Liminal states

DRAFT!  Work in progress, feedback welcome! See the first comment for some specific questions

Revised version to appear on The Ideators’ Journey, kicking off a series on collaboration and innovation, perhaps as two posts.

Eve’s Ask for help makes a great introduction to a series that Mikal Lewis and I will be kicking off on collaboration.  Eve, Michael, Mikal, and many of the other people you’ll see participating in this series met on the Ad Astra (Analysis and Development of Awesome STRAtegies) project I led at Microsoft.

During this series, we’ll apply approaches from Change the Way you see Innovation to a real-world problem: designing a free web-based collaboration tool, while simultaneously exploring business opportunities in this space.  In this post, I’ll lay out an initial scenario, and Mikal will take it from there.  First though a little background for people joining our journey in progress.

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DRAFT! Work in Progress!  Feedback, please!
Final version to be published in The Seminal, potentially in two parts

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Tracy Viselli and I are working on an article for The Exception on how progressives can use Twitter.  Here’s our current thinking on recommendations:

1. progressives should get good at Twitter best practices: insiders providing information regularly, backchannels at conferences and workshops, regular Twitter-based chats by organizations and bloggers, contact lists and skills pitching to journalists who prefer Twitter, etc.
2. activists need to refine techniques for Twitter-based “flash actions” (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6).  Social computing technologies are tools; we need to learn to use them effectively.
3. Twitter can be a medium for progressives to engage online with communities currently marginalized by the “progressive blogosphere”.  Shared vocabulary and hashtag structure, and respect for different norms in different hashtags, can help.
4. we should reach out to conservatives, libertarians, and greens to explore ways to engage more constructively

The full article will of course go into detail on the thinking and experiences that lead to the recommendations.

Any feedback?  Suggestions for improvements, related experiences, criticisms, ideas about how to make this happen — it’s all good.  Please don’t be shy!  We’ll do our best to incorporate the feedback in the final draft.

Thanks much!

jon

DRAFT, CURRENTLY BEING REVISED SUBSTANTIALLY.   New recommendations here.  Thanks all for the feedback!

Final version to appear in The Exception.

Collaboratively authored with Tracy Viselli.

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