Orientation Welcome

Welcome to the orientation for the Oakland Community Voice Blogging project. Today we will be talking about how you can join this project: come to a one-day training (meal provided), work with your fellow bloggers on identifying an important community issue, begin blogging and attend a public event around the issue. We are arranging this for you to become a blogger and express your voice around community issues you have identified as important.

 Blogging is a very powerful channel to reach out and be heard. Today is not the training, but an orientation, but to give you a sense of what is to come each of you will create a yahoo account, a blogger account and begin a personal blog. During the training you will use the yahoo account for creating your community voice blog and for rss aggregation (more on that during the training).

Please join this project team in building the first blogger community from ECC for the sake of East Oakland.

Examples of Blogs

Political Blogs

Daily Kos

Al Gore – he posts about his testimony on capitol hill

Citizen Ads - the “vote different” ad creator revealed on Huffington Post

Skeptical Brotha - Response from Barak Obama’s pastor to a NYT

Oakland Magazine – the “politics” tag

Community Blogs

Alameda Magazine

Oakland Arts

East Oakland Community High School

Prescott-Joseph Center

People’s Grocery – Stop predatory development in west Oakland

Byron Williams blogs about crime in Oakland

Ella Baker Center – Wake up Oakland!

Celebrating Dia de los Muertos, Domigoyu’s blog about music and education

Journalistic Blogs

EastBay Experss

NPR – Rough Cuts with Michel Martin, “Mocha Moms”

CNN – blogs, topics of the day

Other blogs

Find more blogs

One step closer…

After a hopeful meeting with CTFC we are one step closer to grant approval and getting started on our ECC Connected project.  the current objectives are:

1. By December 1, 2006, establish training partners – Brain Jams, SeniorNet, Eastmont Computer Center, and set up project management site.

2.  By February 1, 2007, complete development of the training curriculum, tools and lead trainers. Identify potential community issues to integrate into the training and announce the training roll-out. In conjunction with ECC, begin identifying individuals to recruit to participate in the training program.

3.  By April 1, 2007, coordinate the initial training of 30 seniors and 15 youth.  Identify and coordinate the training process for 3 D-scribes (citizen journalists).  D-Scribes will attend civic meeting and events to report on them.

4. By May 1, 2007, facilitate the trainee’s identification of a specific civic / legislative issue that they will focus their communication / outreach efforts on.  Begin outreach and advocacy effort to the relevant local officials linked to the chosen issue.

5.  By June 1, 2007, establish a plan and time frame for subsequent sessions to take place, including a participant debriefing session and a public event based around the chosen civic issue.  Have a structure in place for Eastmont Computer Center to maintain the program.

 

6.  By December 2007, 30 seniors and 15 youth are trained on and actively using web-based social networking and advocacy tools to participate in public debates and/or influence local public policy.

Social Media Club workshop

The workshop held by the Social Media Club was a gathering of MarCom pros and bloggers. The discussion focused around integrating social media in to the corporate media channels. Jeremiah Owyang has a super roundup from the day. Giovanni has video.

Chris introduced the Strategy Cafe a process learned from the WorldCafe.  

 The goals were to 1. Promote media literacy 2. support ethics and standards (such as a social media press release) 3. share best practices.

Chris posits there are 7 roles for social media: 

1. Transparency and Authenticity
2. Talk “with” instead of “to”
3. Can’t manage microsegments
4. Participation is marketing
5. Can’t control the message
6. Listening is more important than talking
7. Engagement is genuine

The Pew Interactive Study was mentioned – 60% of readers do not realize they are reading blogs.  

Successful uses of social media today? EasterSeals, Dove, SUN’s CEO, WholeWheatRadio

The attendees and presenters included professional technologists, Marketing/Communications and PR pros:

Lisa Stone - founder of Blogher and social media strategist

- 4 things a blog should answer 1. who are the bloggers? 2. wht are they blogging? 3. why are they doing it? 4. why do i care?

- Addresses blogging ethics with the Walmart-Edelman example

Robert Scoble - An A-list blogger, presented the power of the blogosphere and using video instead of a press release

- Traffic comes from search engines

- The #1 stragegy for getting noticed-google keyword acquisition

- Need to upload enough new links out there to keep competitors from usurping your search

Giovanni Rodriguez - see videos from the session

Daniela Barbosa 

Deborah Schultz

Brian Solis

Mark Ivey

Jeremy Pepper

SanFrancisco’s Digital Inclusion Strategy

The City and County of San Francisco is developing a comprehensive Digital Inclusion Strategy in order to bridge San Francisco’s digital divide.  We invite you to provide comment and feedback on the initial draft document:
http://www.sfgov.org/site/tech_connect_index.asp?id=47976

The document outlines approaches that the City proposes to address the technology needs of its underserved residents including:

• free and affordable internet access
• affordable computers and equipment
• training and support
• relevant content and applications

We are soliciting initial feedback through November 11, 2006 and using that initial feedback to update the document for release by December . However, we welcome input throughout the process.

Comments can be sent to:

Digital Inclusion Programs
Dept. of Telecommunications and Information Services City and County of
San Francisco
875 Stevenson St., 5th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94103
techconnect@sfgov.org

CNN covers Upwardly Global

Congratulations to one of my fellow ZFellows – Camille. Her organization, Upwardly Global was covered on CNN.

Upwardly Global is a nonprofit organization that helps highly-skilled immigrants, refugees and asylees reclaim their careers here in the United States and helps American employers discover and understand this hidden talent pool.

Debating the social web

There is a debate about the merits of social web tools in our society. The SF Chronicle hosts a discussion between Andrew Keen author of “The Cult of the Amateur” and Chris Anderson author of “The Long Tail“.

 They discuss wikipedia, democracy (direct v. representative), the masses vs. the niche, groupthink, advertising, citizen journalism and much more.

I am particularly interested in their discussion of filtering. Anderson talks about how he gains access to a million voices by layers of filters “I have time for perhaps two hundred voices…but collectively I’m filtering a million voices…as a result I get a richer, higher-quality diet of inforamation better suited to me from a wider pool adn wider variety of sources.” Keen contends that these layers are what more mainstream media does for us – filer, edit.

Anderson counters that the mainstream media is not interested in addressing individual narrow interests, but that others are and when they are found, it’s a benefit.

That makes sense. But, for some reason I want to know what the NYT finds important too and I’m more likely to spend my limited time there than sifting through layers. These layers, choices and bounty of content also can overwhelm and after an hour frustrate.

As we develop the project and progress in our learning we may want to include this discussion.

Listen or read