can transition from carbon intensive to low-carbon (or zero carbon). It is union members who will bear the brunt of mitigation and adaptation policies. It is union members, in TAFEs and universities, who will train and retrain workers in carbon intensive industries, or a new generation workforce in clean energy jobs. Union members in ambulances and hospitals will deal with increasing numbers of climate change related illnesses (tropical diseases in temperate areas, heat stroke from unseasonally hot days). It is union members who will have to adapt our mass transit to cope with heat waves. The TUC in the United Kingdom has done some great work on the Just Transition concept in relation to climate change.

The role of unions on climate change is clear. Unions need to shape the future for their members, rather than wait around for changes to be made to them.

Thankfully, unions are responding. The ACTU and a number of unions (including my union) are running a climate change campaign, promoting clean energy jobs and working to engage thousands of unions members on climate change.

The personal action campaigns are a first step – by no means the last. I strongly believe that political action and political will is required to seriously address climate change (that is why I am a member of the ALP).

Nevertheless, personal action campaigns are important. The vast majority of Australians, although they want action on climate change, do not know what they personally can do to help. By engaging them at a personal level, unions can help lift them to a more politically aware level. We cannot expect union members to all be politically aware or active. Most Australians are not.

Running a personal action campaign not only builds union activists and helps make workplaces more sustainable, but also increases the political awareness and engagement of members.

We need to Save the VCA

Alex — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 12:24:15 +0000

Photo: By Atosha McCaw (www.mortartown.com)

The University of Melbourne’s corporate PR department has gone into over drive recently, after their proposed changes to the Victorian College of the Arts blew up in their faces.

Their latest tactic, after locking down media appearances by gaff-a-tron Sharman Pretty (VCA Dean), has been to misdirect and confuse. For example, rather than addressing the main issues of funding and practice-based training (as opposed to research-focused arts teaching), the University of Melbourne has been talking about mergers and the Melbourne Model.

I’ve been pretty heavily involved in the Save VCA campaign (and have written about it earlier here), and was so incensed by a recent article that I wrote in to The Age to set the record straight. My letter was published on Saturday:

VCA smokescreen

KRISTY Edmunds’ comments yesterday (“Give merger a chance”, The Age, 3/9) sideswipe the community’s concerns about changes made to the VCA. Even a cursory glance at the Save VCA campaign’s website shows that it is focusing on the lack of funding that is driving staffing and subject cuts, a preservation of the practical training elements of VCA’s teaching, and genuine consultation with staff, students and the arts community on future changes.

No one in the campaign is calling for the merger between VCA and the University of Melbourne to be undone. Furthermore, no one in the campaign is suggesting that the curriculum be frozen in time. These claims are just a smokescreen to distract the community from the real issues. Given the complex nature of what is at stake, it is no wonder the university wants to make it a debate about non-issues.

Alex White, Footscray

You can read more about the Save VCA campaign here, and join the Save VCA Facebook page here.

I also encourage you to print out and sign the Save VCA petition here (pdf).

Six effective print communications tips for union campaigns

Alex — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 01:32:16 +0000

Unions have little hesitation in spending thousands of dollars, in some cases tens of thousands of dollars, on printed communications – leaflets, posters, newsletters, fact-sheets, stickers and so on.

At the start of a campaign, the first thing many union officials think is: “we need an A4 leaflet and a poster for this campaign”. Unfortunately, a great deal of this money is wasted, due to poor design of materials.

Printed communications should be consistent, have a professional standard of design, and be clearly written.

All communications should be “on message” – and this message should be determined at the start of the campaign. Print communication strategies, like media and public relations strategies, need to be integrated into the main campaign plan. Throughout the campaign, printed materials should keep a common visual style: fonts, colour palette and images.

A lot of union communication materials do not follow basic design principles. This undermines the union’s efforts, wastes time and resources, and can confuse members.

So, here are six tips on producing effective printed communications for union campaigns.

1. Know and write for your audience

Union campaign materials will likely be seen by a diverse number of people. A leaflet intended for members could be seen by the employer. A poster for the community will be seen by members. Despite this, each piece of printed communication should consider its audience.

Think about the concerns and needs of your audience. Communications aimed at members should be different from that aimed at non-members. Keep in mind that your material will be seen by someone other than your intended audience.

For example, in the university sector, some material must specifically address students, rather than staff. While staff are concerned about job security and workloads, this is unlikely to concern most students. Instead, the communications could focus on the effects of high workloads and lack of job security – class sizes, less one-on-one time with tutors and lecturers, quality of education and so on.

In the health sector, unions would need to produce material aimed at patients and their families. These could focus on positive health outcomes that would come from nurses, doctors and paramedics that are not over worked.

2. Have simple, clean design

All union printed communication should be of a professional standard. The materials that our members see day in and day out from other sources (government, employer, advertising) is generally of high quality. There is an expectation that their union appear professional in their printed communications.

Newsletters and leaflets should be visually simple, and should emphasise the content. Fonts and the text should be readable. Do not use a wide variety of fonts for each piece of material. The campaign should have an established style – and the union should also of course have a style guide.

A lot of union communications I see make three common mistakes, rendering the material almost useless.

Small, crammed text: the text size is too small – size 9 or even smaller. Ideally, all text in a paragraph (body text) should be between size 10 and 11. This reads well in almost all formats
Too much text: Many union publications are overly long and poorly edited. For leaflets and even newsletters, keep the amount of text to a minimum. Write your article, then re-write it and try to reduce the number of words by a quarter.
Mismatched colours: Poor colour choices, such as red text on a blue background or similar design errors can render a leaflet or poster unreadable. Additionally, sometimes text goes over a photo or image and cannot be easily read due to contrast.

3. Ensure there is lots of white space

Many union publications like to cram as much information into a leaflet as possible. This reduces the readability of the material. Thick areas of empty space, as borders and between paragraphs increases readability. It may feel like it is wasting space, but research shows that crowded pages decreases readers’ ability to understand and retain information.

4. Large, descriptive headlines

Research shows that most union members only browse through union publications, rather than reading each article individually – eight out of ten people will read a headline, but only two out of ten actually read the text of the article. This means that the headlines or titles in an article, newsletter, leaflet or poster could be the only thing a member reads.

These headlines therefore should be as descriptive as possible, and should be emphasised in the design of the material. The reader should be able to get as much informationÂ as possible, without the headline turning into a long sentence.

5. Use dot points and avoid large slabs of text

Everyone has different levels of education, reading ability and vocabulary. Union publications especially should ensure that they can be read by as many people as possible.

It is not just unions with high levels of non-English speaking backgrounds who should keep things simple; white collar unions in the public service or academia must recognise that the rules of Plain English apply.

Using dot points to convey information is a useful way of condensing complex information, and emphasising important points.

Dot points can also increase readers retention of information.

6. Highlight important information using text boxes and quotes

Newspapers and magazines do this all the time. They take out interesting or informative quotes from an article and emphasise them. This can also be done by putting important information in a text box that is highlighted and differentiated from the surrounding text.

Alongside the headline or title, this information may be the only thing that the reader actually takes in.

Get involved in politics to make a change

Alex — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 05:45:01 +0000

Following from my recent criticisms of those who sit on the sidelines and complain, rather than joining in and getting their hands dirty, I’ve tracked down the Maribyrnong Leader article I featured in:

A FOOTSCRAY man is determined to shift people’s perceptions on climate change.

Alex White says his commitment to the issue has been re-affirmed after attending a three-day summit, which featured a presentation by former American Vice President and environmental activist Al Gore.

“He came across as someone very passionate and very knowledgeable … his passion and commitment to this issue was quite clear,” Mr White, a National Tertiary Education Union officer, said.

He plans to teach his colleagues and fellow residents about ways to reduce carbon emissions.

People getting involved with the political process could make the most change.

He would also like to see Maribyrnong Council investigate the banning of water bottles, employ “more efficient business practices” and ensure 100 per cent green energy is used.

“There is evidence water bottles are incredibly wasteful for the environment,” he said.

He also plans to arrange meeting with councillors.

“I think there’s a lot local councils can do to show leadership.”

Quite a short article really, but local councils really can make a difference. A large proportion of possible action on climate change must take place at a local (state or municipal) level.

Online social activism and Twitter

Alex — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 08:07:27 +0000

A large part of my job is online communications: blogs, social networking, and new fads like Twitter.

A big challenge is how to use these tools in a meaningful way to support the campaigning and organising activities of the union. How can we engage our members and supporters using the social networking tools they are comfortable with?

A new service, called Twitition (Twitter + Petition) may aid in this.

Twitition allows Twitter users to create and sign short petitions. These petitions can be easily re-Tweeted by friends and followers.

The goal of so many not-for-profits using the Internet and social networking is the Holy Grail of “viral”: a video, email, image or similar that takes on a life of its own and receives massive circulation.

A service like Twitition could help not-for-profits to make their campaigns go viral.

To experiment, I created a Twitition calling on Rudd and Gillard to abolish the ABCC. We’ll see how well that goes.