Scoutseven

Heading to mamma land

I am having a baby.   And pretty soon.  So, I’ll be offline for a while.

Happy new year y’all.

Thanksgiving: how we remember

Happy Thanksgiving friends.

Each year, on this day, I have a ritual of remembering that I’d like to share with y’all.

Before the feasting and celebrating begins, I chose to acknowledge the indigenous peoples of this land — to remember and honor the brutal history that so many Americans chose to forget, and to bring witness and understanding to the very present and constant struggle for sovereignty. I spend some time studying and I spend some time offering prayer.

While there is some dispute about the origins of the “First Thanksgiving,” Americans commonly understand that sometime back in 1621 the Wampanoag Indians offered food to the poor, starving colonists. “This harvest meal has become a symbol of cooperation and interaction between English colonists and Native Americans,” as History.com would have it (a familiar tale).

The subsequent genocide of the Wampanoag and every other Native American tribe across our lands always gets left out of this happy little tale. This willingness to forget is something I’ve never understood about my culture.

In the United States, the ongoing struggle of the Native American people is not a part of our common cultural narrative, even among progressives. Can we put a stop to this trend? This is not about beating our chests in guilt-striken despair, but simply having the courage to look our cultural heritage square in the face.

Our celebrations of abundance have come at a horrible price. We need to integrate this reality into the fabric of our lives — our shared memories, our national policies, our calls to action, our prayers.

Wikipedia is no defacto authority on anything, but it’s got some great info and background on Native Americans in the United States. And, the “current status” portion of this article is quite illuminating.

Also, check out an older classic: Thanksgiving: A Native American View.

“How Positive Thinking Wrecked the Economy”

Barabara Ehrenreich’s latest essay is by far my favorite opinion/analysis of this economic craziness. She simply rocks when it comes to unpacking issues that affect working people.

A quick and very worthy read.

Women and power

Currently, approximately 15% of the seats in the United States House and Senate are held by women. By comparison, Sweden has 47%, Spain 36%, and Vietnam 27% (see full list). That highest glass ceiling desperately needs shattering, but it’s not just about women having power, it’s about how we wield it. It’s about who benefits from our leadership, and who suffers as a result of the policies we enforce.

As a feminist, I find Sarah Palin’s nomination to the Republican presidential ticket manipulative and offensive.

It’s yet another example of women taking charge by becoming good ol’ boys, playing with guns, talking tough, and looking pretty all the while. Her policies hurt women, hurt the environment, and send her own children off to fight stupid wars. Let us not be fooled. This choice is not about women’s progress or women’s rights. Sarah Palin drives a dominating, patriarchal agenda, which makes some men in her own party look like bra-burning liberals.

We can do so much better than this.

Another great Mac application

My fantabulous colleague Alexandra Samuel told me about VoodooPad many months ago, and as things go, I bookmarked it in my head and didn’t get back to it until yesterday.

If you’re like me and you’re trying to track everything from favorite quotes, to client notes, to books you want to read, to doodles, this application rocks.

Essentially, VoodooPad functions a bit like a wiki instance on steroids — interrelated pages, easy cross referencing, you can drag and drop just about anything into the pages (sound files, pictures, etc.), and the search feature is very powerful.

So, for example, I have one Voodoo document that I use for all my random meeting notes, another I use for a client project, and another called “Leda’s Brain” that I use for a variety of uncategorizable things.

Super useful for centralizing notes (big and small, meaningful and meaningless) in a retrievable fashion. Check it out…

2007, here we come.

May it be a good year for you and the planet.

Vote, Dammit!

And if you need some inspiration, check out George Michael at his absolute best!

The New Generation Gap

What happens when the younger generation holds the keys to our shared knowledge, and the older generation does not? What does that do to a culture?

In fun, storytelling fashion, this video (link below) details the reality that many elderly people are experiencing vis a vis the Internet — it all happened too fast, they can’t keep up, and now they’re left out of this cultural language. Which means they start do disappear. Which is very bad news for a healthy society.

My good friend Liza’s mother — Tobey Dichter — founded an organization called Generations Online to address this issue, and from what I can tell, they’re doing awesome work. She’s a great storyteller, and this is an issue rarely discussed in a public forum. Very worth watching! And thanks Liza for passing on mom’s good work!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHUYmavvDzw

dotOrganize Comes Alive!

I spent a good part of the last year incubating a project called dotOrganize.

Our goal: empower organizers with the online tools, processes and strategic guidance they need to support their work.

I started the project because I got tired of seeing group after group struggle with the exact same needs. I wanted to start addressing some of our sector-wide tech woes, once and for all, so organizers have more energy for the good stuff — their missions, their campaigns, their communities.

dotOrganize’s first major project was a massive due diligence effort to thoroughly document the state of online technology in the social change sector. I firmly believe you can’t solve a problem without understanding it inside and out, so we spent 9 months interviewing people, crunching survey statistics, and trying to tell the story.

The result is Online Technology for Social Change: From Struggle to Strategy.

The report compiles insights from more than 400 social change groups, technology providers, and nonprofit technology capacity builders. Giving voice to organizers, many of whom are really struggling to use online tools effectively (or at all), the report tells it like it is, and then offers recommendations for filling gaps in strategy, software development, and tool adoption.

In addition to the fancy PDF, we put the entire thing online to make for easy reading, but more imporantly, so you could add your thoughts. Please do.

And spread the word…

http://www.dotorganize.net/report