I have talked with a few folks about the power of informational awareness across a coalition and network of groups. However, there is consistently a push back that it can not happen.
Please meet Richard Rogers a guru on the ways information moves thru issue networks. Richard showed me this project years ago and it has been stuck in my mind ever sense I first played with it.
Richard's tool indexes the websites of groups as they publish information to show the rise and fall of issues. I want to apply the tools and logic farther back in the food chain to discussion boards, listserves and internal planning pages of the coalitions so that loosely tied groups can have dashboards collecting response and feedback across lots of sites not just their own.
Richards approach to data, shifts in data and the amount of information online (culture change) are opening up new network-centric strategies that we must explore if we want to find new places to harness the power of our distributed movement.
Link: Infoid.org | The Web Issue Index.
The Web Issue Index of Civil Society may be likened to a consumer price index. A consumer price index watches price fluctuations in a stable set of goods for indications of inflation. The Web Issue Index watches the campaigning behaviour of stable sets of non-governmental organisations for indications of attention to social issues.
There is one source basket and it is comprised of those organisations that participated in the European Social Forum, Paris, France, November 2003. "Old Europe," a remark made by the U.S. Secretary of Defense in reference to those countries that did not cooperate with U.S. military policy in Iraq, also may be thought of as a collection of issues. The Old Europe Web Issue Index of Civil Society is such a collection.
The Web Issue Index ticker has three layers. Each layer wades deeper into the civil society issues, provided by the actor set. The top layer consists of the most significant issues according to the actor set, the middle layer the actors' most significant sub-issues per issue, and the bottom layer the actors' most significant URL per sub-issue. Significance for the issues and sub-issues is measured by frequency of mentionings in the actors' issue lists. For the bottom layer, the URLs, significance is measured by frequency of mentions and linking to the URL by the actors. These methodological guidelines are followed in a manual,
